Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Disproportionate Influence of Precise Riflemen in Battle

Timothy Murhpy, sitting in a tree, shot the British General Simon Fraser at 300 yards during the battle of Saratoga. Then he shot General Burgoyne's Aide-de-Camp for good measure. Some folks say this was integral to demoralizing the Brits and giving the Americans one of the most important victories of the war.

http://www.americanrevolution.org/murphy.html

Hiram Berdan and his sharpshooters were credited with slowing Longstreet enough so that the Yankees were able to maintain possession of Little Round Top.

Berdan's report concerning sharpshooters at Gettysburg:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/gettyber.htm

October 8, 1918 Alvin York killed 25 German soldiers, took out 3 machine guns and captured 125 German soldiers. He said he surrounded them.

One account indicates he learned his battlefield tactics hunting turkeys back in Tennessee. Shoot the one at the back of the line first so the rest don't run away so fast.

Carols Hathcock and John Burke pinned down and subsequently killed, (with artillery assistance) an entire company of NVA regulars in the famous Elephant Valley incident in Vietnam. Most amazing.

If I have my facts correct, Burke used an M14 and Hathcock a bolt action. Anybody know the facts on Hathcock's rifle at that incident?

Found it:

"Hathcock's rifle was a Winchester model 70 equipped with a long Unertl 833 power target scope. Nearly two years earlier he had won the one thousand yard Wimbledon Match with a model 70 Winchester.

Lance Corporal John Burke, Carlos's observer, was similarly clothed and equipped except that his weapon was an M-14 rifle, and the corporal had to carry the team's radio. The Sniper team was unaccompanied."

Modern-day death from afar:

Longest sniper kill in Iraq

At the battle of North Point/ Baltimore, British General Robert Ross was killed by two young marksmen:

"In point of fact, which Smithsonian and the History Channel should surely have reported, Gen. Ross was killed by two young Baltimore boys, Daniel Wells and Henry McComas.

They were themselves killed in action after they got in close enough to draw perfect beads on the mounted Gen. Ross.

On Pratt Street in downtown Baltimore, there is a monument over the gravesite of these two boys. "

From this link:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40445

WmacD:

Interesting article. Texans with mini computers-gps, remingtons and Marine sniper school... scary combination.

If I were a Texan, I would say, "No big deal." As an ex-grunt, I would say it gives new meaning to the phrase, "Smoke 'em if you got 'em."

Dixie,

The subject of this thread is so true; they are many such examples. For instance, the Battle of Adobe Walls, and the effect the Tennesse Rifleman under Stonewall Jackson had on the Brits during the War of 1812.

I think it was the Battle of New Orleans, but I might have the name wrong. Anyway, the Britich musket wasn't reliable much past 100 yds, and when a rifleman shot an officer of his horse at 300 yds, making a headshot no less, the Brits became terrified.

Blaine

The longest shot ever recorded in South Viet Nam was in 1967. The weapon was the Remington Model 700 w/Redfield 3x9 scope. The distance was 1900 meters, distance and KIA was confirmed by a Marine 1st Lieutenant 1/5. The shooter was L/Cpl. Martin E. Berry, 5th Marine Scout Sniper Platoon

Canadians aren't bad shots either. This is blurb about Canadians in Afghanistan.

Somewhere in the middle of the first week of Anaconda, Alex made his longest shot. It was an elevated target at 2,310 meters. Alex was shooting from approximately 8,500 feet at an enemy forward observer at 9,000 feet (verified by his spotter via the Leica Vector laser range-finder) with his bolt-action McMillan .50 cal (LRSW), firing AMAX Match ammunition and mounting a 16x Leupold scope. His first two shots missed. �The first shot was high and left, the second shot was left, and the third shot was a hit.�

Blaine;

I looked it up, had never researched it before. At the 2nd Battle of Adobe Walls 28 men and 1 woman held off 700 Indians. The incident included one buffalo hunter shooting an Indian off his horse at just shy of a mile. Most amazing!

Here is one of my favorite quotes reported to be made by a Union Gen. during the Civil War.

Gen. John Sedgewick:
Union commander in the American Civil War, shot at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in 1864 while looking over a parapet at the enemy lines
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."

Actually the South won... cuz if you kept score we killed more of them than they did of us... LOL

William Tell may be fictional but he is the representative "Free-man" who refuses to bow to tyrants and uses his marksmanship to dethrone a tyrant and defend the rights of individuals. The Swiss are a remarkable folk with a national hero like William Tell they have done well for themselves in maintaining their freedom. It used to be, (and maybe still is) that every able bodied man has a state of the art battle rifle in his own home and is subject to call up until age 60 or so.

