A few years ago, I watched a program about Pearl Harbor. A destroyer, the USS Ward sighted a mini submarine and immediately hit it’s small conning tower and sunk it.
The Captain’s story was widely disbelieved because it was thought it would be highly unlikely to hit it so quickly.
They eventually found the sub and sure enough there was a hole in it from a five inch gun.
+. Great story! The hole was exactly where the Ward reported it to be.
My battle station was first loader on a 5"-38 naval gun. While we never fired a shot in anger (I served 1961-64; my "war" was the Cuban Missile Crisis) we did drill from time to time. At sea when we drilled for battle our targets were 55 gallon steel drums with one end weighted and a sheet of radar reflective metal standing up on the other end. A tiny target from a half mile or more. Not a moving target, though. But most shots (radar directed or "seat of the pants") hit close enough that a small vessel would have been damaged.