Sale, Richard "Torpedo."

Sale anthropomorphizes a World War 1 era torpedo and uses it (actually, a "she" according to Sale) to strike a blow against Nazi tyranny in this short story published just one short month before American entry into the Second World War. His back story has it that the torpedo had been manufactured in the United States for a U.S. Navy destroyer in 1918. Sent to the South Pacific aboard the destroyer during the waning days of the war, the torpedo ends up beached - and unexploded - after a German sea raider destroys the American warship. A French colonial (he'd coincidentally - and conveniently - been a torpedo man when in the French Navy) living on a small atoll in French Polynesia finds the torpedo in the early 1920s, turns it (or "her") into a lawn ornament (!) and then rearms the weapon after the 1940 Fall of France. Shortly thereafter a German sea raider stops off at his atoll to take on provisions and drop off a load of survivors from the many Allied and neutral ships they'd sunk. With most of the ship's German crew ashore, the patriotic Frenchman secretly rigs the torpedo onto an old skiff and, à la The African Queen, pilots his "Old girl" onto the anchored warship. For another of the author's 1940s "torpedoes-go-to-war" tales, see his "Warhead," which appeared in the July 19, 1941 issue of Argosy Weekly.