Beery,
I know you're right. But let me tell you that even nowadays it's a painstaking proces to correlate ew (electronic warfare) and/or acoustic data to a radar contact.
Making a contact from being "pending" to assumed hostile or confirmed hostile may take not much time in enemy waters, making a contact a merchant or warship may take a lot longer then people think.
If, for ex. a contact was plotted on the SW quadrant, there's no telling what's further down that bearing (out of radar range) but could clearly being picked up by hydrophones. The seawater is capable of transporting sound in very many ways. It happens a lot that the closer ship cannot be heard, the further away one can be heard.
What I'm trying to say is that reporting a radar contact as being a warship right away is something every navy is still looking for today.
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