Angry Planet - Snipers: Battlefield saviors or sinners?

Episode Date: March 10, 2016

Snipers play a key role in the world’s armies. They target commanders on the opposing side and other targets with an outsize impact. Working by themselves, they can pin down a group, creating fear and confusion. This week on War College we look at the history of snipers and the role they play now. It’s fair to say the role wasn’t always considered a badge of honor.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Today's standard infantry rifle is as accurate and has as much range to it, really, as the sniper rifle of World War II. Hollywood cast Bradley Cooper, handsome Bradley Cooper, as Chris Kyle in the movie American Sniper. In real life, Kyle killed at least 160 people with his rifle, according to the Pentagon.

This week on War College, we look at the history of snipers and the role they play in today's military. One of the things we learned is that in the past, this job was not exactly considered a batch of honor. You're listening to War College. College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm writer's opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. Today we're talking with Ian McCollum. He's the editor of Forgotten Weapons.com.

The site is dedicated to researching and archiving information about historic and unusual firearms. It's an amazing collection of information. I totally recommend it. Ian previously walked us through the fascinating history of the machine gun, and today he's here to talk about snipers. Ian, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm flattered. Let's start up with just sort of the basics. Well, what exactly is a sniper?

How do you define what a sniper is and does? Well, I would say traditionally and still today, one would consider a sniper to be a person in military service whose focus is on hitting specific precise targets instead of just targets of opportunity. I think a lot of what we see as the definition of a sniper, it stands out a lot more in historical warfare rather than today. I think we'll talk about this a little bit in more detail a little bit later on, but I think we've kind of reached a point today where every soldier today in some ways would be considered a sniper 200 years ago. All ranged weaponry starts with humankind as a way to hunt game. These are tools that were developed to kill animals first,

and then later turned on fellow human beings. So in that context, the idea of one person managing to hit as precise a target as possible, as far away as possible, and with as few tries as possible, makes sense. That's the goal for everyone. You know, if you're out there, stalking a deer, you want to kill it in your first shot and not miss and then have to chase it down or lose it and find another one. So in that way, I think the idea of precision weaponry literally dates back as far as the idea of ranged weaponry does. Well, I guess it makes sense. You have David and Goliath in the Bible with David using a sling, right? Sure. Yeah, there's a very early example. Are there any other early examples? Like, did ancient armies have troops that were

specifically set aside to use precision weapons on high-value targets? I'm thinking pre-gun powder. Not really that I have ever been able to see. Part of that comes from the fact that in general, ancient battles were fought on wide open fields. You needed room to maneuver, and there wasn't necessarily a whole lot of concealment. You couldn't have some dude hiding within, you know, arrow range of the enemy general. Now, that's not always the case. The first really, well, non- biblical, really perfect example of sniping I was able to find, is actually King Richard the Lionheart, who was shot in the neck by a sniper in 1199. He was besieging a castle in Normandy that was particularly poorly defended, and he was just kind of wandering around inspecting

the siege fortifications without his armor on. And there was some ostentatious guy up on the parapets with a crossbow shooting. And apparently the guy actually took a pot shot at Richard and missed. And Richard thought this was rather entertaining and congratulated him from afar. And then the guy took another shot and hit him in the neck. But this is a perfect example of this isn't a bunch of guys volley firing arrows into an army and happening to hit the king. This is one dude with one weapon specifically trying to shoot Richard and hits him. In fact, what's kind of funny is they end up capturing the castle very quickly. Like I said, it was very poorly defended. And Richard has the, this guy summoned to him, and the guy basically says, hey, you know, I'm sorry,

but you killed the rest of my family, and I was kind of pissed. And Richard actually pardons him for it. He says basically, well, you know, that's kind of understandable. Here, have a hundred shillings and go on your merry way. Then Richard dies, and then one of Richard's mercenary captains, grabs the guy anyway, flays his skin off, and hangs him. Yeah. Ancient combat or medieval combat was not a pleasant thing. That actually shows really dramatically how one arrow or one bullet can change things, too, because when you think about who succeeded Richard, it ended up being King John,

who was supposed to be the worst king in all of English history, and the Magna Carta, one of the world's most famous documents came out of that, too. It's like the first sniper changed the world completely. I don't want to call this guy the first sniper. And by the way, his name is probably Pierre Basila. I'm probably butcher in that pronunciation. But the record gives him several other names as well, and nobody really knows for sure. I have no doubt that he is not the first sniper.

