Torpedo juice: The legendary illegal World War II liquor drunk In Alaska and across the world

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

Not too long ago, while researching an entirely unrelated topic, I happened upon this circa 1943 photograph in the National Archives online catalog. It’s one of millions in their holdings. The caption begins, “Fighter pilots at Aleutian party.” Service members drinking together is historically more common than a photograph in the National Archives, but the caption continued. From left to right, “Lt. Williams, Lt. McBreger, Lt. Speckles, Lt. Bavra pouring ‘Torpedo Tessie,’ a homemade concoction where the alcohol is derived from the interior of a regular ... torpedo.”

Torpedo Tessies were far more commonly known as torpedo juice, the legendary liquor of World War II servicemen. The name had a literal origin. As of the beginning of World War II, American torpedoes utilized 180-proof ethyl alcohol as fuel for the miniature steam engines that drove them toward their targets. Lacking consistent access to liquor, opportunistic sailors occasionally drained the torpedoes of their alcohol and mixed it with something to cut the strength. The practice existed before the 1940s, albeit quietly, almost an institutional secret. With the rapid expansion of the Navy during the war, torpedo juice exploded in popularity and quickly became public knowledge. As a result, it is inextricably linked to World War II lore.

During the war, Jim Nerison was a torpedoman on a patrol torpedo boat, the PT-305, nicknamed the USS Sudden Jerk. He recalled, “The torpedo wasn’t going to use it all anyway, so we kind of tapped off a little bit of it.” As Sen. Russell B. Long declared in a hearing, “The first thing a good skipper did was to make sure that his crew had not consumed the alcohol in the steering mechanism of that torpedo.” The Louisianan spoke from experience, from his own time in the Navy during the war.

Pineapple juice was the most popular mixer, but other juices, like lemon, orange, and grapefruit, worked well in a pinch. The drink was more prevalent in the Pacific theater, where torpedoes and juices were easier to procure. The name “torpedo juice” referred to the alcohol itself and the resultant mixed drinks. It became another synonym for moonshine in some places, no matter where the alcohol originated. The torpedo juice was not necessarily taken directly from a torpedo. Barrels of alcohol for torpedo fuel were targeted by off-the-records acquisitions, and ships also maintained small stores of alcohol as cleaning agents and for the ship’s compass.

Even drowned in mixers, no one who drank torpedo juice exactly enjoyed the experience. The taste was brutally insistent, a firm wallop to the interior, followed eventually by a mighty hangover. The intrinsic intoxication, social bonding, and escape from boredom were prioritized over something so trivial as flavor. Some of its appeal was as a machismo test, to endure the punch without flinching. Still, if there were options, servicemen drank the options.

World War II texts and oral histories are rife with references to torpedo juice. George Moore served on the destroyer USS Abner Read. As he remembered, “Life aboard ship was not all work and watch standing. There was card playing and dice and all other games of chance that could be imagined. Also, there were refreshments for as many as cared to indulge, with grapefruit juice. There is much I would like to relate, but the statute of limitations may not have run out, such as what happened to the alcohol that was removed from the torpedoes.”

Seaman Second Class Roy D. Robinson also served on the Abner Read. “I remember one time, we had torpedo juice, and Rictor, he was a little guy who had blonde hair. He took about half a sip of it and about twenty minutes later, he started to walk off the fantail of the ship. He was like I was, 17-years-old and hadn’t been away from home long, and hadn’t been drinking any of the hard stuff.”

For years, “juice” was a common nickname for sailors assigned to the torpedo room, a tradition that lasted longer than its inspiration. Norman Carroll was a torpedoman on the submarine USS Guitarro. He noted that when cargo arrived, “we had this daisy chain of food being loaded on the ship, we always had a torpedoman at the gangway where the food came. He steered all the fruit juices and good stuff to the after-torpedo room.” He humbly claimed, “Nobody got drunk, but they were — we put it in our coffee once in a while.”

Ship Fitter Third Class Edward Capraun was more prosaic about the acquisition process. “It was two hundred-proof torpedo juice. It was two hundred proof and they would put orange juice in it. We were a bunch of crooks in the Navy. Whenever stores came aboard, it was a case of canned orange juice, one of those cases disappeared in the ship fitter’s shop. And cans of fruit. Stuff like that.” When some officers offered to share their personal soda stores, Capraun remembered thinking, “Well, they didn’t know that we were already drinking their Pepsi and Coke without their permission.”

The Alamo Scouts were an Army reconnaissance unit known for their harrowing missions behind Japanese lines. Some of their missions lasted for more than two months. As Lance Q. Zedric, author of an Alamo Scouts history, put it, “Often after a rough outing behind enemy lines the Scouts wouldn’t be too talkative about the mission. After a few drinks of (torpedo juice), they had a tendency to loosen up and join in the spirit of the debriefing.”

