A collection of bedtime stories - or sharpshooter & sniper tales

“It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o’clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. … Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt—it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness … The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling … I heard a S[oldier] behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck.

“The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a S[oldier] or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting.”

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•“Concentrate on the reticle not on the target.”

•“The heavier your rifle barrel the more solid you can hold (especially in a cross wind). A heavy rifle barrel is more tiring to carry, but when you are tired you will shoot a heavy gun better than a light gun because you barrel will not wave in the breeze.”

• “When forward of your own troops, never be tempted to make use of a captured enemy sniper rifle. Each make of weapon has its own distinctive sound bite, and friendly troops behind you hearing an enemy rifle out front are likely to bring heavy fi re onto your position.”

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"As he made to leave, a feeling of intense unease gripped me and I hooked a hand on his shoulder to restrain him. ‘Watch out, you were a sitting duck when you came over. This still air is perfect for a sniper—no need to allow for wind when he aims.’

“‘You worry too much,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders before scrambling out of the trench.

“He took a few paces back the way he had come and then turned and stood for a moment lost in some private thought, gazing across the frozen fields before slinging his rifle over his shoulder. There was a metallic clink. His head swayed under the weight of his steel helmet then his arms fell limply to his sides. The rifle slid from his shoulder and he slumped to his knees like a burst sack of flour. He groaned something—it might have been his girlfriend’s name—before falling face first in the snow. His helmet rolled away from his head and rocked back and forth a few times before coming to a rest on a patch of iice. Bright blood spread under his face, freezing in seconds into a congealed mass, its redness intensified by the purity of the snow. At the front of the helmet, exactly in the center, was a perfectly round hole."

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The reason we had magazine cutoffs in WWI at the start, don't waste ammo.

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“They started back in their jeep to a command post several miles to the rear. Captain Gale was sitting beside the driver. Sergeant Harrington was in the back seat. The top was down, and the windshield folded flat and covered—for a windshield can create a glare that makes a perfect target for snipers. It’s funny the things a man learns in war. For instance, the soldiers were issued sunglasses before coming ashore, but they had to abandon them because the glasses caught the sun and made nice targets.

“The three drove on along the highway, among vineyards, under a warm sun. Everything was quiet. This phase of the war seemed about over.

“Suddenly the driver, for no apparent reason, fell over his steering wheel, and the jeep swerved. Blood splashed down over his uniform. He never uttered a sound. Unheard and unseen, a sniper’s bullet had taken him just over the right eye. He died instantly.

“Harrington reached over the body and grabbed the wheel. Captain Gale got his foot around the dead driver’s leg and shoved the throttle to the floor. Two more shots zipped past but missed. The jeep roared on down the road and out of danger, with one man steering and another man at the throttle.”

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"You have to be extremely careful becaause numerous Russian snipers with telescopic rifles - or even anti-tank rifles - were lurking everywhere, and many lone soldiers fell victim to them. Only when you knew what areas were overlooked by the enemy could you feel relatively safe in the ruins."

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During the breakout from the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket, Oberstleutnant Gerhard Franz had a rifle with telescopic sights. He was among some retreating survivors when he was approached by Belgian SS Waloon Legion men who reported, "An enemy machine gun is blocking the way out from the forest across a clearing. We can't get through. We've already suffered casualties - killed and wounded." Franz took his rifle and accompanied them forward so that they could point out the machine gun to him. Peering through the scope, he estimated the distance to be 300 meters. He fired three shots, killing the machine gunner and his two assistants. After waiting, he stepped out into the open and after going five paces, the rest of the column followed him southwest. He did manage to break out and ended the war as the commanding general of the 256 Volksgrenadier Division.

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World War II Snipers.


It is the nature of history that most written accounts are made long after the event. When occasionally they are committed to paper immediately afterwards, the narrative has the advantage of being fresh in the mind of the writer, detailed and usually matter-of-fact, for the author has not had the dubious benefit of time to consider the historical perspective or allow his memory to be become clouded by later judgements. This makes autobiographies fascinating but sometimes one-dimensional. None of the participants in World War Two could have begun to conceive how the war would eventually change the world; politically, militarily and geographically. Post-1945 it has taken decades for this to become apparent. Indeed, it can be argued that even now, events are being played out whose seeds were sown in 1939.

The best histories are those that are able to combine a sense of perspective with the immediacy of the experiences of the men and women who were there. However, there is an inherent problem in achieving this, for many veterans (particularly snipers) were subsequently unwilling to discuss their experiences and with time and age, their ability to reliably recall what happened gradually diminishes. As we all know, memory can be selective or simply inaccurate and for an author, finding this middle ground is at best be difficult, at worst near-impossible. By including many never-before published first-hand accounts, Gary Yee has brought the pages of history alive through the words and experiences of the snipers who served during those momentous years. No form of combat is more intimate, yet calculating, than that of deliberately shooting an enemy soldier whose face you can see clearly through a telescope.

