The fleet really threw a punch once the Navy got torpedoes that actually blew stuff up. The early torpedoes were terrible.
And, like today, they weren't allowed to talk about it for the longest time.
If it weren't for the war, people would have been gone to prison for what happened as a result of the shoddy work, pathetic bureaucracy and defective torpedoes. TWO YEARS. Imagine if any other service had defective shells/bullets with the same failure rate for the same term in the rest of the war...