What was the most effective sniper rifle?

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#21

Some good points there.

I would suppose that a part of defining the sniper-role, would be defining a sniper. In my day, there was a distinction drawn between a marksman and a sniper. One of the points made was that to become a sniper, one was required to be a marksman, but not every marksman could necessarily become a sniper. Perhaps it is about the way the role has evolved, but I seem to recall a novel, in trilogy form, by John Masters, set in the trenches and no-mans land of WW1. Most of his characters come from the same estate in the Kent weald, and paocher becomes a sniper.

Masters’ character demonstrates the qualities of stealth, guile and cunning which are pre-requites for a ‘sniper’ in the British forces context.

For anyone who enjoys a good read, I would highly recommend it. There are some excellent sniper-on-sniper encounters.

Trilogy: Now God be Thanked.

#22

Someone with more knowledge (but in light of what I’m about to say probably not a US Marine :D) may correct me, but my recollection is that in WWII (and perhaps still) the USMC was solidly based on the rifleman and sound infantry squad / section skills and tactics. The USMC was rather more demanding in its qualification standards in those areas than the US Army. The USMC therefore taught and achieved high standards of marksmanship and general rifle company skills, not unlike the British Army up to WWI.

My recollection also is that the USMC didn’t in some senses differentiate between a sniper role and a general rifleman except that what is generally called a sniper was in the USMC a rifleman who was required to engage in precision marksmanship. Or something like that.

#23

Rising Sun, Refering to your post I think that a true sniper (not a marksman), due to his special knowledge of fieldcraft, is also predestined to do reconnaisance behind or close to enemy lines, where shooting would draw undue attention to him. Should he on the other hand see a noteworthy target, he would be in the position to destroy it (like e.g. a high enemy officer).

Jan

#24

Jan

I think we might be like two men talking about apples, but one has a picture of an orange in his mind. I don’t know which of us sees the orange. :smiley:

My understanding is set out in my earlier post and the quote from the Australian sniper trainer, and in my following post about the Australian sniper in Korea. The Australian view of snipers is an aggressive but surreptitious marksman who, largely from a more or less fixed position or area as distinct from roaming around on a wide-ranging recce, shoots the enemy to hamper his ability to advance or fight by killing NCO’s, officers, advancing troops, and even the rear of advancing columns and rear area troops.

I think your conception is more to do with what I would regard as an intelligence-gathering patrol authorised to engage the enemy if a target of sufficient value presents itself.

#25

Nobody can tell who has what it takes for anything. It has always amazed me when I see a photo of some VC or MC or MM etc winner who before the war was a bespectacled little bookkeeper nerd who but whose proved courage was a hundred times that of the big bronzed hero with the square jaw and impressive pre-war feats of strength, endurance and sporting prowess. I don’t know if this is still so, but it used to be said that SAS troops in Australia were generally smaller than the average digger. Small man’s syndrome? Or just more proof that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters but the size of the fight in the dog?

Australia’s most formidable sniper in the Korean War, and quite probably in any war in which Australia fought, was Ian Robertson. He started out as a military photographer after joining the army in 1945 after WWII ended. He was made a sniper in Korea because of his marksmanship, despite being the battalion photographer which was hardly the most gung-ho role or the most likely source for a bloke who probably killed at least 150 enemy (This is documented somewhere but I can’t find it) as a sniper in a fairly short time. Robertson would worm his way into position in the middle of an open field etc (less likely to be identified than if near obvious cover) at a time in the night or day before to avoid leaving frost trails etc then camouflage himself and fire into the enemy during the day while being unable to shift his position or even move to have a feed or piss. I think he held some positions for more than one day.

Snipers were issued with a modified version of the venerable Lee-Enfield .303 rifle used by British Empire troops since the Boer War half a century before. The sniper model had a small telescopic sight and a heavy barrel, but otherwise was little different from a million others lugged by Allied infantry in two world wars.

