There was only a small training school at Camp Perry, Ohio. The United States had dropped most of its sniper programs between the two wars. Japan had a number of different sniper rifles, including the 6.5 mm Type 97 and the 7.7 mm Type 99. Great Britain still had stocks of its P1914 Mk1 (T) sniper rifle left over from the first conflict. Russia stated that by 1938 six million troops had qualified for the “Voroshiloff rifle badge, and that the soviet munitions factories had built over 53,000 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifles. Japan was in the process of creating its “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” which was announced June 29, 1940. The War to End All Wars (named in error, as was proven a few years later), saw Germany and Great Britain make great strides in snipers and sniper rifles up to the end of the war in 1918.Īs the 1930s closed, it became obvious that the old animosities were leading up to another global conflict – this time much greater that the last one.
During this period snipers were utilized by both sides to pick off any soldier who exposed any part of his body for a period of three seconds, or less. Trenches were dug with what came to be known as “No Man’s Land” between opposing forces. By the end of 1914, armies on both sides had stalled their advance. This was the initial battle on what was to become the Western Front. The first skirmish of the First World War took place Augat a small village named Joncherey in France. The French had the Chassepot 11mm bolt action rifle the Prussians the Dreyse 15.4mm needle gun. Sniper rifles advanced in design through the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the first bolt-action breech loading rifles became available. They fit very tightly in the bore and had much less friction than round bullets fired through standard rifling. The bullets were long for the caliber and they were hexagonal instead of round. The bore of the barrel was hexagonal with a 1 in 20 inch twist. What made the Whitworth stand out and have such excellent accuracy was the design of its rifling – which it didn’t really have. The Confederate States of America used some of them during the American Civil War. Around 13,000 of them were built between 18. It was a single-shot muzzle-loaded 45 caliber percussion-fired rifle with an accurate range out to 2,000 yards. The first true sniper rifle is generally thought to be the British Whitworth rifle invented in 1854 by Sir Joseph Whitworth, under commission from the British War Department. The military sniper came into being back at the turn of the 18th century. One definition of a sniper rifle is “a precision rifle used to insure more accurate placement of bullets at longer ranges than other small arms.” The word “sniper” is derived from the snipe bird which was very hard to shoot as its flight path was highly erratic. The K98k Mauser is above the Springfield M1903A4.