I'm really curious to know how they knew the hole was from an 8" as opposed to a 5" shell.... It seems to be just guesswork to me. Of course the hole can be expected to be larger than the shell itself, but how MUCH larger? How firm is that ID of an 8" shell anyway?
Now, from the wording of the Polaris article, the identification of the surviving boat must have been made after the war upon consulting Japanese records. I would trust that more than the identification of the hole as being from a 50 caliber 8" gun. How in hades can they look at a hole and say the gun was 50 caliber? I've seen some black magic around here lately but nothing quite like that!
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