American Rifle - Alexander Rose [108]
In this respect Upton’s preparedness scheme proved politically useful. Sherman might be able to squeeze extra dollars for the army and the “National Volunteers” out of a penny-pinching Congress that was relieved that the country’s defense needs could apparently be fulfilled on the cheap. Meanwhile, the patent inability of American soldiers to hit anything with their Springfields was becoming, thanks to the target-shooting fad and Church’s cascade of editorials, hugely embarrassing. The Legend of the American Rifleman remained potent, and considering that the army was avidly recruiting German and Irish immigrants, as well as liberated blacks, into the ranks, perhaps teaching them how to shoot accurately—and thereby “Americanizing” them—might not be such a bad thing?
To this end, Sherman ordered a wholesale revamping of the army’s regulations on marksmanship. Colonel Theodore Laidley, who had been an Ordnance officer since the 1840s, was given the task of replacing Henry Heth’s antebellum system of training. In 1879 his Course of Instruction in Rifle-Firing appeared, and following a short, nasty, but rather entertaining legal spat launched by George Wingate of the NRA, the Department of War gave it its imprimatur. Wingate accused Laidley of plagiarizing his own Manual for Target Practice, which the latter disputed by alleging that Wingate’s Manual bore a suspicious resemblance to his own official work, the Ordnance Manual of 1861. The case never came to court, and Laidley in the end salved Wingate’s amour propre by making it more apparent that his basic principles “followed” those laid down by the NRA at Creedmoor.39
Laidley ruled that each garrison should appoint an “instructor of musketry” (strange how the old terminology lived on) to ensure standard training for enlisted men, and he insisted that officers, hitherto absolved from shooting practice, must also take lessons. Soldiers, following Upton’s emphasis on small squads, would train in teams of six; each man would fire in turn rather than simultaneously, as had formerly been the case, so that his mistakes could be corrected.40
Marking the end of strictly regimented eighteenth-century line volleys governed by officers, this innovative reform heralded the rise of individual or squad-level initiative on the battlefield, a method of fighting particularly apposite to the frontier and other guerrilla-type environments. Thus, instead of being drilled solely in the regulation pose of standing upright—a relic of the Musket Age and the Napoleonic Wars—men would be taught to fire while kneeling, prone, and lying on their backs with their Springfields’ muzzles resting on their thighs (a position known as the Texas Grip). These positions had all been developed by American riflemen before and during the Revolution, not only to take advantage of any available cover but to ensure a better, surer shot.
Laidley additionally increased the variety of ranges. Instead of restricting target practice to the usual 100 or 200 yards, he laid down new regulations that the men must be competent at up to 600 and sometimes up to 1,200. Further, in order to ensure that none became too accustomed to a certain range (a technique called “known distance firing”), Laidley told instructors to surprise their pupils with random distances, to test them at no more than two ranges per session, and to allow each man no more than fifteen rounds to achieve his task.41 You have “an army of marksmen,” the chief of Ordnance exultantly informed the secretary of war once the reforms were in place, “and this gratifying result is due largely to Laidley’s Rifle Firing.