There's a story from the USS Drum (now a museum ship in Mobile, Alabama) that the skipper eventually gave up trying to get his crew to stop drinking the torpedo juice, and just ordered them to leave enough alcohol for a 1,500 yard range (out of 4,500yd or 9,000yd at slower speeds). Their success rate actually went up as a result, because they were making shots from much closer in.
The museum also includes the battleship USS Alabama, a good collection of aircraft, and then some tanks, artillery, and other equipment. My grandpa took me there every summer as a kid and I could never get enough.
I'm not sure why people think this I'd guess its from burning toast it becomes charcoal and that will work to an extent. ( the filter story is also told about toast)
In France, around 1985, an old man said to me that just after WW2 he was, as a French soldier, working in Germany in some airfield or military site which was then used to host Allied soldiers of various nationalities.
They had a problem with Soviet soldiers dying due to some poisonous/toxic substance they consumed.
It lasted for days, maybe weeks. Nobody had a clue.
Then they realized that some/many Soviet soldiers had discovered a tank containing jet fuel and secretly drank from it. Those who drank too much or were too weak just died, but other ones weren't deterred.
Alcoholism in Russia, and most of the former USSR is just like, real bad. The sex ratio in Russia is something like 80 men : 100 women, and it's mostly due to alcohol.
Kinda, sorta? The global data is roughly "the more patriarchal a society is, the less women drink".
> Or are men somehow more susceptible?
That's also possible, but it's hard to suss out of the data, because the cultural aspects are so large. In some countries, alcohol use is like an order of magnitude higher for men than women, and in others it's roughly equal.
My guess: jet fuel is commonly kerosene, which if ingested (especially at somewhat palatable dilutions) will majorly fuck you up, but with effects that can somewhat mimic being drunk. That said, it's also going to fry your liver, kidneys, and pretty much anything else, but if you were already a conscript that spent 26 hours a day in a state somewhere between unconscious and drunk, a little kerosene nightcap might be just the thing. And if you ended up in the infirmary, at least they'd change the sheets between patients -- no such luxury in the barracks.
Some universities in the USSR, especially ones that dealt with electronics and silicon manufacturing, would keep their solvents under strict lock and key. Mostly because the military 'cadets' tended to pretty quickly consume any solvents that didn't immediately kill them.
I saw Russians depicted as drinking brake fluid in Beast of War and couldn't believe it. A few searches proved it true!
Here's an excerpt from "Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan" by Alexander Alexiev (US Army document):
You cannot imagine what they drink. They will drink shaving lotions and cologne. That's good stuff. Then they will drink toothpaste. The best one is the Bulgarian Pomorin brand. They will simply squeeze four or five tubes in a jar, dilute it with water and drink it. They also drank truck antifreeze, glue, and brake fluid. The brake fluid they used to heat up and put some nails in it for some reason. I don't know why. They will also take shoe polish and smear it on a piece of bread and leave it in the sun until the alcohol separates from the shoe polish. Then you eat the bread and get drunk.
There's a legendary Russian recipe for drinking brake fluid. I've seen claims that this goes as far back as WW2, with Soviet soldiers using their Mosin rifles to treat German brake fluid in this manner.
1. Be someplace very cold.
2. Find a steel crowbar or something similar (metal and long).
3. Stick it in a bucket.
4. Drip brake fluid onto the exposed end such that the liquid flows slowly along the surface into the bucket.
This supposedly filters out most of the chemicals as they freeze onto the cold metal surface, leaving the liquid in the bucket drinkable.
I would strongly advise against actually trying this for real, though.
It is funny how putting on a uniform instantly makes you ... stupid. It is like a part of your brain shuts off. The social behaviour regress to like 5th grade in adult men.
Like of someone tells you you tie your shoes in the wrong way you become a child mentally or something.
Being a Soviet/Russian conscript is a terrible fucking lot in life. Being raped, beaten, denigrated was and remains extremely common. You're taken from wherever you had probably spent your whole life, thrown into a shitty uniform, shipped off like cattle to wherever it is that the motherland needs you, and used as an inanimate tool until you were either too broken and destroyed to function anymore, or you had managed to survive to the end of your term.
Alcoholism was and remains rampant, and in many cases even encouraged, as to keep the system 'lubricated'. Getting shitfaced on whatever you could find that'd get you there quickly is just an extension of that.
I left the country when I was young, and as soon as I became of age, the military came around my old apartment to find me. I couldn't return to the country for a decade - there was absolutely no way I was going to take even the slightest chance of being in the Russian military.
This is very much the same reason I'm not going back now. It saddens me that I may never step foot there again.
Remember the military bukhankas rolling around in late May and early June, grabbing men off the street for conscription if they looked even a little bit like they'd just finished high school?
I've got a pretty vivid memory of seeing the 'recruiters' grabbing an amputee out of a wheelchair in broad daylight and shoving him in the back of the van along with the several other men they already had in there.
I am a NCO in the reserve. I am speaking from experience and I can add that I am not arguing I am smart and others are stupid.
Note, that my emphasis is on the system that make people behave strange.
It is somewhat ironic too, since being a soldier exposes you to so many practical and different problems that are so different each time that there is no room to be actually stupid.
And I am not talking about combat, but mundane stuff like, tying a rope between two trees to hang wet cloths on. In normal life people that would fail at stuff like this can get routine and hide that they can't do such tasks without messing up, but soldiers do so much different things that they don't get routine and if you are a bit off you are exposed.
If you are the kinda guy that can tie ropes between trees to dry cloths on, the military structure makes you behave like you would have been "stupid" in many situation that only is a problem because you lack power.
So Soviet or American sailors, that wanted booze but had no way to get it, solved it in the way they could. In civilian life they could just not have put them self in the situation where they couldn't buy booze.
Hazing is maybe a big problem since you are locked in with some jocks you can't escape since the front gate is guarded by MP.
Soviet air force personnel had it better. The Tupolev Tu-22 bomber used a cooling system that contained 40% pure alcohol so of course that was constantly siphoned off.
I read the same story from Anthony Beevor’s book about the battle of Berlin, although I think it was a different chemical. The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.
Life in Soviet/Russian armies is grim. Many of the recruits come from remote regions so poor that they lack fridges, washing machines and even toilets (today as well [2], hence all the looting in Ukraine [3]). Broken-down equipment - either because it was crap from the factory or because someone along the chain sold off parts and fuel on the black market -, substandard equipment, shoddy living conditions, and on top of all of that (which would turn most Western soldiers into alcoholics already) come brutal hazing rituals [1] that traumatise those who manage to survive it (there's tens of thousands of incidents a year, and as late as 2006 hundreds of deaths a year), and the meatwave battle strategy that both past and current leadership have embraced.
