A torpedo station is an assembly room with the equipment necessary for test launches, built at the bottom of a water body, a few hundred metres from the shore. It was connected to the land by means of a pier used for transporting torpedo components to be assembled in the hall.
On the territory of the occupied Poland there were two Nazi torpedo research centres in operation, both of them located in Gdynia (Babie Doły and Oksywie). The construction of the torpedo stations in Gdynia is identical.
The torpedo station in Babie Doły
This facility was built on caissons sunk three hundred metres from the shore. Unused and not subject to renovation, it fell into disrepair after the War, and its harbour dock became silted up. The torpedo station in Babie Doły can be seen in the last minutes of the Brzeg morza (Seashore) episode of the Czterej pancerni i pies (Four tank-men and a dog) series, in the Kryminalni (The Criminal Police) TV series and in the Superwizja (The Supervision) feature film, to name but a few.
The torpedo station in the army seaport in Oksywie (known as Formoza)
It was built on the basis of crates made of sheet-pile retaining walls filled with sand and ended up as a 500m pier. The station has been used through to present times, although for different purposes. Nicknamed “Formoza” due to the association of the building’s location next to massive structures of the army seaport in Oksywie with the location of Taiwan (historically called Formosa) next to China.
