Inside the Crosshairs

by Col. Michael Lee Lanning

  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.†

  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 t
he 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.

  In the graveyard he found the concrete-and-metal crypt the sniper had used as a “hide.” Next to the heavy slab covering the grave lay a short stick for propping open the cover just enough for a rifle and scope to protrude. The former infantry officer continued, “ ‘I lifted the slab and drew it away. Then horror seizing me in its grip, I turned hurriedly away and did not look back again. One look had been enough. Within the narrow retaining wall lay a moldering skeleton, to which clung rotting folds of gray uniform! Beside the body lay a rusty rifle and the remains of a light pack. What a ghastly revenge!’ ”

  The captain paused, according to the author, and then continued, “ ‘For the sergeant and the private had crept upon the sniper and made him prisoner. Then they had thrust him back into that horrible retaining wall—ALIVE—after which they returned the slab to its place. But they had made retribution doubly sure. For wrapped around and about that moldering skeleton, fold upon fold, was a veritable maze of rusty barbed wire.’ ”

  Whether or not they had such horrors in mind, it is not surprising that the United States and its allies once again shelved their snipers at the end of the war. Besides expressing resistance to men who cold-bloodedly killed with no warning from hiding, many world leaders thought that World War I was “the war to end all wars” and that neither snipers nor armies themselves would be needed in the future.

  Unfortunately, “the war to end all wars” did not live up to its billing, and by the end of the 1930s combat once again swept across the plains of Europe and expanded around the world. Renewed interest in snipers surfaced in the earliest battles of World War II. During the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist snipers had experienced particular success in engaging the flanks and rear areas of the attacking Nationalist forces. Both Russian and German observers of the Spanish war returned to their countries with recommendations that they include snipers in the pending global conflict.

  Once World War II began in earnest with the German blitzkrieg across Europe, however, the swift Nazi offensives did not require the skills of individual marksmen. The Germans had snipers with their infantry in the war’s initial months, but they found little opportunity to use them.

  The British were as ill prepared to field snipers against the blitzkrieg as they were to stop the attacks. British sniper expert Captain Clifford Shore wrote in 1948, “I have spoken to many men who were in France from September 1939 until the time of Dunkirk [June 1940] and to date have not met anyone who could tell me that he saw any sniper rifles in that campaign.”

  It was not until the German offensive on the Russian front stalled outside Stalingrad in late 1942 that the sniper emerged as a viable weapon in World War II. When the lines stagnated outside the Russian city, German and Soviet snipers began to make it extremely deadly for anyone to leave the protective foxholes, bunkers, and reinforced positions in the city’s buildings. Soviet snipers armed with 7.62-mm bolt-action Model 1891/30 Mosin-Nagant rifles and German marksmen with Gewehr 98ks, slightly modified into a shorter-barreled version of the World War I rifle, engaged enemy infantry as well as each other throughout the long cold winter.

  The snipers so impressed the Soviet commanders at Stalingrad that they began a training school within the city inside a section of the Lazur Chemical Plant. Firing at targets painted on the factory’s wall, Soviet riflemen trained for only two days with scope-equipped Mosins before rejoining the front lines as snipers.

  According to articles written by Soviet officers that appeared in U.S. military journals shortly after the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russian snipers worked in teams of two, one shooter and one observer, and focused on officers, machine gunners, mortar crews, and enemy snipers. Vassili Zaitsev, a former hunter from Elininski in the Ural Mountains, honed his skills at Stalingrad and by the end of the war is said to have achieved 242 confirmed kills of German soldiers. That number included several of the Nazi’s top snipers.

  Although the story of Zaitsev appears valid, the Soviets did not hesitate to greatly enhance tales of the proficiency of their snipers and other soldiers to bolster morale. The actual contribution of Soviet snipers in securing Stalingrad and counterattacking into the German heartland is impossible to calculate, but the Germans were known to respect and fear the single shot from the Soviet lines.

  Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, also appreciated the skills of his marksmen. On May 1, 1942, Stalin issued an order that advised, “Line troops must learn the rifle thoroughly, must become masters of their weapons, must kill the enemy without fail, as do our glorious snipers, the exterminators of the German invaders.”

  The German army was bested at Stalingrad, but the German sniper remained an efficient killer for the balance of the war. An article written by an officer that appeared in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt on May 9, 1944, praised German snipers for their service to the Fatherland. Referring to the performance of snipers against the Russians as “very satisfactory,” the unnamed officer provided an excellent description of the expert marksmen that would remain true for the rest of the war—as well as today: “Not everyone becomes or is able to become a sniper. Not everyone meets the necessary requirements. Natural proclivity, passion for the chase, fanatical love of firearms—these assure the results required of a sniper.”

  The German army continued to recruit and train snipers until the last days of the war. In 1944, to promote volunteers and encourage those already in the program, the German army authorized a special oval sniper badge composed of an eagle’s head and oak leaves. Twenty confirmed kills gained a sniper the first-degree badge, forty the second-degree badge and sixty the third-degree badge.

  Despite the successes of German and Soviet snipers on the Eastern Front the British high command remained unconvinced of the need for special riflemen on the mobile battlefield. Not until they encountered increased German sniper activity in North Africa and Italy did the British finally reactivate the sniper training they had used in World War I. In September 1943, the first British sniping school began training at Llanberis, in North Wales.

  In conjunction with the training school, the British decided to present to infantry battalion commanders two-day orientations on sniper operations before they deployed for the battle zones. This training provided information on sniper capabilities as well as instruction on their proper deployment.

  The acceptance of snipers in Commonwealth regiments accelerated steadily during the war. By early 1944 sniping instructors had established schools in the rear areas of battle zones to provide immediate replacements. Members of the unit that eventually became the 21st Army Sniping School landed at Normandy on August 17, 1944, and began their first instruction two days later. The unofficial definition of British sniping became “the art of drilling round holes into square heads.”

  Despite years of warning, the United States Army entered the conflict as ill prepared to field snipers as the British had been. German marksmen immediately took a toll of U.
S. infantrymen from their earliest battles in North Africa and continued to do so until the war’s final fights. Despite their losses to German snipers and the success of Allied marksmen, the U.S. Army did not establish a central sniper training program or policy during the war.

  In the European Theater, the U.S. senior command left sniper training and employment to the individual units. Some division, regiment, and battalion commanders did not use snipers at all, while others actively recruited soldiers with extensive hunting or competitive shooting experience. The army’s minimum standard for designation as a sniper became the ability to strike a dummy target at 400 yards and to hit a head-size target at 200 yards.

  The War Department did provide some written guidance. Its Field Manual 21-75, “Infantry Scouting, Patrolling, and Sniping,” which appeared in various editions and updates before, during, and after the war, provided extremely brief and basic sniping principles. For instance, the February 6, 1944, edition of FM 21-75 included a mere twelve pages of sniping information in a chapter at the end of the manual. War Department technical manuals of the period also included useful guidelines on the maintenance and care of the various sniper rifles and scopes.

  Once trained—to whatever degree—by their units, U.S. Army snipers in Europe generally employed the same procedures and tactics as other countries’ snipers. They primarily worked in two-man teams and focused on engaging officers and heavy weapons crews. Most American snipers, especially early in the war, used the same ’03 Springfields that had proved successful in World War I and adapted several advanced telescopic sights to these weapons.