Robertson could group 15 rounds in a space smaller than his fist at 300 metres, hit a target the size of a man’s head at 600 metres, and was confident of hitting a man from 800 to 1000 metres if conditions were right. Not that long-range marksmanship helped much in his first engagement.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/26/1082831474340.html

The last sentence in the quote refers to an event in which his rifle shooting skills exceeded his camera shooting skills.

It was their first week in Korea. Robertson and his first sniper partner, a South Australian called Lance Gully, were escorting their commanding officers on reconnaissance - driving ahead in a Jeep to “clear the ground”.

It meant they would draw enemy fire first, protecting the officers.

They stopped their Jeep and split up to scout on foot. Minutes later, Gully surprised 30 or more enemy soldiers hiding in a ditch. They showered him with hand grenades. He jumped in the ditch with them to avoid the blasts, then backed out of it, firing as he went. If he missed he was dead. After nine shots for nine hits, a grenade burst wounded him.

When he heard firing, Robbie ran to help. He saw a flap of his mate’s bloodied scalp hanging off his head and a crazy thought struck him: “Lance looks sharp with that Mohawk haircut.” The wounded man screamed: “There’s a million of them in there, and they’re all yours.”

Years before, an old digger had told him how to survive superior numbers at close range: Keep both eyes open, point and snap-shoot, count the shots and reload after six.

And be aggressive: give them time to think and they’ll kill you.

He ran up to the ditch, shooting anyone who opposed him, squeezed off six shots then ran back, jammed in another clip and ran at the ditch again. He did it six times, until no one was left alive.

Gully had shot nine. The rest of the jumble of bodies were down to Robertson. He could hardly believe he was alive, unhurt apart from a furrow across his wrist left by a machine-gun bullet. It was a miracle.

Officially, it was a “skirmish” at the start of what historians call the Battle of the Apple Orchard. Lance Gully returned to the line later, but the shrapnel in his body made him too sick to stay.

So the boy from Preston got a new sniping partner, a reputation and the first of a lifetime of recurring dreams.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/26/1082831474340.html

#26

The Marines. point is a good one. Sniping within the Brtish Army was allowed to decline after WW2 or, perhaps, Korea (not certain now). Anyway, as BAOR (British Army of the Rhine) was considered to be Britain’s main commitment after withdrawal from Empire, the sniping role was considered obsolete in a mechanised environment. It was the Royal Marine Commandos that continued the practise of sniping and developed the courses. In the late sixites and early seventies, however, the British Army recognised a need to re-introduce sniping and, therefore, working with the Marines, began training cadres for both snipers and sniper intstructors.

A major skill required by a sniper is that of stalking. Another ethos of the stalk is cover from view, not necessarily cover from fire. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider a sniper as being useful for intelligence gathering as his skills of observation are raised to a very high standard through continuous training. Naturally, if a sniper is out and about in no-mans-land, operating from stands which enable him (or them), to enfilade the enemy from a concealed position, he is going to be able to observe much and pass it on. So, as the role of the sniper had evolved in previous wars it was natural to attach the Sniper Section to the Int. Section.

Today, since the re-introduction of sniping in the British Army, selected people have been specifically trained in the sniper-role, and where they have in the last two or three decades completed six to eight week sniper courses at battalion level, there is now a sniper course run at the Battle School in South Wales, which raises the standards to an even greater level.

#27

Training develops natural abilities to greater levels of effectiveness. It also gives the opportunity to assess individual soldiers’ abilities and draw comparisons between them. A sniper training course is very rigorous and those seleccted to attend one have to be marksmen as a pre-requisite. The company officers and senior NCOs will generally have a good idea of who are the bette soldiers, not just from training, but from how they have performed on active operations. Of those that do attend sniper training sourses, the failure rate is high. As you have stated, size isn’t a pre-requisite, and neither is a gungho attitude, it’s about soldier qualities.

I think it boils down to definition. There is the marksman who is an all-round good infantryman who adopts the sniper role in a given stuation, and there is the trained sniper who has been more professionally trained for the role (if that doesn’t sound too pretentious?). Of course your point regarding no one can say who, is a valid one, but the British Army has had so much exerience over the past thirty or forty years, that it isn’t long before even the most junior of soldiers are placed in a situation in which they have to acquit themselves, and the better soldiers emerge.

