Snipers at War: An Equipment and Operations History

Snipers at War

Snipers at War

AN EQUIPMENT AND OPERATIONS HISTORY

John Walter

Foreword

Martin Pegler

GREENHILL BOOKS

—————

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND

To Jack the Dog (2005–17), who was always first in line when a biscuit was to be had.

Snipers at War

First published in 2017 by

Greenhill Books,

c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley,

S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

www.greenhillbooks.com

[email protected]

Published and distributed in the United States of America and Canada by the Naval Institute Press, 291 Wood Road, Annapolis, Maryland 21402-5043

www.nip.org

Greenhill Books ISBN: 978–1–78438–184-4

Naval Institute Press ISBN: 978–1–68247–266–8

eISBN: 978–1–78438–185–1

Mobi ISBN: 978–1–78438–186–8

All rights reserved.

© John Walter, 2017

Foreword © Martin Pegler, 2017

The right of John Walter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 2017949271

Contents

Foreword by Martin Pegler

PROLOGUE From the Bow to the Bullet

CHAPTER ONE Rifles and Sights: What Does a Sniper Need?

CHAPTER TWO Civil and Colonial Wars: The Sniper is Born

CHAPTER THREE The First World War: The Sniper Comes of Age

CHAPTER FOUR Redrawing the Map: Snipers Lose Favour Again

CHAPTER FIVE The Height of Fame: The Winter War to Korea

CHAPTER SIX Snipers of Today: Better Rifles, Better Sights

EPILOGUE What Makes a Sniper?

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Foreword

The history of accurate shooting is as old as projectile weapons themselves. From the inception of the first hand-bows capable of lethality at ranges far in excess of any other weapon, men have striven to improve the accuracy and range of the projectiles they shot. There were of course, limits to this where the power of stringed weapons was concerned, but the introduction of the firearm into Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century revolutionised warfare. The early ‘handgonnes’ were crude, inaccurate and incapable of shooting at the distance of a good longbow but progress was inexorable, as they turned from miniature cannon to musket. Yet, for centuries, shooting was a black art, few gunmakers understanding the chemical processes that provided the explosive power of gunpowder, or the physics that enabled a bullet to travel even a moderate distance and hit its target. In this new book John Walter traces this complex quest for accuracy, a process that on the surface may appear as nothing more than the application of science, but no such ‘science’ as we understand it existed until at least the mid-eighteenthth century. As John Walter lucidly reveals in this book, what happened was a very complicated fusion of many disparate elements: metallurgy, chemistry, optics and physics, that coalesced into what we now call technology.

This process did not simply happen overnight and the story, which is both engrossing and complex, is looked at in great detail. Exactly how gunmakers, chemists, foundry-men and a host of other individuals managed to perfect the manufacture of high quality steel, rifled barrels, more efficient propellants and aerodynamic projectiles is lucidly explained. With these advances came a burgeoning demand from civilian shooters for greater precision as hunting and the sport of shooting became increasingly popular, but there was also a delineation between the requirements of the military and those of the sportsman. Linear warfare as practised from the seventeenth to the midnineteenth century required speed of shooting, not accuracy. It was weight of fire that won the day on the battlefield, not the ability of a soldier to pick off an individual at long range. Much of what was learned about accurate shooting was actually due to the requirements of game hunters and shooting societies, not the demands of the military.

Undoubtedly the most significant advance was the introduction of the rifled barrel. Whilst riflemen had been employed during the eighteenth century, they were used in small numbers and John Walter critically examines how the issue of rifles to sharpshooters in the Crimean War and the American Civil War heralded the first major changes in tactical use of the long-arm since the introduction of the military musket. In fact, the lessons of the Civil War were to prove the foundation upon which all later sniping was to be built and the methods devised are still applied today with modern sniper training. As the author shows, this was just the beginning and the evolution of the military sniper from these early days is the subject of the later chapters. Military sniping, which emerged from the shadows during the First World War, had, despite senior commanders’ indifference, progressed into a highly specialised form of warfare by the Second World War. Snipers were employed in huge numbers in every theatre; the Eastern Front, in Western Europe and across the Pacific. How the art of sniping had to be re-discovered during this period is an engrossing tale that continued into the world of ‘small wars’ post-1945.

