Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton

dropped to -40°C, was credited with 505 confirmed kills of Soviet soldiers. All of these kills took place within three months, meaning Simo averaged about five a day. So good was he that he was known as ‘White Death’, a legend bolstered by such facts as the one that he used iron sights on his Mosin-Nagant rifle rather than telescopic sights, because to use a glass sight you had to lift your head higher and so risked being seen by the enemy. 28
    Of course, Hollywood contributed to the myth and mystery of the sniper. Films like American Sniper and Saving Private Ryan show hard-bitten American southerners who dispatch the enemy with clinical exactitude. And the 2001 epic Enemy at the Gates celebrated the duel between the Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev and his partly fictional Nazi foe Major Erwin König, as the battle of Stalingrad raged around them.
    Such hero worship endures today. Websites like snipercentral.com are packed with details about the tactics employed by snipers, specifications of their rifles and scopes, and league tables of the numbers of kills that famous snipers have chalked up.
    Reading these kill lists, you are struck by how prominently modern wars feature in them. This is because as rifle power, sight technology and ballistics have improved, so the distances at which a sniper canhit his mark have lengthened. In 2009 thirty-four-year-old Craig Harrison, a corporal of horse in the Blues and Royals Regiment in the British army, killed two Taliban machine-gunners in Helmand province in Afghanistan at a range of a staggering 2,475 metres. The weapon he used – an L115A3 Long Range Rifle – would likely not have been powerful enough to reach the Taliban fighters had he shot it at sea level, but because he was at an altitude of over 1,500 metres the thinner air meant the rifle’s range was lengthened. At that distance each click on his telescopic sight resulted in a shift of about 25 centimetres as to where the bullet landed. The bullets, when fired, flew for six seconds and dropped about 120 metres on their way. However you look at it, the two kills were incredible feats of skill. 29
    So accurate and deadly have snipers become over the years that they are seen as somehow ‘unfair’ in war; they are feared and loathed in equal measure. The biographer of Sepp Allerberger, a sniper on the Second World War Eastern Front, described in detail what happened when Russian partisans captured a young German marksman. The youth was dragged into a sawmill and, still alive, had every limb cut off with a buzz saw. His torturers ‘tied ligatures around his limbs before cutting them off’ so that he didn’t bleed out. When Sepp found him, dead, the saw blade was ‘still turning, and had reached up to his navel’. 30 In another incident, the Russians found a Nazi marksmen with one of their own sniper rifles – its wooden stock full of notches, one nick for each Russian killed: ‘They’d cut off his nuts and stuffed them into his mouth. But the worst thing was that they’d rammed his gun up his arse, barrel-first right up to the back sights.’ 31
    Knowing the hatred that snipers inspired, I asked this trainer before me, as she sipped her drink, if she had any qualms about teaching such dark arts.
    ‘Yes, sometimes we would sit back and think: “Wow, what are we teaching here?” But we were largely just teaching on a base, all our targets were paper ones. Perhaps not to think of what we were training to do, we even had a stupid sense of fun. We would get T-shirts printed for each course. I remember one of them had very small letters on it that read: “By the time you finish reading this you’ll be dead”.’
    I laughed then, but other T-shirts from Israeli sniper training academies were less amusing. One showed an armed and pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs of a rifle. The caption read: ‘1 shot 2 kills’. Another had a child carrying a gun in the centre of a target. ‘The smaller, the