This investigation is concerned with the three‐dimensional interaction between an infinitely long elastic circular cylindrical shell, subjected to point loading and an acoustic medium. The formal solution to the problem was obtained by solving the governing field equations of the shell and the acoustic medium through the application of integral‐transform and series‐solution techniques. The resulting Fourier Laplace inversion integral was evaluated by means of numerical‐inversion methods. Detailed numerical results are presented for the dynamic response of a steel shell immersed in water when it is subjected to a point loading having the form of a step function of finite duration. Since there are no approximate relations introduced in the fluid‐shell phenomena, the result obtained from this investigation is the exact solution to the problem within the scope of linear‐acoustic and thin‐shell theory, and the approximation errors introduced by the numerical techniques.