Before the development of
rifling, firearms were
smoothbore and inaccurate over long distance. Barrel rifling was invented at the end of the fifteenth century, but was only employed in large cannons. Over time, rifling, along with other gunnery advances, has increased the performance of modern firearms.
1701–1800 Hunting terminology was quickly adapted to warfare by British soldiers. In a 1772 letter, a soldier described enemies firing very accurately: At the
Battles of Saratoga,
Morgan's Riflemen positioned themselves in trees and used early model rifles to target senior British officers. Most notably,
Timothy Murphy shot and killed General
Simon Fraser of Balnain on 7 October 1777 at a distance of about 400 yards. In early 1800, Colonel
Coote Manningham and Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon.
William Stewart of the British Army proposed using what they had learned while leading light infantry to establish a special unit of marksmen. Subsequently raised as the "
Experimental Corps of Riflemen", they were armed with the formidable
Baker rifle rather than the inaccurate smoothbore muskets used by most troops at that time. Through the combination of a leather wad and tight grooves on the inside of the barrel (rifling), this weapon was far more accurate, though slower to load. On 25 August 1800, three companies, under the command of Stewart, spearheaded an amphibious landing at
Ferrol, Spain.
1801–1900 The term, "sharp shooter" was in use in British newspapers as early as 1801. In the
Edinburgh Advertiser, 23 June 1801, can be found the following quote in a piece about the North British Militia; "This Regiment has several Field Pieces, and two companies of Sharp Shooters, which are very necessary in the modern Stile of War". The term appears even earlier, around 1781, in Continental Europe, translated from the German Scharfschütze.
Scouts in the
Ashanti army were made up of professional hunters who used their skill as
marksmen to snipe at advancing enemy forces in response to detection by the enemy. They executed this often from a perch high in trees. The Whitworth rifle was arguably the first long-range sniper rifle in the world. A
muzzleloader designed by Sir
Joseph Whitworth, a prominent British engineer, it used
polygonal rifling instead, which meant that the projectile did not have to bite into grooves as was done with conventional rifling. The Whitworth rifle was far more accurate than the
Pattern 1853 Enfield, which had shown some weaknesses during the recent
Crimean War. At trials in 1857 which tested the accuracy and range of both weapons, Whitworth's design outperformed the Enfield at a rate of about three to one. The Whitworth rifle was capable of hitting the target at a range of 2,000 yards, whereas the Enfield could only manage it at 1,400 yards. During the Crimean War, the first optical sights were designed to fit onto rifles. Much of this pioneering work was the brainchild of Colonel D. Davidson, using optical sights produced by
Chance Brothers of
Birmingham. This allowed a marksman to observe and target objects more accurately at a greater distance than ever before. The telescopic sight, or scope, was originally fixed and could not be adjusted, which therefore limited its range. Despite its success at the trials, the rifle was not adopted by the British Army. However, the
Whitworth Rifle Company was able to sell the weapon to the
French army, and also to the
Confederacy during the American Civil War, where both the Union and Confederate armies employed sharpshooters. The most notable incident was during the
Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, where on 9 May 1864, Union General
John Sedgwick was killed by a Confederate Whitworth sharpshooter at a range of about after saying the enemy "couldn't hit an elephant at this distance".
Second Boer War During the
Boer War the latest
breech-loading rifled guns with
magazines and
smokeless powder were used by both sides. The British were equipped with the
Lee–Metford rifle, while the Boers had received the latest
Mauser rifles from Germany. In the open terrain of South Africa the marksmen were a crucial component to the outcome of the battle. The first British sniper unit began life as the
Lovat Scouts, a Scottish Highland regiment formed in 1899, that earned high praise during the
Second Boer War (1899–1902). Just like their Boer scout opponents, these scouts were well practised in the arts of marksmanship,
field craft, map reading, observation, and military tactics. They were skilled
woodsmen and practitioners of discretion: "He who shoots and runs away, lives to shoot another day." They were also the first known military unit to wear a
ghillie suit.
Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard said of them that "keener men never lived", and that "Burnham was the greatest scout of our time." Burnham distinguished himself in wars in South Africa, Rhodesia, and in Arizona fighting the Apaches, and his definitive work,
Scouting on Two Continents, provides a dramatic and enlightening picture of what a sniper was at the time and how he operated. Often a steel plate was used with a "key hole", which had a rotating piece to cover the loophole when not in use. Starting with a first class of only six, in time he was able to lecture to large numbers of soldiers from different Allied nations, proudly proclaiming in a letter that his school was turning out snipers at three times the rate of any such other school in the world. He also devised a metal-armoured double loophole that would protect the sniper observer from enemy fire. The front loophole was fixed, but the rear was housed in a metal shutter sliding in grooves. Only when the two loopholes were lined up—a one-to-twenty chance—could an enemy shoot between them. Another innovation was the use of a dummy head to find the location of an enemy sniper. The
papier-mâché figures were painted to resemble soldiers to draw sniper fire. Some were equipped with rubber surgical tubing so the dummy could "smoke" a cigarette and thus appear realistic. Holes punched in the dummy by enemy sniper bullets then could be used for triangulation purposes to determine the position of the enemy sniper, who could then be attacked with artillery fire. He developed many of the modern techniques in sniping, including the use of spotting scopes and working in pairs, and using
Kim's Game to train observational skills. In 1920, he wrote his account of his war time activities in his book
Sniping in France, to which reference is still made by modern authors regarding the subject. The main sniper rifles used during the First World War were the German Mauser
Gewehr 98; the British
Pattern 1914 Enfield and
Lee–Enfield SMLE Mk III, the Canadian
Ross rifle, the American
M1903 Springfield, the Italian M1891
Carcano, and the Russian M1891
Mosin–Nagant. The
Ottoman Empire initiated very effective sniper tactics against the British and ANZAC troops. The Allied forces on the
Gallipoli Campaign came to believe that the Ottoman forces employed women snipers as well.