Given their titular origin, torpedo juice was a Navy specialty though desired in trade with members of all service branches. Alcohol was a literal liquid currency and typically more popular than actual money. Back in 1914, the Navy officially prohibited “the use or introduction for drinking purposes of alcoholic liquors on board any naval vessel, or within any navy yard or station.” The pursuit of potent libations by sailors thereafter slowed but certainly did not cease. Instead, they concocted mad recipes, making wines and liquors out of whatever was at hand, usually from fruit, medical supplies, or fuel, as with torpedo juice.

Just during World War II, raisins were fermented into raisin jack. Moonshine was a black-market staple, labeled with colorful nicknames like swipe and Kickapoo joy juice. Servicemen constructed jury-rigged stills out of cans, pots, and kettles. Some seemingly innocuous over-the-counter products were consumed out of desperation. Aqua Velva aftershave was particularly in demand. James Jones, then a private in the 25th Infantry Division, noted, “Mixed with canned grapefruit juice . . . (the aftershave) did not taste at all. Grapefruit juice seemed to cut all the perfume out of it. It made a drink rather like a Tom Collins. Everyone loved it.” Jones survived and became a celebrated author, with works like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line” that were based heavily on his experience in the Pacific Theater and made into movies.

Intoxication during the war required imagination. Army signalman Stu Lucas was stationed at the remote Ulithi Atoll, a critical Western Pacific Ocean staging point. His favorite recipe: “One drilled a hole in a coconut then added some sugar if available, or a chewed-on, but not swallowed, candy bar like a Hershey, or whatever, which one spit into the coconut. The spit was the vital additive, as the enzymes therein were the key to speed the fermentation. One then sealed it and then placed it in the direct tropical sunlight. The coconut was spun a third of a turn every three days.”

As syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Ruark later wrote, “In a way this explains why we won the war. Our lads, dying of thirst, were forced to invent beverages, and so developed the ingenuity that led them to triumph over the Germans and (Japanese). I have tasted, in our ‘dry’ Navy, some of the most amazing concoctions, made from raisins, potatoes, torpedo juice, compass alcohol, old skivvy shirts, and anything else the kids could find that might ferment if you stole enough sugar.”

In 1946, the 145th Naval Construction Battalion — Seabees — published a regimental history that included advice on reentering society. “If you are entertaining at home and plan serving any stimulants, you must be very careful. It has been your experience overseas that such drinks as varnish remover and grapefruit juice, hair tonic, or an invigorating combination of torpedo juice and water are highly acceptable. Your civilian friends are more discriminating.”

Eventually, the Navy altered the alcohol fuel with foul-tasting, often poisonous additives meant to discourage sailors from consuming it. In this, whatever well-intentioned officer behind the changes displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the desperate, creative nature of bored sailors who were more than willing to expend significant effort if a drunken bliss awaited at its end. At first, poisonous methanol was added to the fuel, marked with red dye as a visible warning. Then Croton oil, a laxative that caused violent cramps, was added. Poisons and laxatives did not end torpedo juice. Sailors just became more interested in filtration and distillation methodologies.

According to repeated legend, sailors used loaves of bread to filter the torpedo fuel, hoping to eliminate the poisonous aspects. The remaining liquid remained a pale red, prompting a new nickname for the drink: a pink lady. However, when it comes to bread as a filter, its efficacy might be more apocryphal than actual.

A circa 1945 regimental history of another Seabees unit, the 27th Naval Construction Battalion, includes a colorful anecdote about a failed attempt to filter torpedo juice with bread. “We got a long loaf of bread, cut off the ends, and attempted to strain the juice through it. After emptying a gallon, which had cost us $5, we noticed that only a few drops came through the lower end. We shook the loaf. We petted it. We squeezed it. Nothing happened. The bread was cooked almost solid. We couldn’t do anything with it. We threw it away in disgust, and the big rats rolled in sin and raised merry hell all night.”

If bread worked as a filter, it was only in combination with other efforts, like distillation. Homemade stills of varying complexity were treasured secrets of many military installations and larger ships. These were called gilly stills. And the product from the stills was sometimes called gilly juice or simply gilly.

At a 1964 Pearl Harbor veteran reunion in Nebraska, an ex-Navy bootlegger revealed his secrets. However, he preferred to remain anonymous. As he told the Omaha World-Tribune, “I’m not sure whether the Navy would want to take my Good Conduct medal back or give me another one.”