No wonder that the Russian / Soviet / Russian army has always been associated with alcoholism, most of them self-medicate with it (or whatever other drugs they can get their hands on). And it's also no surprise given the traumatisation that many of the Russian soldiers act completely depraved on the battlefield - why not rape, torture and kill for fun, when you're probably not going to survive the war long enough to get held accountable?
To be fair it’s hard to reconcile with them being paid relatively high wages due to manpower shortages (since they are generally reluctant to send conscripts into Ukraine).
When Ethanol started being used as car fuel in Brazil (in the 70's), there were not life-threatening additives on it, so of course some people would use it to mix with drinks.
The practice only stopped in the late 80's when there was a supply crisis and Brazil had to import methanol and the TV started reporting cases of people going blind due to severe methanol poisoning.
The torpedo grade ethanol (fuel grade alcohol generally) necessitates quality control than ethanol for consumption because it has to pair with a precise number of oxygen molecules (which in the case of a torpedo are pre-allocated so you can't just tolerate it running lean or rich without a huge change in range) and produce known energy in the process and calling a bunch of subs and ships back to have their ethanol tested because you put out a bad batch is a way bigger PITA than telling a bunch of distributors to trash product and collect a refund.
If unsafe for humans amounts of methanol in the product was tolerable for the torpedos they would have just done that to prevent consumption.
The cleanliness and hygiene controls along the way are going to be lesser. It's not like it's being made in a food factory.
> The cleanliness and hygiene controls along the way are going to be lesser. It's not like it's being made in a food factory.
Sincere question: isn't "hygiene" usually referring only to bacteria, viruses and other organic contamination? Don't get me wrong, I'm with you that I'd worry about contamination with all kinds of other toxic stuff.
Probably more like trace amounts of heavy metals and other things like benzene or residue from other substances from the vessels. Stuff that would be awful to consume but likely won't make much of a difference in fuel. Like with anything else, the price will increase for how ever pure you need the substance to be. Using alcohol as a solvent doesn't require much purity, any other alcohols in the mix will still do the job. If you want to be able to drink it, then the alcohol needs to be as pure as possible.
You really got me wondering about that. I can't find a definitive answer, but Wikipedia certainly suggests it is:
> The terms cleanliness and hygiene are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. In general, hygiene refers to practices that prevent spread of disease-causing organisms. Cleaning processes (e.g., handwashing) remove infectious microbes as well as dirt and soil, and are thus often the means to achieve hygiene.
> Home hygiene pertains to the hygiene practices that prevent or minimize the spread of disease at home and other everyday settings such as social settings, public transport, the workplace, public places, and more. Hygiene in a variety of settings plays an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
It does seem like hygiene controls are going to be concerned exclusively with infectious disease, while cleanliness is going to prevent broader contamination of anything toxic.
From what I understand, although methanol is usually present in small amounts when fermenting things, even when distilling you never really concentrate enough of it to be a problem unless you are specifically trying to produce and distill methanol. That doesn't mean they are good spirits, just not deadly. The idea that moonshine might accidentally be methanol and kill you is just prohibition propaganda to shift alcohol deaths away from the government purposefully tainting alcohols to prevent/punish people from drinking it and onto the illegal bootleggers who were providing safe drinking spirits. Methanol is always a purposefully added substance at some point if it is anywhere near poisonous levels. To produce it you don't ferment anything first, you just heat up wood until it decomposes from heat and distill off the oils and alcohols and tars that come off like how they break down coal into gases and oils. But for non-consumption purposes adding methanol to ethanol may have desirable benefits for the application, and isn't just there to poison people to prevent consumption. Sometimes it might just be cheaper than regular ethanol if you are just going to burn it.
Some quick notes about "it's just propaganda" with some "regulation is hard to do without tons of side effects" undercurrents:
1. When distilling you DO concentrate methanol but as a waste product. An unethical moonshiner could still sell this or cut it back into the main product (although the latter isn't usually a problem because of the concentration and the fact that ethanol is a treatment for methanol proving). You would definitely know if you were drinking straight methanol but you might not know in a cocktail (or might not care - lots of crazy stuff in these comments about drinking various dangerous liquids).
2. Other things went into the shine. A very common one was dynamite because nitroglycerin helps fermentation continue at low temperatures, like out in the woods where your secret still might have to be. Nitroglycerin can do all sorts of things to you - it is sometimes prescribed as a heart medicine.
3. Moonshining is, by definition, a criminal enterprise and things-you-might-not-like happen all the time just like with illegal drugs today. One common blindness cause wasn't actually methanol but antifreeze and other "engine gunk" because you could put your new, un-aged shine into things like car engines and it would come out the other side with the impression of being aged or in some way better.
So there is some fun-fact nuance on the "moonshine could make you go blind" lore! I like to respond to that with "yes, but probably not for the reason you think!"
"Methanol is always a purposefully added substance at some point if it is anywhere near poisonous levels."
That's usually true. Adding methanol to ethanol can be either deliberate or accidental. Where I am (Australia) methanol and pyridine used to be added to ethanol as a denaturant so it could be sold without liquor tax and it was sold as 'Methylated Spirits' and labeled 'POISON'. If I recall the amount of methanol was 15% and the pyridine was 3%. Methanol was set at 15% with the deliberate intention of making the 'spirits' toxic and the pyridine to make it foul tasting (and pyridine itself is also toxic). At those percentages both denaturants were similar enough to ethanol as not to interfere significantly with its primarily purposes—as a solvent, fuel, etc.
Nevertheless, that didn't deter diehard drinkers/alcoholics from consuming methylated spirits and the effects on their health were catastrophic—blindness and death.
Several decades ago both methanol and pyridine were removed and replaced with denatonium (aka Bitrex) as the denaturant, which is not toxic at the level necessary for its purpose. Nevertheless, the product is still sold as 'Methylated Spirits' with the fine print calling it 'ethanol solution 95%, UN 1170', and the warning changed from 'POISON' to 'CAUTION'. The logic behind the change being that it was 'safer'—read it cost the State less in medical expenses.
I think the UK has done something similar and no doubt a number of other countries have followed suit, except I believe the US makes ethanol harder to get and usually substitutes isopropanol/rubbing alcohol for domestic use (someone in the US please update me on the rules there).
