by Gary Yee
To open the Dardanelles, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. Instead of advancing inland rapidly, they entrenched themselves in anticipation of a Turkish counterattack. The Turks also dug trenches and not having forgotten the lessons of centuries ago, began sniping at unwary ANZAC soldiers. As casualties mounted, reinforcements were needed and the Australian 5th Light Horse was called up and sent to Gallipoli where they fought as infantry.
Among the 5th Light Horse was Private William Edward Sing, better known as Billy. Being of both Chinese and English ancestry, he was ineligible for enlistment, as only men of European descent were qualified to enlist, but his origins were overlooked by the recruiting officer. Sing, after all, was an excellent horseman and the best shot in the Proserpine Rifle Club. Predictably Sing would be called upon to neutralize the Turkish snipers. Described as “a little chap, very dark, with jet-black moustache and a goatee beard,” Sing’s tally grew such that the Turks wanted him very badly. Ion Idriess recounted spotting for Sing:
He has a splendid telescope and through it I peered across at a distant loophole, just in time to see a Turkish face framed behind the loophole. He disappeared. A few minutes later, and part of his face appeared. That vanished. Five minutes later he would cautiously gaze from a side angle through the loophole. I could see his moustache, his eyebrows, and part of his forehead. He disappeared. Then he showed all his face and disappeared. He didn’t reappear again, though I kept turning the telescope back to his possy. At last, farther along the line, I spotted a man’s face framed enquiringly in a loophole. He stayed there. Billy fired. The Turk vanished instantly, but with the telescope I could partly see the motions of men inside the trench picking him up. So it was one more man to Billy’s tally.
As Sing’s fame spread, the Turks sent their best sniper, nicknamed Abdullah the Terrible by the Australians, to kill Sing. Sing got him first and went on to have over 160 confirmed kills as well as another 150 probables. After Gallipoli was evacuated, Sing transferred to the 31st Infantry Battalion and was sent to France. Wounded several times, Sing earned the Belgian Croix de Guerre. Postwar, Sing returned to Proserpine and died in 1943. Sing is interred at Lutwyche Cemetery, Brisbane and honored by Australia with a bronze statue of a sniper behind a sandbagged loophole in Hood’s Lagoon, Clermont.
An Ojibwa from Ontario, Canada, Francis Pegahmagabow was not formally trained as a sniper but his boyhood hunting and trapping experience was sufficient and he was near invisible as a sniper. Serving with Canada’s 23rd Northern Pioneers—which later merged with other units to become the 1st Battalion, Western Ontario Regiment—Pegahmagabow was the most accomplished sniper of World War I with 378 kills and over 300 captured. While he aspired to pen his memoirs, Pegahmagabow never did and we have but one statement that attests to his skill: “The best shot I ever made, about nine hundred yards away, long distance sniping. Man on horseback. Yes I got him.” He was one of only thirty-nine Canadian soldiers to receive the Military Medal with two bars.
United States
When the United States Army adopted the Warner & Swasey prismatic “Telescopic Musket Sight Model of 1908,” it was the first army in the world to adopt a scope sight. Having a short eye relief of only 1½ inches, this 6× scope had a rubber eyepiece; later eyepieces had airholes punched into them to prevent suction against the eye socket when the shooter lowered the rifle. The scope base was soldered onto the rifle and added 2¼ pounds to the total weight of the gun. It was succeeded in 1913 by the Model 1913 which reduced the magnification to 5.2×. The locking nut was changed for the elevation knob and a clamping screw was added to the eyepiece adjustment knob. The Model 1913 was adopted by Canada and one mounted on a Ross rifle is displayed at Quebec’s Museé Royal 22nd Regiment.