Sniping is, of course, all about the men and women behind the trigger, but it is also a very technical subject involving many disciplines, and Gary Yee has covered these in detail. Selection and training were the most vital elements in producing an efficient sniper. The failure rate for sniping courses was very high, but a bad sniper would inevitably soon be a dead sniper, proving a waste of time, money and effort. It was crucially important to ensure that only the most suitable were selected, not only for the sake of the armies they represented, but for themselves. Training, fieldcraft and camouflage are sometimes regarded as secondary skills to shooting, but whilst being able to shoot accurately was indeed a vital part of sniper training, if he or she was unable to get close enough to guarantee a hit without being detected, then it mattered little how accurate the rifle or how talented the sniper was. Many authors have concentrated solely on the weapons, but this is to ignore two of the most important elements of sniping: observation and intelligence gathering. These skills became increasingly vital as the Second World War progressed, snipers frequently being the only soldiers able to see and report on enemy forces. Yet the training that the combatant nations gave to their snipers was astonishingly varied. This did to some extent reflect on the regions where fighting took place. Russian tundra in winter was a different world to the Pacific Islands, which in turn bore little resemblance to Northern Europe. To show how the warring powers found solutions to problems that their training manuals did not even begin to tackle, Gary has taken an in-depth view of each of the major areas of conflict, looking at how sniper training was adapted and improved to enable the snipers to become as efficient as possible. Indeed, how each country modified its training and equipment to suit the tactical demands is a fascinating, and often a surprising story.

To a great extent, the same held true for the rifles used. The Great War of 1914-1918 had initially been an object lesson for the allies in how not to wage a sniping war, in the face of the well-equipped and trained German snipers who took a steady and draining toll from the outset of war. Of necessity the Commonwealth, French and American troops learned quickly, of course, and they dominated the battlefields by 1918. One of the hard-learned lessons that was that the rifles and optical sights issued to the soldiers had to be the best that could possibly be sourced. Giving a sniper a standard issue rifle with a randomly selected scope did not provide him with many advantages over a good shot with a service rifle. Nowhere was this more apparent than the British War Office demanding that the service Enfield rifle was fitted with a scope offset to the left, making it next to useless when fired from a loophole. Such mistakes clearly had to be rectified, but post-war political apathy and reductions in army manpower meant that in 1939 Britain possessed only a few WW1-era sniping rifles and no training program. The U.S was no better, for by the time that it entered the war after Pearl Harbor, it was shockingly apparent that there was nothing available in terms of weapons or equipment for sniping. Of all of the major powers, only the Soviet Union had considered the possibility that a sniping war may once again be fought, based primarily on the heavy losses inflicted on them by Finnish snipers during the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-1940. They alone understood the pressing requirement for the production of dedicated sniping rifles and compatible optical sights.

In practice, the rifles used during the war differed little from those of the First World War, in that they were standard military issue weapons, albeit usually selected for accuracy and converted with the addition of a telescopic sight. Where there was a measurable change, it was in the optics employed, which had improved considerably. Partly through the use of better and larger lens assemblies, giving enhanced magnification, a brighter image and wider field of view, but more crucially with the addition of range and windage drums, finally allowing a sniper to adjust not only for elevation but for lateral drift due to wind.

Naturally, every country adopted these changes in their own way, ironically with the Germans initially lagging behind by retaining the clumsy adjuster-screw method of compensating for windage. But following the invasion of Russia and the unexpectedly heavy Soviet sniper presence by the latter half of the war, German sniping rifles and their scopes had made considerable technical strides, with semi-automatic rifles becoming commonplace. Gary Yee quite rightly devotes a considerable section of the book to examining how these problems were resolved by each of the combatant countries, and how their differing approach to sniping affected their choice of weapons. Of particular interest was the use in the Pacific by U.S Marines of commercial rifles and scopes, which combined superior accuracy with long-range capability. Although this was not a widespread practice, the success of such rifles led eventually to the adoption by American snipers during and after the Vietnam War of commercially sourced, custom-made rifles that were not designed or issued with infantry service in mind. Every other country who employed snipers was to follow suit through the 1980’s, the decade that witnessed the demise of the old infantry-based sniping rifle.

Covering such a complex story in detail is a mammoth task for any author, as is trying to decide what to include and what to omit. In order to achieve this, an extraordinary amount of research has been required, for with a very few exceptions, hardly any snipers have published their memoirs and those have, are mostly Soviet or German. Conspicuously missing from the bookshelves are those by British, American or other allied snipers. To give the reader some idea of the task required to gather all of this information together, I would suggest taking a brief look through the Bibliography and try to visualise how many hours of work have been involved in sifting through books, articles, newspaper accounts and incalculable online sources. Then there are the images, whose sources must be tracked down, captions verified (these are often minimal and frequently incorrect) and selections made of those that not only enhance the text itself but also impart to the reader something that may be difficult to convey in words. And there is an art to image selection, for many authors use the same easily obtainable photos that avid readers will instantly recognise. Finding previously unpublished pictures is not an easy task, as I know well, but they add immeasurably to the informative value of the book.

I think Gary Yee has done an exemplary job in World War II Snipers. It deserves to stand as both an achievement in telling the stories of those most secretive of soldiers, the snipers, whilst at the same time providing a unique historical insight into their tactical employment and effectiveness which is so frequently absent from post-war military histories. No reader buying this book should be disappointed for it deserves a place alongside the very best published work of its type.


Martin Pegler

Limoges, France

July 2022

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This book goes into everything, and I mean everything, about sniping and snipers in World War II. It takes us from the Weapons, to training, to the history, and also has the snipers' personal stories.

This book is one of the most detailed reference books I have ever read. The material it has in it about the guns themselves is worth a book itself. I have used a scoped rifle many times in my life. However, because of this book I have learned so much about scopes that I seem to be a simple tyro in my knowledge regarding them. The information inside the book is almost a training manual for sniping, at least with World War II weapons.

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