How did blackpowder sharpshooters achieve precision?

Question

I was wondering about this since I delved into the naval warfare of the age of sail and noticed the mentions of having sharpshooters on the masts of ships to pick off valuable targets. It seems to have been a common practice, and while I don't know much about their counterparts on land this couldn't have been limited to naval warfare, especially once early rifles appeared.

Technically it was not impossible to pick off a target as a common foot soldier. But while lines of musketeers were apparently quite effective at 100 - 200 yards and even successful hits at 300 were not that uncommon, that's mostly in context of massed volleys that could be devastating even with mere 10% accuracy, and such numbers don't seem enough to me for a sharpshooter trying to take out a specific officer while on top of a mast of a ship rolling in the waves.

So what did they do to increase their chances? rifles? better sights or early scopes? Were they just so skilled they could decapitate a beetle at 500 yards by hip-firing a pistol?

My question is how did these sharpshooters differ from the other troops, in both equipment and training, and what did they do and use to enhance their accuracy? In short, what went into making someone a sharpshooter at the time?

Answer 1

Talking about muzzle-loaders:

• Using rifles rather than smoothbore muskets.
• Better sights (still open sights, for most of the era, but better ones).
• Careful loading with greased patches rather than musket firing drill with paper cartridges which focussed mostly on speed.
• Better training of troops selected for good marksmanship.

Talking about cartridge-loading breechloaders:

• Better open sights (possibly a ladder-type rear sight).
• At times, early telescopic sights (that link is a bit US-focussed).
• Better training of troops selected for good marksmanship, again.

Answer 2

Achieving a level of practical usefulness with a muzzle-loading rifle of old times was not a trivial task. It was a specialized field, which is why it was given only to special troops until about the 1840s-ish.

The OP makes some generous claims about the smoothbore musket. Its trajectory was almost entirely random. Hitting something at 100 yards and beyond was simply left to chance. The chief instructor for the British Army's School of Musketry, Colonel Ernest Wilford, in the 1850s made several comments to the effect that hitting an intended target at 300 yards was essentially impossible.

Granted, the smoothbore was used in only a simple manner. The typical infantry smoothbore had no sights and the soldiers closed their eyes and opened their mouths when they fired (due to the flash from the pan, and the noise). Beyond 100 yards it was about useless, but within that range a volley could be devastating. That's also why early artillery was so important: it handled fires beyond 200 yards.

Early riflemen required special training and had their pros and cons on the battlefield. The cons were considerable, such that Napoleon himself didn't see the value of riflemen.

One of the first issues was ballistics: the early rifle was accurate, but its muzzle velocity was lower than a smoothbore because the ball encountered so much resistance when being stuck in the rifle grooves (most smoothbores had high velocity because the ball was undersized to the barrel by a generous amount, and therefore contacted the barrel only a couple times on its journey). Riflemen were therefore working with a pronounced arc - a repeatable arc, but a big arc nonetheless. Working with it was a skill earned through experience, and was a skill set that the common infantry training regimes never touched.

There was also the problem of how to load a weapon in the muzzle, whose main virtue was that the ball engaged the rifling. You had to engage the rifling on the way DOWN. Early riflemen used a slightly oversized ball and would use a mallet to get the bullet formed into the barrel - you can recognize early paintings of them with the mallet in their belt. Or, they could use a slightly undersized ball with various patches, paper or leather (if you had a leather shirt or pants with wide frills, you could cut off a frill for a patch). The temperature of the barrel also came into it, with a cold barrel being a tighter fit. Therefore, you could find riflemen with various sizes of ball to choose from, depending on their circumstances, and also possibly needing to blank-fire it a couple times to warm up the barrel. Being a rifleman was an art, not a science.

The end result was that a rifle was much slower to load than line infantry, and more finicky to use. Its only virtue was that it was accurate, but only if the riflemen knew what he was doing, usually with knowledge that came from somewhere other than the standard infantry training regime.

As it turned out, rifles wouldn't become common until the technology of the rifle approached the simplicity of the smoothbore musket, and this was generally accomplished by the Minie ball.

All info for this post is from:

The Destroying Angel. Brett Gibbons. 2019. No publisher given in my copy.

Answer 3

While not a complete answer, I would dispute some of the claims made against musketry and their reasons for success or lack thereof.

On Killing, a book which briefly achieved wide coverage after the Columbine shooting had a very different take on things.

First, he looked specifically at long-lasting musket engagements and compared their outcome to modern recreation against targets meant to simulate ranks of massed infantry. It did not take long to achieve a high proportion of penetrated targets. I don't recall the exact numbers, but it seemed to be in the order of 20-60 minutes, not the umpteen hours of some of these battles.

Rather his book posits that, historically, active, aim-to-kill shooters ranked at 10-15% of troops. The rest... helped, but did not aim to hit. They might ferry ammo, they might help their fellows, they might get killed in the frontline without shirking, they might aim high. They did not want to kill others.

This was one of the reasons given for the high proportion of kills achieved by crew served weapons in WW2 - it was way more difficult to fudge shots.

Furthermore, he posited that a small proportion of soldiers had an active kill-to-defend reaction instead. Without being psychopaths, they understood the need to protect their group and did engage in aimed fire.

So a self-selected cadre of sharpshooters would not necessarily be operating on the same basis as massed infantry.

It might be more relevant to look at what hunters achieved with the same contemporary weapons.

Additionally, they did seem to use rifles, which were too slow to reload to use in line, but acceptable in sharpshooters.

Rifles were created as an improvement in the accuracy of smoothbore muskets. In the early 18th century, Benjamin Robins, an English mathematician, realized that an elongated bullet would retain the momentum and kinetic energy of a musket ball, but would slice through the air with greater ease.[3] The black powder used in early muzzle-loading rifles quickly fouled the barrel, making loading slower and more difficult. The greater range of the rifle was considered to be of little practical use since the smoke from black powder quickly obscured the battlefield and made it almost impossible to aim the weapon from a distance. Since musketeers could not afford to take the time to stop and clean their barrels in the middle of a battle, rifles were limited to use by sharpshooters and non-military uses like hunting.[citation needed]

p.s. It's a fascinating book for the military geeks as he states the US Army noted the 10-15% ratio for WW2, took steps to correct it and achieved 50% by Korean War and 90%+ by Vietnam War.

p.p.s The Inaccuracy of Muskets - Journal of the American Revolution