From the mid-twentieth century the role of the sniper was re-evaluated, as armies began to adopt highly accurate sporting rifles in a combat sniping role and, as a result, converted military rifles were largely abandoned in favour of dedicated sniping rifles based on the designs of the finest target rifles in production. This development has not ceased in the twenty-first century; indeed, if anything, the march of progress has increased in pace, and John Walter looks at not only the huge improvements in modern weapon design and ballistics but also at the incredible advances in optical science and electronics that, combined, have enabled the modern sniper to become the most valued and highly trained specialist on the modern battlefield.

I found the book totally engrossing and, above all, infinitely readable and I challenge any reader, however knowledgeable, not to find some fascinating revelation in its pages.

Martin Pegler

Preface and Acknowledgements

When I began work on Snipers at War, I had no clear vision of what the endproduct would be. So much had been written about snipers and sniping, particularly in the last decade, and so many memoirs had been published, that I saw my task as simply to collate existing information in a way that would have broad appeal.

This plan lasted only until I was asked to prepare abstracts for the Frankfurt Book Fair. This meant submitting material which had to be convincingly accurate. But even my first attempts revealed that the story was not as straightforward as I had assumed: ‘facts’ sometimes rested on the flimsiest evidence, claims didn’t always have much basis in reality, and credible stories had been overlooked. The more I searched, the more I found; and the more I found, the more I needed to explain why details were being challenged.

The ever-increasing accessibility of on-line resources also shaped the way in which Snipers at War evolved. Digitisation of patents and individual servicemen’s records, fast-growing genealogical archives, and the ease with which out-of-print books can be accessed have all been helpful. It may be prudent to add, however, that personal experience of on-line family trees, wonderful repositories of data though they can be, suggests that many are wrong – and that the errors range from comparatively minor, to countless generations derived from baseless assumption.

In his Foreword, Martin Pegler has very generously suggested that there is something in Snipers at War for everyone. This is what I was trying to achieve, of course, but it is difficult to do so within the limitations of even a few hundred pages. Consequently, the book has a conscious pre-Vietnam historical bias largely because, though even yesterday is history, secrecy can still inhibit evenhanded summary. The true story of snipers in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, and now in Syria, will be told only when unchallengeable information becomes available.

Nor is Snipers at War intended to be a catalogue of equipment, instead concentrating only on selected weapons to allow the inclusion of genealogical research; information can be extracted from some of the books listed in the Bibliography, though The Sniper Encyclopaedia, intended for publication early next year, will fill many of these gaps.

Of course, I could not have completed Snipers at War without assistance. I am particularly grateful to Michael Leventhal, who commissioned the project and turned a not-so-blind eye as it grew and grew . . . and grew; to Martin Pegler, who not only reviewed what I had written with a diligently critical eye, but gave me access to his American Civil War Sharpshooters book before it had been published; and to editor Donald Sommerville, who found many things which had eluded everyone else.

Adrian Gilbert, author of Sniper: One-on-One and Stalk and Kill: The Sniper Experience, helped me overcome problems during the formative stages of the book; Leroy Thompson supplied advice, based on first-hand Special Forces experience, and details of Simo Häyhä’s career; Charles Sasser generously allowed me to quote from One Shot—One Kill; Mark Spicer, sniper-trainer par excellence, let me divert questions to his authoritative An Illustrated Manual of Sniper Skills; and Leigh Neville shared information published in Guns of the Special Forces 2001–2015. Alla Begunova, author of Angely Smerti: Zhenshchni-snaĭpery, 1941–1945, answered many of my questions about Soviet sniping; Rhoda Maling kindly lent me a copy of her friend Denis Edwards’s memoir, The Devil’s Own Luck; David Foreman, translator of the Nikolaev and Pavlichenko memoirs, helped to overcome problems arising from my sketchy knowledge of the Russian language; and Bill Harriman provided some vital snippets. I am grateful to Heckler & Koch, among others, for information from which accuracy could be analysed; and Tom Irwin and Alice Bond of Accuracy International were always among the first to respond to requests for pictures and information.

Images have come from many sources, usually credited in individual captions, but there are a few whose origins remain uncertain; I have tried to acknowledge copyright wherever possible, and will gladly correct errors or omissions in any future edition. I owe a huge debt to Lisa Oakes of James D. Julia, Inc., auctioneers of Fairfield, Maine (www.jamesdjulia.com), for patiently dealing with many requests for help. Snipers at War would be much poorer without so many excellent photographs.