The self-described “best torpedo juice expert in the Navy” said, “I had an in with the bake shop. 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 some copper tubing. I’d heard somewhere the best still has seven loops and I was particular about that. We’d get a half cup — one of those big crock cups — to a gallon of juice that way.” Compared to other moonshine trafficked in the service, his “product was what Chivas Regal is to Scotch.”

Leo “Doc” Carter, another Navy veteran, was also an amateur chemist during his service. In 2000, he wrote to Florida Today, “One I have personal knowledge of was a metal Silex coffee pot that had a tight-fitting rubber top with coils of copper tubing coming out of it. The pot was filled about halfway with denatured alcohol and placed on a hot plate on low setting; the resulting steam was pure distilled alcohol. We mixed this with canned grapefruit juice for an excellent cocktail that suited most of us 18- and 19-year-old sailors.”

To be clear, torpedo juice was an overpowering, often deadly liquor, more so if makeshift stills and loaves of bread failed to remove the poisonous methanol. Thomas Duncan grew up in Tennessee and volunteered for the Navy after Pearl Harbor. His memories of torpedo juice were marked by tragedy. He said, “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. 22 (years old). He went to bed, and he drowned in his own vomit, laying on his back. He was out, so he didn’t know what he was doing. Sad deal. Just one of those things, you didn’t say no.”

When first lady Eleanor Roosevelt toured the Pacific Theater in 1943, she observed the absence of wine and beer on the islands. She also noted, “Last night, four men died from drinking distilled shellac.” Deaths from moonshine or other toxic potable consumption were common throughout the war in all theaters. From Jan. 1 to July 10, 1945, 188 American soldiers died in France and Germany alone from consuming moonshine of various origins.

Norton “Norty” Lund was a Navy hospital corpsman stationed at Peleliu Island during the war. For him, torpedo juice was part of a larger substance abuse problem onboard ships. “We had guys drinking alcohol. Torpedo juice they call it. We got a couple of guys that got the wrong stuff. You can go blind from it and you can die from it. We had that problem. We did have some alcoholics. We had some drug problems also because the corpsmen, especially like the hospital corpsmen that were on tugboats and small landing craft where you had just a corpsman, they had access to drugs. We had a couple of them that had to be pulled off these boats.”

In some extreme cases, torpedo juice was deployed officially. 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.”

Torpedo juice and other moonshines were as desired in Alaska as anywhere else during the war. As historian Brian Garfield stated in his “The Thousand Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians,” “Alcohol was scarce and obtaining it became an obsession.” At Adak, the post exchange was forced to stop selling aftershave since the men were drinking it. Fifths of proper whiskey cost as much as $50, more than $900 in 2024 money. In the picture from the beginning of this article, the pilots have repurposed a precious, emptied bottle of Gibson’s rye whiskey to hold their torpedo juice.

Robert J. Mannheimer enlisted in the Army in 1940 and rode the war at Alaska and the Philippines. He spent time stationed at Anchorage, Kodiak, Nome, and Dutch Harbor. He preferred the latter location. He said, “Well, that was a lot better than Nome in a lot of ways because it was a freshwater or an ice-free port. And we got — got good food. We got everything that we — a lot of things we had missed up in Nome. Plus the fact they had a sub base there and a lot of men got problems with torpedo juice. I know I was a battery commander by that time. And I had a couple run-ins with submarine people and their torpedo juice.”

Walter Stohler spent most of the war in the Aleutians, primarily on Adak. “Yeah, that was pretty lonely existence up there. Some people kind of went a little nutty up there. They’d drink some of that torpedo juice, which is straight alcohol and got pretty sick and they was nutty. We had one post guy was a postal carrier and he’s a nice guy. He lived in the same barracks with us. But he went nuttier than a fruitcake. They sent him back of course. But he was taking some of that sneaky Pete.” Sneaky Pete was another nickname for torpedo juice.

Garner H. Buchanan was not yet a teenager when Pearl Harbor was attacked, He spent his formative years in wartime Sitka, for a while a small town controlled by the military. For a 2007 Daily News article, he recalled, “The sounds and images of one terrible incident in 1944 burned a permanent scar in my young brain. Several sailors and Mariners were at a barracks party. Apparently, a few of them had stolen some ‘Torpedo juice’ to spike their drinks . . . Normally, it was pure grain alcohol and safe to consume. But in this one lot of torpedoes, someone had substituted denatured alcohol, a violent poison, and several young men died and some were blinded.” As he added, “The newspaper didn’t mention the incident because the military censored all negative news, but all of us kids knew.”