More information on William Tell:

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=2312&sid=5045647

According to this account B.M. Powell shot Sedgewick at over 1/2 mile with a British Whitworth rifle.

http://www.sedgwick.org/na/families/robert1613/B/2/9/2/powell-benjaminm1841.html

No question that good rifles in capable infantrymen's hands could swing battles in the days of fixed position warfare. And trained snipers can also influence outcomes in modern warfare which puts a premium on firepower rather than single shot accuracy.

But hyperbole is surely at work in some of these claims.

An aimed shot at a half mle -- 880 yards! -- with a round ball, black powder, load and open sights! How was the distance measured? At max elevation and charge, would a round ball's balistics and velocity even permit it to go that far, much less hit anything aimed at?

1B

Well, I found this:

Sir Joseph Whitworth of England created a rifle with a twisted hexagonal bore and then shaped bullets to match this bore. (1) He patented his hexagonal bore in 1854. (2) A Confederate weapon in the Civil War, when outfitted with a telescopic sight this firearm had an effective range of 1,500 yards. The twisted hexagonal bore imparted a steadiness of flight to its .45 caliber bullet, and made this rifle the favorite of Confederate sharpshooters.

So 880 yards is within the effective range of 1500 yards. It was not a round ball but a rifled bore and and a rotating projectile. It might not have been a Sharps buffalo rifle but it's not totally out of the question for an 880 yard aimed shot to be made with open sights and that rifle. One of my coworkers has a rifled .45 caliber muzzleloader that hits gongs pretty regularly at those ranges in the right hands.

They made some good weapons even back then. They had some really skilled marksmen, even back then.

An anecdote, I think from WWI, says; At a party in Switzerland, a German general said to a Swiss diplomat, "I can march an army ten times the size of yours into your country, and what could you do to stop me?" The diplomat answered, "Each of my men would go out, shoot ten times, and return home." The rest is history. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

1B-
Check out Seyfried's article on the Whitworth rifle in the January 2003 issue of Rifle magazine. In trials for the British government, Whitworth's rifle shot a 20-shot 7-inch group at 500 yards, and a 20-inch group at 1000 yards. It shot a hexagonal bullet from a hex bore.
--Bob

Blaine... its probably a bit of exaggeration to say the Brits were "terrified" of long range riflery, it after all requiring steady nerves to stand and exchange fire with muskets at fifty yards. Then too the Brits had their own snipers, including Major Patrick Ferguson, an expert marksman and inventor of the Ferguson breechloading rifle, who likely passed up a chance to take out George Washington himself. The prevailing British attitude towards sniping officers being summed up nicely in the following paragraph...


As to the qualities of the musket of course, a muzzleloading rifle will invariably become hopelessly fouled when used in sustained fire, making loading impossible. A smoothbore on the other hand will remain loadable for may more shots.

This situation was not rectified until the appearance of the minie ball, it being an undersized bullet that expanded to fit the rifling, hence the appearance of "rifled muskets" in the 1850's.

The recent edition of "Muzzleloader" magazine has a discussion of colonial-era riflery. Turns out that a great many period "rifles" were actually "smooth rifles", essentially longrifles in apearance with smooth bores. Modern experience shows that with tight loads and a clean bore such rifles delivered "minute of deer" out to 75 yards or so as well as being cheaper, easier to clean AND usable with shot on small game. No wonder that these smoothies apparently outnumbered actual rifles in Pennsylvania at least. The author points out that some American riflemen, perhaps carrying smooth rifles, were actually discouraged from attempting long shots becuase their poor results were eroding the Colonials carefully guarded reputation for accuracy.

Guys like Tim Murphy did exist, but so did Patrick Ferguson and likely a whole bunch of wannabees (like me, f'rinstance <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />).

Shorty... the way I heard it is...
Same message, different war, and good both times.

Dixie... It likely isn't just snipers where marksmanship makes a difference (ask the Marines <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />) , I have been reading up on the exploits of Wisconsin's black hatted "Iron Brigades" in the War Between the States when pitted against lee and Jackson's finest. They didn't always win but stood and took enormous losses, more relevant to this thread they invariably inflicted similarly heavy losses on the equally stubborn Rebs.

I can't help but think that superior marksmanship with rifled muskets on both sides accounted for the long casualty rolls.

Birdwatcher