On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 20:18:00 -0700, (Marc Reeve) wrote:

Alan Minyard wrote:
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:
In message , Paul F Austin
writes
500 pound bombs aren't ship killers for ships that size. 2000 pound
bombs may be. After thinking about it, a hard target penetrator fuzed to
go off after exiting below the keel may be the most lethal way of
attacking large ships. The explosive fill makes a torpedo look small and
there's a fair chance of breaking the ship's back.

21" torpedo warheads ran around ~800lb of Torpex at the time (UK Mark
VIII - 640lb Torpex for the US Mark 14), which sounds competitive for
BLU-109/B (if a bit smaller than Mark 84)

That said, if you could get an under-keel detonation with any of those,
it will *hurt* a ship of that era.

One hit from a US Sub blew the Taiho sky high. The Japanese were
notorious for filling their ships with avgas fumes.

So were we, at the start of the war. Witness what happened to the
Lexington.

I vaguely recall reading that the real problem with Japanese ships was
that they were using light, sweet crude from the Netherlands East
Indies, _unrefined_, as bunker fuel. This stuff would leak all sorts of
interesting volatiles around the interior of a ship if an attack
broached fuel tanks, and all it took was one spark...

-Marc

True, but the Japanese never did figure out that CO2 inerting could save
a carrier. What happened to the Lex involved far more than a single
torpedo hit, the Lex took at least two torpedoes and an unknown number
of bomb hits. The explosions are thought to have been the result of
damaged bunker fuel tanks.

Al Minyard