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Originally Posted by Admiral Von Gerlach
there was no advanced sighting other than what came with the gun and experience but a trained crew could fire maybe 15 rounds a minutes and with good accuracy, relatively.
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'Relatively' is a relative term. In WW2 no ship had stabilized fire control systems like the ones in use today. They had to "fire on the roll", pretty much the way it was done 200 years earlier. This means that once the range and speed of the target were calculated, as well as the speed of their own ship and the coriolus effect (rotation of the earth means the shell tends to move sideways as well, depending upon the direction of fire), they then had to take into account the rolling of their ship.
Today (and as early as 1946) the fire-control periscopes and the guns themselves are gyro-stabilized, so as the ship rolls the guns move up and down, and are always pointed to the same elevation. During the Second World War battleships depended upon the 'Stable Element'. This was a leveling device with a tripswitch that fired the guns the moment the ship was perfectly level, so the gun captain didn't have to. Smaller ships such as destroyers didn't have this, and the fire control officer had to do his best. On a submarine it became pretty much "by guess and by golly", which means that the actual rate of fire in combat was more like 10 rounds per minute on a perfect calm day and 4 rpm in any kind of sea at all, and since a sub has a very low deck fire was only accurate at very close ranges.
Overall gun accuracy for the war was around 7% hits.
The best book I've read on the subject is Peter Padfield's
Guns at Sea, which gives a good history of the development of naval gunnery from the 1300s to the modern era.