What's Wrong with Private Jackson's Sniper Rifle? (Saving Private Ryan)

hey 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 Saving Private Ryan specifically how the 1903 A4 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 Saving Private Ryan 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's also some problems and when I went back and rewatched it with an eye specifically towards private Jax and sniper rifle yeah it was it was pretty bad Barry Pepper who played our sniper in Saving Private Ryan never had a correct 03 A4 in his hands during the entire movie but you could because I've actually teamed up with a veteran-owned small business called get entered to win.com to give 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opportunity because uh this contest Ends Tonight so check out the link in the description text below if you would like to get this go.getunterduin.com forgotten weapons and good luck 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 1903 A4 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 o3a4 the Lyman Alaskan was the scope that the US military preferred 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 alignment Alaskan the actual scope the Weaver 330 has its adjustment knobs 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 the front sight is missing as it is in the movie that's that's correct but not the right scope and given the attention to detail and other aspects of the movie I'm not sure why exactly this slipped through the cracks uh now there were Lyman alaskans that were retrofitted onto rebuilt o3a4s after World War II they did see some use uh in Korea although the majority of them went on the vast majority of them went on to m1c Garand snipers but you would never have run into one of these rifles with a lime and Alaskan in the European theater or really anywhere in World War II 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 a 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 this the scope that he's got on his rifle is insufficient for the task and well he's not necessarily wrong on that it's a two and three quarter Power Scope pretty low magnification and Jackson's solution is to go to that that tube I think it's on the shoulder that he's had on his back the whole time and by the way that is a correct appears to be correct carrying case for a new nerdal eight Power Scope and he pulls that thing out and sticks it on his rifle now we have like five simultaneous problems here uh first off the owner adult was used as a scope on a World War II sniper but it was the Marine Corps sniper rifle and private Jackson's 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 uh 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 uh there are no Marines there there are not going to be any Marine Corps sniper rifles there it's just private Jackson is standard issue 1903 A4 uh the other problem here is that the mounting points for the owner tool are not the same as the mounting points for this guy this has a mounting a front mounting point up here on the receiver on the inertial Scopes they actually mount a a scope mounting block up here in the middle of the handguard and the rifles have basically customized hand guards that are cut away so that they can put a mounting point up on the front end of the rifle they're also for what it's worth they're also 1903 standard rifles not O3 a4s so they actually have rear sights on them the Marine Corps rifles have front sights on them they're really I mean 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 unurkle it it's physically impossible and there weren't any hurdles there so that's our biggest single issue of the movie I think now let's just accept at this point that okay Jackson has an inertile eight Power Scope on his rifle fine uh 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 over some cover and uh goes to figure out where the the shot's going to be in a Justice scope to make the shot and what you see him doing is cranking on the the front objective of the scope which is adjustable on the inertile if you listen you can hear him saying two clicks windage well the problem is he's not actually adjusting windage what adjusts 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're not then if your eye is off center 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 inertial to set the 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 well here it's right there on the nerdle there like right over here uh actually they're on the front mount of the scope in fact if you look at this still frame of of the universal scope you can see that it doesn't have a mounting point out in front where a real and Ertel would have one and that's because they have to clutch it onto an o3a4 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 filmmakers 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 uh one of the interesting things about the inertial 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 an inertial 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 1903 A1 snipers they decided to leave deliberately 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 inertile would have worked and if there was a movie done that did portray a U.S Marine Corps sniper with one of these scopes on his rifle that's how you would expect it uh that 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 others which we don't need to get into in real detail because they're just oopsies um in one scene the the bolt is actually set for disassembly that that safety flag is lifted all the way up uh in fact interesting point of order with a proper uh Weaver scope you can't actually do that because that flag won't fit underneath the rear lens of the scope that way um also of course Jackson fires more than five rounds without reloading the thing okay fine that's kind of a typical movie thing in theory maybe they cut and edit where he reloaded it but uh those are less technical issues than the big ones so oh and of course uh Jackson's left-handed so one of the things that I do see people complaining about uh when they're talking about the 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 so fire and then he will reach over the Gun and Cycle the bolt 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 they're honestly they're 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 bolts 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 U.S army snipers in World War II didn't have a whole ton of training they certainly would not have had the sort of really detailed in-depth training of how to properly like 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 well if you'd like to have the rifle that private Jackson should have had that is the correct authentic original 1903 A4 this specific one right here you do have a chance to win that one yourself whether you want it for shooting or just for collecting today tonight is your very last opportunity to uh to get a chance to win it so check out the link in the description text below go.getenteredtowin.com forgotten weapons uh good luck to you check it out hopefully you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 25,678

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly

Id: v2Eagq3fI0E

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023