But all would be for nothing had not Alison, Adam and Nicky supported me through awkward times. Our grandchildren – Findlay, Georgia and Holly – provided much-appreciated and often hilarious distractions.

John Walter

2017

PROLOGUE

From the Bow to the Bullet

The idea of competition has existed since Stone Age hunters first fastened flint heads to their staves and competed with rival families to bring down a mammoth. Those who threw consistently accurately would have risen in status. Power might have been one thing, but technique was another.

Millennia passed, but the principles remained the same. If a weapon could be projected, a premium was placed on skill. Competitive throwing of the Greek javelin is said to have been included in the Olympic Games as part of the pentathlon, from 708 bce until 393 ce, and Roman spear-throwers were often lauded for their performance in battle.

The introduction of the ox-horn bow is lost in antiquity, but probably occurred to different people at the same time. It was to be a great advance in technology. No more were long-distance strikes confined to spears, which could easily be returned by opponents; if arrows were available, archers could fire at will. Engagement range increased considerably.

Specialist bodies of archers were recruited, allowing battles to be won simply by aerial threat. The death of Achilles in the Trojan War, according to Greek myth, was due to an arrow fired by Paris striking him in an unprotected heel. And the Battle of Hastings (1066) was influenced by the arrow that immobilised the English king Harold by striking him in the eye or, perhaps, the forehead. Though Harold’s wound may not have been immediately fatal, it was serious enough to change the course of the conflict by distracting the defenders at a crucial moment.¹

Even from the beginning, Mongol horsemen used the bow to engage specific targets; yet there was a tendency in European warfare to loose arrows as a volley or wave, relying more on quantity than individual target-selection to subdue opponents.

The first step towards reliance on ultimate accuracy came with the crossbow, which has a surprisingly long pedigree. The first crossbows to appear in Europe were the work of the Greeks, diminutives of the siege engines used by Greek and then Roman armies.² At much the same time, the crossbow was introduced in China – where, for perhaps the first time, mass-production techniques created the bronze multi-part trigger mechanism fitted to the bows of the many crossbowmen of the Terracotta Army (and, presumably, those that were in use with the Chinese forces of the time).

A bow-catapult or gastraphētēs, showing its similarity with some crossbows of the Middle Ages. The drawing is based on a description by Hero of Alexandria, writing in Belopoeica in the first century ce, from J. G. Landels, Engineering in the Ancient World (1997).

In Europe, however, the heyday of the crossbow passed with the sack of Rome in 410 and the fall of the western Roman empire. The shortbow was already pre-eminent in Britannia, and similar weapons were favoured by the barbarian hordes that had raged across Europe.

By the time of the siege of the French city of Senlis in 947, however, the crossbow had reappeared in military service. It is said then to have come to England in 1066, with William of Normandy, ‘the Conqueror’, even though the Bayeux tapestry shows nothing but conventional bows.

Use of crossbows spread rapidly: perhaps because they were easy to shoot, if not necessarily to draw. Crossbows were used by Crusaders during the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, soon to be copied by the Saracens. Anna Komnene (1083–1153), the daughter of Emperor Alexios I of Byzantium, observed that the crossbow was a ‘weapon of the barbarians, absolutely unknown to the Greeks . . . a truly diabolical machine’.³ Pope Innocent II clearly concurred with Anna Komnene. His predecessor Urban II had already objected to their use in 1096, and so, during the Second Lateran Council of 1139, Innocent banned not only crossbows but bows of all types used ‘against Christians and Catholics’. This proscription had a temporary, but considerable effect in many European states.

Guillaume le Breton testified that the crossbow was ‘unknown in France’ until 1185, when Richard the Lionheart ordered the French to be instructed in its use. By the thirteenth century, crossbows were to be found in most military inventories. King John of England (reigned 1199–1216) had a company of mounted crossbowmen, as did Philippe Auguste of France and Friedrich II of the Holy Roman Empire.⁴ The quantities involved could be surprisingly large. In 1295, for example, Philippe IV of France (‘Philip the Fair’) bought 2,000 crossbows from the sénéchaussée of Toulouse to arm men being raised to fight a war in Aquitaine. Philippe’s agents also acquired in Bruges, among a variety of military stores, 1,885 crossbows and 666,258 quarrels to equip his fleet.⁵

Perhaps the best-known exponents of the medieval crossbow were the Genoese, whose state-supported bowmen were often hired to those who would pay for their services: the French and other Italian states. Yet the tactical deployment of crossbowmen was often handled badly by their masters. This was true of many individual campaigns in the Hundred Years War, including the great naval Battle of Sluys (24 June 1340), when English archers overcame the threat of crossbowmen aboard the French ships by loosing their arrows much more quickly and initially at a range the crossbow bolts could not match.

Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt reinforced the supremacy of the longbow in the field. Crécy, fought on 26 August 1346, was a particular disaster for the Genoese, who had fled when faced with a ‘veil of English arrows’ – only to be ridden down by charging French knights, who paid little heed to the fate of men whom they regarded with contempt. The Genoese contingent, variously estimated as 2,000–6,000 strong, suffered terribly; their leader, Ottone Doria (or ‘Odon Dorioa’), was just one among perhaps a thousand dead.

To counter charges of cowardice, the crossbowmen blamed a sudden downpour for soaking their bowstrings. The English, by contrast, had been able to detach their bowstrings instantly to keep them dry, but the design of crossbows prevented the Genoese from acting similarly. This explanation was disputed even by their French masters, who suspected that their crossbowmen had simply run away, but tests undertaken in the early 1890s by Ralph Payne-Gallwey provided support.

The laminated-bone bow-arms of many fourteenth-century crossbows were usually short and often straight. Consequently, the bowstring hung loose; inadequately waterproofed, if moistened by mist or rain it would slacken ever more greatly. The effects of moisture duly compromised the draw, considerably reducing the power that could be generated. Most later crossbows not only had the bow-arms bent so that tension kept the string taught, but lacquer and similar methods of waterproofing prevented loss of utility.

Crossbows have often been regarded as the ‘poor relation’ of the longbow – especially in England, where training with the longbow was still mandatory in the reign of Richard II (1377–99). A statute of 1389 had imposed on ‘servants and labourers’ an obligation to obtain bows and arrows with which to practise on Sundays and holy days at the expense of all other games.⁶ Edward IV (king, 1461–83) ordered that all men should possess a bow of ‘yew, wych, hazel or ash’ of their own height, furnished with arrows the length of a man’s arm. Henry VIII (1509–47) decreed not only that practice with anything other than a longbow was forbidden, but also that anyone found in possession of a crossbow would incur a fine of £10.

Henry also laid down in statutes the minimum distances at which men over twenty-four years of age were expected to practise: not less than 220 yards if ‘flight arrows’ were used, and not less than 140 yards with ‘sheaf arrows’.

However, it was easier to fire a crossbow from cover or when prone. In addition, unlike the longbow, from which an arrow had to be loosed almost instantly, the interposition of a trigger in the crossbow mechanism allowed the bowman to wait patiently for the right moment to fire. The crossbow, therefore, was a far better stealth weapon.

Crossbows could be powerful, but had many serious disadvantages: they were comparatively complicated (becoming more so as the centuries passed) and notoriously difficult to draw. The lack of significant mechanical advantage in the short bow-arms compared with a longbow meant that the power needed to draw the bowstring was greatly increased. This in turn restricted the rate of fire, and also the engagement range.

Experiments reported by Payne-Gallwey⁷ showed that a 14-inch bolt weighing about 3 oz, fired from a large siege bow, would fly through a ¾-inch deal board placed 60 yards away. Extreme range was reportedly 460 yards, but it is not clear how far the bow had been elevated to make the shot. Modern experiments suggest that the initial velocity of a medieval crossbow bolt was only about 175 ft/sec; yet the draw needed to cock Payne-Gallwey’s bow was calculated to be about 1,200 lb – more than half a ton! – compared with only 120 lb for the most powerful longbow.

The crossbowman still presented a very real threat to the armoured knight, however, especially when bolts with a special head were used. Designed to minimise deflection, these had four small points on a squared tip. A Savoyard text of 1395 tells of armour that was certified to resist the impact of the bolt from a standard crossbow, and of a better grade that would resist a bolt fired from a more powerful siege bow (arbalète à tour).⁸ However, at the Battle of Homildon Hill in 1402, Archibald Douglas, fourth Earl of Douglas, was severely wounded by five arrows which penetrated his mail-and-armour defences.

