"snipers" Topic

Although often not talked about, the killing of prisoners, particularly while the heat of battle is still on the captors, is not uncommon.

You don't seem to hear much about this in the ACW apart from some tragic instances with black soldiers.

I was particularly wondering about the fate of captured snipers, a hated sect who often are killed in retaliation.

For instance, where captured Berdan sharpshooters killed?

I don't think Berdan's men were thought of that way. I would guess they were just viewed by the Confederates as really good skirmishers. I hate to overuse the term "elite."

I've read quite a few accounts of soldiers trying to surrender and getting killed. I just read in Marcus Woodcock's autobiography in the 9th KY where a rebel shot at a Federal in the works on Missionary Ridge, then tried to surrender. After a flippant remark the Federal shot him. Things like that were probably pretty common.

Remember Chamberlain on Round Top saying a rebel officer handed him his sword and tried to shoot him at the same time? Chamberlain could have just as easily shot him.

"where captured Berdan sharpshooters killed?"

No… nope. As Cleburne1863 said correctly they were skirmishers first and foremost, not snipers.

True snipers (as we know today – specialized teams) were not as common and the ordinary soldiers would rejoice when snipers were killed by return fire. There are many accounts of this. The common soldiers wrote gleefully about this but not many of them capturing them and killing them. They viewed sniper as sadistic soldiers and deserved anything they got.

During the battle of Gettysburg a Reb sniper were annoying the Union artillery men on top of Cemetery Hill. He was picking off gunners and basically making life for them and the infantrymen nearby miserable. One battery took the bull by the horns and bated the sniper to shoot at them so they could find out where exactly he was. After spotting the sniper's nest (in town situated in a house) they loaded their piece and 3 artillerymen made minor corrections to the gun and pulled the lanyard. The solid shot flew into the suspected window where the sniper was thought to be. From that point to the end of the battle they were not bothered again. After the battle a Sgt. of the battery went into town to find out what happened to their 'friend'. He went upstairs in the second floor room of the house in question. He found a headless Reb sniper and the body had his head taken clean off by their solid shot. Needless to say the artillerymen were overjoyed.

I read one account for during the Wilderness, a group of Federal troops were being picked off by a Reb sniper. A small detachment from the 2 USSS went hunting for him. A little while later they came back with a Wentworth Enfield and a large roll of green backs. They said they had shot the sniper took his rifle and found the money on his body (it appears he had been looting some of his victims). They never said if he tried to surrender.

They viewed sniper as sadistic soldiers and deserved anything they got.

This is the somewhat unfair view of snipers throughout history.

"This is the somewhat unfair view of snipers throughout history"

I'm just repeating what the soldiers themselves said and it's in print. They hated snipers and that's the deal. One soldier said that snipers would kill a soldier while attending the call of nature and that REALLY ticked him off.

@avidgamer

Yes, I think snipers have been loathed even by their own side.

My view is that they are professionals, doing their job.

Thanks for your reply.

I checked this half-memory out: it is claimed at least 6 Rebel generals were killed by snipers in the ACW.

That's pretty impressive.

Useful tools but cold hearted…..they have to be.

My understanding from recently reading Hess's The Rifle Musket, is that the term "sniper" didn't enter the English lexicon until WWI. ACW soldiers would have refered to them as 'sharpshooters.'

Artillery shots at snipers ? Those look pretty accurate. Probably make a sniper think twice about setting up shop in the 2nd floor window of a whitewashed building surrounded by green.

PS Not a good location ! I can see some knucklehead private saying "Hey, sarge you can shoot at 'em easy from up here".

@Glover

I think so.
The term 'sniper' originally refers to shooters trying to hit the illusive snipe (bird).

It appears to have been taken to mean a good shot in the British Indian army
& went from their to the GBP (Great British Public) in WW1 when letters home from the troops complained of the large numbers of hidden German marksmen-snipers- shooting at them.

Of course the media now calls any psycho with a rifle a sniper.

@ BD

Hiding in a tree is another classic but bad sniping position. You can see the enemy but after you shoot, they can see you (particularly in black powder days)

"My view is that they are professionals, doing their job."

The 'snipers' in the CW were not "professionals, doing their job", hardly professionals ordered to kill soldiers cooking their food or attending the call of nature. It serves no military purpose. They were just sadistic. Today is another story but NOT in the CW.

If you read accounts of the soldiers themselves they hated them and even the ones on their own side. It was not an honorable occupation or duty.

Gamer: I disagree. If a crack-shot could take out an artillery crew or an officer, then he should do so. If he can keep the enemy's heads down so his boys can move to a better position, he should do so. If he can kill the other man who is making all efforts to do the same to him, he should do so. If a soldier gets killed while cooking a meal or answering the call of nature, that's an unfortunate reality of war. Perhaps the victim should have chosen a better spot.

There is no difference between then and now other than improved technology. War is dirty, ugly, and bestial. Always has been, always will be.

Glover, I think you missed avidgamer's point. We in the 20th and 21st Centuries may have the view that all is fair, and all soldiers are fair targets no where they are on the battlefield (since all soldiers ultimately contribute to the entire war effort), but the soldiers in the American Civil war most certainly did not.

You cannot "disagree" with avidgamer, its not his opinion to diagree with. Its the oft written opinion of many of the soldiers themselves back then.

Cleburne1863 is 100% correct. There are times when you view historical situations and you must separate your modern feelings and sensibilities and put yourself in their shoes and find out what they felt. You are not judging them, just finding out why or how they felt and that's equally important to understand the time in which they lived. It's easy to sit back in judgement now and declare it okay to be a sniper then but it wasn't back then.

