page_title: Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard
section_title: Innovations
hierarchical_section_title: Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard / Military service / Innovations
caption_attribution_description: English: "Spotting the Enemy Sniper" Soldiers raise a dummy head on a stick, to allow it to be shot and reveal the position of an enemy sniper. Deutsch: "Den feindlichen Schützen ausspähen" Die Soldaten heben einen Dummy an einem Stock, um einen Schuß zu provozieren und so die Position des Schützen zu ermitteln.
context_page_description: Major Hesketh Vernon Prichard, later Hesketh-Prichard DSO MC FRGS FZS was an explorer, adventurer, big-game hunter and marksman who made a significant contribution to sniping practice within the British Army during the First World War. Concerned not only with improving the quality of marksmanship, the measures he introduced to counter the threat of German snipers were credited by a contemporary with saving the lives of over 3,500 Allied soldiers.
  During his lifetime, he also explored territory never seen before by a European, played cricket at first-class level, including on overseas tours, wrote short stories and novels and was a successful newspaper correspondent and travel writer. His many activities brought him into the highest social and professional circles. Like other turn of the century hunters such as Teddy Roosevelt, he was an active campaigner for animal welfare and succeeded in seeing legal measures introduced for their protection.
context_section_description: He recognised German skill in constructing trench parapets: by making use of an irregular top and face to the parapet, and constructing it from material of varying composition, the presence of a sniper or an observer poking his head up became much less conspicuous. In contrast, British trench practice had been to give a military-straight neat edge to the parapet top, making any movement or protrusion immediately obvious.
  An observer was vulnerable to an enemy sniper firing a bullet through his loophole, but Hesketh-Prichard devised a metal-armoured double loophole that would protect him. The front loophole was fixed, but the rear was housed in a metal shutter sliding in grooves. Only when the two loopholes were lined up—a one-to-twenty chance—could an enemy shoot between them.
  Another innovation was the use of a dummy head to find the location of an enemy sniper. The tempting target of a realistic papier-mâché head was raised above the parapet on a stick running in a groove on a fixed board. To increase the realism, a lit cigarette could be inserted into the dummy's mouth and be smoked by a soldier via a rubber tube. If the head was shot, it was dropped rapidly, simulating a casualty. The sniper's bullet would have made a hole in the front and back of the dummy's head. The head was then raised in the groove again, but lower than before by the vertical distance between the glasses of a trench periscope. If the lower glass of a periscope was placed before the front bullet hole, its upper glass would be at exactly the same height as the bullet had been. By looking through the rear hole in the head, through the front hole and up through the periscope, the soldier would be looking exactly along the line the bullet had taken, and so would be looking directly at the sniper, revealing his position.
caption: Soldiers raise a dummy head to locate an enemy sniper
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