From 600 Yards in the Rain, They Hit Helmet Rims and Grenade Pins So Often That a Captured German Officer Swore U.S. Marines Were Using “Witchcraft” Instead of Rifles

The first time the Germans called it witchcraft, Corporal Joe Harkins was trying very hard not to sneeze.

The rain had been coming down all morning in a cold, thin curtain, soaking the French hillside and turning the low ground into a patchwork of puddles and slick clay. The sky was a flat gray sheet. The wind smelled like wet wool and cordite.

Harkins lay on his stomach along a shallow rise, chin barely off the mud, the butt of his M1 braced tight in his shoulder. His helmet dripped. His sleeves dripped. His nose dripped.

Just don’t sneeze, he told himself. You can’t blame the wind on a flyer if you jerk the whole rifle.

Beside him, Lance Corporal Eddie “Chicago” Russo adjusted his own sight and then, because he never could keep his mouth shut, muttered:

“You realize, back home, this’d be perfect weather to stay in bed. Maybe read the sports page. Not go hunting Germans from the prone.”

“Back home,” Harkins said quietly, “we’d be on the rifle range anyway. Sergeant Turner would say rain builds character.”

Eddie snorted softly.

“Sergeant Turner thought breathing built character,” he said. “I miss that miserable man.”

Ahead of them, the ground sloped down toward a hedgerow-lined field and, beyond that, a small crossroads village that someone in Division had circled on a map and called “important.”

They’d been told the Germans might counterattack to push them off this ridge.

They’d been told to be ready.

Harkins liked being ready.

He wiped a glove across his eyes, blinked the rain away, and looked again through the little ring of his rear sight, watching the shapes below.

“What’d the scouts say?” Eddie asked. “Company strength?”

“Less,” Harkins murmured. “Probably a platoon. Maybe two. Armor’s farther back. This is just the guys who still think they can sneak.”

“Lucky us.”

They lay there for another ten minutes, listening.

It came first as a vibration in the ground more than a sound, then as the faint clink of equipment, the rustle of boots on wet grass.

Figures slipped into view beyond the hedgerow: gray-green uniforms, helmets low, rifles held at the ready. They moved carefully, but not carefully enough for men who knew someone was watching.

Eddie’s breath slowed. Harkins’ world narrowed.

He wasn’t thinking about “witchcraft.”

He was thinking about lessons.

About a sandy parade deck on Parris Island, with Sergeant Turner’s voice hammering into a humid dawn:

“Marines don’t spray bullets! You place them! Sight picture. Bone support. Natural point of aim. You get three things right, the rifle will do the rest!”

He’d thought it was just yelling at the time.

Now it was the rhythm his muscles moved to.

Downrange, a German corporal raised his head, peering toward the ridge, eyes narrowed against the rain. His helmet brim made a clean, hard line about six inches tall.

Harkins’ front sight post climbed lazily up from the man’s chest and stopped right at that line.

He let his lungs half empty.

Press, not jerk.

The M1 kicked, a quick, familiar push.

The German corporal’s helmet popped up and off as if someone had flicked it. The man went straight down, his rifle slipping from his hands.

Eddie let out a low whistle.

“Six hundred yards,” he murmured. “And you give him a haircut.”

“Helmet was shiny,” Harkins said, but he felt a small knot of satisfaction settle in his chest.

Below, the column halted.

They’d heard the shot, but they hadn’t seen it.

That mattered.

Men who saw their comrade fall to a visible gun could shoot back.

Men who saw him fall with no obvious source… hesitated.

That hesitation was where Harkins and Eddie lived.

“Second from the left,” Eddie said softly. “The one giving hand signals.”

Harkins saw him—a younger soldier, maybe twenty, lips moving as he shouted orders, fingers flashing directions.

Before Harkins could line up, Eddie fired.

The German’s hand froze mid-gesture. For a fraction of a second, his fingers splayed in a strange, claw-like shape. Then his arm dropped and he folded, face-first, into the ditch by the hedgerow.