Since the advent of denatonium as a denaturant, it seems to me there is no need to add methanol and I reckon it ought to be highly illegal to do so. If ethanol/methanol mixtures are needed for some purpose then they should be strictly labeled and denatonium a mandated additive.
What concerns me is the accidental addition of methanol to ethanol (to 'Methylated Spirits'). I use a lot of ethanol in the form of Methylated Spirits for cleaning and as a solvent as it's a much cheaper substitute for isopropanol and I've noticed occasionally that its odor is very different (once every 3 or 4 months on weekly purchases). In fact, I've noticed the odor of formaldehyde on more than one occasion (and that's not the only impurity I've detected by nose).
This tells me there's very little control on the distribution of industrial solvents (in this class that is). I'd suggest tanks/tankers, etc. aren't properly flushed when changing product and or such. If distribution equipment isn't being cleaned properly then people aren't being careful and worse could easily happen.
From my experience it seems to me it's still a very risky business to assume that 'industrial' ethanol is actually just that (95% ethanol, 5% H2O and trace denatonium). There's no way I'd ever risk drinking the stuff—that is assuming I could stand the taste of the excruciatingly bitter denatonium.
I'd be interested to know how other countries now handle the rules in regard to ethanol distribution.
Ethanol is an antidote for methanol. Methanol is a very poisonous by itself, but when mixed with ethanol, its consumption might end without long term consequences like blindness or death. The deadliness of their mix depends on a ratio, I believe that 50/50 is survivable.
So if you are not very picky when it comes to drinks, it doesn't really matter if your ethanol has 10% of methanol.
Perhaps so, but is that a one-off shot/dosing or habitually (as an alcoholic)?
In my other post I pointed out that denatured ethanol sold as 'Methylated Spirits' used to have 15% methanol and 3% pyridine as denaturants and in practice this combination was considered highly toxic and that's why the denaturants were changed to nontoxic denatonium (ie 95% ethanol, 5% H2O and trace denatonium).
For Methylated Spirits the methanol/pyridine ratios were set deliberately to be toxic and the product was labeled 'POISON'.
Whether the pyridine added significantly to the toxicity I cannot say. Nor do I know why the ratios were set as they were. No doubt a check of how that standard was set and the death rate stats before and after the denatonium was added would tell the actual story.
Benzene really only shows up in traces if you're trying to get absolute ethanol (100%). You can distill up to 95% ethanol (the EtOH-water azeotrope) without introducing anything else.
Right, the EtOH/azeotrope is the normal domestic (industrial grade) product available where I am (Australia), it's available in all supermarkets, etc. That said, it often has impurities that ought not be present (see my other post).
Here, 'absolute ethanol' is typically 99%. No doubt H2O is a significant part of that last 1% but going on my experience with 95% EtOH I wouldn't be a bit surprised about it being benzene and it's likely there's other undesirable stuff as well.
BTW, over the years I've bought a lot of industrial grade 'absolute ethanol' which I use in woodworking as a solvent for shellac. 95% EtOH is unsatisfactory as the water in it often causes the shellac to turn a cloudy/milky colour.
I have to buy the 99% grade in 20-litre plastic containers as usually that's the smallest amount that's supplied. Moreover, it's much more expensive, at least double the price and on par with that of isopropanol.
Given its price and comparative rarity I doubt whether its consumption would be a signifiant problem. Anecdotally, the stuff I buy seems to have significantly more denatonium than the normal EtOH, quite some time after using it I've momentarily held my (dry) hand on my face near my mouth and the denatonium is almost overpowering. That's not the case with normal domestic EtOH (in the same situation denatonium is present but nowhere near as objectionable).
This is why I've written severe poisoning. It was never a healthy thing to do, but it took a case of "shit, people are actually going blind because of this" for it to stop.
> Alcohol proof (usually termed simply "proof" in relation to a beverage) is a measure of the content of ethanol (alcohol) in an alcoholic beverage. The term was originally used in England and from 1816 was equal to about 1.75 times the percentage of alcohol by volume (ABV).
That omits entirely the origin and meaning of the word proof in this context.
Proof originally related to proving that the alcohol content was of such a degree that excise duty was due not to actually measuring the alcohol content.
"In 16th-century England, the original test involved soaking a pellet of gunpowder with the liquor. If it was still possible to ignite the wet gunpowder, the alcohol content of the liquor was rated above proof and it was taxed at a higher rate, and vice versa if the powder failed to ignite."
https://homepages.uc.edu/~jensenwb/reprints/111.%20Proof.pdf
See, the early hard drives used in Soviet computers required a lot of manual maintenance, which included cleaning the heads with ethanol. They also topped out at ~5Mb.
In late 80s these were gradually replaced with imported Western hardware that offered more storage for less. In some places, the engineers in charge of servicing those things got creative and used such upgrades as an excuse to up their ethanol quota. After all, if a 5Mb HDD needs N ml of ethanol to service daily, it stands to reason that a 20Mb HDD needs N*4, right?
Acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation was itself a critical WWI technology, as cordite required acetone. That fermentation process requires only sugars and an acetobutylicum strain. The first president of Israel developed this process.
I don't know how the balance broke down during WW2, but synthesis of ethanol from ethylene in more recent times is economically competitive with fermentation. So for instance, fermentation of sugarcane is easily cheaper in Brazil, but in America most industrial ethanol came from synthesis until corn subsidies were introduced in the 80s which made fermentation cheaper than synthesis.
The US has ample ethane now (it's abundant in much fracked gas) so I suspect this synthesized ethanol would be superior here without the corn subsidies.
A 50lb bag of cracked corn is about $12 at Tractor Supply. I've considered making my own moonshine just for the hell of it. Might actually get around to it one of these days.
"When it comes to drinking rubbing alcohol, the digestive tract suffers the most, even when only swallowing a small amount. The body metabolizes these extremely high alcohol levels into acetone. If consumed to intoxication, the substance can lead to organ damage. Because it's a central nervous system depressant, side effects can include dizziness, headaches and inebriation. Because it's a gastrointestinal irritant, it can cause nausea, abdominal pain and vomiting blood. In addition, "due to having a higher molecular weight than ethanol, isopropanol, is more intoxicating than ethanol and can produce an altered sensorium, hypotension, hypothermia, and even cardiopulmonary collapse. Hypotension is associated with severe overdose and related to a mortality rate of nearly 45 percent," according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
I am not sure I would call that "drinkable", unless you just mean it will physically go down your gullet.
