Free Inside the Crosshairs by Col. Michael Lee Lanning Page A

look back again. One look had been enough. Within the narrow retaining wall lay a moldering skeleton, to which clung rotting folds of gray uniform! Beside the body lay a rusty rifle and the remains of a light pack. What a ghastly revenge!’ ”
    The captain paused, according to the author, and then continued, “ ‘For the sergeant and the private had crept upon the sniper and made him prisoner. Then they had thrust him back into that horrible retaining wall—ALIVE—after which they returned the slab to its place. But they had made retribution doubly sure. For wrapped around and about that moldering skeleton, fold upon fold, was a veritable maze of rusty barbed wire.’ ”
    Whether or not they had such horrors in mind, it is not surprising that the United States and its allies once again shelved their snipers at the end of the war. Besides expressing resistance to men who cold-bloodedly killed with no warning from hiding, many world leaders thought that World War I was “the war to end all wars” and that neither snipers nor armies themselves would be needed in the future.
    Unfortunately, “the war to end all wars” did not live up to its billing, and by the end of the 1930s combat once again swept across the plains of Europe and expanded around the world. Renewed interest in snipers surfaced in the earliest battles of World War II. During the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist snipers had experienced particular success in engaging the flanks and rear areas of the attacking Nationalist forces. Both Russian and German observers of the Spanish war returned to their countries with recommendations that they include snipers in the pending global conflict.
    Once World War II began in earnest with the German blitzkrieg across Europe, however, the swift Nazi offensives did not require the skills of individual marksmen. The Germans had snipers with their infantry in the war’s initial months, but they found little opportunity to use them.
    The British were as ill prepared to field snipers against the blitzkrieg as they were to stop the attacks. British sniper expert Captain Clifford Shore wrote in 1948, “I have spoken to many men who were in France from September 1939 until the time of Dunkirk [June 1940] and to date have not met anyone who could tell me that he saw any sniper rifles in that campaign.”
    It was not until the German offensive on the Russian front stalled outside Stalingrad in late 1942 that the sniper emerged as a viable weapon in World War II. When the lines stagnated outside the Russian city, German and Soviet snipers began to make it extremely deadly for anyone to leave the protective foxholes, bunkers, and reinforced positions in the city’s buildings. Soviet snipers armed with 7.62-mm bolt-action Model 1891/30 Mosin-Nagant rifles and German marksmen with Gewehr 98ks, slightly modified into a shorter-barreled version of the World War I rifle, engaged enemy infantry as well as each other throughout the long cold winter.
    The snipers so impressed the Soviet commanders at Stalingrad that they began a training school within the city inside a section of the Lazur Chemical Plant. Firing at targets painted on the factory’s wall, Soviet riflemen trained for only two days with scope-equipped Mosins before rejoining the front lines as snipers.
    According to articles written by Soviet officers that appeared in U.S. military journals shortly after the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russian snipers worked in teams of two, one shooter and one observer, and focused on officers, machine gunners, mortar crews, and enemy snipers. Vassili Zaitsev, a former hunter from Elininski in the Ural Mountains, honed his skills at Stalingrad and by the end of the war is said to have achieved 242 confirmed kills of German soldiers. That number included several of the Nazi’s top snipers.
    Although the story of Zaitsev appears valid, the Soviets did not hesitate to greatly enhance tales of the proficiency of their snipers and other