Snipers - New Facebook Post
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by
ral104
moderator, scientist
https://www.facebook.com/OperationWarDiary/posts/668069499943312:0
Posted
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by
brownfox
Thanks for another interesting post. I did tag a number of pages for the 1st Bn Irish Guards when they had been given a rifle with telescopic sights and were using it to give the German snipers some of their own medicine. See http://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/subjects/AWD00012y3 and following pages.
[Have you noticed that the British have sharpshooters whilst the Germans doing the same job are snipers? One of those irregular nouns beloved of Yes Minister!]
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by
ral104
moderator, scientist
Interesting - do you know what year that page comes from?
The officer who set up the first sniping school had previously distributed as many scoped rifles as he could, from his own collections and the collections of friends, as well as new ones he bought with his own money.
I'm not quite sure when we started referring to our own snipers as snipers, rather than sharpshooters.
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by
brownfox
1915 (January). There seem to be some other cases if you do a search for Telescopic. Thanks for your interest.
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by
ral104
moderator, scientist
Fascinating, isn't it? That's about one month before Major Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard arrived in France - he was the officer who really formalised sniper training and did an awful lot to get scoped rifles distributed to the troops even before that.
This does show, though, that there must have already been localised efforts to establish unit snipers, even if on an ad-hoc basis.
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