American Rifle - Alexander Rose [109]
The army also introduced a practice known as “skirmish firing,” in an attempt to simulate the combat experience. The traditional battered iron plates hanging forlornly on the range and the lead-bespattered bull’s-eyes painted onto walls were exchanged (in the words of Mr. Powhatan Clarke in Harper’s Weekly) for “ingenious targets of the revolving and disappearing type” that were often placed at random distances, at varying heights, in unexpected places, and partially hidden by brush or rocks.43
The need for such “realistic” practice was vividly borne out by one innovative officer at Fort Mackinac. He decided to test his men’s combat efficiency by having a kneeling silhouette pulled back and forth laterally across the range. Out of 120 shots fired at 185 yards, just 23 hit. A little later, at Fort Niagara, a similar test held at 175 yards resulted in 15 hits out of 170 rounds. Two hunters were then asked to undergo the same test. Each fired 20 rounds; the first man hit the moving silhouette 18 times, the second, 10. The test demonstrated that practice with rifles could not fully replace actual experience with them.44
For honing similar skills, the army encouraged its soldiers to go hunting whenever they had a free moment.45 Following guard duty, any trooper was granted “permission to take his horse and rifle and go where ever his fancy may lead him,” reported Turf, Field and Farm magazine. “The majority provide themselves with a liberal stock of ammunition and seek for sport in the chase.” Hunting had the happy dual benefit of allowing soldiers to practice shooting at moving targets at varying ranges, and at the same time encouraged thriftiness. One fall, F Troop of the Sixth Cavalry helpfully saved the army “$300 on bacon alone.”46
To inspire competition among units, Sherman and Laidley instituted shooting matches (the prizes were gold medals and handmade Springfields) and then sent teams up against the NRA’s crack shots at Creedmoor. Initially, they went home with their tails between their legs, but by the early 1880s the military’s overall marksmanship was rapidly improving.
Accuracy had become the army’s watchword. John Gibbon, the officer who had once averred that for a soldier to hit anything “beyond one hundred or one hundred and fifty yards . . . is pretty much a matter of chance,” became something of an authoritarian on the issue: in 1883 he ordered his company commanders to hold target sessions six days a week beginning at seven a.m., and no man, unless he was sick, was to be excused. Army-wide, a complex system of scoring was developed to keep track of each unit’s progress. Men were divided into “marksmen,” and then into first-class, second-class, and third-class “shooters,” whose scores were weighted differently. In 1883, by using Laidley’s new methods and computing his soldiers’ ability according to the scoring matrix, Major General John Pope of the Department of Missouri proudly reported that his command had 883 marksmen: three years previously, there were just two.
An array of military and civilian sights from the heyday of marksmanship. The precision demanded of these once-primitive devices is remarkable.
The system’s success resulted in so many marksmen that the army had to invent a new, elite category of “sharpshooter.” (In 1909 a superelite category of “expert” would come into being, members receiving a monthly five-dollar bonus.) To achieve that rank and gain the Sharpshooter’s Cross—based on the German Iron Cross and worn at the neck (the Marksman’s Pin was attached to the breast)—a soldier had to hit the bull’s-eye with at least 88 percent of his shots at 200, 300, and 600 yards, and with at least 77 percent at 800, 900, and 1,000.47 That quality of shooting gave even the Creedmoor gents pause for thought.
In tandem with reforming its training procedures, the army took a good look at the venerable Springfield and ordered technical changes to maximize its accuracy. In 1879 its simple rear sight, which had been designed in the days when marksmanship was of secondary importance, was replaced