He just happens to be the first really well-recorded one because he managed to actually hit a particularly high-value target. So moving on to the age of gunpowder. When did sniping really become a factor when people were fighting with gunpowder? Well, there are a couple things to consider. First off, as far back as there have been firearms, there has been marksmanship competition, although it was not necessarily widespread,

but we know it was pretty well established in Holland and the German states by the 1500s. The first known recorded such competition was actually in the 1460s in Switzerland, and it was both musket and crossbow. So you had events for both weapons at the same time. Now, part of the problem with these early competitions is you were using smoothbore weapons. Rifling hadn't been invented yet. And with a smoothbore firearm, your accuracy is mechanically pretty limited. So you're talking not more than 100 or maybe 200 yards, and on relatively large targets. No matter how good you are, having a smoothbore musket is going to limit your ability to make. precision long-range shots at all. So in a military context, are you going to have a guy who's good enough and has the equipment, and is he actually going to be within 100 or 200 yards of a particular high-value target? Is there going to be a general that close that he can take a pot shot at? Probably not all that often. It's with the advent of rifling that all of sudden firearms become much more precise weapons of

longer ranges, and then you have the opportunity for people to take up sniping as an effective tool. When were rifles invented? Or the technique of rifling, I should say? Kind of varies typically in the 1600s, although they didn't become all that popular and widespread until the 1700s. In general, people consider, like, the American Revolution to be one of the first large-scale uses, military uses of rifle arms. That's not strictly true. They were used earlier, but that can gives you a good ballpark. Just for fun, would you mind just explain very briefly what rifling is and what it does? Sure. The idea of rifling is you are actually, you have a spiral groove or series of grooves on the inside of the barrel, and you're firing a soft lead projectile. And that projectile is squeezed gas type into the barrel, which means as it moves down the barrel upon firing, it's going to grab that groove.

and that groove is going to force the bullet to spin. And what you get is an effect just like a thrown football. The spin creates a stabilization effect, and it keeps the bullet going in a much more predictable path and repeatable path. So a smooth board gun, you have a plain circular musket ball going down a smooth barrel, and it can bounce around, well, it won't bounce around inside the barrel, but its flight path is somewhat unpredictable and very subject to getting blown around by it. wind, air currents, different movement of the bullet as it flies. A spin-stabilized bullet is much more accurate. Now there were some downsides to the rifling at the same time, which helped explain why it may have been invented in the 1600s but didn't really become

commonplace for some time. First off, it's much more expensive to make. You need a better machinist, a better gunsmith to make a precision rifled barrel than a smooth barrel. It also has implications for reloading. At this point, all firearms are loaded from the muzzle. So you basically have a tube that's closed at one end and open at the other. And in order to load it, you're going to pour powder from the muzzle end of the barrel all the way down to the breach, and then you're going to put a lead ball or bullet in the muzzle and then ram it down until it compacts the powder at the very bottom. That is a lot easier to do with a smoothbore. The problem with a muzzle loading rifle is that you have to

engrave that rifling onto the bullet as you ram it down the barrel. So it takes more effort, it takes more time. It is, for example, much more difficult to do, say, lying down, protecting yourself. You have to kind of stand up to get enough leverage on a ramrod to do that effectively. The alternative is you can actually use an undersized bullet, and that was sometimes done, which means there's less distortion of the bullet and it's easier. But that, of course, at the same time reduces your accuracy. So you'd mentioned that the American Revolution was kind of what people historically think of as the first time snipers were rolled out. Why, what happened during that war and how were they used? Well, at that point, what you had was a bunch of guys who were, they had their own personal weapons. You know, this much of the, well, some of the American Revolution was done with militias and not standing armies.