I take care of plenty of patients that drink IPA. It is not uncommon in both people that think it will kill them and do it as a suicide attempt, as well as people that are desperate for a buzz but can't access ethanol (I work on the Navajo nation where ethanol is illegal and more difficult to obtain).
In general, these patients sober up and go home, just like patients that drink ethanol. Compared to ethanol, patients are much more intoxicated, take much longer to get sober, and are more likely to exhibit symptoms of gastritis or esophagitis. But there is nothing about caring for them that is categorically different than caring for a patient with a significant alcohol ingestion -- in both cases, it is dose dependent.
You can be hospitalized for drinking too much ethanol, or too much water. Are those not drinkable?
I'm an ER physician. I have worked in a poison control center. I take care of the people that drink IPA. I work on the Navajo Native American reservation, where this isn't terribly uncommon.
See also the Mark 14 torpedo, the primary American torpedo in WWII, which didn't actually work for the first 2 years of the war because they had never bothered to actually test it because it would be too expensive.
Specifically, they didn't want to waste 1-10 torpedoes for testing, which maybe that can be defensible, but it became utterly indefensible when every single submarine came back from patrol with reports of "we launched a spread of 4 torps, 2 hit the hull of the enemy ship, zero detonations".
The lost value in un-sunk enemy shipping, the number of dead seaman that should have come back victorious, the number of subs that got sunk after an attack utterly failed, all were individually prices that dwarfed a single Mk14 torpedo, and together had a measurable impact on war performance.
All because the bureau of ordinance basically refused to hear any feedback.
Nearly every single component of the torpedo was unfit for service. The magnetic exploder didn't work. The contact detonator was nearly incapable of working because of the physics of torpedo impacts in a way that meant getting a perpendicular hit, which was considered optimal, actually was less likely to detonate. The depth keeping system was calibrated incorrectly, due to module integration mistakes, and ran 10 feet deeper than it was supposed to in some cases.
It's actually kind of common for US military procurement to produce a somewhat failed piece of equipment initially, but it usually gets modified and iterated on and improved to the point of being very respectable hardware in short order. The refusal of BuOrd to hear feedback is the real problem here. Their insane delays in fielding and responding to feedback cost real US lives. Once the torpedo was fixed up, the American sub fleet in the pacific ran roughshod over Japanese supply and utterly crippled their abilities to maintain control over the island chains.
The reason BuOrd gave for refusing to double check their work as these scathing reports came in? You see, the navy was struggling to produce enough torpedoes to meet requirements, so we can't waste a couple for testing. Instead, HUNDREDS of outright non-functioning torpedoes were sent to the bottom of the pacific, completely wasted, with almost no hope of actually working, because they were never tested.
The entire situation should be required reading for anyone in management, anywhere. Textbook case of penny smart, pound foolish.
If I remember correctly part of the issue was that they used magnetic detector based firing systems and only tested them off the coast of California. When they fired them elsewhere the Earth's magnetic field was different enough that the detonators failed.
Not only did the magnetic fuses not work, the impact fuses would collapse and fail if the torpedo made a direct hit. And the torpedoes would consistently run deeper than they were set to. US torpedoes in the early stages of the war were nearly completely ineffective.
FWIW, everyone in the beginning of WWII had magnetic detonator / torpedo problems, so it couldn't be just that. They were difficult to depth-keep just right to pass under a ship but within detection, for one thing. The sub captain had to correctly identify the ship, look up the draft, and call down to manually set the depth keeping. (Good luck in the swells of north atlantic). Often it just didn't use that depth anyway, due again to issues with design/testing.
The contact detonators had their own issues, for one they couldn't explode at an oblique angle, instead needed near-right-angle impact - but even then had a high dud ratio.
So, in theory the magnetic ones were preferable, even though standard doctrine was to fire for right-angle impact regardless (it makes evasion much more difficult, for one thing).
The Navy medical corps that deployed with the Marines in Korea deliberately used pure (not denatured) ethyl alcohol because they knew if they put stuff in it the soldiers would drink it anyway. Better not to poison them.
There's a story from the USS Drum (now a museum ship in Mobile, Alabama) that the skipper eventually gave up trying to get his crew to stop drinking the torpedo juice, and just ordered them to leave enough alcohol for a 1,500 yard range (out of 4,500yd or 9,000yd at slower speeds). Their success rate actually went up as a result, because they were making shots from much closer in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZQ-uMspz5c
The museum also includes the battleship USS Alabama, a good collection of aircraft, and then some tanks, artillery, and other equipment. My grandpa took me there every summer as a kid and I could never get enough.
That's good leadership
Bread won't work as a filter.
I'm not sure why people think this I'd guess its from burning toast it becomes charcoal and that will work to an extent. ( the filter story is also told about toast)
Experiment here - https://youtu.be/_A8AErdGz20?t=248
In France, around 1985, an old man said to me that just after WW2 he was, as a French soldier, working in Germany in some airfield or military site which was then used to host Allied soldiers of various nationalities.
They had a problem with Soviet soldiers dying due to some poisonous/toxic substance they consumed.
It lasted for days, maybe weeks. Nobody had a clue.
Then they realized that some/many Soviet soldiers had discovered a tank containing jet fuel and secretly drank from it. Those who drank too much or were too weak just died, but other ones weren't deterred.
Alcoholism in Russia, and most of the former USSR is just like, real bad. The sex ratio in Russia is something like 80 men : 100 women, and it's mostly due to alcohol.
Do women not drink? Or are men somehow more susceptible?
> Do women not drink?
Kinda, sorta? The global data is roughly "the more patriarchal a society is, the less women drink".
> Or are men somehow more susceptible?
That's also possible, but it's hard to suss out of the data, because the cultural aspects are so large. In some countries, alcohol use is like an order of magnitude higher for men than women, and in others it's roughly equal.
According to my father, a number of GIs blinded or otherwise injured themselves experimenting with antifreeze around VE day.
Why were people even drinking jet fuel? Did it have any psychotropic effects?
My guess: jet fuel is commonly kerosene, which if ingested (especially at somewhat palatable dilutions) will majorly fuck you up, but with effects that can somewhat mimic being drunk. That said, it's also going to fry your liver, kidneys, and pretty much anything else, but if you were already a conscript that spent 26 hours a day in a state somewhere between unconscious and drunk, a little kerosene nightcap might be just the thing. And if you ended up in the infirmary, at least they'd change the sheets between patients -- no such luxury in the barracks.
Some universities in the USSR, especially ones that dealt with electronics and silicon manufacturing, would keep their solvents under strict lock and key. Mostly because the military 'cadets' tended to pretty quickly consume any solvents that didn't immediately kill them.
