US' WWII torpedo development suffered from spending cuts in Defense; which otherwise, would have shortened the war considerably. US' WWI torpedoes were actually better.
Problems with the warhead triggering mechanism aside (a bit “if”), the US torpedoes suffered from a lack of imagination in design.The earliest compressed air torpedoes simply used the mechanical energy stored in the compressed air to power the propeller. That was deemed unsatisfactory because the pressure in the the air tank dropped rapidly because the temperature dropped with the drop in pressure. To compensate for that effect, they added fuel and burned it in the compressed air. And that was the basic design of the US Navy torpedo (and, AFAIK, that of the rest of the world other than Japan) at the start of WWII.
The Japanese did the logical thing and viewed the problem as one of generating the maximum volume of gas at the maximum pressure, from a system which fit inside a torpedo tube. When you look at it that way, you realize that pure oxygen is five times as chemically energetic as the same volume of air at the same pressure. The USN called the Japanese torpedo the “Long Lance” but the Japanese name for it translated into English as the “oxygen torpedo.”
I assume that the Japanese would have used a relatively dilute mixture of alcohol as the fuel in their oxygen torpedo,so that the temperature of the combustion gas going into the turbine would not promptly melt the turbine . . .
When the B-29’s could reach Japan form the South the first target selected was the long lance torpedo factory. That’s how important it was to damage that facility.