Snipers at War by Walter John;

Author:Walter, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / General
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Sometimes these initiatives were successful, but no real progress was made until the New Zealanders organised a ‘sniper squad’ of picked men, including Jesse Wallingford, who had shot for Great Britain in the 1908 Olympic Games. They began to take such a toll of Turks that the Australian commander ordered his men to follow the example of their Antipodean cousins. Into this cauldron came William Edward ‘Billy’ Sing (1886–1943), son of Shanghai-born John Sing and Mary Ann Pugh, born in Staffordshire.

At an early age, Sing and his two sisters encountered anti-Chinese sentiment and their upbringing was harsh. Something of a loner, Billy drifted from job to job, to become a successful kangaroo hunter and a prize-winning target shot for the Proserpine Rifle Club in Queensland.

Billy Sing enlisted on 24 October 1914 in the 5th Australian Light Horse Regiment. After basic training in Egypt, his unit was sent to Gallipoli in the spring of 1915. With Turks taking a terrible toll of Anzac troops, experienced marksmen were sought in the hope of a suitable riposte. Sing’s rifle-shooting abilities had already been recognised and so he began his career as a sniper from Chatham’s Post, firing a standard SMLE which is sometimes said, apparently without much evidence, to have been fitted with a Galilean sight (these are discussed later in the chapter).28

In no way handicapped by the roundnose Mk VI .303 ball ammunition issued to the Anzacs, which was inferior ballistically to the 7.65 mm Turkish Mauser round, Sing took steady, calculated and cold-blooded revenge; helped by his spotters, Ion ‘Jack’ Idriess and Tom Sheehan, his score mounted rapidly.

Despite the hindrance of a freak injury to his shoulder, by a bullet which ricochetted off Sheehan’s spotting telescope, Billy Sing was credited with 119 kills by Brigadier Granville Ryrie, commander of the 2nd Australian Light Horse Brigade, as early as September 1915. On 23 October, General Sir William Birdwood, commander of the Anzac troops, noted Sing’s kills to be 201 ‘including unconfirmed’, and Major Stephen Midgeley, who had drawn Birdwood’s attention to his sniper’s performance, put the total as ‘about 300’ when the Allied forces withdrew from Gallipoli.

They were said to have included ‘Abdul the Terrible’, a renowned Turkish sniper killed by Sing in a counter-sniper duel, but the details rely greatly on an article written by Idriess in the 1950s and are now considered to be largely apocryphal. But there can be little doubt that Sing’s reputation would have been well known in Turkish lines, and that the most effective snipers would have been charged with eliminating the Australian.

Billy Sing was mentioned in dispatches in February 1916 and awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal on 10 March. He arrived on the Western Front early in 1917, but was wounded in the leg in March and returned to Britain to recuperate. Discharged from Harefield Hospital on 22 May 1917, Sing travelled north. After a whirlwind courtship, he married Gladys Elizabeth Addison Stewart in Edinburgh on 29 June 1917 but left for the Western Front on 3 August.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.