#28

I don’t have sources (well, I do if a beer-fuelled memory counts :D) but my recollection is that in WWII, to the extent that the sniper function in the Australian army** was formalised, an infantry battalion had snipers attached to the support company (not HQ or rifle companies but battalion support company with miscellaneous elements such as MG and mortar) in a sniper / scout section. As a section was a third of a platoon, that would be about 10 to a 12 men depending upon establishment, which would give maybe five to six sniper / scout teams in a battalion. Nominally.

The scout function might encompass reconnaissance but it was distinct from the sniper function.

It needs to be remembered that a sniper usually lays in wait for or stalks a target. A scout precedes an advance. A scout section might be used for an intelligence gathering patrol but it moves through an area and takes information back to HQ. In WWII Australian snipers probably didn’t have scarce radios to send their information back to HQ; nor might they be able to use them in their positions; nor usually could they send anyone back with information.

** The problem with the Australian army in WWII is that it comprised militia and AIF elements which weren’t consistently organised.

#29

Moi?

Grasshopper.

Et peu un prétentieux.

I just wish I knew what the ***k that last sentence means. I tried it on Babel but it just gave the English version as “ET peu prétentieux”. Captilasing the second letter and dropping out the ‘un’ didn’t help. I suppose it makes sense in the original Spanish, but Panzerknacker should be able to translate it.

P.S. Panzerknakcers: I’m not having a go at you, but at 32Bravo, the English beast that he is. If I was having a go at you, the asterisks would be in Spanish. :slight_smile:

#30

In my battalion, we snipers were atached to rifle companies after we had concluded sniper traing. However, the six of us regularly worked together in training, as training was a constant on-going thing. On operations we would either work within our companies or as a complete sniper team. When operating as a sniper team, we were usually conducting operations at higher level than battalion. This raises the question of whether snipers are tactical troops or strategic troops? I would say it depended on the task.

On the point of snipers and marksmen - in my day, snipers were trained to a much higher level than would be a rifleman. In the context of a British marksman being a rifleman who has qualified as a marksman in his classification shoot. A sniper also qualfies in a classification shoot and to be badged a sniper, he must qualify as a sniper-marksman (as well as pass various stalking tests etc.). Snipers are also taught a wider range of shooting positions (no pun intended) such as the Hawkins position and the Canadian Saw-back position. It all adds another dimension to shooting and field-craft, and when snipers are promoted and become, say, section leaders, they have skillls that they are able to pass on to their soldiers, thus enhancing their soldiers’ skills.

Scouting. We never used the term Scouting, except in discussion when first training to become a sniper, we were issued with ‘Scout-scopes’ which were telescopes that the British Army had had in use since the Boer War (brass affairs in a leather case - quaint, but effective). Those were used to get a ‘big-close-up’ of objects that one had picked out with ‘binos’. We were never used on any intelligence gathering missions, and intelligence gathering would be incidental to the main task of engaging targets.

Another quaint piece of sniper terminology, was a ‘sweet-let-off’ which is not a nice smelling fart, but occurs when everything comes together to produce the perfect shot (I’m trying not to laugh :)).

#31

Having been rumbled as being black (How did he do that?..is it the accent, do you think?), does the tag of Grasshopper come about because someone is of the opinion that I’m a Rastaman? :smiley:

I used to be a crazy craghopper, but the old knees seem to protest these days, I still manage a little, but one has to make do with the easier ascents. Still, grasshopping is better than nothing, and far easier on th knees - softer landings.:smiley:

#32

The SVD is not a snipers’ weapon in the Western sense. It is a markman’s rifle. It’s main role is to extend the range of the standard Russian infantry squad past that of the AK assault rifle.

#33

I suggest that you shoot a 8mm mauser, or a .30-06 or a .303 before you make such assumptions.