And so these guys were bringing their own personal rifles or muskets to the battle. and because they were subsistence hunters, the reloading time for a rifle wasn't a big deal, and the accuracy was a big deal, because if it meant that you only needed one shot to bag a piece of game and feed the family for a little while longer, that was worth all the trade-offs. So a lot of these guys brought rifle weapons to combat. When you have standing armies, typically the cost isn't worthwhile. Military tactics of the day were to line everyone up in rows and fire in the air. volleys. And for that, smoothbores work pretty well. In fact, you can you can volley fire smoothbore

arms faster because of this reloading speed difference. And so to a lot of military tacticians, rifles weren't a benefit to the army. So the Americans were using rifles. The British, on the other hand, did they have riflemen as well? I mean, I know there was actually during the Napoleonic Wars a whole type of unit called riflemen. The British did have riflemen, but not in. not in large enough numbers to make a substantial impact on the battlefield. The British actually used what is probably the first military-issued breech-loading rifle as well during the American Revolution, the Ferguson rifle, but it was used in such small numbers that it didn't really have any meaningful impact on the fight.

This is one of those things where if you try and track down what was the first time there was a military use of a rifle, you're going down a rabbit hole. There will always be one incident a little bit earlier where one or two, guys showed up with one and you'll never, I don't think you'll ever really be able to find the absolute first incidents. What we can look for instead is the first time it was really used in substantial numbers and had a major impact. Let's switch tracks to a little bit narrower focus on the rifles themselves. As the rifles are coming into more common practice and they're being refined, what are some of the weirder weapons that were developed? I knew you're going

to get to this because I kind of have a reputation for dealing with weird weapons. But there isn't really all that much weirdness involved with sniping rifles and precision rifles. There are some things out there. Certainly some people would look to the Whitworth rifle, which was an early British design that actually uses very pretty cool and interesting. Instead of what we would think of today as a rifled barrel where it's round with some grooves cut in it, the Whitworth actually was a hexagonal hole. hole, and that hexagon shape was twisted down the length of the barrel. So you had a number of advantages to it. You weren't actually imprinting rifling on a bullet. You were taking a hexagonal bullet into a spiraling hexagonal bore, so it was faster to load. But you still got a gas seal, and you still got the effectiveness of spin rifling on the bullet. And those were used,

and they actually have an excellent reputation for accuracy for the time. Did they jam more? Did they have problems loading? You said it was easier to load because you weren't imprinting the bullet. No major problems with them that I'm aware of. Although, again, you come to cost. You also have to mold hexagonal bullets for them instead of being able to use round bullets. There are a number of often logistical issues like that. We'll take a gun where today we look at it.

We go, you know, this is so much obviously better. why didn't they use this? And often what we don't consider are some of the logistical and cost reasons. There were air rifles that were as powerful as some of our medium-sized guns today that were used in the Napoleonic Wars. And again, someone would wonder why these things were quieter, they didn't make smoke, they were repeating. You know, you could fire 20 shots in a row, almost as fast as a modern semi-automatic rifle. Why wouldn't they use these? And the answer comes down to a lot of logistics and training and durability in the field. So we see sniper movies. They're set World War II. Also, there's an episode of MASH that stuck

in my memory for about 35, 40 years, where they were pinned down by a sniper. Were snipers also used during World War I? Yes, absolutely. In fact, I would say as a military tactic sniping really came into its own during the First World War. You do see it. officially used in decent numbers during the US Civil War, but really World War I, everyone gets into the game. It takes some countries longer than others. The Germans were probably at the outset the best equipped. I've actually seen some suggestion that a lot of this actually goes back to geography. The Germans, German states had a lot of forests and a lot of mountains and a lot of areas where hunting was an acceptable and commonplace practice for young men. And that's not really the

