What do snipers do?

When they make their kill?

From this thread I got this site and from there looked up this wikipedia article.

So having crawled that far, what happened next, did he get up and run off? Aren’t snipers a bit vunerable having made their kill? Or are they far enough away from their target that they can slip away with no-one knowing what direction they’ve shot from? Are sniper kills usually over such a long distance as 1-2km?

My understanding (from the Discovery Channel, Military Channel, etc) is that the sniper role of stalking an enemy commander through miles of bush is a fairly rare occurance. Especially now since such a task can be more safely performed by something like a Predator drone.

Modern snipers are generally used for reconnaissance, observation and survailance. They also provide support and security for other combat troops and installations by reaching out and touching targets that are out of range of the M-16s and light machineguns.

In the novel Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth’s titular assassin hoped to get away in the confusion following the kill, helped by the fact that it wouldn’t be possible to tell where the shot had come from (He was using explosive bullets, which wouldn’t leave a clean wound that would indicate a direction, and he was far from the kill site in an enclosed, concealed space).

I don’t know how well it would have worked, but it seems plausible. In the other kills cited in this and other Forsyth books, the snipers were far enough to get away easily, or the kill wasn’t disdcovered until long afterwards, or the sniper had the advantage of covering forces to protect him.

How Military Snipers Work seems pretty good. I have no personal knowledge of the topic, though.

When GySgt. Carlos Hathcock described that event in the book Marine Sniper he said that he remained concealed after making the shot, and had to carefully crawl back to a treeline in the jungle while avoiding patrolling enemy troops looking for him. You have to read one of the books about him, the man could literally disappear into thin air when he had to.

Cluricaun beat me to it, but yup - Hathcock got out the same way he went in. IIRC, an NVA stood just feet away from him at least once after the shot.

Look for Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson.

The Marines learned a lesson in Vietnam and it appears they are still training snipers to be able to take that kind of shot, even if they rarely do it.

One shot, one kill

In the film Saving Private Ryan Jackson, the sniper (Barry pepper) states that given a clear line of sight between him Hitler and his rifle, “Wars over”

Now then how feasible was this given that in the early days of WW11 the Germans were flushed with victory, surely it would have been easy enough to infiltrate and Bang! wars over!!

The word for that isn’t sniper – it’s sorceror.

They drag it into their tree and eat it. I saw it on the Discovery channel. The tree bit is for keeping it away from other predators. Pretty clever, those guys.

Which explains why no one killed Hitler. He was well known to be stringy and tough.

This assumes that Hitler alone drove the Germans to war and that in his absence, the entire German government, military, and people, would lay down their arms. If Hitler really had so little support, he wouldn’t have stayed in power.

Consider the question in this context: If Bin Laden were assassinated, would the Al Qaeda movement suddenly stop? If President Bush were killed would the war in Iraq suddenly end? This strategy may have worked 500 years ago (or even 100 years ago), but it seems absurd today.

With respect I have to point out that Hitler stayed in power mainly because of the machinations of terror employed by his SS/Gestapo and other die hard factions of the Nazis.
Admittedly he had lots of support from the German people but even in that country there was opposition to his rule, i.e. The White Rose organisation.

IMO Hitler did drive Germany to war, maybe not alone, but his was the driving force

You’re not answering his question, really. He’s asking how easy it would have been to snipe Adolf Hitler during WW2, not whether that literally would have ended the war.

Though as to that point, IMO, Nazi Germany was much more (though not entirely) based on Hitler’s personality, and would have been weakened and (more importantly) willing to negotiate an end to the war if he was out of the picture.

As to the first question, Hitler was notorious for changing plans at the last minute and being unpredictable in his movements to avoid assassination attempts. He was also one lucky SOB: he survived one attempt when a bomb on his plane simply failed to detonate, and another attempt when a rather large suitcase bomb detonated about five feet from him. (Interesting story, that last one.)

The other thing you have to remember is that Nazi Germany didn’t allow foreigners with sniper rifles to just wander around the countryside. OK, a boat lands you on the Atlantic coast. Now you’ve got to sneak all the way to Berlin. I imagine you’d need to be a native speaker of German to do this, even with forged papers. Then you’ve got to stake out a spot to shoot Hitler. Make it a suicide mission, it would be a lot easier if the shooter doesn’t expect to escape.

Thing is, by the time the war really got underway Hitler’s appearances at mass rallies and speaches were a thing of the past. He started getting more paranoid and stopped appearing in public. Assassinating him wouldn’t be easy, even if you were a general who met with him regularly.

If I’m remembering correctly, that was the attempted assassination of the president of France during some kind of public festival in Paris, right? It seems like in a major, internationally connected metropolis like Paris with so many transportation options available, there would be a range of exit strategies, but what about in the OP’s scenario in which it was rather a feat to make it to the remote site in the first place?

For a fictionaized (some have said way too fictionalized) account of a Marine sniper during Gulf War I, see the movie or read the book “Jarhead” by Anthony Swofford. Some good detail on what it means to be a capable sniper in modern times (for starters, they usually work in teams of two, with a spotter and a shooter).

This was basically the plot of The Dirty Dozen 2, except that they wanted to kill a German general to prevent him from killing Hitler. IIRC, the theory was that Hitler had gone so far around the bend by that time that the Allies wanted to keep him alive, since he was handling the post D-Day war so badly. No idea how true that was, but there was plot point where none of the Dozen (including Lee Marvin) realized that the black guy “who gets killed doing something heroic and athletic” wouldn’t be able to pass as a German soldier until they were actually on the plane about to parachute into Germany.

Back to the OP and Hathcock … I have a tangential question: did the VC not use dogs? Seems like dogs would have had him in five minutes, so there’s obviously more info about this than I know.

I’m far from old enough to have served in Viet Nam myself, but I’ve never come across anything in all my reading about NVA or VC using dogs as part of their military. Also, as I understand it, dogs have to have a scent to track. You know, the old “Here boy, smell this sock. No go get him!”. Hard to track a Winchester 70 from just an expanded boattail round I’d think. :wink:

Not thinking so much of tracking from a scent. More like using dogs to “amplify” the hearing and smelling abilities of the collective patrol.

Now that I think about it, though … a military unit in deep jungle cover could be compromised easily by a barking dog. Might be why dogs weren’t out there. At first, I was thinking that maybe the VC had dogs as “company pets”, as it were … but I can think my way out of that impression after a little consideration.