Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white silent clip shows a training exercise featuring the launching of torpedoes armed with dummy warheads from a Royal Australian naval destroyer, the missiles being retrieved and a spare torpedo being winched on board from a depot ship while at sea. Several torpedoes are shown being launched in real time and in slow motion. Footage shows sailors rowing a ship’s boat to recover a torpedo, which is attached to the boat’s side and then winched on board. The clip is taken from a documentary from around 1930. Intertitles provide detailed explanation.

Educational value points

• This clip illustrates the capacity of a Royal Australian naval destroyer for carrying and launching torpedoes. Destroyers of the time carried 533-mm-diameter torpedoes that were more than 6 m long and could travel at about 65 km per h for just over 7 km. The Australian destroyers Anzac and Success, included in the film from which this clip is taken, each carried two twin tubes, or deck-mounted launchers, from which the torpedoes were fired.

• Training exercises such as the one in the clip were crucial in ensuring the readiness of fleets in case of war. However, they were also expensive, and during the inter-war years most navies skimped on testing their torpedoes. Tight budgets in the 1920s and early 1930s led to a drastic reduction in the size of the Royal Australian Navy. Torpedoes were retrieved and dummy warheads used for reasons of economy.

• Torpedoes are self-propelled explosive projectile weapons designed to detonate on contact with or in the vicinity of a target. They are launched below the water from a submarine, or above the water surface from a warship and propelled underwater towards their target. Early torpedoes, such as those shown, were powered by a compressed air engine and driven by a single propeller. Today propulsion is achieved by battery-powered electric motors.

• Slow-motion footage in the clip was taken using an ultra-rapid camera designed in the 1920s, which took shots at the rate of 250 images per second. When the film is played back at a standard speed the image appears in slow motion. Designed by a Mr Cox of the Cinechrome Instruments Company for the British Admiralty to analyse the cause of accidents that occurred when planes returned to the deck of early aircraft carriers, they were also used to capture sports in motion.