I saw Russians depicted as drinking brake fluid in Beast of War and couldn't believe it. A few searches proved it true!
Here's an excerpt from "Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan" by Alexander Alexiev (US Army document):
You cannot imagine what they drink. They will drink shaving lotions and cologne. That's good stuff. Then they will drink toothpaste. The best one is the Bulgarian Pomorin brand. They will simply squeeze four or five tubes in a jar, dilute it with water and drink it. They also drank truck antifreeze, glue, and brake fluid. The brake fluid they used to heat up and put some nails in it for some reason. I don't know why. They will also take shoe polish and smear it on a piece of bread and leave it in the sun until the alcohol separates from the shoe polish. Then you eat the bread and get drunk.
There's a legendary Russian recipe for drinking brake fluid. I've seen claims that this goes as far back as WW2, with Soviet soldiers using their Mosin rifles to treat German brake fluid in this manner.
1. Be someplace very cold.
2. Find a steel crowbar or something similar (metal and long).
3. Stick it in a bucket.
4. Drip brake fluid onto the exposed end such that the liquid flows slowly along the surface into the bucket.
This supposedly filters out most of the chemicals as they freeze onto the cold metal surface, leaving the liquid in the bucket drinkable.
I would strongly advise against actually trying this for real, though.
One can't drink glue. You need to make a mixer head (drill and wire is OK) and collect the solid dissolved mass on it. The rest you can drink.
Indeed! The man who told me this did not know the reason but his hypothesis was indeed that they wanted to get drunk.
Thank you for the details. I heard about Russian women hiding their perfumes for men not to find (and drink) them...
It is funny how putting on a uniform instantly makes you ... stupid. It is like a part of your brain shuts off. The social behaviour regress to like 5th grade in adult men.
Like of someone tells you you tie your shoes in the wrong way you become a child mentally or something.
Being a Soviet/Russian conscript is a terrible fucking lot in life. Being raped, beaten, denigrated was and remains extremely common. You're taken from wherever you had probably spent your whole life, thrown into a shitty uniform, shipped off like cattle to wherever it is that the motherland needs you, and used as an inanimate tool until you were either too broken and destroyed to function anymore, or you had managed to survive to the end of your term.
Alcoholism was and remains rampant, and in many cases even encouraged, as to keep the system 'lubricated'. Getting shitfaced on whatever you could find that'd get you there quickly is just an extension of that.
I left the country when I was young, and as soon as I became of age, the military came around my old apartment to find me. I couldn't return to the country for a decade - there was absolutely no way I was going to take even the slightest chance of being in the Russian military.
This is very much the same reason I'm not going back now. It saddens me that I may never step foot there again.
Remember the military bukhankas rolling around in late May and early June, grabbing men off the street for conscription if they looked even a little bit like they'd just finished high school?
I've got a pretty vivid memory of seeing the 'recruiters' grabbing an amputee out of a wheelchair in broad daylight and shoving him in the back of the van along with the several other men they already had in there.
It's probably not the clothing, but rather some aspect of the circumstance that coincides with the uniform (such as, loss of freedom.)
Oh ye ofc. There are many normal professions with uniforms.
But when you are in it, putting on the uniform is the magic transition between the real you and vice corpral Rightbyte.
Loss of freedom is certainly the main factor.
You clearly don't know many people in uniform, to make that sort of sweeping generalization.
I am a NCO in the reserve. I am speaking from experience and I can add that I am not arguing I am smart and others are stupid.
Note, that my emphasis is on the system that make people behave strange.
It is somewhat ironic too, since being a soldier exposes you to so many practical and different problems that are so different each time that there is no room to be actually stupid.
And I am not talking about combat, but mundane stuff like, tying a rope between two trees to hang wet cloths on. In normal life people that would fail at stuff like this can get routine and hide that they can't do such tasks without messing up, but soldiers do so much different things that they don't get routine and if you are a bit off you are exposed.
If you are the kinda guy that can tie ropes between trees to dry cloths on, the military structure makes you behave like you would have been "stupid" in many situation that only is a problem because you lack power.
So Soviet or American sailors, that wanted booze but had no way to get it, solved it in the way they could. In civilian life they could just not have put them self in the situation where they couldn't buy booze.
Hazing is maybe a big problem since you are locked in with some jocks you can't escape since the front gate is guarded by MP.
Simple as that. The limitations make you stupid.
I read somewhere that some Soviet jets used huge quantities of alcohol for cooling.
Still do, though these days they're a little more efficient, so it's only the flight crew that needs to be cooled with that alcohol.
Specifically the Tu-22 is known for this.
MiG-21 radars used high quality pure ethanol in evaporating cooling system
Many of the Russian fighters still in active service have alcohol coolant. The ground crews are reputed to partake when they want a tipple.
Some did, however there were no Soviet jets at the time of this story.
Soviet air force personnel had it better. The Tupolev Tu-22 bomber used a cooling system that contained 40% pure alcohol so of course that was constantly siphoned off.
https://youtu.be/bKoHMXggEHU
I read the same story from Anthony Beevor’s book about the battle of Berlin, although I think it was a different chemical. The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.
> The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.
s/seemed to have/has had and still has/
Life in Soviet/Russian armies is grim. Many of the recruits come from remote regions so poor that they lack fridges, washing machines and even toilets (today as well [2], hence all the looting in Ukraine [3]). Broken-down equipment - either because it was crap from the factory or because someone along the chain sold off parts and fuel on the black market -, substandard equipment, shoddy living conditions, and on top of all of that (which would turn most Western soldiers into alcoholics already) come brutal hazing rituals [1] that traumatise those who manage to survive it (there's tens of thousands of incidents a year, and as late as 2006 hundreds of deaths a year), and the meatwave battle strategy that both past and current leadership have embraced.
No wonder that the Russian / Soviet / Russian army has always been associated with alcoholism, most of them self-medicate with it (or whatever other drugs they can get their hands on). And it's also no surprise given the traumatisation that many of the Russian soldiers act completely depraved on the battlefield - why not rape, torture and kill for fun, when you're probably not going to survive the war long enough to get held accountable?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
[2] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_by_Russian_forces_duri...
Look for a copy of Zinky Boys. It shows the conditions for Soviet soldiers during the Afghan war, I think it hasn't changed much.
Don't forget shitty leadership - harsh, anti-intellectual, and expecting obedienece, not initiative.
Where have I heard that before?