Trained longbowmen could fire as many as fourteen arrows in a minute, even if required to do so en masse; crossbowmen would do well to fire four quarrels or bolts in the same time, and then only if their bow was comparatively simple. Even in the earliest days, the bowman often lay on his back to place both feet on the bow-arms so that he could retract the bowstring until it was held on the ‘tricker’. The introduction of foot-stirrups helped, as did technological advances such as the goat’s foot lever and the crannequin⁹ or windlass, the first of which appeared as the thirteenth century drew to a close. The problem was so extreme that crossbowmen were often provided with pavises, large manheight shields that were carried onto the battlefield by shieldsmen or ‘pavisiers’ to protect bowmen while they reloaded. In the Montaperti campaign of 1260, for example, the army of Florence deployed three hundred pavesari to protect a thousand crossbow-men.

But the luckless Genoese bowmen at Crécy lacked their pavises, which were with the laggardly baggage train when the battle began. There could be no protection from the English arrows that descended from the skies. It is still by no means clear if the retreat of the Genoese, who swore fealty not to France but only to themselves and their state, was panic-stricken or simply a tactical withdrawal. The French knights granted no quarter.

A depiction of the Battle of Crécy (1346), from a version of Froissart’s Chronicles commissioned early in the fifteenth century by Flemish nobleman Louis de Gruuthuse, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Note the absence of pavises, and the crank-spanned bow in the left foreground.

A major advantage of the crossbow lay in its ability to engage individual targets at long range, which could be particularly beneficial if cover could be used advantageously. The defenders of castles and fortifications were, therefore, well placed to select targets at will. It had been recognised since the emergence of organised warfare that eliminating commanders was one of the best ways to win a battle.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, it was necessary only to sever the head to kill a serpent. Roman legionaries had often gone to great lengths to protect the standards that customarily marked the position of their commanders, and such ideas persisted into the wars of the nineteenth century.

Many high-ranking officers fell victim to the crossbow bolt, deliberately assassinated, but at others times simply victims of combat. The former group may have included William II ‘Rufus’ of England, who was killed while hunting in the New Forest in August 1100 – an accidental ricochet, or perhaps a deliberate plot to place his brother on the throne.¹⁰

The latter group included Richard I (‘The Lionheart’, Cœur de Lion) of England, who was wounded by a bolt at the siege of Gaillon in 1192 and then fatally wounded seven years later at the investment of Châlus in the duchy of Aquitaine. Many, especially clergy, considered Richard’s untimely death to be divine judgment: the inevitable consequence of accepting the use of the crossbow against fellow Christians, which had been proscribed sixty years previously by the Second Lateran Council.

Crossbows were still being used in combat in the sixteenth century, at a time before the gun had been developed sufficiently far to provide competition, and had had a lengthy target-shooting career. The earliest authenticated targetshooting competition of any type was held in 1286 in Schweidnitz, and a specially built target range in Görlitz had been constructed by 1377.

There were many who believed the bow to be a better weapon than the first guns. During the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603), Sir John Smith, one of her ablest generals, stated:

I will never doubt to adventure my life, or many lives (if I had them), amongst 8,000 archers, complete, well-chosen and appointed, and therewithal provided and furnished with great store of sheaves of arrows, as also a good overplus of bows and bow-strings, against 20,000 of the best harquebusiers and musketeers there are in Christendom.¹¹

A company of bowmen was raised to guard King Charles I as late as 1643, almost as soon as the Civil War began; and a competition held in the summer of 1792 in the Cumbrian village of Pacton Green, when twenty arrows and twenty musket-shots were fired at a target with a diameter of one clothyard (about forty inches) placed a hundred yards away, was won by the bowmen with sixteen hits. Their opponents had managed only twelve.

‘Shooting the Popinjay’ was promoted from the thirteenth century onward. Usually undertaken in Europe with crossbows, often of exquisite quality, this involved knocking a brightly coloured wooden parrot or ‘Papingo’ (derived from the medieval French popinjay) from the top of a pole or tree. In Prussia in 1354, the Grand Master had ordained the erection of a suitable target in each and every city in his dominion.¹²

The appearance of the first cannon on the battlefield, its provenance still hotly disputed, was to end the supremacy of the bow. At the beginning, however, this was not obvious; the first cannon were cumbersome, slow-firing, prone to explode, and could hurl projectiles only short distances. Only when steps had been taken to transform what would in modern parlance be called ‘crew-served’ into individual weapons was progress made.

