How WWII sailors made torpedo juice from weapon fuel

Desperate sailors during WWII turned torpedo fuel into a legendary bootleg booze that packed enough punch to blind or kill those who dared drink it. Called "torpedo juice," this dangerous concoction spread from the Aleutians to Australia, becoming an infamous part of wartime culture.

As reported in the Anchorage Daily News, American torpedoes ran on 180-proof ethyl alcohol, and thirsty servicemen discovered they could drain this fuel and mix it with fruit juice – preferably pineapple – to create a potent cocktail. "The torpedo wasn't going to use it all anyway, so we kind of tapped off a little bit of it," recalled Jim Nerison, who served on PT-305 during the war. The practice became so widespread that Senator Russell B. Long later noted that "the first thing a good skipper did was make sure that his crew had not consumed the alcohol in the steering mechanism of that torpedo."

The Navy tried to stop the practice by adding poisonous methanol and Croton oil to the fuel, but determined sailors responded by creating elaborate filtration systems using everything from bread loaves to makeshift stills. As one anonymous veteran told the Omaha World-Tribune in 1964, "We'd strain the juice from the torpedo through at least six loaves of bread to take out the oil and other impurities. Then I'd boil it and distill it through copper tubing."

The consequences could be deadly. "We had a guy – some of the guys knew how to fix it, mix it with some kind of juice or something. This guy drank some, and it was his day off. Twenty-two years old. He went to bed, and he drowned in his own vomit," remembered Navy veteran Thomas Duncan.

In Alaska, where a fifth of whiskey could cost the equivalent of $900 in today's money, torpedo juice became particularly prevalent. As historian Brian Garfield noted in The Thousand Mile War, "Alcohol was scarce and obtaining it became an obsession."

Torpedo juice wasn't just a stupefactant; it was sometimes a life-saver. As reported in the Anchorage Daily News:

In September 1942, the USS Seadragon, a Sargo-class submarine, was patrolling the South China Sea under orders to disrupt the Japanese supply chain. On his 19th birthday, Seaman First Class Darrel Rector developed severe abdominal pain, eventually diagnosed as appendicitis by Pharmacist Mate Wheeler Lipes. They were in enemy territory around 1,000 miles from shore, without a surgeon or anesthesia.

The commanding officer ordered Lipes to proceed with an appendectomy. Lipes employed torpedo juice to roughly sterilize the pajamas used as scrubs, his gloves, the instruments, and Rector's skin. After the appendix was removed, the stump was cauterized with carbolic acid and then washed with more torpedo juice to neutralize the acid. Against all odds, Rector recovered quickly. Within days, he was eating so much that the cook complained to Lipes, "Doc, you must have sewed him up with rubber bands, the way he eats."

Previously:
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A moonshine maker describes his setup – a Boing Boing exclusive
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