American Rifle - Alexander Rose [150]
The general believed that British and French commanders had deluded themselves that “developments since 1914 had changed the principles of warfare.” Fighting, his allies told him, had now become a static affair dependent on slow, grinding attrition to weaken the enemy. Pershing respectfully disagreed. “It was my opinion that the victory could not be won by the costly process of attrition, but it must be won by driving the enemy out into the open and engaging him in a war of movement.” Alarmed that American troops were to be placed under Franco-British command and taught the same pessimistic precepts, Pershing insisted on a separate American sector and control over his own armies on the Western Front.13
To further mark his turf and allow the unblooded Americans flooding into France to prove their spunk, Pershing fastened on to the legendary American proficiency with the rifle as a propaganda device. “You must not forget that the rifle is distinctively an American weapon,” he stipulated. “I want to see it employed.”14 Grasping the emotional power of marksmanship, Pershing called upon the NRA version of history, the one genetically grafted onto elements stretching back to Colonial days, Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, and the triumph at Creedmoor—all events where the rifle had liberated Americans from their self-created inferiority complex toward Europeans. Now rifle-bearing, crack-shooting Americans were to liberate stout Britain, cocky France, and plucky little Belgium from the jackboot of the Kaiser, leader of a nation of field firers.
Pershing quickly reinstated marksmanship as the most important part of the GI’s education. While the men had many demands on their all-too-brief training time, nothing, he ordered, should “be allowed to interfere with rifle practice.”15 To further burnish the reputation of the American rifleman among friends and foes alike, a confidential pamphlet, Training for Rifle Fire in Trench Warfare, was circulated among officers at the Army War College; the manual proposed creating an elite “sniping” unit within each battalion that would consist of one noncommissioned officer and twenty-four privates. Those wanting to qualify for the unit would have to pass a still more onerous set of tests than those required for regular marksman status. Being “brave, yet cautious; cool, observant, patient, resourceful, and prompt,” snipers would adhere to the traditional ideal of a sharpshooter and possess a “correct knowledge” of the influence that “a cold piece, a hot piece; clouds, heat, moisture, wind; a worn rifle; fouling; recent cleaning and oiling” would have on their shooting. Expertise in estimating range was absolutely required.16
American shooting superiority was often used as a rhetorical point to needle the Hun. Because the Germans had not participated in the great Creedmoor-style shooting competitions, Scientific American’s Edward Crossman wrote, their infantry “turned out to shoot about as poorly as the infantry of most other nations not of Anglo-Saxon breed.” Indeed, the Germans had deliberately designed their rifles’ rear sights “so no man could do fine shooting, or stand a show in a long range rifle match, even if the desire . . . should enter his breast.” The Teutonic rifle, devoid of “wind-gauges and devices for making fine changes in elevation,” Crossman claimed, could at best place a bullet within six feet at one thousand yards, and even their finest shooters were “still pathetically insufficient in making what we consider first-class shots.”17
So ingrained became these convictions that whereas the British and the French felt that the only way to overcome the Germans’ tough machine-gun entrenchments was to flatten them with heavy artillery bombardments, progressives believed that a sharpshooter was more than a match for any machine-gunner. Spew hundreds of bullets wildly as he might, the man behind the machine gun was still prey to a single, precisely aimed shot.18
Chief among this class