> today as well
To be fair it’s hard to reconcile with them being paid relatively high wages due to manpower shortages (since they are generally reluctant to send conscripts into Ukraine).
When Ethanol started being used as car fuel in Brazil (in the 70's), there were not life-threatening additives on it, so of course some people would use it to mix with drinks.
The practice only stopped in the late 80's when there was a supply crisis and Brazil had to import methanol and the TV started reporting cases of people going blind due to severe methanol poisoning.
Methanol is a biproduct of fermentation, and will be part of the destillate if not done carefully.
I doubt that ethanol used in car and torpedo fuel will go through the same quality control than drinking alcohol.
The torpedo grade ethanol (fuel grade alcohol generally) necessitates quality control than ethanol for consumption because it has to pair with a precise number of oxygen molecules (which in the case of a torpedo are pre-allocated so you can't just tolerate it running lean or rich without a huge change in range) and produce known energy in the process and calling a bunch of subs and ships back to have their ethanol tested because you put out a bad batch is a way bigger PITA than telling a bunch of distributors to trash product and collect a refund.
If unsafe for humans amounts of methanol in the product was tolerable for the torpedos they would have just done that to prevent consumption.
The cleanliness and hygiene controls along the way are going to be lesser. It's not like it's being made in a food factory.
> The cleanliness and hygiene controls along the way are going to be lesser. It's not like it's being made in a food factory.
Sincere question: isn't "hygiene" usually referring only to bacteria, viruses and other organic contamination? Don't get me wrong, I'm with you that I'd worry about contamination with all kinds of other toxic stuff.
Probably more like trace amounts of heavy metals and other things like benzene or residue from other substances from the vessels. Stuff that would be awful to consume but likely won't make much of a difference in fuel. Like with anything else, the price will increase for how ever pure you need the substance to be. Using alcohol as a solvent doesn't require much purity, any other alcohols in the mix will still do the job. If you want to be able to drink it, then the alcohol needs to be as pure as possible.
You really got me wondering about that. I can't find a definitive answer, but Wikipedia certainly suggests it is:
> The terms cleanliness and hygiene are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. In general, hygiene refers to practices that prevent spread of disease-causing organisms. Cleaning processes (e.g., handwashing) remove infectious microbes as well as dirt and soil, and are thus often the means to achieve hygiene.
> Home hygiene pertains to the hygiene practices that prevent or minimize the spread of disease at home and other everyday settings such as social settings, public transport, the workplace, public places, and more. Hygiene in a variety of settings plays an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene
It does seem like hygiene controls are going to be concerned exclusively with infectious disease, while cleanliness is going to prevent broader contamination of anything toxic.
No, hygiene means anything done for the purpose of maintaining good health. It is commonly used as a synonym for cleanliness.
From what I understand, although methanol is usually present in small amounts when fermenting things, even when distilling you never really concentrate enough of it to be a problem unless you are specifically trying to produce and distill methanol. That doesn't mean they are good spirits, just not deadly. The idea that moonshine might accidentally be methanol and kill you is just prohibition propaganda to shift alcohol deaths away from the government purposefully tainting alcohols to prevent/punish people from drinking it and onto the illegal bootleggers who were providing safe drinking spirits. Methanol is always a purposefully added substance at some point if it is anywhere near poisonous levels. To produce it you don't ferment anything first, you just heat up wood until it decomposes from heat and distill off the oils and alcohols and tars that come off like how they break down coal into gases and oils. But for non-consumption purposes adding methanol to ethanol may have desirable benefits for the application, and isn't just there to poison people to prevent consumption. Sometimes it might just be cheaper than regular ethanol if you are just going to burn it.
Re: moonshining
Some quick notes about "it's just propaganda" with some "regulation is hard to do without tons of side effects" undercurrents:
1. When distilling you DO concentrate methanol but as a waste product. An unethical moonshiner could still sell this or cut it back into the main product (although the latter isn't usually a problem because of the concentration and the fact that ethanol is a treatment for methanol proving). You would definitely know if you were drinking straight methanol but you might not know in a cocktail (or might not care - lots of crazy stuff in these comments about drinking various dangerous liquids).
2. Other things went into the shine. A very common one was dynamite because nitroglycerin helps fermentation continue at low temperatures, like out in the woods where your secret still might have to be. Nitroglycerin can do all sorts of things to you - it is sometimes prescribed as a heart medicine.
3. Moonshining is, by definition, a criminal enterprise and things-you-might-not-like happen all the time just like with illegal drugs today. One common blindness cause wasn't actually methanol but antifreeze and other "engine gunk" because you could put your new, un-aged shine into things like car engines and it would come out the other side with the impression of being aged or in some way better.
So there is some fun-fact nuance on the "moonshine could make you go blind" lore! I like to respond to that with "yes, but probably not for the reason you think!"
"Methanol is always a purposefully added substance at some point if it is anywhere near poisonous levels."
That's usually true. Adding methanol to ethanol can be either deliberate or accidental. Where I am (Australia) methanol and pyridine used to be added to ethanol as a denaturant so it could be sold without liquor tax and it was sold as 'Methylated Spirits' and labeled 'POISON'. If I recall the amount of methanol was 15% and the pyridine was 3%. Methanol was set at 15% with the deliberate intention of making the 'spirits' toxic and the pyridine to make it foul tasting (and pyridine itself is also toxic). At those percentages both denaturants were similar enough to ethanol as not to interfere significantly with its primarily purposes—as a solvent, fuel, etc.
Nevertheless, that didn't deter diehard drinkers/alcoholics from consuming methylated spirits and the effects on their health were catastrophic—blindness and death.
Several decades ago both methanol and pyridine were removed and replaced with denatonium (aka Bitrex) as the denaturant, which is not toxic at the level necessary for its purpose. Nevertheless, the product is still sold as 'Methylated Spirits' with the fine print calling it 'ethanol solution 95%, UN 1170', and the warning changed from 'POISON' to 'CAUTION'. The logic behind the change being that it was 'safer'—read it cost the State less in medical expenses.
I think the UK has done something similar and no doubt a number of other countries have followed suit, except I believe the US makes ethanol harder to get and usually substitutes isopropanol/rubbing alcohol for domestic use (someone in the US please update me on the rules there).
Since the advent of denatonium as a denaturant, it seems to me there is no need to add methanol and I reckon it ought to be highly illegal to do so. If ethanol/methanol mixtures are needed for some purpose then they should be strictly labeled and denatonium a mandated additive.
