List of Torpedoes: Naval Torpedo Types by Nation

The modern naval torpedo traces back to Robert Whitehead's 1866 design for the Austrian navy, the first self-propelled underwater weapon capable of running a straight course under its own power rather than being towed or fired as a spar charge. Whitehead's original ran on compressed air, a technology that dominated torpedo propulsion for the next four decades and limited both range and speed. The next major leap was the "wet-heater" engine, introduced in the early 1900s, which burned fuel inside the compressed-air flow to heat and expand it before it reached the engine, a straightforward trick that roughly doubled range and speed over cold compressed air alone, and remained the standard propulsion for most navies through the Second World War.

Imperial Japan pushed the wet-heater principle furthest with its oxygen-enriched Type 93 and Type 95 torpedoes of the 1930s, which used pure oxygen instead of compressed air to eliminate the telltale bubble trail and add substantially more range and speed than any Western equivalent, the weapon Allied sailors came to know as the "Long Lance." Electric propulsion, pioneered by Germany's G7e torpedo, offered no wake at all and became the standard choice for submarine-launched weapons after the war, trading some speed for stealth and simplicity. The postwar decades then layered on guidance: acoustic homing heads that steered the torpedo toward a target's propeller noise, wire guidance that let a firing submarine correct a torpedo's course in real time over a thin trailing cable, and, most recently, supercavitating designs like Russia's VA-111 Shkval, which wrap the torpedo in a bubble of gas to cut water drag and reach speeds far beyond anything a conventional torpedo can match.

How Torpedoes Are Classified

Torpedoes are launched from a trainable deck-mounted tube (common on destroyers), from fixed tubes above or below the waterline on cruisers, battleships and submarines, from low-flying aircraft or helicopters, and, in a handful of early cases such as the U.S. Mark 13 fired from World War II PT boats, from gravity-reliant deck-mounted "drop collars." Diameter is the most common way of classifying a torpedo, since it is the single factor that determines which tubes and launchers a given weapon fits, in the same way caliber classifies a gun. Many navies field two weight classes side by side: a lighter torpedo, typically used as a close-attack weapon by aircraft, helicopters and destroyers, and a heavier torpedo used as a standoff weapon, particularly by submerged submarines.

Larger tube diameters, 660 mm, 762 mm and around 916 mm, have been fitted to some nuclear submarines specifically so the boat can also fire larger munitions such as cruise missiles from the same tubes as its standard heavyweight torpedoes.

Fuzing evolved alongside propulsion and guidance. Early torpedoes relied entirely on a contact exploder triggered by physically striking a hull, a simple mechanism that nonetheless failed at an embarrassingly high rate in some services, most notoriously the US Navy's Mark 14 early in the Pacific War, whose contact and magnetic exploders both malfunctioned for the better part of two years before fixes were forced through. Magnetic influence exploders, designed to detonate under a ship's keel using its magnetic field rather than requiring a direct hit, promised a far more destructive below-the-waterline explosion but proved unreliable across multiple navies in the war's early years, including in Germany's own G7e. Modern homing torpedoes generally combine a proximity fuze with an acoustic or wake-detection guidance package, letting the weapon both find and reliably destroy a target without a precise contact hit.

German Torpedoes

See also the Kriegsmarine's Type VII U-boats, Type I/II U-boats and Type IX U-boats that carried these weapons, commanded through the war by Karl Dönitz.

Japanese Torpedoes

Russian and Soviet Torpedoes

British Torpedoes

United States Torpedoes

French, Italian, Swedish and Multinational Torpedoes

Torpedo range and effectiveness cannot be judged from diameter alone, length, warhead weight, launch speed, and whether a design is optimized for a submarine tube, a surface-ship mount or an aircraft drop all shape how a given weapon is used. For the surface combatants and submarines that carried these weapons into action, see the USN battleships list and the German battleships Bismarck, Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, and the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, all of which carried torpedo tubes of their own alongside their main guns. The Type XXI and Type XXIII Elektroboote closed out the war carrying improved versions of the electric G7e.