U.S. soldiers showcasing a camouflaged Springfield sniper rifle and ghillie suits, May 18, 1918.







U.S. soldiers showcasing a camouflaged Springfield sniper rifle and ghillie suits, May 18, 1918.

These photographs, one colourised by Colourised PIECE of JAKE, were all taken 105 years ago at Badonviller. The pictured soldiers were from the 168th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 42nd 'Rainbow' Infantry Division.

Snipers were a constant threat to soldiers on frontline duty during the First World War. If one was not careful and accidentally peaked their head above the trench parapet for just a second, a skilled enemy sniper could make them pay dearly.
The following is the account of British Lieutenant-Colonel Randolph Arthur Chell from the 10th Battalion, Essex Regiment on his first time on sniper duty on the Western Front in September 1915: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
"After about fifteen minutes quiet watching - with my rifle in a ready position - I saw a capless bald head come up behind the plate. The day was bright and clear and I hadn't the slightest difficulty in taking a most deliberate aim at the very centre of that bright and shiny plate - but somehow I couldn't press the trigger: to shoot such a 'sitter' so deliberately in cold blood required more real courage than I possessed.

After a good look round he went down and I argued with myself about my duty. My bald-headed opponent had been given a very sporting chance and if he were fool enough to come up again I must shoot him unflinchingly. I considered it my duty to be absolutely ready for that contingency.

After about two minutes he came up again with added boldness and I did my duty. I had been a marksman before the war and so had no doubt about the instantaneousness of that man's death. I felt funny for days and the shooting of another German at 'stand-to' the next morning did nothing to remove those horrid feelings I had."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946.

Image
War crime hangings at Landsberg in May 1946. With special thanks to Traugott Vitz for his help with this article. Over two days at the end of May 1946, 28 German war criminals were hanged at Landsberg am Lech prison in Germany (US War Criminals Prison No. 1). The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by two divisions of the U.S. Seventh Army on the 29th of April, 1945.  40 members of it staff were tried at the camp by a US General Military Court, presided over by Brigadier General John Lenz. The trials lasted from the 15th of November to the 13th of December 1945.  36 defendants received the death sentence.  Eight of these sentences were reduced to terms of imprisonment by the Reviewing Authority, the remaining 28 death sentences being confirmed. The trial went under the designation “USA against Martin Gerhard Weiß (Weiss) et al.”, Case No. 000-50-2. Martin Gerhard Weiss was the camp commandant at Dachau.  This trial became the “Parent Case” for 488 other trials (a...
Read more

Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.

Image
Kristina Zhuk was 23 years old, her daughter Kira was 10 months old when they were killed in Gorlovka.  The young mother was buried with the baby in her arms.  A terrible tragedy then excited the world, the pictures spread all over the world, and the deceased Christina was then called the Gorlovka Madonna.  Two years have passed since the murder of the "Gorlovskaya Madonna"...    On July 27, 2014, the city of Gorlovka was subjected to massive shelling by Ukrainian security forces.  The Grad multiple launch rocket launchers were launched.  As a result of shelling Gorlovka from heavy guns from July 27 to July 29, 100 people were injured, 27 more died, four of them were children, the city council reported.  Among the dead were Christina Zhuk and her daughter.  A picture from the square on Rudakova Street, which depicts the dead Kristina and Kira, was posted on the Internet by blogger Oleg Zhelyabin-Nezhinskiy.    After filming at the s...
Read more

U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths.

Image
U.S. Army Hangman John C. Woods Intentionally Botched Nazi Executions To Ensure Their Agonizing Deaths. The  Nuremberg executions  took place on 16 October 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials. Ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were executed by hanging: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher.  Hermann GΓΆring was also scheduled to be hanged on that day, but committed suicide using a potassium cyanide capsule the night before.  Martin Bormann was also sentenced to death  in absentia ; at the time his whereabouts were unknown, but it is now thought that he committed suicide or was killed by Soviet troops while attempting to escape Berlin on 2 May 1945. The sentences...
Read more

Freedomite

Image
Freedomite The  Freedomite  movement consists of a split-off of the Doukhobors, a community of Spiritual Christians began a mass migration from Russia to Canada in 1898. The Freedomite movement first appeared in 1902 in Saskatchewan, and later in the Kootenay and Boundary Districts of British Columbia. Freedomites began to divide from Doukhobors in 1902 in Saskatchewan, Canada, self-named as "God's people" and  Svobodniki  (Russian: "sovereign people"). The faction, later called "Freedomites", opposed land ownership, public schools, using work animals, etc. and are mainly known for protesting nude. By 1920 the common English term for them became  Sons of Freedom . Of about 20,000 active Doukhobors in Canada today, ancestors of about 2,500 were Freedomites, and many descendants have joined the USCC Community Doukhobors. Doctrine Freedomite meetings were similar to other spiritual Christian folk-Protestants fr...
Read more

