LW Torpedo Availability,

[Brady]

LW Torpedo Availability,

I have been doing searches on this forum trying different combinations and I have yet to find any kind of decent reference for production numbers of LW torpedo's, or of delivery numbers from Italian sources, of which thousands were on order from.

In the med in 41 and 42 I have counted at least 300 being expended on operations, using crude sources

Does anyone have any solid info on this ?

[Natter]

I'm just in here for a brief look before going to bed, so I don't have the opportunity to look up any info from my library/archive, but this information would be available from the Munitionslage or similar inventories that was produced on a monthly basis or so (available at BaMa, in the Luftwaffe archives - RL).
If you have access to Laucks book, there's a quite comprehensive table there, listing the numbers of produced/available and expended torpedoes for each month throughout the war (I can get a scan of this later if you can't find it yourself).
Similar inventories were also made for Kriegsmarine, and can be found at BaMa as well as the Kriegsmarine-records at NARA (various microfilm-rolls in the T-1022 publication).

[Brady]

I don’t have access to Lauck book unfortunately, but it sounds like it has just what I am after... if you could scan and post that it would be great !

[Natter]

Some tables from the book in question:

[Brady]

The Holy Grail !

The Title of the Book is ?

Table two is monthly averages ?

And it is only for those two types right ?

[Natter]

The Title of the Book is ?

Der Lufttorpedo. Entwicklung und Technik in Deutschland 1915-1945 (Friedrich Lauck, 1981. Bernhard & Graefe Verlag. ISBN 3-7637-5230-7 ). It used to be hard to find, but I can see several at offer on AbeBooks and eBay for quite decent prices, so you should probably take the opportunity to get hold of one now.

Table two is monthly averages ?

Hmm... I'm not sure. My german is really rubbish (to put it mildly). The text referring to the table says "jeweils im dezember des angegebenen jahres waren vorhanden", and I'm not sure if it means a summary for the end of the year, or just the numbers for desember..?

I've read somewhere that this kind of information was highly secret (especially the specific dates for the inventory) and hard to find in the original records.

And it is only for those two types right ?

Table 2? It just says LT's, which must be a summary for all types. The F5b variants (German) and the F5w (Italian) was the major models used thorughout the war so they would naturally make out the bulk of these numbers anyway.

[Brady]

Thank you again