In the first part of the Pacific War, U.S. torpedoes were powered by a miniature steam engine burning 180- or higher-proof ethyl alcohol as fuel.
Sailors being sailors began drinking the fuel mixed with pineapple juice, thus inventing Torpedo Juice.
The Department of the Navy began adding Methanol to discourage the drinking practice which in return would cause temporary blindness if ingested. The sailors simply devised a filtering mechanism using a compressed loaf of bread.
Then, Croton Oil was added which caused painful cramps, internal bleeding and a violent emptying of the bowels.
The sailors, not giving a fuck, devised crude stills to slowly separate the alcohol from the poison, as alcohol evaporated at a lower temperature than the oil.
With the introduction of the Mark 18 torpedo, the juice stopped flowing, but the greatest generation still found ways to get fucked up.
Side note: During WW1, on a British ship during the Gallipoli campaign, the naval officers had been noticing that the ANZAC soldiers where constantly drunk.
Suspecting smuggled aboard alcohol, they conducted numerous searches of the troops quarters with very little being turned up.
Turns out what had been happening was, one soldier had starved himself to the point that he could fit through the ventilation duct into the alcohol locker adjacent to the officer's mess, from there he would pass out bottles to his mates outside.
The bottles would be drunk and then refilled with any other commonly available liquid, then replaced at the back of the box on the next run.
Apparently they only caught him when they opened the locker and found him passed out inside.
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