What concerns me is the accidental addition of methanol to ethanol (to 'Methylated Spirits'). I use a lot of ethanol in the form of Methylated Spirits for cleaning and as a solvent as it's a much cheaper substitute for isopropanol and I've noticed occasionally that its odor is very different (once every 3 or 4 months on weekly purchases). In fact, I've noticed the odor of formaldehyde on more than one occasion (and that's not the only impurity I've detected by nose).
This tells me there's very little control on the distribution of industrial solvents (in this class that is). I'd suggest tanks/tankers, etc. aren't properly flushed when changing product and or such. If distribution equipment isn't being cleaned properly then people aren't being careful and worse could easily happen.
From my experience it seems to me it's still a very risky business to assume that 'industrial' ethanol is actually just that (95% ethanol, 5% H2O and trace denatonium). There's no way I'd ever risk drinking the stuff—that is assuming I could stand the taste of the excruciatingly bitter denatonium.
I'd be interested to know how other countries now handle the rules in regard to ethanol distribution.
Ethanol is an antidote for methanol. Methanol is a very poisonous by itself, but when mixed with ethanol, its consumption might end without long term consequences like blindness or death. The deadliness of their mix depends on a ratio, I believe that 50/50 is survivable.
So if you are not very picky when it comes to drinks, it doesn't really matter if your ethanol has 10% of methanol.
"I believe that 50/50 is survivable. "
Perhaps so, but is that a one-off shot/dosing or habitually (as an alcoholic)?
In my other post I pointed out that denatured ethanol sold as 'Methylated Spirits' used to have 15% methanol and 3% pyridine as denaturants and in practice this combination was considered highly toxic and that's why the denaturants were changed to nontoxic denatonium (ie 95% ethanol, 5% H2O and trace denatonium).
For Methylated Spirits the methanol/pyridine ratios were set deliberately to be toxic and the product was labeled 'POISON'.
Whether the pyridine added significantly to the toxicity I cannot say. Nor do I know why the ratios were set as they were. No doubt a check of how that standard was set and the death rate stats before and after the denatonium was added would tell the actual story.
If I recall correctly, there might be benzene remaining in the alcohol from the water removal process.
Benzene really only shows up in traces if you're trying to get absolute ethanol (100%). You can distill up to 95% ethanol (the EtOH-water azeotrope) without introducing anything else.
Right, the EtOH/azeotrope is the normal domestic (industrial grade) product available where I am (Australia), it's available in all supermarkets, etc. That said, it often has impurities that ought not be present (see my other post).
Here, 'absolute ethanol' is typically 99%. No doubt H2O is a significant part of that last 1% but going on my experience with 95% EtOH I wouldn't be a bit surprised about it being benzene and it's likely there's other undesirable stuff as well.
BTW, over the years I've bought a lot of industrial grade 'absolute ethanol' which I use in woodworking as a solvent for shellac. 95% EtOH is unsatisfactory as the water in it often causes the shellac to turn a cloudy/milky colour.
I have to buy the 99% grade in 20-litre plastic containers as usually that's the smallest amount that's supplied. Moreover, it's much more expensive, at least double the price and on par with that of isopropanol.
Given its price and comparative rarity I doubt whether its consumption would be a signifiant problem. Anecdotally, the stuff I buy seems to have significantly more denatonium than the normal EtOH, quite some time after using it I've momentarily held my (dry) hand on my face near my mouth and the denatonium is almost overpowering. That's not the case with normal domestic EtOH (in the same situation denatonium is present but nowhere near as objectionable).
This is why I've written severe poisoning. It was never a healthy thing to do, but it took a case of "shit, people are actually going blind because of this" for it to stop.
Depicted in the 2012 Paul Thomas Anderson movie “The Master” - a movie I love for reasons I don’t understand.
TIL:
> Alcohol proof (usually termed simply "proof" in relation to a beverage) is a measure of the content of ethanol (alcohol) in an alcoholic beverage. The term was originally used in England and from 1816 was equal to about 1.75 times the percentage of alcohol by volume (ABV).
(from Wikipedia)
That omits entirely the origin and meaning of the word proof in this context.
Proof originally related to proving that the alcohol content was of such a degree that excise duty was due not to actually measuring the alcohol content.
"In 16th-century England, the original test involved soaking a pellet of gunpowder with the liquor. If it was still possible to ignite the wet gunpowder, the alcohol content of the liquor was rated above proof and it was taxed at a higher rate, and vice versa if the powder failed to ignite." https://homepages.uc.edu/~jensenwb/reprints/111.%20Proof.pdf
The story I heard was that the gunpowder test originated in the Royal Navy.
More recent analog: https://simpleflying.com/tupolev-tu-22-booze-carrier-why/
There's a similar story about Soviet hard drives.
See, the early hard drives used in Soviet computers required a lot of manual maintenance, which included cleaning the heads with ethanol. They also topped out at ~5Mb.
In late 80s these were gradually replaced with imported Western hardware that offered more storage for less. In some places, the engineers in charge of servicing those things got creative and used such upgrades as an excuse to up their ethanol quota. After all, if a 5Mb HDD needs N ml of ethanol to service daily, it stands to reason that a 20Mb HDD needs N*4, right?
"American torpedoes utilized 180-proof ethyl alcohol as fuel for the miniature steam engines that drove them toward their targets."
I wonder if this was by design ...
I think isopropyl alcohol is probably generally available/popular only because it is not drinkable.
Ethyl alcohol is _cheap_. You literally need just a bunch of sugar, yeast, and a still. Straightforward, low-tech, and safe.
Isopropyl alcohol needs to be synthesized from acetone, which itself is synthesized.
Acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation was itself a critical WWI technology, as cordite required acetone. That fermentation process requires only sugars and an acetobutylicum strain. The first president of Israel developed this process.
Yes, Chaim Weizmann.
When was this supplanted by the cumene process?
EDIT: this process was developed from 1939-1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumene_process
https://shop.tarjomeplus.com/UploadFileEn/TPLUS_EN_2421.pdf
BTW, isopropyl alcohol is industrially produced from propylene, not acetone.
I don't know how the balance broke down during WW2, but synthesis of ethanol from ethylene in more recent times is economically competitive with fermentation. So for instance, fermentation of sugarcane is easily cheaper in Brazil, but in America most industrial ethanol came from synthesis until corn subsidies were introduced in the 80s which made fermentation cheaper than synthesis.
The US has ample ethane now (it's abundant in much fracked gas) so I suspect this synthesized ethanol would be superior here without the corn subsidies.