America’s late entry into the war meant it could benefit from Canadian and British experience and the first American sniping manual was directly copied from Crum’s manual. Besides the Warner & Swasey scope, equipment included the Winchester A-5 5× scope that was unique in having a tube bored from round stock. It had a simple crosshair reticle but others were available. It was unique in its time in having a groove milled on the underside of the tube. A spring-loaded plunger engaged the groove and prevented any rotation of the scope body while simultaneously allowing the scope body to move laterally. Not having internally adjustable reticle, the rear scope mount had micrometer dials for windage and elevation adjustment. Installation of the scope bases required drilling two holes in the receiver as well as two in the barrel. Criticisms against the Winchester A-5 included its high magnification with its small field of view, making target acquisition slow. The 6-inch space between the mounts meant the scope was not well supported and the scope had to be pushed forward of its firing position before the bolt could be operated. Afterward it had to be pulled back so it could be used. The narrowness of the ocular lens made it useless in poor light. Originally rejected in 1915, it was adopted in 1918 as an emergency measure. In Marine hands, the Winchesters A-5 scopes served as late as the campaign on Guadalcanal in World War II. It was also adopted in 1918 by the British and Canadians, who were desperate to catch up with the Germans and installed them on the Ross rifle and the Short Magazine Lee Enfield Mark III (abbreviated as SMLE Mark III).
Not all Americans were trained by British or Canadian instructors and Private Al Barker, 5th Marines, became a sniper without any training:
I was selected as a sniper with a few others. … I climbed a tall tree near as possible to the German trenches and stationed myself there very comfortably. We could see the Germans setting machine guns in position to be used against our forces. We both had our rifles and plenty of ammunition, so we began to pick off the men who were operating the machine guns. … We succeeded in putting four of these guns out of commission when we were discovered by German snipers. I received a bullet wound in my knee and fell twenty feet to the ground. …
The most notable American sniper fought under Canadian colors. Eager to get into the fight, Herbert McBride resigned his captaincy in the Indiana National Guard and crossed the border where he was gazetted to the 38th Battalion as a captain. As the 38th was not yet mobilized, McBride was assigned to instruct musketry to the 21st Battalion. While there, he learned that the 38th was being sent to France first and resigned his commission to become a private in the Machine Gun Section. McBride attended a sniping school near LaClytte and was issued a Ross rifle with a Warner & Swasey scope.
M1903A3 Springfield rifle with Warner & Swasey optical sight. (Springfield Armory National Historic Site)
M1903A3 Springfield periscope rifle in open and closed position. (Springfield Armory National Historic Site)
After sighting it in, McBride selected an observer who was not only a good companion but had keen eyesight:
Early one morning Bou and I were stretched out in our little hole, he with the big telescope and I with my binoculars, scrutinizing the German line, about five hundred yards away. Suddenly the Kid says, “There he is, Mac, right in front of that big tree just to the right of No. 4 post, see him?” I shifted my glasses a little and, sure enough; there was a man, evidently an officer, at the point he mentioned, standing upright, with a big tree behind him, and looking out over our lines through his glasses. Only the kid’s keen eyesight discovered that fellow. I had passed him over several times, but, when my attention was called to it, I saw him quite plainly— through my glasses. When I tried to pick him up through the sight, however, I had considerable difficulty in locating him, but, finally, by noting certain prominent features of the surrounding background, I managed to find the right tree and got him centered in sight and cut loose. I got him.
On Christmas Eve an officer believed the Germans would not fire on stretcher parties and that it was safe to move in the open. As they crossed, an unseen German shot down one stretcher bearer, then another and finally the officer who was rendering aid to a stretcher bearer. McBride observed the shot and determined it came fr
om a tree top in the woods behind the German line. Unsure which tree concealed the sniper, McBride opened with his machine gun. Other machine guns joined in as did an artillery battery. It is unclear who was responsible for dropping the German, but that he was killed was all that mattered.
* * *
By war’s end, all major powers practiced sniping and the British sniping effort reduced British losses to “only forty-four in three months for sixty battalions; that means in three months … [a saving of] 3,500 lives.” The Germans lost their initial advantage and Crum described the success of British sniping: “It was sometimes enough to kill a single really troublesome Hun sniper to secure complete moral superiority. In one sector, I remember, on our arrival, it was unsafe to show your little finger. When we came away, three weeks later, I saw one of our men coolly lathering his face in full view as he did his morning shave.” Postwar, sniping was forgotten and overshadowed by emerging technology like aeroplanes, submarines and tanks.