This is not the place to give a detailed history of the earliest man-portable firearms, except to observe that once the crudity of the first matchlocks gave way to the surprisingly sophisticated wheel-lock – an obvious sign not only of technological progress but also that the status of the gun had risen – it was a short step to universal rearmament. The wheel-lock was often the plaything of the rich, but greater nobles such as the Elector of Saxony were sufficiently rich and powerful to arm corps of bodyguards with firearms.

The earliest wheel-lock guns were made by clockmakers in southern Germany and Bohemia, and the combination of reliable ignition, long barrels and comparatively small calibre often gave surprisingly good accuracy. This suited the firearm not only to target-shooting but also to an assassin. Several states attempted to ban guns, and especially short-barrelled pistols that could be easily concealed. However, armies saw in the arquebus and its successor, the musket, a way of equipping large numbers of ill-trained men with a weapon that was far easier to master than a bow.

Credit for introducing the first ‘standard issue’ firearm is usually given to Gustav II Adolf of Sweden (‘Gustavus Adolphus’) during the Thirty Years War of 1618–48. At this time, the matchlock was still the weapon of the infantry and wheel-lock pistols served the cavalry. When the wheel-lock, difficult and timeconsuming to make, gave way to the simpler flinted locks in the seventeenth century, the idea of production in quantity became a reality.

This was not the mass-production method of later days, but merely ensured that the products of countless individual gunmakers conformed to basic standards: the calibre, for example, or the length of the barrel. Individual muskets still varied appreciably from each other, as the only way of obtaining large quantities was to recruit as many individual gunmakers as possible. Each man had his own ideas and techniques, and so each gun was effectively unique.

Yet performance steadily improved. Though most armies relied on the smashing power of volleys fired by serried ranks of well-drilled men, and though the accuracy of the smooth-bore infantry musket was very poor at any range beyond a hundred yards – compressing the battlefield into a narrow strip, filling the air with clouds of powder smoke sufficient to prevent individual targets being engaged – the value of rifling had been appreciated for many years. Though widely attributed to the English scientist Benjamin Robins and his contemporaries in the mid-eighteenth century, the idea of stabilising a projectile by spinning it in flight had been known to bowmen many centuries previously.

The earliest date on which rifling gun-barrels was practised has always been disputed, largely because no evidence has ever been produced to back any of the claims. It is possible that the earliest guns had straight grooves, intended to minimise the effects of fouling, and that the benefits of rifling arose as much by chance as design.

Predilection for decoration, generally with sculptural qualities, could have led an enterprising gunmaker to twist a barrel formed with flats – usually octagonal – to give a spiralling effect. This would have twisted the straight-cut grooves, of course, and the gun would have shot far better. Once established, the idea that twist-rifling improved accuracy would then have become commonplace within a few years.

August Kötter of Nuremberg, who died c. 1525, is often identified as the inventor of twist-rifling, even though it probably originated a generation previously. It seems likely that the straight grooves came first (there is no real confirmation), c. 1460, and that the twist-type followed ten to fifteen years later.¹³ The oldest surviving rifle of this type, dated 1476, is owned by the Armeria Reale in Turin, and another with multiple grooves, rayée à mèche or ‘rifled with stripes’, once the property of the Emperor Maximilian, bears arms that can be dated precisely to 1486–93.¹⁴

Shooting competitions are mentioned as early as 1426, and by 1472 were being contested regularly in southern parts of Germany and throughout the cantons of Switzerland where crossbow-shooting was still popular. In 1563, a competition advertised in Berne classified guns with straight and twist-type rifling in separate categories. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, straight-groove rifling had been largely discarded.

A few guns were made by hammering strip-iron around a special mandrel and then, once the mandrel had been removed, twisting the entire barrel to give a bore with the cross-section of a heart or a star. It is possible to see in these an influence behind the Whitworth rifle and other designs with polygonal bores of the nineteenth century.

The rifle soon developed into a weapon of precision, by sophisticated multilever triggers and improvements in sights that included an occasional ‘sighting tube’ in which inspiration for the optical sight may be seen. Surprisingly sophisticated aperture sights also appeared in the sixteenth century, with windage and elevation controlled by screw-wheels. Improved performance encouraged some far-sighted noblemen to form corps of riflemen, beginning in Hesse in 1632. The riflemen were recruited from Jäger and Förstleute, hunters and foresters, who required little tuition in the arts of observing, tracking and shooting.

