A player asks: Does it REALLY take ten turns (half an hour) to reload torpedo tubes on German submarines? And is it ten turns per tube or ten turns for all the tubes on the boat? This seems like a long time and I’d be interested on the historical background of this issue. Chris Carlson answers: I’m afraid it really is ten three-minute Tactical Turns per torpedo tube. With the notable exception of the Type XXI, all German U-boats stored their spare torpedoes below the deck of the torpedo room, which doubled as the main crew berthing area. To reload, the crew had to stow all the bunks, remove the deck plates and then hook up and winch up a torpedo onto the loading rack. They then had to inspect the weapon, check the battery if it were an electric torpedo, and install the pistol or fuze. Once this was completed, the weapon could be manually loaded into the torpedo tube. The only hard data I have is the German discussion that reloading was to be done only after a battle and that it took several hours to complete. I went with 30 minutes per weapon as a conservative estimate. If I remember correctly, there is a definitive number in the Royal Navy’s exploitation report of HMS Graph (ex-U110), but I don’t have it available. BT Back to The Naval Sitrep # 25 Table of Contents Back to Naval Sitrep List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by Larry Bond and Clash of Arms. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history and related articles are available at http://www.magweb.com