In the Rev War it was not considered 'gentlemanly' or 'sporting' to shoot at officers. During the CW it was okay. Stonewall Jackson once ordered a whole company to shoot at one particular brave Union officer. They drew the line at shooting at Surgeons, hospital stewards, the wounded, women, children etc etc and only depraved individuals would do such a thing and these types deserved any and all horrible deaths that could be inflicted upon them.

Don

Wrong war but, my Dad told me when he was in Normandy anybody who shot at you that you could not see was considered a sniper. I guess if you are receiving fire you don't really care who is shooting.

As Avid Gamer said
I also read recently about Gettysburg and cthe emetary hill story……..long range snipers indeed.

The story goes at Antietam that rebel riflemen in haymounds were picking off gunners at several hundred yards.

Generals always get hit by smipers after dark. Bullets don't have brains. Rebs did not have infrared. Both sides had men who were very good shots.

The reason snipers are ordered to shoot at men who seem to be doing tasks that seem to be non worthy of being killed. is that it strikes fear into grunts who believe it is safe to do what they are doing. If you can mentally do them in you are winning half the battle.

Wilsh8517,

Maybe today they are ordered to do that but NOT during the CW. It was a different time. The 'snipers' were just being cruel and not worthy of any sort of praise, advancing the war effort. ‘Snipers' were just sadistic killers that enjoyed killing people at random, plain and simple. As I've said, their own side were gleeful when they saw their own snipers dead. Don't mix periods with today.

Of course, just to play devil's advocate, it is widely acknowledged that men on both sides went through a process of "hardening" as the war went on. This changed many of their previously held notions of what war ought to be. So, the soldiers of 1861 who cringed at the suggestion of shooting individual targets had no problem with it by 1865. I can't think of a specific sharpshooter example at the moment, but certainly similar examples might be the use of "land torpedos" and arming freed slaves. Just a thought.

Billy Yank

Strange though there are hundreds and hundreds of memoirs which were published after the war. I don't think I've ever seen a book or heard of any written by a 'sniper'. If someone knows of one I'd love to find it. The old Vets were very proud of their experiences so how come no 'snipers' wrote proudly in memoirs of their work? Probably they felt some shame (or might not). Sure we have memoirs written by Berdan's men etc. but they weren't true 'snipers', more like glorified skirmishers/line regiments.

It is true the nature of the war changed towards the end. It got pretty ugly at times. 'snipers' did shoot soldiers as they did early on but rarely outside the boundary of the fighting.

All I'm saying it was not a respectable job to do so don't confuse it with today's snipers.

It's a fair point but tactics change in war and people have been killing each other since the dawn of time so I don't think the time period effects it.

But the period does change things. Victorian values were a radical departure from the earlier American periods. The horrors of WW I was another changing point.

A sniper of the 20th or 21st century is a completely different animal from anything known in the 19th Century. Frankly, to group them together is an insult and disservice to the incredibly difficult training and hard work done every day by snipers. The 19th century equivalent was just a good shot amateur murderer.

I have found a civil war sniper for which one can compare the differences with the modern professional, Jack Hinson. Old man Hinson was a civilian Kentucky farmer with dubious loyalty to either side, though probably more pro-union at first. He and his boys acted as spies during the Fort Donelson campaign. Anyway, his sons are eventually picked up by the Federals for spying. The Yanks executed them, decapitate them, and mounted their heads on fence posts. Old Jack goes insane with rage and buys a heavy target version of a Kentucky rifle. He then spends the next few years murdering any Yankee he can get within his sights. Seems a favorite tactic was to sit along the river and randomly kill people on passing steam boats.

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No that guy is just a mad that revenge killing not sniping at all. I'm not insulting anyone being a sniper myself I am just trying to get the point across of the tactics.

My point is there is no documented tactics from the period. In a previous thread I asked if anyone could come up with a period sniper tactics manual. Nobody could as it just didn't exist and was not taught. This sniper ideal is just modern ideas seeping thru and clouding the our view of the past.

Interesting that Old Jack's story did inspire the modern myth a bit. I couldn't help but think of Josey Wales and the Missouri boat ride.

California Joe, a Berdan sharpshooter, seems to have acted like a modern sniper.

The news article was more propaganda hype than reality (based more on the novelty of his advanced age, 52, and no doubt hard frontier appearance). Shortly after the articles he was removed from the army for impaired vision and senility and went back west.

However, I'm not saying he wasn't a good shot in his day. Is being a good shot the only qualification for being a sniper? Or being a frontiersman? Were Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson snipers? I wish we had a modern sniper on the board who could tell us.

At some level maybe this is the same debate you have in WWII between the Russian and German snipers. The professional versus some natural raw talent forged by a hard life. I brought up Hinson as a negative example, but he did kill between 35 and 100 men. His reign of terror actually did have a slight effect on the war as more than a regiment of men had to be detailed with dealing with him.

There were no regulations for snipers. However the ANY had a vattalion of sharpshooters who acted quite independently and were no respected by the "boys" on the other side.

However, I'm not saying he wasn't a good shot in his day. Is being a good shot the only qualification for being a sniper? Or being a frontiersman? Were Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson snipers? I wish we had a modern sniper on the board who could tell us.

Not a sniper myself, just a semi-dedicated rifleman.

The difference between the training a designated marksman (typically the best shot in the unit) gets and the training a sniper gets is the fieldcraft portion of the sniper school. The shooting part of the two courses is very similar (and I believe it used to be identical).

I believe an important part of a sniper's role is intelligence gathering.

I would be interested to know if the Berdan sharpshooters were used in this role.