World War II on a 1943 stamp During the
interbellum, most nations dropped their specialized sniper units, notably the Germans. Effectiveness and dangers of snipers once again came to the fore during the
Spanish Civil War. The only nation that had specially trained sniper units during the 1930s was the
Soviet Union. Soviet snipers were trained in their skills as marksmen, in using the terrain to hide themselves from the enemy and the ability to work alongside regular forces. This made the Soviet sniper training focus more on "normal" combat situations than those of other nations. Snipers reappeared as important factors on the battlefield from the
first campaign of World War II. During Germany's
1940 campaigns, lone, well-hidden French and British snipers were able to halt the German advance for a considerable amount of time. For example, during the pursuit to
Dunkirk, British snipers were able to significantly delay the German infantry's advance. This prompted the British once again to increase training of specialized sniper units. Apart from marksmanship, British snipers were trained to blend in with the environment, often by using special camouflage clothing for concealment. However, because the British Army offered sniper training exclusively to officers and
non-commissioned officers, the resulting small number of trained snipers in combat units considerably reduced their overall effectiveness. most with the Finnish version of the
iron-sighted bolt-action Mosin–Nagant. The most successful German sniper was
Matthäus Hetzenauer with 345 confirmed kills. In Germany, kills are only confirmed in the presence of an officer, so Hetzenauer's estimated kills are many times higher. His longest confirmed kill was reported at . Hetzenauer received the
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 17 April 1945. ,
Soviet Union (1942) One of the best known battles involving snipers, and the battle that made the Germans reinstate their specialized sniper training, was the
Battle of Stalingrad. Their defensive position inside a city filled with rubble meant that Soviet snipers were able to inflict significant casualties on the Wehrmacht troops. Because of the nature of fighting in city rubble, snipers were very hard to spot and seriously dented the
morale of the German attackers. The best known of these snipers was probably
Vasily Zaytsev, featured in the novel
War of the Rats and the subsequent film
Enemy at the Gates. German
Scharfschützen were prepared before the war, equipped with
Karabiner 98 and later
Gewehr 43 rifles, but there were often not enough of these weapons available, and as such some were armed with captured scoped Mosin–Nagant 1891/30, SVT, Czech Mauser rifles or scoped Gewehr 98 from WW1. The Wehrmacht re-established its sniper training in 1942, drastically increasing the number of snipers per unit with the creation of an additional 31 sniper training companies by 1944. German snipers were at the time the only snipers in the world issued with purpose-manufactured sniping ammunition, known as the 'effect-firing' sS round. The 'effect-firing' sS round featured an extra carefully measured propellant charge and seated a heavy 12.8 gram (198 gr) full-metal-jacketed boat-tail projectile of match-grade build quality, lacking usual features such as a seating ring to improve the already high ballistic coefficient of .584 (G1) further. For aiming optics German snipers used the
Zeiss Zielvier 4x (ZF39)
telescopic sight which had
bullet drop compensation in 50 m increments for ranges from 100 m up to 800 m or in some variations from 100 m up to 1000 m or 1200 m. There were ZF42, Zielfernrohr 43 (ZF 4), Zeiss Zielsechs 6x, Zeiss Zielacht 8x and other telescopic sights by various manufacturers like the Ajack 4x, Hensoldt Dialytan 4x and Kahles Heliavier 4x with similar features employed on German sniper rifles. Several different
mountings produced by various manufacturers were used for mounting aiming optics to the rifles. In February 1945 the
Zielgerät 1229 active infrared aiming device was issued for night sniping with the
StG 44 assault rifle. A total of 428,335 individuals received Red Army sniper training, including Soviet and non-Soviet partisans, with 9,534 receiving the sniping 'higher qualification'. During World War ІІ, over 100,000 women went through sniper training, of which more than two thousand later served in the army. Some used the
PTRD anti-tank rifle with an adapted scope as an early example of an anti-materiel rifle. , Holland, 14 February 1945 In the United States Armed Forces, sniper training was only very elementary and was mainly concerned with being able to hit targets over long distances. Snipers were required to be able to hit a body over 400 meters away, and a head over 200 meters away. There was almost no instruction in blending into the environment. Sniper training varied from place to place, resulting in wide variation in the qualities of snipers. The main reason the US did not extend sniper training beyond long-range shooting was the limited deployment of US soldiers until the
Normandy Invasion. During the campaigns in
North Africa and
Italy, most fighting occurred in
arid and mountainous regions where the potential for concealment was limited, in contrast to Western and Central Europe. The U.S. Army's lack of familiarity with sniping tactics proved disastrous in Normandy and the campaign in Western Europe where they encountered well trained German snipers. The intentional shooting of children by Israeli snipers has a long history, for instance as documented in 2019 by an independent international commission of inquiry reporting to the
United Nations Human Rights Council. In the
West Bank, Israeli security forces have shot children at distances ranging from 300 metres to 20m. ==Training==