Inside the Crosshairs (8 page)

The increased rate of fire and general distaste for marksmen who fired from relative safety at specifically designated targets might have ended the U.S. Army sharpshooter program, but they did not deter the continued evolution of ammunition,
arms, and optics. The years just prior to and following the Civil War brought a parade of armament advances.

Self-contained metal cartridges, first patented by New York City inventor Walter Hunt in 1848, shortened loading time and added to the barrel gas seal that produced greater bullet velocity. Edward Maynard improved the cartridge design in 1856, and in the same year Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson introduced advances in primers.

The problems with metallic cartridge reliability and costs that limited their use in the Civil War were resolved during the decade following the conflict. By 1870 the U.S. Army and other armies had adopted center-fire brass cartridges, modifying old weapons or designing new ones to accommodate the improved ammunition.

Alfred Nobel of Sweden and other manufacturers introduced in the 1880s smokeless powder made from nitrated cellulose that eliminated the giveaway cloud of white smoke that had compromised the positions of Civil War sharpshooters. It also eliminated much of the smoke that had previously covered battlefields.

Gun makers next decreased caliber size and added steel, copper, and alloy jackets to lead projectiles to increase their velocity and heat resistance. By the 1890s various models of bolt-action, clip-fed rifles firing .30-caliber metal-jacketed bullets propelled by smokeless powder were available. Telescopic sight technology developed three-power scopes with a larger field of vision. Except for the introduction of automatic assault weapons, the basic infantry and sharpshooter weapons and ammunition for the twentieth century had been perfected by the end of the nineteenth.

The U.S. Army was slow to adopt many of those innovations because it spent the two decades following the Civil War mired in the Indian Wars in the West. Because of limited military funding, cavalry and infantry units fighting the Indians carried Sharps or Springfields. In several battles, the Native Americans, some of whom had repeating rifles, were better armed than the soldiers.

During the Indian Wars, the U.S. Army did not conduct specific sharpshooter training, nor did it issue special marksman weapons. Limited military budgets often failed even to provide sufficient training ammunition for the infantry and cavalry.

Superior shooting in the West came not from the ranks of the soldiers but from frontiersmen and buffalo hunters. On June 27, 1874, several hundred Comanche Indians attacked about thirty buffalo hunters and merchants at an isolated trading post known as Adobe Wells in the Texas Panhandle. After the hunters drove them away with long-range, .50-caliber Sharps fire, the Indians referred to the Sharps as “the gun that shoots today and kills tomorrow.”

The Battle of Adobe Wells produced the best-known single shot of the long conflict between whites and Indians. Early on the morning after the initial fight, a dozen or more Indians appeared on a ridge distant from the trading post. Buffalo hunter and sometime-army-scout Billy Dixon took careful aim with his Sharps .50 and fired. One Indian fell from his horse and the others hastily retreated. Estimates about the range of the shot vary from 1,200 to 1,600 yards.
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Years later, Dixon remarked about his shot, “I was admittedly a good marksman, yet this was what might be called a ‘scratch’ shot.”

There were other extraordinary marksmen around the world. As armaments improved so did the skills of the shooters, and superior mastery of hitting distant and difficult targets garnered a new name. Although various definitions would define and redefine the term many times in the future, from the late 1800s to the present day, the soldier or Marine armed with special weapons and trained to deliver single well-aimed shots to kill enemy troops would be known as a “sniper.”

The term probably originated with the British army in India, where officers hunted snipes, a slender-billed bird related to the woodcock. Snipes, fleet of foot and wing, were difficult targets, and shooters proficient at hitting them became known
as “snipers.” The British then began referring to well-aimed shots both toward and from the enemy as snipes, and those who fired the rounds as snipers.

The earliest confirmed written reference to snipers is in a 1773 letter from India by a British officer. Another letter from India, this one dated 1782, states, “The individual will be popped at or sniped as they call it from time to time.” Still another correspondent in India wrote in 1824 that “several sepoys were killed and wounded by the enemy’s snipers who generally stalk the sentries from behind stones.” By the time of the Boer War, at the end of the nineteenth century, sniper had become the preferred term for long-range shooters throughout the British Empire.

