American Rifle - Alexander Rose [101]
Heth’s manual was certainly a leap forward, but the outbreak of war put paid to its widespread adoption (and it didn’t help that Heth joined the Confederacy). During that conflict a new soldier’s first shot often coincided with his first battle, and in any case, the fierce frontal attacks popular among generals ensured that the cultivation of marksmanship was given little emphasis.6
By the war’s end and well into the 1870s, many line officers were even less convinced of marksmanship’s merits, believing that the focus on single-shot accuracy was undermining their men’s fighting efficiency by restricting their ability to rapid-fire. During a firefight, stipulated General John Gibbon of the Seventh Infantry, anything “beyond one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards . . . is pretty much a matter of chance.”7 In the heat of battle his men were naturally more interested in firing off as many rounds as they could, usually at close range, than in scoring hits at one thousand yards.
Gibbon’s words were borne out on June 17, 1876, when General George Crook’s two thousand foot and horse clashed with the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Rosebud River. In the vicious melee that followed his forces hardly had a chance to take a bead on the enemy. The mounted Indians swept in close and very fast; Captain Anson Mills wrote that they “overwhelmed them, charging bodily and rapidly through the soldiers, knocking them from their horses with lances and knives, dismounting and killing them, cutting the arms of several off at the elbows in the midst of the fight and carrying them away.”8 Amid the stormy sea of men and neighing beasts, the soldiers had to fire as fast as they humanly could. Sergeant Louis Zinger of Company C, Third Cavalry, recalled that at the beginning of the fight each soldier carried 150 rounds; by its end, they were down to five rounds apiece.9 Company C’s fifty-eight men alone had fired something like 8,400 shots in fewer than six hours, while in total Crook’s force blew through about 25,000 rounds. For this remarkable expenditure of lead and powder, just thirteen Indians lay dead on the field (though Crazy Horse later pegged casualties at 36 killed and 63 wounded).10
In that kind of desperate environment, Ordnance’s precious hit-rate statistics were worthless; what counted was raw firepower—which inevitably meant shockingly low scores. Eight days after the Rosebud clash, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the doomed troopers of Custer’s Seventh expended 38,030 rounds (plus about 2,954 pistol rounds) to kill roughly sixty Indians and wound a hundred more.11 These figures equate to a minuscule 0.16 kill-rate (excluding the wounded and pistol shots).
Postwar marksmanship training was, if possible, even more lax than it had been in the 1850s. First, owing to budgetary constraints, the army decided to restrict each soldier to ten rounds per month for practice and left it to individual commanders to decide whether to bother training their men.12 Many did not—with predictable results. At the Battle of Slim Buttes, for instance, a colonel remarked of his own skirmishers that “they couldn’t hit a flock of barns . . . much less an Indian skipping about like a flea.”13 “Compared with the white hunter of the plains, the Indian is a wretched shot. He