Torpedo net. Well, it seems that everyone, or at least any modeler, is somehow attracted by something in particular. So, as soon as I saw a Liberty with a deployed torpedo net, I was attracted by that particular device. Indeed I think that it is the unusual that strikes our imagination and the challenge that drives us. Therefore, limiting the argument to the Liberty Ships, someone is attracted by radar pickets, others by oil tank conversion or to AK or other conversions. Unfortunately the Liberty Ship itself is a topic extremely wide, much more than I even suspected when I first bought the kit and started working on it. So, even though more than 2700 ships were built, their being sisters did not translate into being twin sisters and it is difficult to find two ships looking the same (ditto, as just learnt). Ok, beyond philosophy, in terms of torpedo nets, I spent some time, indeed a lot, investigating about it (may wife, who did not appreciate it, would have said that i wasted a lot of time). It seems that it was something covered by secret at war time and very little can be found about it. I wanted to understand also the effectiveness of them. But finding an answer about how many torpedoed ships used a torpedo net was not so easy. I started creating a database with all the Liberty Ships and crossed it with all the ones that had been somehow damaged. Then, for all those ones that were hit by torpedoes, 122, I searched at least one picture. And I found images for 44 but only 5 showed torpedo net. In particular nr 338 Richard Hovey sunk on 29.03.44 by a Japanese submarine, 1209 Edward M. House damaged on 29.06.44, 1795 Horace Busnell lost on 20.03.45, Martin Van buren lost on 14.01.45 and 1951 Jose Navarro damaged on 26.12.43. For sure there are other units that received the torpedo net, like 1001 Pierre L-Enfant, 1215 Arthur M. Huddelll, 1074 Louis A. Godey, 2420 Charles Morgan, 1061 Hoke Smith, 1936 Sam Houston II and others, but I did not find any logical connection. Such nets were used on units in different theatres, in different years, on units built by different yards and so on. Even in terms of narrative, I found only two mentions, one about the Richard Hovey, that surely had the net deployed when torpedoed, and another about the Dwight L. Moody, that deployed them at least twice, but was not attacked. Does anyone know if there was a specific logic behind the adding such devices to some ships and not to others ? For sure the net itself reduced the speed of the ship, maybe up to 2 knots, therefore it could not be deployed for long periods. Any contribution is welcome.
|