case in the United Kingdom. They didn't, you know, hunting in the UK was much more of an aristocrats affair. And the result of this was when the Germans are conscripting troops for World War I, they have the fairly large pool of people with active stalking and precision shooting backgrounds. They've been competition shooting, they've been hunting, they know how to handle guns, they know how to handle themselves in the field. And that's a resource that the British just didn't necessarily have. So the Germans started out the war. Their sniper program actually used a lot of, and this is actually this is the case across all the countries really. They started out the war with commercial hunting rifles as their basis for their sniper program. And then as they are able to

build the manufacturing base, they start using more military-issue guns. Although the Germans in particularly never really had a single basic sniping rifle design. They had a couple different types of mounts, and they would use a wide variety of commercially available telescopic sites on their rifles. Is this also when militaries begin specifically training people to snip? Yes. I think you'll find some of that in the U.S. Civil War, but again, World War I, it really comes into its own. It takes a little while to get going. People have to kind of get over this initial idea that sniping is dishonorable and contrary to the generally recognized rules of war, which is there's a lot of holdovers from the Napoleonic era that show up in World War I. There's a similar problem with the machine guns, right, when we were talking about those.

They thought the hell of them as ungentlemanly. Exactly, which they, no doubt are, but that doesn't mean they aren't very effective and they don't get used a lot. The same thing goes for snipers. So once people kind of got over that objection and realized, you know, hey, this is effective and, oh, by the way, the enemy is bombing our civilian cities and we don't really care what happens to them anymore. So let's start using snipers and flamethrowers and poison gas and anything else we can come up with. Then yeah, all the major countries institute training programs.

They all start developing more or less standardized sniping arms. And yeah, you get a lot of doctrine. You get doctrine regarding things like sniper hides and loops. You'll find early in the war the Germans actually had little armored shields that they would use for snipers, something you could set up on the trench, and you'd have a little opening, a little sliding flap on it that you could put a rifle muzzle through, and use that to protect yourself while you're shooting. That lasted for a little while before they realized that this was bulletproof, to an extent, but it was in no way hidden. And so actually it's kind of funny, one of the early British responses to this when they realized that this armor shield is proof against their 303 service

ammunition is they actually started bringing up to the front big game rifles from English sporting big game rifles in 400 and 500 and 600 calibers. And they would use those things to blow holes through the German sniper armor because it was visible and obvious. You just had to have a big enough gun to break through it. So after that, things started turning more towards hiding rather than just trying to protect yourself. And in a lot of places in World War I, this got very elaborate. You would have multiple overlapping and reinforcing sniper hides. They would position the hides in defilade or in enfilade so that you're not pointing straight at the enemy trend. pointing kind of perpendicular down along a trench, which makes it very difficult for someone to spot your hide. And then you get weird stuff like the British would actually make

fake horse corpses that you could hide a guy in and it just looked like another piece of debris on the battlefield, except there's a sniper hiding in it. The use of gilly suits goes back to, I'm sure a lot of people have heard that term, that goes back to World War I. And that was actually a practice taken from Scottish game wardens, more or less, who would build these rather fancy suits to camouflage themselves into the heather. And that practice gets adopted in various ways. Can you tell us a little bit about how modern sniper teams operate and how people are trained to do it and where you're likely to find them? So yeah, to some extent I can. Through most of history a sniper is kind of one element of a combined arms unit. And the sniper is the guy who has a

particularly precise rifle and is able to take shots that the rest of the guys with standard infantry arms can't take. However, the sniper typically isn't able to keep up a volume of fire equivalent to a standard infantryman. So you see this in a number of armies. The Russians in particular, the sniper is in some ways treated like a mortar team or a machine gun team. You'll put him in a specific place on the offense or on the defense where he can make the most of this more precise rifle. And he can make hits out to several hundred yards on small targets. And like I said, historically, that's usually what a sniper is. They're going to take shots of opportunity. They may be

