86 Dahlgren 



they would send down. "We have a new airplane going out. What's the best 

 i4-inch armor we could put in it to protect the pilot against 30-caliber ammuni- 

 tion?" 



Well, unfortunately, this was a silly question, because there wasn't any. It's 

 better to leave it out than put in an inadequate piece of armor which simply 

 takes up weight and doesn't protect the pilot against anything. So for a while, 

 Dahlgren was writing letters back saying, "The best thing you can do is use such 

 and such material. It isn't any good at all, but it's the best you can do. It will stop 

 a 30-caliber bullet if you fire it from 2 miles away, but those are not the attack 

 conditions." Finally we put a stop to it. We wrote one letter back and said what I 

 just said — that it is absolutely useless. Don't put anything on it. Take it off. Save 

 weight. 



Another problem for Dahlgren came with the attack on North Africa. The 

 French Fleet started to come out, and this made the Navy very nervous because 

 they didn't want to get into a battle with the French for several reasons. 

 However, MASSACHUSETTS had to fire at a French destroyer and put a 

 14-inch projectile squarely through the stack. There was a 14-inch hole in the 

 stack of that destroyer, and that was all. The projectile didn't go off. "Why 

 didn't it go off? What kind of bad ammunition or bad fuzes are you giving us?" 



Well, you see it was an armor-piercing projectile. They were loaded for bear. 

 They were loaded for the French Fleet. They fired an AP projectile at this poor 

 little destroyer that didn't have a plate on it thicker than a quarter of an inch. It 

 didn't do the projectile any harm at all. In fact, the projectile didn't even know it 

 hit anything. Other than deceleration, an armor-piercing projectile has noth- 

 ing to act as a signal to the fuze that it has hit something, because the fuze is 

 carefully hidden inside where it can't suffer damage. You have to get it through 

 a rather thick plate of armor without getting it hurt and then let it function. All 

 it can feel is the deceleration. If it hits a 3-inch plate of armor, it gets a real 

 whack. That starts its processes going, and it goes off. If it hits the !4-inch 

 armor, the projectile doesn't even slow down enough to give the fuze a shock. 



These were some of the flaps that had to be answered, because it was 

 perfectly conceivable from the Fleet's point of view — and I'm not blaming them 

 for ignorance or malice or anything — that there was a bad fuze there. It had 

 been known to happen. 



Everybody was quite conscious of the terrible situation we ran into with 

 torpedo fuzes at the beginning of the war — largely because Congress had been 

 too damned tight to provide any money for testing torpedoes. All of our 

 torpedoes had been designed and built without fully testing them. If you tested 

 them, what you did was run a dummy with no warhead. If you tested the motors 

 in the torpedo, you could recover the torpedo and refurbish the motors and use 

 it again. You could afford to do that. You could not afford to blow up a torpedo. 

 It's a very expensive device. We paid for that very heavily in the first months of 