THE RED ROOMS OF THE DEEP WEB

Image
THE RED ROOMS OF THE DEEP WEB This topic seems so simple that it is almost obvious, but you will find that it is far from so. Many of us, even just out of curiosity, have tried to inform us on the internet if there really is a deep web and to what extent sites go down illegally. The Red Room would be "the apotheosis of illegality", where through a live streaming viewers can decide the fate of a victim, even going as far as his death. But do such sites really exist or are they an urban legend? I will try to get there by steps. The term "Red Room" derives from the Japanese metropolitan legend "Red Room Curse", which in turn refers to a horror animation created in Adobe Flash of 2000 in Japan. So if we really want to be picky, we will never find a site called "Red Room" on the deep web (unless the authors are very, very stupid). Until a few years ago the red rooms were considered a hoax invented by some perverted individual and with a bad morality, ...
Read more

During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women.

Image
During World War II, millions of people were sent to concentration camps, including women. Women in concentration camps were subjected to brutal treatment and often faced more severe conditions than their male counterparts. The conditions in the camps were inhumane, and women were often subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experiments. Women were treated differently in concentration camps than men. They were often separated from their families, forced to perform hard labor, and subjected to sexual abuse. Women who were pregnant were also subjected to harsh conditions and medical experimentation. Many women were killed, either as part of the genocide or because they were deemed too weak to continue working. One of the most notorious concentration camps where women were held was Auschwitz-Birkenau. There, women were subjected to forced labor, starvation, and medical experimentation. Many were killed in gas chambers or through other forms of execution. The camp was designed ...
Read more

The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski

Image
The capture of brave Russian officer Rosinski This is a shocking image and I apologize in advance for sharing it, but here’s one that truly got to me… in Belarus, 1918, after WWI had already ended, the brave Russian officer Rosinski was captured by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks tortured the captain, likely to get information out of the man, which he bravely refused to give. After that, they simply continued with the torture out of some sick sense of innate cruelty. He was ‘the enemy’ and he was at their mercy, so they brutally murdered their captive. The brave captain was emasculated. And anally impaled on a tree branch. All this while still alive. Alfred Savoir, the man who published the picture and was an eye witness to the death of the brave military officer, described "M. B.", who ordered this atrocity, thus: I knew him not long ago; he was a charming teenager with an ironic wit and joker. He was rubbed with French culture, he admired the novels of Barres and he quot...
Read more

Lina Medina the youngest confirm mother

Image
Lina Medina the youngest confirm mother Lina Medina was a Peruvian girl who was born in 1933, and she is the youngest confirmed mother in medical history. At the age of five, her parents brought her to a hospital in Pisco, Peru, because they believed she had a tumor that was causing her abdomen to protrude. However, the doctors determined that Lina was actually about seven months pregnant. Lina gave birth to a healthy baby boy via caesarean section on May 14, 1939, at the age of five years, seven months, and 21 days. The identity of the biological father has never been determined, and there have been various theories and speculations about how Lina became pregnant at such a young age. Some have suggested that she may have been the victim of sexual abuse, while others have proposed that she may have had a rare hormonal condition that caused early puberty and fertility. Lina and her son were raised by her parents, and both lived relatively normal lives. Lina never revealed the identity o...
Read more

The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides.

Image
  The Top 6 Deadliest Genocides . Throughout human history, there have been several terrible genocides where millions of people lost their lives. These genocides were carried out with deliberate and systematic violence, targeting specific groups based on their ethnicity, religion, or politics. Even though these events are very dark, it’s important to talk about them so that we can prevent them from happening again. The top 7 deadliest genocides in history have left a lasting impact on the world and are still studied, discussed, and debated by historians and scholars today. From the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews, to the Bengali Genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 3 million people, each of these genocides represents a harrowing chapter in human history. Here, we will examine the shocking reality of the top 7 deadliest genocides that shook the world to its core. 1 Moriori massacre The Moriori people were the indigenous inhabitants of the Chatham Islan...
Read more

The Ocean Sunfish.

Image
The Ocean Sunfish. Also known as the 'Mola Mola', the Ocean Sunfish is the largest fish in existence, measuring up to 4 meters in height and 3 meters in length, with an enormous weight estimated between 200 and 400 kg. With its unique oval shape and a caudal fin resembling that of a shark, it is a completely harmless species. You might wonder why it suffers so much. Well, it is the perfect prey for all predators in the ocean: it is slow, clumsy, large (making it easy to spot and catch), with a thick layer of fat and skin (15 cm thick), a practically harmless set of teeth (as it feeds almost exclusively on plankton), and very limited reflexes. Because of these characteristics, the Ocean Sunfish inhabits the most central, isolated, and remote areas of the ocean, far away from the coasts and their proximity (which are rich in predators). Unfortunately, if this creature comes into contact with a shark, an orca, or a sea lion, its fate is inevitably the following: ...
Read more