Torpedo juice could be found around the Pacific Rim. In Australia, where the military maintained less control over the press, tabloid newspapers ran wild with tales of ribald torpedo juice-fueled parties that erupted in violence. “Torpedo juice evil,” declared the (Queensland) Worker. A member of Parliament claimed that a few drops “could make a personal almost, or wholly insensible. It was a real danger to the innocent section of the community.” After a Brisbane woman stabbed an American soldier in 1943, the scandal sheets blamed torpedo juice.

Electric torpedoes, beginning with the Mark 18 first introduced in 1943, meant the end of proper torpedo juice. But the name survived. Any rotgut that brought back wartime memories for returning sailors might be called torpedo juice, for a similar taste if dissimilar origin. And of course, service members continued to experiment with intoxicants. During the Vietnam War, some soldiers chewed bits of C-4 explosive to get high. When ingested, C-4 causes nausea, vomiting, and seizures.

Torpedo juice recipes varied. The traditional formula called for two parts alcohol to three parts juice. Other sources claimed it was more like one part alcohol to three parts juice. Nobody was really measuring. Juice was added until the mixture became palatable, perhaps a little less after a bad day or a little more if there was a need to stretch the concoction for as many people as possible.

There is less art or science to making torpedo juice than personal limits. Recreating it today is far simpler than in a 1940s destroyer. Just buy Everclear, the pure white evil of many college experiences, and add juice until satisfied. Or still alive. From personal experimentation, it burns unpleasantly, as if hell hosted a party at a tiki bar. With that taste, all my fears and worries faded away. With that kick, there could only be the moment, no room for anything else.

Key sources:

Arnold, Bruce Makoto. “‘Your Money Ain’t No Good O’er There’: Food as Real and Social Currency in the Pacific Theater of World War II.” Food and Foodways 25, no. 2 (2017): 107-122.

Capraun, Edward. DESA Oral History Project. By Thomas Greene. November 16, 2002. Monmouth University Library.

Carroll, Norman. By Terry MacDonald. 2004. Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center.

Downing-Turner, M. Elizabeth, and Michael Davis, editors. “Memories: The Crew of the USS Abner Read DD-526, Second Edition.” Monographs 28 (2021).

Duncan, Thomas. Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project. By Jason A. Higgins. May 19, 2014. Oklahoma State University.

Ellis, John. The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980.

Garfield, Brian. The Thousand Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

Hansen, Dwayne M., and Mary Aaland. “Appendectomy on Board a Submarine by a Pharmacist’s Mate Under the South China Sea During World War II.” American Surgeon 88, no. 8 (2022): 2035-2038.

Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate on Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, August 1963. Day 3, August 21, 1963.

Hett, D. A., and K. Fichtner. “A Plastic Explosive by Mouth.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95, no. 5 (2002): 251-252.

Jesson, C. J. “‘Torpedo Juice’ Evil.” [Queensland, Australia] Worker, October 18, 1943, 5

Lund, Norton “Norty.” Oral History Project: World War II Years, 1941-1946. By Thomas Saylor. September 23, 2002. Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Mannheimer, Robert J. Veterans History Project. By Gary D. Rhay. July 2, 2014. American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.

May, Ed and Milinda. “Wartime in Sitka.” Anchorage Daily News, March 25, 2007, D-3.

“Nebraska Byways—Torpedo Juice Expert Tells Secret.” Omaha World-Tribune, December 7, 1965, 34.

Ruark, Robert. “Kicking the Booze Habit.” Anchorage Daily Times, July 25, 1964, 4.

Rubin, Jay. “The Wet War: American Liquor Control, 1941-1945.” In Alcohol, Reform and Society: The Liquor Issue in Social Context, edited by Jack S. Blocker Jr, 235-258. Greenwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Salamon, Milt. “‘Torpedo Juice’ Was Potential Killer.” [Brevard County, FL] Florida Today, June 28, 2000, 14A.

Stohler, Walter. Aleutian World War II National Historic Area Oral History Project. By Joshua Bell. January 9, 2014, National Park Service.

“This Is PT-305, Also Known as the U.S.S. Sudden Jerk.” Technology Wire, March 24, 2017.

“‘Torpedo Juice’ Party Denied by U.S. Sailor.” [Brisbane] Truth, October 17, 1943, 15.

Triest, Willard G. and Edward J. Doherty. Danger: Fighting Men at Work. Baton Rouge, LA: Army & Navy Pub. Co., circa 1945.

United States Navy. Service record of the 145th Naval Construction Battalion, 1943-1944-1945. Baton Rouge, LA: Army & Navy Pictorial Pub., 1946.

Zedric, Lance Q. Silent Warriors of World War II: The Alamo Scouts Behind Japanese Lines. Ventura, CA: Pathfinder Publishing of California, 1995.