A 50lb bag of cracked corn is about $12 at Tractor Supply. I've considered making my own moonshine just for the hell of it. Might actually get around to it one of these days.
Apparently modern US production ratios for ethyl vs isopropyl alcohols are roughly 100:1.
Expect they would have been the same during the war era, hence engineering torpedos to run on a more widely available fuel.
It’s currently that way because of ethanol in fuel correct? It seems unlikely it would have been that way during WW2?
Isopropyl is drinkable (and highly intoxicating). Just very unpleasant to drink and highly irritating to the mucosa.
"When it comes to drinking rubbing alcohol, the digestive tract suffers the most, even when only swallowing a small amount. The body metabolizes these extremely high alcohol levels into acetone. If consumed to intoxication, the substance can lead to organ damage. Because it's a central nervous system depressant, side effects can include dizziness, headaches and inebriation. Because it's a gastrointestinal irritant, it can cause nausea, abdominal pain and vomiting blood. In addition, "due to having a higher molecular weight than ethanol, isopropanol, is more intoxicating than ethanol and can produce an altered sensorium, hypotension, hypothermia, and even cardiopulmonary collapse. Hypotension is associated with severe overdose and related to a mortality rate of nearly 45 percent," according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
I am not sure I would call that "drinkable", unless you just mean it will physically go down your gullet.
Please see my response to a sibling commenter.
Nearly everything above is also true of ethanol.
Drinking too much water is also lethal.
I take care of plenty of patients that drink IPA. It is not uncommon in both people that think it will kill them and do it as a suicide attempt, as well as people that are desperate for a buzz but can't access ethanol (I work on the Navajo nation where ethanol is illegal and more difficult to obtain).
In general, these patients sober up and go home, just like patients that drink ethanol. Compared to ethanol, patients are much more intoxicated, take much longer to get sober, and are more likely to exhibit symptoms of gastritis or esophagitis. But there is nothing about caring for them that is categorically different than caring for a patient with a significant alcohol ingestion -- in both cases, it is dose dependent.
If I recall correctly, a politician's wife back in the 80's was hospitalized for drinking isopropyl.
(Just looked it up on Wikipedia - I recall correctly)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/11/09/...
Kitty Dukakis
You can be hospitalized for drinking too much ethanol, or too much water. Are those not drinkable?
I'm an ER physician. I have worked in a poison control center. I take care of the people that drink IPA. I work on the Navajo Native American reservation, where this isn't terribly uncommon.
What was the source of the oxygen to maintain ethyl alcohol combustion in a sealed WWII torpedo?
Compressed air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo#Wet-heater
My grandfather was a radar operator in WW2, on a ship that was hit and damaged by opposing forces.
He told me stories of how they would make barges that would float off the side of the ship, where sailors would go to drink torpedo juice.
He claimed at the time it was only the “expired” kind that they would have to change out anyways.
See also the Mark 14 torpedo, the primary American torpedo in WWII, which didn't actually work for the first 2 years of the war because they had never bothered to actually test it because it would be too expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo
>because it would be too expensive.
Specifically, they didn't want to waste 1-10 torpedoes for testing, which maybe that can be defensible, but it became utterly indefensible when every single submarine came back from patrol with reports of "we launched a spread of 4 torps, 2 hit the hull of the enemy ship, zero detonations".
The lost value in un-sunk enemy shipping, the number of dead seaman that should have come back victorious, the number of subs that got sunk after an attack utterly failed, all were individually prices that dwarfed a single Mk14 torpedo, and together had a measurable impact on war performance.
All because the bureau of ordinance basically refused to hear any feedback.
Nearly every single component of the torpedo was unfit for service. The magnetic exploder didn't work. The contact detonator was nearly incapable of working because of the physics of torpedo impacts in a way that meant getting a perpendicular hit, which was considered optimal, actually was less likely to detonate. The depth keeping system was calibrated incorrectly, due to module integration mistakes, and ran 10 feet deeper than it was supposed to in some cases.
It's actually kind of common for US military procurement to produce a somewhat failed piece of equipment initially, but it usually gets modified and iterated on and improved to the point of being very respectable hardware in short order. The refusal of BuOrd to hear feedback is the real problem here. Their insane delays in fielding and responding to feedback cost real US lives. Once the torpedo was fixed up, the American sub fleet in the pacific ran roughshod over Japanese supply and utterly crippled their abilities to maintain control over the island chains.
The reason BuOrd gave for refusing to double check their work as these scathing reports came in? You see, the navy was struggling to produce enough torpedoes to meet requirements, so we can't waste a couple for testing. Instead, HUNDREDS of outright non-functioning torpedoes were sent to the bottom of the pacific, completely wasted, with almost no hope of actually working, because they were never tested.
The entire situation should be required reading for anyone in management, anywhere. Textbook case of penny smart, pound foolish.
Makes perfect sense to me. If you don't test, then there are no bugs. Field reports can be written off as user error.
/s
There's a lovely youtube historian, Drachinifel who covered this https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=eQ5Ru7Zu_1I
If I remember correctly part of the issue was that they used magnetic detector based firing systems and only tested them off the coast of California. When they fired them elsewhere the Earth's magnetic field was different enough that the detonators failed.
Not only did the magnetic fuses not work, the impact fuses would collapse and fail if the torpedo made a direct hit. And the torpedoes would consistently run deeper than they were set to. US torpedoes in the early stages of the war were nearly completely ineffective.
I had never heard that theory before!
FWIW, everyone in the beginning of WWII had magnetic detonator / torpedo problems, so it couldn't be just that. They were difficult to depth-keep just right to pass under a ship but within detection, for one thing. The sub captain had to correctly identify the ship, look up the draft, and call down to manually set the depth keeping. (Good luck in the swells of north atlantic). Often it just didn't use that depth anyway, due again to issues with design/testing.
The contact detonators had their own issues, for one they couldn't explode at an oblique angle, instead needed near-right-angle impact - but even then had a high dud ratio.
So, in theory the magnetic ones were preferable, even though standard doctrine was to fire for right-angle impact regardless (it makes evasion much more difficult, for one thing).
There's a building at NUWC Division Newport that's designed to survive a direct hit from a 500 lb bomb.
The joke is they had to build it to survive attack from Navy crews that were livid about the quality of the torpedoes built there.
https://archive.is/cGLMS
The Navy medical corps that deployed with the Marines in Korea deliberately used pure (not denatured) ethyl alcohol because they knew if they put stuff in it the soldiers would drink it anyway. Better not to poison them.
I wonder if you can heat up a nice hotpot from that torpedo juice.