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Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look at the movie
specifically, how the 1903A4 sniper rifle is portrayed
in the hands of Private Jackson in that movie.
Now I want to preface this video by saying that I really enjoyed
It's a fantastic movie, there's an incredible amount of work
that went into making it realistic and accurate.
And there are some fantastic little details in there that most people will never even notice
that are incredibly accurate and period appropriate.
But there are also some problems, and when I went back and re-watched it
with an eye specifically towards Private Jackson's sniper rifle, yeah, it was pretty bad.
We first see Private Jackson on the assault craft heading to Omaha beach,
he's with us for the entirety of the movie.
And if you notice, even in this very first scene he's got a tube over his shoulder.
That's a scope carrying tube, which is interesting because it tells me
whoever put together the uniform and the equipment for Private Jackson
definitely put some real thought into what they were doing.
Unfortunately they got it basically all wrong.
So when we first see Private Jackson actually using his rifle
it is on the beach to take out a German machine gun nest.
And in that scene his rifle is a 1903A4 set up with a small scope like this.
However, unfortunately what they actually gave him was a rifle that has a Lyman Alaskan scope on it.
That was, as we touched on in my video on the 03A4,
the Lyman Alaskan was the scope that the US military preferred
and wanted to have for these rifles, but they weren't actually available.
And so they used the Weaver 330 instead.
Now if you look closely at Private Jackson's rifle, you will see that he has adjustment knobs
up here just behind the front scope mount, that is a Lyman Alaskan.
The actual scope, the Weaver 330, has its adjustment knobs
(you can see it a little better over here) right back here, way at the very back of the scope.
So even from the beginning they've given him the right rifle
(note that the front sight is missing as it is in the movie, that's correct) but not the right scope.
And given the attention to detail in other aspects of the movie,
I'm not sure why exactly this slipped through the cracks.
Now there were Lyman Alaskans that were retrofitted onto rebuilt 03A4s after World War Two.
They did see some use in Korea, although the ... vast majority of them went onto M1C Garand snipers.
But you would never have run into one of these rifles with a Lyman Alaskan
in the European theatre, or really anywhere in World War Two.
So that's our first problem.
The next time that we see Private Jackson and his sniper rifle in the movie
is where we have probably the biggest factual problem
with how it's presented, that's the bell tower scene.
So there's a German sniper up in the bell tower, shoots one of the Americans,
Private Jackson figures out where he is, "That's where I'd be."
And estimates the range at 450 yards and decides that
the scope that he's got on his rifle is insufficient for the task.
And he's not necessarily wrong on that, it's a 2.75x power scope, pretty low magnification.
And Jackson's solution is to go to that tube
(I think it's on this shoulder) that he's had on his back the whole time.
And by the way, that ... appears to be a correct carrying case for a Unertl 8x power scope.
And he pulls that thing out and sticks it on his rifle.
Now we have like five simultaneous problems here.
First off, the Unertl was used as a scope
on a World War Two sniper, but it was the Marine Corps sniper rifle.
And Private Jackson is not a Marine, there weren't any Marines at D-Day.
Which is kind of weird if you think about it,
the biggest amphibious landing that had ever been done and it didn't have any of the Marine Corps.
But that's a separate issue, they were busy in the Pacific.
Anyway, there are no Marines there, there are not going to be any
Marine Corps sniper rifles there, it's just Private Jackson his standard issue 1903A4.
The other problem here is that the mounting points for the Unertl
are not the same as the mounting points for this guy.
This has a ... front mounting point up here on the receiver.
On the Unertl scopes they actually mount the
scope mounting block up here in the middle of the handguard.
And the rifles have basically customised handguards that are cut away
so that they can put a mounting point up on the front end of the rifle.
... For what it's worth, they are also 1903 standard rifles, not 03A4s,
so they actually have rear sights on them, the Marine Corps rifles have front sights on them.
... As much as two 1903-based sniper rifles can be different,
those are substantially different sniper rifles.
There is in fact no way that you can just swap this scope and the Unertl.
It's physically impossible, and there weren't any Unertls there.
So that's our biggest single issue of the movie, I think.
Now let's just accept at this point that OK, Jackson has a Unertl 8x power scope on his rifle.
Fine. Unfortunately there are a couple more problems with how he's shown operating that scope.
So the very first thing he does with it is he peeks up over some cover
and goes to figure out where the shot's going to be and adjusts his scope to make the shot.
And what you see him doing is cranking on the front objective
of the scope, which is adjustable on the Unertl.