In the post–Indian War period, the U.S. military again emphasized individual marksmanship with the standard issue .30-caliber Krag-Joegensen rifle and benefitted from that when the United States engaged in a brief and decisive war with Spain over Cuba and the Philippines. Due to the war’s short duration—war between Spain and the United States was declared on April 21, 1898, and the fighting lasted only three months, even though the treaty ending the war wasn’t ratified by the U.S. Senate until 1899—the regular army did most of the fighting.

The army did not conduct sniper training or issue special weapons to its troops bound for Cuba. However, at San Juan Hill and several other battles, various U.S. regiments assigned their better shots as sharpshooters to engage Spanish riflemen and to keep the enemy pinned down during ground advances.

It was World War I that provided conditions favorable to advancing the sniper’s art. After only a few months of fighting, the Western Front aligned into two opposing sides dug into trenches that extended for more than 450 miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea. Periodic offensives resulted in enormous casualties but virtually no significant ground gains. During these battles, and especially during the many days between offensives, snipers accounted for a growing body count.

Germany entered the war prepared and willing to commit snipers to the battlefield. With its superior gun-manufacturing
plants, the world’s best optics and telescope makers, and a tradition of training young men in hunting marksmanship, Germany fielded large numbers of proficient snipers early in the war. In addition to rifles and scopes specifically designed for military use, German logisticians secured civilian hunting weapons and telescopes to supply their marksmen. In 1915 alone the German supply system provided 20,000 rifles with telescopic sights to the frontline infantrymen.

Britain countered with snipers of its own, recruiting former big-game hunters from Africa and expert marksmen from Canada and Australia as well as training additional troops in England and France. The British trained their snipers not only to engage and kill individual targets but also to be observers and to gather intelligence. In 1916, the British army formed intelligence sections composed of eight snipers, eight scouts, and eight observers in each infantry battalion. The snipers worked in two-man teams using elaborate personal camouflage and sandbagged, steel-plated “sniper hides.” The armored “hides” protected the British marksmen from observation and from the enemy’s snipers—the most common countersniper tactic—and from concentrated infantry and artillery fire.

Americans entered World War I late but fairly well prepared in individual sniper equipment. During the decade following the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps conducted numerous studies of rifles, ammunition, telescopic sights, and silencer devices. As a result, the U.S. military adopted the .30-caliber bolt-action M1903 Springfield rifle in 1906, and subsequent models of that durable, highly accurate weapon remained the primary American infantry and sniper rifle for more than three decades.

Scope production also advanced during that period. The Army Ordnance Department conducted its first field test of telescopic sights in 1900. The department’s test board found the sights provided by the Cataract Tool and Optical Company of Buffalo, New York, “to be of especial value in hazy or foggy weather and at long ranges” of up to 2,000 yards. The board concluded its June 8 report by recommending that the
army purchase more scopes for field tests by soldiers, and stated, “If found to be satisfactory, a sufficient number should be purchased to supply such a number to the sharpshooters of each organization.”

The introduction of the early models of the M1903 Springfield preempted tests on equipment for the military Krag rifles and the Cataract scope. Instead, the Army Ordnance Department turned to the Warner and Swasey Company of Cleveland, Ohio, for telescopic sights more suited to the ’03 Springfield. Over the next year the army procured twenty-five of the scopes. It became obvious immediately that, although the civilian scopes needed modification for the rigors of military use, they definitely had a place in the army of the future. An obscure entry, paragraph number 269, in the army’s
Small Arms Firing Regulation
for 1904 recorded the first official acceptance of those telescopic sights in the U.S. military.

Four years later the army adopted a Warner and Swasey product as the Telescopic Musket Sight, Model of 1908, along with mounting brackets for the ’03 Springfield. Subsequent models over the next few years added stadia lines within the scopes to mark ranges at 500-yard increments from 1,000 to 2,000 yards. The manufacturer delivered more than 2,000 of the improved scopes to the military over the next four years.

