Inside the Crosshairs Read online

  A recruiting poster dated August 19, 1861, appealed to “Sharpshooters” and announced, “Your Country Calls!! Will You Respond?” The poster proclaimed that the regiment was “destined to be the most important and popular in the service” but warned that all who reported to Bellow Falls, Vermont, would not be accepted: “No person will be enlisted who cannot when firing at the distance of 200 yards, at a rest, put ten consecutive shots in a target, the average distance not to exceed five inches from the center of the bull’s eye to the center of the ball.”

  Recruited from throughout the Union, but organized into subordinate companies by state of origin to maintain cohesiveness, soldiers in both regiments initially provided their own rifles. Senior U.S. Army officers recommended that Springfields replace the private weapons, but Berdan requisitioned the Sharps Model 1859, which he received only after President Lincoln approved the request as a result of viewing a spectacular shooting exhibition by the colonel, for his sharpshooters.[13]

  Accurate at up to 600 yards, the percussion-fired .52-caliber Sharps rifle contained a breech block loading device that allowed the sharpshooter to reload in the prone position, thus limiting his exposure to enemy fire. By pushing forward a lever that doubled as a trigger guard, the shooter could lower the breech block to gain access to the chamber for loading a paper or linen cartridge. The closing of the breech cut the end of the cartridge to aid in ignition. A trained soldier could reload and fire up to ten rounds per minute with the Sharps, three times the firepower of men armed with Springfields or other muzzle loaders.

  Although Berdan proved an excellent organizer and trainer of sharpshooters, his combat leadership abilities fell short of his shooting prowess. Fortunately, the companies of both sharpshooter regiments were usually detached to divisions and Berdan’s shortcomings did not endanger his marksmen or the commands they supported.

  The 1st and 2nd Sharpshooter Regiments saw action in most of the war’s major battles, including the Peninsula, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Used mostly as skirmishers, similar to the British 95th Regiment in the Crimea, the sharpshooters also became proficient in hitting enemy artillery crews and senior officers. Several accounts credit the two sharpshooter units with inflicting more casualties on the enemy than any other regiment in the Union army and with killing at least six Confederate generals.

  While the 1st and 2nd Regiments primarily used the Sharps rifle with a post front sight and a folding-leaf adjustable rear sight, they also employed a few special weapons designed strictly for them. Gun maker Morgan James produced several dozen rifles for the sharpshooters complete with telescopic sights that ran the length of their barrels.[14] The rifle’s weight of more than thirty pounds and its sensitive scope limited its widespread use.

  Southern commanders organized their sharpshooters much differently, but the rebel marksmen experienced the same success as the Union shooters. Instead of forming dedicated regiments, the Confederates allowed their sharpshooters, selected from unit competitions, to operate semi-independently in acquiring targets. Rarely joining skirmish lines, these marksmen, like their Union counterparts, focused on artillery crews and senior officers.

  Confederate sharpshooters carried either personal weapons or issue Springfield and Enfield rifles. Although the typical Rebel rifleman did not have the advantage of the breech-loading Sharps, a few of them received the most accurate and deadly rifles yet used in battle.

  In early 1863 Confederate agents in England purchased twelve Whitworth rifles and blockade-runners delivered them. Six were issued to the Army of Northern Virginia; the other six went to the Confederate units in the West. Two riflemen in each Confederate corps earned possession of the English rifles through shooting contests.

  Using the .45-caliber Whitworths with the fourteen-and-one-half-inch-long telescopic sight that mounted on the left side of the stock, Confederate sharpshooters were soon hitting targets at ranges of up to 1,000 meters. In July 1863, the Confederates procured eighteen additional Whitworths, and the following February purchased twenty more. During the war’s final months, the Confederacy secured another twenty-two Whitworths.

  Only the most proficient marksmen had the opportunity to shoot the Whitworths because of their prohibitive price. Each Whitworth cost the Confederate States $500, payable not in Confederate script but in gold. In contrast, producing a Springfield or purchasing an Enfield cost less than $40.

  Despite their small numbers, Whitworth-armed Rebel sharpshooters made their mark during the war. At Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 19, 1863, a Whitworth sharpshooter mortally wounded Union General William H. Lytle of Ohio. The following May 9, another Whitworth sharpshooter engaged Union General John Sedgwick at the Battle of Spotsylvania, Virginia, where Sedgwick and a group of subordinates were reconning the area for their artillery positions. Spotting Confederate riflemen more then 800 meters across an open plain, Sedgwick’s men took cover while the general criticized their caution, saying, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” At that instant a Whitworth bullet slammed into his head. Sedgwick’s death delayed the Union offensive and contributed to the eventual Rebel victory in that battle.

  Confederate agents in England also procured .44-caliber muzzle-loading Kerr rifles in limited quantities. The exact number is unknown, but it is likely that fewer Kerrs than Whitworths made their way to the Civil War.

  Rebel sharpshooters acted more independently than their Union counterparts, but marksmen of both sides generally concentrated on similar targets. Officers remained a priority, but artillery units also drew the attention of marksmen. The range of most of the period’s artillery allowed batteries to set up beyond the normal range of infantrymen and fire their lethal cannons from positions of reasonable safety. Sharpshooters of both sides quickly ended this artillery advantage and frequently interrupted or delayed their fire. In a few instances, a lone marksman rendered an entire artillery battery useless by killing its leaders and preventing crewmen from exposing themselves to serve their cannons.

  Throughout the war, Union and Confederate commanders sought effective countersharpshooter methods. The most common was simply to deploy sharpshooters against sharpshooters. Artillery units initiated a type of countersharpshooter technique that would remain a tactic in future wars: when artillery crews came under sharpshooter fire, their observers, who had previously only adjusted cannon fire, attempted to identify the enemy shooter so that the entire battery could fire at the location. While such an expenditure of ammunition against a single rifleman might not have been economical, it did tend to decrease the number of sharpshooters targeting the artillery.

  By the conclusion of the American Civil War, sharpshooters were a fixture on the battlefield. Both Union and Confederate soldiers learned that being visible was being vulnerable. While Americans did not originate the concept, their sharpshooters in both blue and gray did, however, refine sharpshooting into an art form that would forever influence individual marksmanship on the battlefield.

  CHAPTER 4

  Snipers Come of Age: The World Wars and Beyond

  AT the end of the Civil War, America possessed the largest number of military weapons in its history. Regular-issue Springfields as well as Sharps and special rifles imported and then surrendered by the South filled armories across the country.

  Eliminating sharpshooter regiments and special marksmen went hand in hand with “mothballing” the arms of the war. Although marksmanship training for all infantrymen remained an important part of the postwar soldier’s life, some of the conflict’s innovations caused concerns over the future of firepower—individual and otherwise. Breech loaders and the newly introduced repeating rifles so enhanced the rate of infantry and calvary fire that logistics officers worried about their ability to meet ammunition requirements.

  Some field commanders even concluded that volume of fire could negate the need for individual accuracy. In a letter to the president of the New Haven Arms Company dated March 15, 1865, Major Joel W. Cl
oudman of the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry praised the firepower and efficiency of the .44-caliber Model 1860 Henry Repeating Rifle. According to Cloudman, “I often heard the enemy discuss its merits. They all feared it more than any arm in our service and have heard them say, ‘Give us anything but your damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.’”

  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.[15] 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.