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Originally Posted by reallydedpoet
Seriously though, how much were they used in the Pacific Theatre? I am curious, I am guessing not as
much as the Atlantic Theatre.
RDP
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My gut feeling is they were probably used more in the pacific then the atlantic. Particuarlly in anti picket boat sweeps. Wooden vessels of all kinds were used as pickets. I dont think any of which merited a torpedo, and none of these sinkings were tallied with subs offical tonnage scores.
In the book "Silent Running", Calvart talks about using the deck gun on more then a few occasions. Infact, he went into detail about how they would use radar to zero the gun by seeing where the shell splash would land on the PPI, and adjust from there. According to calvart, it was very accurate.
USS Wahoo, acutally attacked a convoy (if im not mistaken), with just a deck gun when all torepdos were expended. The message he sent was famous, it started with " In 10 hour running gun and torpedo battle....." later he sent, "Another running gun battle today, destroyer gunning, wahoo running."
Apparently deck gun action was so common, as to merit its own battle condition, "Battle surface", and i guess was common enough for someone to draw this comic:
http://www.ducimus.net/sh4/pto/humor.jpg
So i think the deck gun was very common in the pacific. Hell, while the germans removed them late war, the americans kept them, if not adding more (that is, if the double 5/25" configuration is historically accurate)