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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
And you would lose that bet. A battleship is armed with 'secondary' batteries specifically to protect them from destroyers and the like. They have a very limited amount of large shells, and they didn't waste them on small targets. An Iowa class battleship could fire the 16" guns at a rate of about two per minute, and they carried 20 5" guns that could fire about 10 shells per minute, would be just as effective against a small target and a whole lot cheaper. It would be like your u-boat shooting at a guy swimming in the water with your deck gun.
There was one exception - USS Iowa and New Jersey tried to sink the Japanese destroyer Nowaki with their 16" guns, but the range was in excess of 35,000 yards, far outside the range of the 5" guns. Also, they didn't score a single hit.
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Shooting a shell the size of a Volkswagen at a U-Boat would have been extreme massive overkill. Only kind of scenario that I could think that any ship captain might even think about using all batteries is if one of the original u-boat aces had stayed in the war for the duration of the war or far into the war and (irl) racked up 500,000 tons or more, and then only if he didn't something like Von Ricktofen and paint his submarine red. Unless the target was something of massively high value, 5" guns are plenty nasty enough to euthanize your crew. Heck, even the flak guns would've probably been enough if they could aim them at a negative camber (don't think they're able to though?).