Concurrent with the development of military scopes by the Warner and Swasey Company, other manufacturers worked to perfect silencers for the ’03 Springfield. The first acceptable silencers procured by the army came from the Maxim Silent Firearms Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1910.

The Warner and Swasey Company continued to improve its scopes, and its 1913 model, with a 5.2 magnification capability, found use in the U.S. Army as well as with Canadian forces deploying to the European war. Within the American army, the Ordnance Department issued Pamphlet Number 1957, which outlined the care and maintenance of both the M1908 and M1913 telescopic sights.

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven, Connecticut, also manufactured telescopes used by American, Canadian, and British snipers during World War I. Winchester
introduced its A5 telescopic rifle sight in 1910 primarily for civilian sports shooting. Despite its lack of durability under battlefield conditions, the A5, mounted on ’03 Springfields, became the telescopic sight of choice for U.S. Marine Corps snipers. Canadian and British snipers also adapted the scopes to their rifles.

Unlike the American Civil War, in which generals frequented the front lines and artillery crews were easily visible, World War I found senior officers only in rear areas and artillery placed mostly out of sniper range. As a result, the primary targets of snipers on both sides were junior frontline officers and regular infantrymen—as well as their counterpart marksmen on the other side of no-man’s-land.

Most of the noted snipers of the period were officers who gained their recognition through postwar writings. Many in uniform, as well as the civilian population, still saw the sniper as a somewhat sinister character who killed indifferently from a great distance. Most accounts of successful World War I snipers mention the number of their kills without providing complete identifications of the shooters. Several World War I sniper stories mention a “former Canadian trapper” who claimed 125 kills but do not include his name.

In 1915, a Viennese newspaper printed an account of German snipers identified only by their last names. According to the article, German “Private Herrenreiter” had accounted for 121 sniper kills of French soldiers. It also claimed that a sniper by the name of “Fark” killed sixty-three Russians in a single day.
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The late entry in the war of the United States limited its opportunities to innovate sniper operations, but the influence of the single, well-aimed shot, both outgoing and incoming, made an impression on those who occupied the trenches.
American snipers talked and wrote little about their work, and few first-person stories of their experiences exist. Interestingly, “The Sniper,” one of the most descriptive accounts, originally appeared not in official reports but in the popular pulp fiction periodical
Weird Tales
. Even then it did not make its way into print until nearly a decade after the war and focuses on Allied and enemy rather than American snipers.

The Marine Corps magazine
Leatherneck
eventually reprinted the article, by Arthur J. Burks, in its August 1926 edition. According to “The Sniper,” a Canadian infantry company had just taken over a portion of the frontline trenches when a single round struck one of the soldiers in the forehead. Over the next three days, eleven more of the company’s infantrymen fell to the unseen sniper’s fire.

Although the shots came from a cemetery at the edge of no-man’s-land, the Canadians could not locate the sniper’s lair. Finally, on the third night, a sergeant and a private requested that the company commander permit them to conduct a countersniper patrol. Reluctantly, the captain agreed.

The article continued by stating that the two men departed and returned. Early the next morning the captain asked, “ ‘Did you get him, Sergeant?’ ”

The sergeant replied, “ ‘Captain, there will be no more bullets from that particular sniper. But for the sake of your own peace of mind, don’t ask us what happened in the still watches of the night! Yet, rest assured, sir, that whatever we did to him was not enough to pay him for the death of twelve of our buddies; that he had twelve lives to give that would still have been insufficient. On his part it was cold-blooded murder!’ ”

According to the story’s narrator, the sergeant would reveal nothing further except that there had been a crypt. The captain let the matter rest. He did nothing about the incident until shortly before shipping out for home after the war ended. The captain once again visited the former front lines easily finding the cemetery because it was “etched unforgettably” in his mind.