CHAPTER 6
WORLD WAR II TO THE PRESENT
1940–
“Reach out reach out and touch someone”
(Telephone jingle adapted by snipers)
WORLD WAR II FOUND ALMOST ALL major powers unprepared for sniping. The Great Depression meant tight budgets for military development and when war erupted, the West believed that trench warfare would resume. The 1940 British sniping manual anticipated the use of decoys from trenches! The blitzkrieg on France proved its fallacy and motorized warfare effected a paradigm change. At war’s outbreak the only major nation with any interest in sniping was the Soviet Union.
Soviet optics had their origins in the Versailles Treaty. Since the Treaty limited German weapons development, the Germans began cooperating with the Soviet Union to test new weapons and theory. Isolated because of their communist government, the Russians welcomed the Germans as partners and their closed society meant nothing would be leaked to the West. One of the pieces of equipment developed was the D-III scope which evolved in 1932 into the 4× PE, of which about 55,000 were produced before 1938.
By contrast the American military was not receptive to sniping and all scope development in the interwar period was done for the civilian market. Canada had only three hundred Warner & Swasey-equipped Ross rifles, and British scope development wasn’t for rifles but for machine guns. Since the Germans were more interested in building the Luftwaffe, panzers and its navy than sniping, German optics makers catered to the civilian market to survive.
The Winter War
The Soviet Union asked Finland to relinquish land and when Finland refused, the Soviets declared war and invaded on November 30, 1939. Anticipating an easy victory, the Soviet Union invaded and the Finns held the Soviets at the Mannerheim Line.
Simo Häyhä was a farmer and when not farming, hunted and trapped. At age seventeen he volunteered for the Rautjärvi Civil Guard where Finnish Civil War veterans helped Häyhä with marksmanship. Häyhä was soon the best shot in his platoon and when he was conscripted into the Finnish Army for fifteen months, Häyhä was already a champion shot. On November 30, 1939, while Häyhä was attending an antitank course, a 450,000-strong Soviet army invaded. He reported to 6./JR 34 and fought in the battles around Suojärvi before being forced back to Kollaa. that Häyhä was an excellent shot, his lieutenant did not assign Häyhä to a squad but made him a sniper. His first mission was to locate and eliminate a Soviet sniper who had shot three platoon leaders and a non-commissioned officer. Häyhä waited all day motionless and as the evening approached, saw a glint of light reflect off the sniper’s scope. Häyhä aimed, squeezed the trigger and killed the sniper. That was not the only time Häyhä was ordered to kill a Soviet sniper:
It happened once that my Co, Lt. Juutilainen, “the Horror of Morocco” as he was known from his previous service in the Foreign legion, tried to kill an enemy sniper with a scoped rifle. This Russian had taken up position about 400 meters from us and was constantly shooting toward our lines. After a while, the lieutenant sent for me and showed me approximately where he knew the enemy’s sniper’s position to be. One of our 2nd lieutenants was with us, acting as a spotter, when our duel begun. At first, I did not see a trace of him, just a small rock where he was supposed to be. After careful investigation, we spotted him behind a little hump of snow near that rock. I took a careful aim with my trusted M/28-30 and the very first shot hit the intended target.
As Häyhä’s reputation grew so did the Soviets’ awareness of him and they tried killing Häyhä with mortars or artillery fire. Injured once, Häyhä survived and joined in raiding parties:
By mid-December, the Russians had resumed their usual attacks, and after a while we started counter attacks on our behalf. The Russians were taken by surprise as they sat around four large campfires, and we crawled very close before opening fire. The resulting battle scattered the Russians in complete disarray and we captured plenty of booty from this trip. Among the items we captured were machine guns, submachine guns and four antitank guns.