The renowned Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp was killed by an English marksman during the Battle of Scheveningen (1653). It is assumed that the sailor used a flintlock musket, probably of the so-called ‘dog-lock’ pattern common in England at the time. Tromp’s death had an important effect on the course of the battle, which, though inconclusive, did enough damage to the Dutch fleet to ensure an English victory in the first Anglo-Dutch War.

Where the Elector of Hesse led, others were to follow until, by the eighteenth century, almost all central European armies (even those of minor states and principalities) had corps of riflemen. In Britain, however, only the largebore ‘Brown Bess’ musket was approved for rank-and-file until long after the Napoleonic Wars had ended. The British had, perhaps, missed a trick. Though the principal firearm of the English Civil War (1642–9) had been a musket, usually a matchlock, the first ‘turn-off’ barrels had appeared. Though these guns looked like muzzle loaders, they were charged by unscrewing the barrel, placing the ball and the powder in the chamber, and then screwing the barrel back against the frame. Made with early forms of flinted lock, guns of this class could be exceptionally accurate.

There is no real evidence that marksmanship was used deliberately to eliminate officers or artillerymen on battlefields such as Marston Moor, but the capability was there. On 31 July 1653, shortly after the Civil War had ended, Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp, commander of the navy of the Republic of the United Netherlands, was killed during the Battle of Scheveningen by a sharpshooter stationed in the tops of the British ship James, commanded by Admiral Sir William Penn.

The global situation was changed by conflict in North America. The Seven Years War (1756–63) was a struggle for supremacy between the British and their allies on one side and the French and their allies on the other. The British had seized French territory in North America, and a series of bloody campaigns ensued. Eventually, General Wolfe defeated the forces of the French General Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham above Québec on 13 September 1759, and the Battle of Quiberon Bay (20 November 1759) proved to be similarly conclusive at sea.

Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, Marquis de Saint-Veran, did not survive the decisive attack on Québec, dying a day later from a musket-ball in his back. Wolfe had been struck three times in the arm, shoulder and chest during the advance, though there is nothing to give credence to claims that any of these shots was the work of a sharpshooter. Those who attended the dying general attributed the hits to the fortunes of war and to Wolfe’s fateful decision to lead his men by example.

The war in Canada and the northern part of what was to become the United States, where hostile terrain made conventional lines-of-battle impossible, promoted not only skirmishing but also irregular warfare of unbridled savagery in which Native Americans played a leading role. The British and the French both made good use of these tribes, whose hunting, tracking and observational skills were far better than those of European soldiers pitched into a campaign dominated by the spectacular geography of northern America.

Among the renowned irregulars were Rogers’ Rangers, raised by the Massachusetts-born Robert Rogers (1731–95) initially for service in New Hampshire, who were destined to play an active part in the Seven Years War and are now hailed as the precursors of today’s Special Forces. Dressed largely in green, Rogers’s men gained a reputation for daring raids – admittedly, sometimes inflated by optimistic claims – and highly effective intelligencegathering. Marksmanship was just one of their attributes.

British commanders who had seen the value of Rogers’s sharpshooters at first hand, or had made good use of Iroquois scouts, soon demanded riflemen of their own. But few recruits were to be readily found in the British Isles, nor was British gunmaking organised in such a way that rifles could be obtained in quantity. The answer was to recruit from the German states that supported the British cause: Hanover, Brunswick–Wolfenbüttel, Hesse-Kassel and Schaumburg–Lippe. Virtually all of the guns were obtained in Germany and Bohemia, though William Grice and Robert Wilson copied guns sent home from the America colonies in the late 1750s.

This was at a time when the Jäger rifle had become regulation issue in the armies of Austria, Prussia and even Russia, though the earliest representatives, acquired from Zella St Blasii and Suhl, seem to have been issued in 1710–11 to sharpshooters in the pay of the king of Norway. Ironically, Charles XII of Denmark, who had been wounded by a Russian marksman in 1709, was killed by one of the Norwegians in 1718.

Jäger rifles usually had short heavy barrels, spurred trigger guards, plain stocks with patch boxes in the butt, and furniture cast of iron or brass. The barrels were often ‘swamped’, increasing in diameter towards the muzzle, so that the additional weight helped to control the shot, and a set-trigger mechanism was commonly fitted. Most of the Jägerbüchsen had bars brazed to the side of