7. The Officials Who Failed to Test a Defective Weapon, Then Blamed Servicemen for its Failures
The next evil act was not done by a private company, but by officials of a government bureaucracy. They first screwed up when they failed to adequately test a vital weapon enough to make sure it worked as advertised before it was issued to the uniformed end users. When war broke out and the weapon was put to use, reports poured in about serious defects. The bureaucrats ignored or downplayed them. They even blamed the weapon’s failures on human error, rather than on the obvious defects they would have detected if they had tested like they should have done in the first place.
The weapon in question was the Mark 14 Torpedo, used by American submarines when the country joined WWII in 1941. Designed in 1931, it differed from earlier torpedoes that detonated on impact with a target’s hull. Instead, the Mark 14 used an innovative magnetic detonator that was supposed to set off the torpedo’s explosive charge directly beneath the enemy ship’s keel – an explosion that would break the ship’s back. It meant that just one Mark 14 could sink any targeted ship, regardless of its size. That was a vast improvement over earlier torpedoes, which usually required multiple torpedo hits to hole an enemy’s hull in various spots to sink it.