If you listen you can hear him say, "Two clicks windage."
Well, the problem is he's not actually adjusting windage.
What ... turning the front objective on that scope does is actually adjust parallax.
This essentially is an adjustment to allow you to make sure
that the reticle and the scope are focused on the same plane.
Because if they are not, then if your eye is off centre at all in the scope,
the reticle is going to shift and your point of impact is going to change.
So it is important, especially on an old-school fully-adjustable scope like the Unertl,
to set the parallax correctly.
But that's not windage, the windage are the knobs on the top and the side of the scope
that are mounted ... right there. On the Unertl they're like right over here.
Actually they are on the front mount of the scope.
In fact, if you look at this still frame of the Unertl scope,
you can see that it doesn't have a mounting point out in front where a real Unertl would have one.
And that's because they have to kludge it onto an 03A4 sniper rifle somehow.
A bit later on in the film, when we see Jackson doing his own shooting from up in the bell tower,
there was an opportunity for the film makers to have a really great piece of technically accurate detail.
Well, it would have been assuming that the rifle was accurate to this setting, which it's not. But.
One of the interesting things about the Unertl scopes is in order to isolate them from recoil,
because they were relatively early, relatively fragile scopes, they are actually not fixed in their rings.
So when you fire a rifle with a Unertl scope on it, the scope actually moves forward.
I mean technically it doesn't, what's happening is the rifle moves backward.
Inertia tends to hold the scope where it is, and so the result is the scope offsets forward on the rifle.
Now on the civilian versions, the competition and hunting versions of these scopes,
there was a spring built into the scope and base system so that the scope would bounce forward
and then the spring would push it back into position and reset it for your next shot.
When the Marine Corps adopted these scopes on their 1903A1 snipers,
they decided to [deliberately] leave that spring out.
And I think the idea was that it might get fouled or caught on stuff,
or it was just extra complexity that they didn't necessarily want.
So on the Marine Corps scopes after each shot the scope is offset forward
and the shooter has to physically pull it back against the stops on the mount
to put it back in position to make the next shot.
And of course, since this is a scope that is mocked up on a rifle
that it's not actually appropriately suited for, it doesn't move.
And I mean at this point I'm not surprised that it doesn't move,
but I think it's worth pointing out that that's how the Unertl would have worked.
And if there was a movie done that did portray a US Marine Corps sniper
with one of these scopes on his rifle, that's how you would expect it.
... If they wanted to be right, that's how they would do it.
So those are our big primary issues with the rifle.
There are a couple of others which we don't need to get into in real detail, because they are just oopsies.
In one scene the bolt is actually set for disassembly, that safety flag is lifted all the way up.
In fact interesting point of order, with a proper Weaver scope you can't actually do that,
because that flag won't fit underneath the rear lens of the scope that way.
Also of course Jackson fires more than 5 rounds without reloading the thing.
OK fine, that's kind of a typical movie thing, in theory maybe they cut an edit where he reloaded it.
Those are less technical issues than the big ones.
... Oh, and of course Jackson is left-handed.
So one of the things that I do see people complaining about
when they are talking about the realism of the movie.
So Jackson's left-handed, so he's going to be holding the rifle like this.
What he does in every scene is he'll fire, and then he will reach over the gun
and cycle the bolt ... (locks open when it's empty) cycle the bolt like this.
And you can actually see him struggling to do that in a couple of scenes.
And people wonder well why didn't he shoot frankly the way that I typically shoot myself,
which is to use my front hand, my right hand,
to operate the bolt so that it's on the same side.
And ... honestly they are good explanations both ways.
If he had been using a shooting sling, which you do see him put on in one scene in the movie,
this arm would essentially be wrapped up and tied to the rifle.
And it's not practical to use it to cycle the bolt,
so you would reach over with your left hand as a left-handed shooter.
Frankly, I see that as less of a substantial issue.
Honestly it's kind of an interesting thing to see where, yeah, there were left-handed guys
who were issued sniper rifles, how did they operate those things?
And what Jackson does is a perfectly legitimate way to do it.
US Army snipers in World War Two didn't have a whole ton of training.
They certainly would not have had the sort of really detailed in-depth training
of ... what's the most efficient way to operate the rifle and get it totally ingrained.
They'd just be shooting the way they'd always normally shot.
So if Jackson were a kid who grew up shooting left-handed on a farm
reaching over the rifle to cycle the bolt because it was easy without having a scope in the way,
and then he just adapts that to a scope and has to struggle with it a little bit
once he gets into the army, that pretty well fits.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.