Somerville’s Ralph Waldo Christie & the Perils of the Mark 14 Torpedo

Somerville Museum presents a Tavern Talk with Dan Breen at Aeronaut Brewery on December 3.
Somerville’s own Rear Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie, and the technical glitches that drove his fellow submariners to distraction in WW2
From the very start of the war in the Pacific, it was clear that American submariners were plagued by terrible problems. From the Solomons to the Marshalls, torpedoes failed to explode, or they ran too deep under Japanese vessels, or in some cases they literally turned around and headed back towards the submarine that had just fired them. A bitter dispute raged throughout the Navy about what could possibly be causing these malfunctions – and at the very center of that dispute was Somerville’s Rear Admiral R. W. Christie, for a time the highest ranking submariner in the Pacific Theater. In this Tavern Talk, we will tell the story Christie, his role in that heated controversy, and explain how its resolution would help lead to the American victory of 1945.

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