Raids like this supplied the Finns with equipment that they lacked due to prewar budgetary constraints. Häyhä and another soldier once established an observation post within 150 meters of a bunker. From it they slew nineteen Russians. “After that the Russians built walls of snow to cover the bunkers and trenches connecting them.”
Soviet supply troops were restricted to roads and the ski-mounted Finns often gained local superiority over isolated Russian groups. This forced the Russians to divert more resources to protecting their flanks. Ultimately the Soviets employed fifty divisions against Finland. Wounded on March 6, 1940, Häyhä never fought again but had amassed 542 confirmed kills and many probables.
Finnish sniper Sulo Kolkka is credited with over 400 kills. Like Häyhä he attacked the Russians behind the front lines in areas that they thought were secure. Kolkka also dueled a Soviet sniper who had killed most of the NCOs in one company. It lasted several days and Kolkka used his iron-sighted rifle to kill him at 600 meters when he rose to leave.
Defeated, Finland ceded 22,000 square miles of land. There was one final consequence of the Winter War: Hitler concluded that if Finland could bloody the Russian steamroller, then the Wehrmacht could destroy it.
Russia
Unlike the Great Powers, the Soviet Union prioritized sniping and opened several sniping schools. Men were selected from among the best of recruits and instructed in camouflage, sniping tactics, scouting and of course, plenty of shooting. Graduates were sent to individual companies where they paired up with another graduate to become the company’s sniping team. To equip them, new rifles were needed and between 1932 and 1938, the Soviet Union produced 54,160 Mosin-Nagant Model 91/30 sniper rifles. High losses in the Winter War wreaked havoc on the Russian sniping establishment. Losses in equipment and the need to replace sniper rifles led to the simplification of the PE scope to the PEM; the latter differing only in that it lacked the former’s adjustable eyepiece. By 1942 another further 53,195 telescope-equipped rifles were produced. Russian arms development was not stagnant and telescope-equipped versions of their semiautomatic M1938 (SVT) and M1940 Tokarev rifles were also made. Initially introduced for the semiautomatic Tokarev SVT-40 rifle, the 3.5× PU was later adapted for the Mosin-Nagant.
Russian snipers and sniping were not anticipated by the Germans. Panzer Generaloberst E. Raus noted that the Russians excelled at camouflage and wore “leaf suits of green cloth patches” as well as face masks. As to their effectiveness, Raus complained: “On 26 August 1941, while combing a woods for enemy forces, a battalion of the German 465 Infantry Regiment was attacked from all sides by Russian tree snipers, and lost seventy-five dead and another twenty-five missing.”
Captured Russian sniper rifles were eagerly turned against their former users. Using a captured Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle, German sniper H. Jung racked up a number of kills. Still, it was insufficient and death due to careless exposure is recalled by another German:
I returned from one of my v
isits outside to discover that Ludwig Kluge had taken my place in front of a black-out window. I didn’t comment on it because Ludwig and I were close friends and had been together ever since we had first met while training at Herford.
We were all feeling pretty good, and in the candlelight that flickered over the faces gathered inside, we began comparing our degustatory skills. All of a sudden a sniper’s tracer bullet ripped through the window opening, striking the ceiling. Everybody jumped up looking for pliers or some other tool to pull the thing from where it had lodged in a wooden rafter before it caught fire. Ludwig remained seated the whole time so when I came back I asked him what was the matter?
“I think that I am wounded,” he said. I opened his shirt and sure enough, discovered the bullet had entered his back, angled down towards the ground, and ricocheted up to the ceiling. He had unwittingly exchanged places and the risks that went with it.
A priority target for the Russian sniper was the German sniper. A German explained:
Our sharpshooters were killed because the Russians considered them primary targets. This was a result of the damage our sharpshooters could do, especially against the Russian commissars. With such an emphasis placed on the sharpshooters, the Russians seemed to make sure that the sharpshooters were eliminated as quickly as possible. We had seen that thing happen and what it meant to us at that moment was that our sharpshooters were dying instantly.