multiple snipers out there, but they usually operate individually. And that's different than what we see today. Normally today, when we think of a sniper, we're thinking of a special ops team, and it's usually two guys, a sniper and a spotter. And they're not so much part of a combined arms unit, generally speaking, as they are a reconnaissance arm. There are a couple of guys, you can picture sneaking into a specific location overlooking maybe an enemy headquarters or a crossroads or something. And they're going to take a lot of notes and capture a lot of intelligence, and then at the, you know, appointed moment they will fire one round and hit some specific high-priority target and then sneak their way back back to the friendly lines. And I think that's much more of a modern take on the sniper.

Because generally, the infantrymen we have today, especially today, most of them have optical sites on their weapons. Today's standard infantry rifle is as accurate and has as much range to it, really as the sniper rifle of World War II. So you've kind of taken that capability from, you know, a couple decades ago, and you've given it to everybody. And you've been able to give them that precision fire without losing the potential volume of fire, because they all have self-loading, very reliable rifles. So instead, today, the sniper is much more of an intelligence arm than a combat arm in many ways. And you also, of course, have drones filling some of the,

role that a sniper used to play as well. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people who will argue that you need actual human eyes on the location or the target rather than just drone footage. And having a sniper in position gives you opportunities for action and analysis that you may not be able to get just from a drone. I think in some people's eyes, drones may before too much longer make snipers irrelevant. I don't believe that's the case, but I think it's an in opinion you'll find out there. Bless question, Ian. Why do you think that there is a romantic view of the sniper in American pop culture?

You know, it's an interesting question because historically, the sniper is not someone that that's viewed romantically. The sniper is usually the criminal and the despised element of a horrible war that nobody wants to emulate. I think today that view comes largely from the American view of the highly skilled individual self-sustaining operative. I think people like to compare themselves to someone who can do something like sneak out into enemy held territory and strike a critical blow and come back all without being spotted or without consequence. They like that. The idea of individual power that that conveys,

rather than the old view of someone who's just shooting unsuspecting people in the back. those are two really really divergent ways of looking at it but on the other hand they both sound really fair kind of yeah yeah sniping often

historically has not been something that one is proud of and announces to other people and of course you have the issue of whether you think it's good or bad the enemy is usually going to take a pretty dim view of you as a sniper and you may be in for not pleasant treatment should you get captured. Probably no better example of that than the Russians and the Germans during World War II. You were unlikely to make it into a POW camp if you were a German or Russian

sniper who got captured by the Germans or Russians on the Eastern Front in World War II. You were probably going to get shot, ban edded, or hanged right wherever you got caught. Gotcha. In fact, actually, if you read some of the original, the manuscripts from guys who were there and did that, they did. They did. that sniper rifle if capture looked imminent. You know, you get rid of that thing. Get it the hell away from you. And don't let anyone know that you're a sniper because people don't like snipers. That is such a long way from Bradley Cooper and the Oscars.

Well, but it's interesting because I think if you look at people's reactions to that film, kind of depending on, in my experience, depending on their their beliefs about the war, they fall on two different sides of it. right and it kind of mirrors those those different views that he was talking about yeah very much so if if you're a member of the enemy in that in that situation and you're looking at at what chris kyle is doing you're probably not going to really be all that happy with him not going to be a popular guy and certainly there are going to be a lot of accusations that this sort of behavior is unfair, to put it one way. So, yeah, it all comes down to your perspective on it.

All right. Well, hey, Ian, Ian McCollum, Forgottenweapons.com. Thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you. It was a pleasure. If you enjoyed this episode of War College, why not let us know? We post every episode to Facebook, and we also tweet everything from at war underscore college. Plus, if you can give us a positive rating on iTunes, that means more people will be able to find us. Next time on War College. His closest aides, his most trusted fellow fighters, and they sort of said, listen, you know,

you didn't consult us, you went over our heads, and he decided that this constituted a challenge to his authority. and they've never been seen since.