100 Kiwi Stories from WW1: Snipers' lethal toll in battle of the crackshots

Officers attend the funeral of Brigadier-General Francis Earl Johnston on August 18, 1917.

Senior New Zealand officer among many soldiers taken out by a marksman’s bullet

NO 69
Snipers were on the battlefield long before Clint Eastwood revived the military gunman with his Iraq war film American Sniper.

In World War I, German sharpshooters, aided by the quality of their scopes, earned a reputation as effective and deadly shots.

Squinting through the optics of their 7.92 mm Mauser rifles, German gunmen set the standard at the start of the conflict. Their weapon was reliable, thoroughly tested and accurate, even if unsuited to rapid fire on account of its bolt action.

At the front, directed by a spotter, the German sniper would be alert for a flash of colour or hint of helmet that signalled a target in the enemy trench.

The kill would be swift.

At Gallipoli the Turks were picking off as many as 30 to 40 Allied soldiers a day with snipers before Anzac forces sent teams out at night to stem the bloodshed.

But the Allies had their crackshots too. One of them was Queenslander Billy Sing, a part-Chinese soldier credited with 150 confirmed kills from the Gallipoli campaign. Known by his comrades as the "assassin", Sing's tally was established by spotters who helped identify targets and added to the total if the enemy soldier fell. Among his victims was his Turkish rival, nicknamed "Abdul the Terrible" by the Allies.

Sing's rifle, rivalling the Mauser in terms of use and reputation, was the British Lee-Enfield .303, issued to virtually all British soldiers on the Western Front (and many elsewhere).

New Zealand had a top sharpshooter in Dick Travis, posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in France. Opotiki-born Travis, known as the "King of No Man's Land", led a small team on reconnaissance and sniping tasks until his luck ran out.

The toll German snipers inflicted on frontline Allied troops - as many as five a day in a regiment - was not arrested until big-game hunter, author, cricketer and adventurer Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard won high-level support to set up a school to train Allied snipers. He urged the use of spotting scopes, encouraged two-man teams and devised innovations such as the use of dummy heads raised above trenches to attract enemy fire.

Brigadier-General Johnston was shot in France.

A lit cigarette clamped in the dummy's mouth added an extra touch, because the red glow directed the sniper's aim - a point vividly illustrated by the final battlefield words of the British writer H.H. Munro, better known by his pen-name Saki. Munro was shot by a sniper on the Somme in 1916. Moments before he was hit he complained: "Put that bloody cigarette out."

New Zealand lost a senior military figure to sniper fire. Sandhurst-educated Francis Earl Johnston had served in the Sudan and the Second Boer War when he was given command of New Zealand infantry forces at the outbreak of War War I. Johnston went to Egypt, where New Zealand troops helped repulse a Turkish assault at the Suez Canal, and to Gallipoli, where his judgments came in for criticism.

Nonetheless he was mentioned in dispatches, and received the honour of Commander of the Bath after the disastrous campaign.

Hampered by indifferent health, Johnston went with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force to the conflict in Europe and was handed command of the 3rd Rifle Brigade.

On August 7, 1917, Brigadier-General Johnston was inspecting the frontline near Messines in France when he was killed by a sniper's bullet.

Two days later, Sir Andrew Russell, who commanded the New Zealand Division, nearly suffered the same fate when a shot drilled a hole in his 'tin hat'. The round was said to have creased his scalp.

Johnston was buried at Bailleul in France, near the border with Belgium.