By 1942, the U.S. Navy had become desperate to achieve the upper hand in submarine warfare. To this end, they
enlisted commissioned
Nikola Tesla to come up with a new technological marvel that would save the day. I bet you never knew Tesla was a Navy man.
Tesla developed his famous coil to propel torpedoes at incredible velocity. Tests of his prototype Tesla coil torpedo launcher seemed promising so the good folks at the Puget Sound shipyard got to work building a submarine to field this new weapon system.
Ground-breaking technologies often take time to get all the bugs out and it wasn't until the war was over the SS-471
U.S.S. Eel was finally ready for service.
Perhaps the most notable feature were the large bulges which housed the Tesla coil torpedo launching system. Close proximity to the sea was necessary due to the weapon's voracious cooling needs. Smaller bulges housed the Tesla coil amplifier-repeaters for the aft torpedo tubes.
But the
U.S.S. Eel's fire-power didn't stop there. She was the lead boat of the proposed Heavy Dreadnought Submarine class and was further armed with two six inch rapid fire deck guns. There was also anti-aircraft capability in the form of twin .43 mm Oleocon auto-cannon mounted just behind the sail.
With little fan-fare but high hopes, the SS-471 was launched in the spring of 1946. While this wasn't reported in the media of the day, the launch didn't go by completely unnoticed as this long-lost grainy government film shows.
However, the Tesla coil torpedo system had been built by shoddy sub-contractors on the cheap and was so unreliable the
U.S.S. Eel's crew referred to them as "Guess-la" torpedoes as it was anyone's guess if they'd work or not.
As if this wasn't enough, it was soon discovered that exposure to Tesla coils caused temporary insanity so the
U.S.S. Eel was hastily decommissioned and scrapped in 1948. While the Tesla coil torpedo turned out to be a technological dead-end, the six inch rapid fire deck guns would be the fore-runner of the armament aboard the famous Harley-Twerk class light destroyers decades later.
To this day there are naval experts who insist the
U.S.S. Eel never existed and must be a figment of the imagination. While
the Official List of U.S. Navy Submarines seems to back this up, if you ask me, it seems more like a cover-up.
I wonder what else
they don't want us to know about...
Brian da Basher