The Sniper They Laughed At — Until He Outshot an Army

Описание: Why a Young Lieutenant Carried a Civilian Rifle into Guadalcanal — and Redefined Sniper Warfare Forever

Why did Second Lieutenant John George carry a civilian hunting rifle into one of the most brutal campaigns of World War II—and how did that decision overturn decades of military assumptions about what wins sniper duels?

January 22, 1943. West of Point Cruz, Guadalcanal. Japanese snipers had killed fourteen Americans in seventy-two hours. Crouched inside the shattered remains of an enemy bunker, Lieutenant John George of the 132nd Infantry Regiment leveled his Winchester Model 70—an off-the-shelf hunting rifle he had purchased with two years of National Guard pay.

His fellow officers mocked it as a “mail-order toy.”
His captain ordered him to leave it in his tent.
No one believed a civilian sporting rifle belonged in a modern war.

They were wrong.

In the banyan groves of Point Cruz, George proved that precision—not rate of fire—decides sniper engagements. His bolt-action Winchester, slower but far more accurate than the standard-issue M1 Garand, delivered performance the Army had never trained for. Over the next four days, George killed eleven Japanese snipers and cleared ground that entire companies had failed to secure.

What began as one lieutenant’s stubborn insistence on using his own rifle led to a tactical revolution. His results forced battalion commanders to rethink sniper employment and inspired field-expedient methods that spread across the Pacific long before they appeared in any official manual.

The innovations born in those coconut groves are still embedded in U.S. sniper doctrine today—and may have saved more than two thousand American lives before the war ended.

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