An infinite elastic cylindrical shell, submerged in a semiinfinite acoustic medium with a free or rigid surface, is acted upon by a concentrated harmonic line force. By using Flügge's shell equations and the appropriate radiation condition, a boundary‐value problem is formulated. In order to make numerical integration feasible, the discontinuities in the solutions of the shell equations due to the concentrated load are removed by subtracting a closed‐form static response, and the semiinfinite physical domain is mapped into a finite (rectangular) mathematical one by using a bipolar transformation. Extensive numerical results are presented for the shell displacements and fluid pressure field for steel shells in water.