Torpedo boat Informations

A torpedo boat is a relatively small and fast naval ship designed to carry torpedoes into battle. The first designs rammed enemy ships with explosive spar torpedoes, and later designs launched self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes. They were created to counter battleships and other slow and heavily armed ships by using speed, agility, and the power of their torpedo weapons. A number of inexpensive torpedo boats attacking en masse could overwhelm a larger ships ability to fight them off using its large but cumbersome guns. An inexpensive fleet of torpedo boats could pose a threat to much larger and more expensive fleets of capital ships, albeit only in the coastal areas to which their small size and limited fuel load restricted them.

The introduction of fast torpedo boats in the late 19th century was a serious concern to the eras naval strategists. In response, navies operating large ships introduced smaller ships to counter torpedo boats, mounting light quick-firing guns. These ships, which came to be called "torpedo boat destroyers" and later simply "destroyers", became larger and took on more roles, making torpedo attacks as well as defending against them, and eventually defending against submarines and aircraft. The destroyer eventually became the predominant type of surface warship in the guided missile age.

In the modern era, the old concept of a very small, fast, and cheap surface combatant with powerful offensive weapons is taken up by the "fast attack craft".

The American Civil War saw a number of innovations in naval warfare, including an early type of torpedo boat, armed with spar torpedoes. In 1861 President Lincoln instituted a naval blockade of Southern ports, which crippled the Souths efforts to obtain war materiel from abroad. The South also lacked the means to construct a naval fleet capable of taking on the Union Navy on even terms. One strategy to counter the blockade saw the development of torpedo boats, small fast boats designed to attack the larger capital ships of the blockading fleet as a form of asymmetrical warfare.

The David class of torpedo boats were steam powered with a partially enclosed hull. They were not true submarines but were semi-submersible; when ballasted, only the smokestack and few inches of the hull were above the water line. CSS Midge was David-class torpedo boats. CSS Squib and CSS Scorpion represented another class of torpedo boats that were also low built but had open decks and lacked the ballasting tanks found on the Davids.

The Confederate torpedo boats were armed with spar torpedoes. This was a charge of powder in a waterproof case, mounted to the bow of the torpedo boat below the water line on a long spar. The torpedo boat attacked by ramming her intended target, which stuck the torpedo to the target ship by means of a barb on the front of the torpedo. The torpedo boat would back away to a safe distance and detonate the torpedo, usually by means of a long cord attached to a trigger.

In general, the Confederate torpedo boats were not very successful. Their low sides made them susceptible to swamping in high seas, and even to having their boiler fires extinguished by spray from their own torpedo explosions. Torpedo misfires (too early) and duds were common.

In 1864 Union Naval Lieutenant Cushing fitted a steam launch with a spar torpedo to attack the Confederate ironclad Albemarle. Also the same year the Union launched USS Spuyten Duyvil, a purpose-built craft with a number of technical innovations including variable ballast for attack operations and an extensible and reloadable torpedo placement spar.

A prototype self-propelled torpedo was created by a commission placed by Giovanni Luppis, an Austrian naval officer from Rijeka, then a port city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Robert Whitehead, an English engineer who was the manager of a town factory. In 1864, Luppis presented Whitehead with the plans of the salvacoste (coastsaver), a floating weapon driven by ropes from the land that had been dismissed by the naval authorities due to the impractical steering and propulsion mechanisms.

Whitehead was unable to improve the machine substantially, since the clockwork motor, attached ropes, and surface attack mode all contributed to a slow and cumbersome weapon. However, he kept considering the problem after the contract had finished, and eventually developed a tubular device, designed to run underwater on its own, and powered by compressed air. The result was a submarine weapon, the Minenschiff (mine ship), the first modern self-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Austrian Imperial Naval commission on December 21, 1866.

The first trials were not successful as the weapon was unable to maintain a course on a steady depth. After much work, Whitehead introduced his "secret" in 1868 which overcame this. It was a mechanism consisting of a hydrostatic valve and pendulum that caused the torpedos hydroplanes to be adjusted so as to maintain a preset depth.

During the mid-19th century, the ships of the line were superseded by large steam powered ships with heavy gun armament and heavy armour, called ironclads. Ultimately this line of development led to the dreadnought class of all-big-gun battleship, starting with HMS Dreadnought.

At the same time, the weight of armour slowed down the speed of the battleships, and the huge guns needed to penetrate enemy armour fired at very slow rates. This allowed for the possibility of a small and fast ship that could attack the battleships, at a much lower cost. The introduction of the torpedo provided a weapon that could cripple, or even sink, any battleship.

The first warship of any kind to carry self-propelled torpedoes was HMS Vesuvius of 1873. The first seagoing vessel designed to fire the self-propelled Whitehead torpedo was HMS Lightning. The boat was built by John Thornycroft at Church Wharf in Chiswick for the Royal Navy. It entered service in 1876 and was armed with self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes.

As originally built, Lightning had two drop collars to launch torpedoes; these were replaced in 1879 by a single torpedo tube in the bow. She carried also two reload torpedoes amidships. She was later renamed Torpedo Boat No. 1. The French Navy followed suit in 1878 with Torpilleur No 1, launched in 1878 though she had been ordered in 1875.

Another early such ship was the Norwegian warship HNoMS Rap, ordered from Thornycroft shipbuilding company, England, in either 1872 or 1873, and built at Thornycrofts shipyard at Church Wharf in Chiswick on the River Thames. Managing a speed of 14.5 knots (27 km/h), she was one of the fastest boats afloat when completed. The Norwegians initially planned to arm her with a spar torpedo, but this may never have been fitted. Rap was outfitted with launch racks for the new self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes in 1879.

The first recorded launch of torpedoes from a torpedo boat (which itself was launched from a torpedo boat tender) in an actual battle was by future Russian admiral Stepan Makarov on January 16, 1878, who used self-propelled Whiteheads torpedoes against the Ottoman gunboat İntibâh during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. The first sinking of an armoured ship by a torpedo boat using self-propelled torpedoes, the Chilean ironclad Blanco Encalada, occurred during the 1891 Chilean Civil War.

In the late 19th century, many navies started to build torpedo boats 30 to 50 metres (98 to 164 ft) in length, armed with up to three torpedo launchers and small guns. They were powered by steam engines and had a maximum speed of 20 to 30 knots (37 to 56 km/h). They were relatively inexpensive and could be purchased in quantity, allowing mass attacks on fleets of larger ships. The loss of even a squadron of torpedo boats to enemy fire would be more than outweighed by the sinking of a capital ship.

The Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, was the first great war of the 20th century. It was the first practical testing of the new steel battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and torpedo boats. During the war the Imperial Russian Navy in addition to their other warships, deployed 86 torpedo boats and launched 27 torpedoes (from all warships) in three major campaigns, scoring 5 hits.

The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), like the Russians, often combined their TBs (which possessed only hull numbers) with their torpedo boat destroyers (TBDs) (often simply referring to them as destroyers) and launched over 270 torpedoes (counting the opening engagement at Port Arthur on 8 February 1904) during the war. The IJN deployed approximately 21 TBs during the conflict, and on 27 May 1905 the Japanese torpedo boat destroyers and TBs launched 16 torpedoes at the battleship Knyaz Suvorov, Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvenskys flagship at the Battle of Tsushima. Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, the IJN commander, had ordered his torpedo boats to finish off the enemy flagship, already gunned into a wreck, as he prepared to pursue the remnants of the Russian battle fleet.

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