“Call that one ‘broken signal,’” Eddie said.

Somewhere behind them, a machine gun opened up, rattling a steady stream of rounds into the hedgerow, tearing leaves and throwing up dirt. Mortars thumped. The whole line came to life.

But the first two shots that started it?

Those were Harkins’ and Eddie’s.

Later, prisoners would call that first minute “cursed.”

In the moment, it was just marksmanship.

They worked their way down the field: officers, runners, men who stayed up too long.

Harkins wasn’t faster than any other Marine. He was calmer.

They had a saying in the platoon: “Harkins doesn’t miss, he reschedules.”

He sighted, assessed, and only then fired. Each bullet had a job before it left the barrel.

By the time the firefight settled into a roar and the Germans broke contact, leaving three bodies in the ditch and dragging others away, the ridge was still in American hands.

No one talked about “magic” that day.

They talked about “good shooting.”

“Good shooting,” of course, was just another way to say: we did what we were trained to do.

The “witchcraft” comment came a week later, in a different field, under a different sky.

The Marines had pushed the line forward, hedgerow by hedgerow, village by village, through a countryside that seemed determined to offer cover for every possible ambush.

The enemy had learned.

They didn’t walk in straight lines anymore. They didn’t bunch up. They kept their heads lower and their movements quicker.

And still, men went down when they did something as simple as stand too tall.

“Rumor is,” Morales, from the next squad over, said one afternoon as they filled canteens from a livestock trough, “they’re starting to think we’ve got glass we can see through hills with.”

“Glass?” Eddie said. “You mean like scopes? We had those in ’18. Germans had them too.”

“No, no,” Morales said. “I mean… like magic glass. Buddy in the interrogator’s tent said one of the prisoners asked if the snipers were Hexen—you know, witches.”

Harkins raised an eyebrow.

“That what he actually said?” he asked.

“Word he used was ‘Hexerei,’” Morales said. “Witchcraft. Said his company commander told them to stay away from open ground if Marines were in front of them, because ‘they shoot like the devil is holding their rifles.’”

Eddie grinned.

“Well,” he said, “devil or not, I missed breakfast, so I’ll take the compliment.”

Harkins didn’t grin.

He thought about the big sign over the entrance to the rifle range back at Parris Island: “Every Marine a Rifleman.”

People had laughed at it the first day. Called it a slogan.

By the time they graduated, it felt like a promise.

He’d seen men in other units fire their rifles sideways, from the hip, eyes closed.

Marines didn’t do that.

Not if Sergeant Turner had anything to say about it.

They’d been on the line for three weeks when the real test came.

It was late afternoon; the sun was a watery ball behind high clouds. The air had that tired feeling that came between rainstorms.

The Marines of Fox Company were dug in along a tree line overlooking a road junction. The road ran from left to right, then curved toward a village whose church tower poked up over the houses like a accusing finger.

“Armor intel says they’ll try to punch through here,” Captain Barnes had said during the briefing. “They’ve got a couple of self-propelled guns and infantry support. We’ve got a battery of 105s on call and some angry machine gunners. I want those first infantry waves cut to ribbons before they even think about using that road.”

He’d looked right at Harkins’ squad as he said it.

“You lads,” he added, “get the long shots.”

Harkins and Eddie took positions slightly forward, nesting in the roots of an old oak tree that leaned over the field.

Through a gap in the hedgerow, Harkins could see the junction clearly. A fence line. A culvert. A small rise that would hide anyone walking behind it for a few seconds.

The machine guns behind him would take anyone foolish enough to stay on the road.

His job was to reach out farther.

He counted ranges in his head.

Two hundred… three… four…

At five hundred yards, the details got fuzzy if you didn’t know how to read them.

He knew.

He’d grown up in Kansas, where the horizon was a straight line and you could tell how far a grain silo was by the way it smudged against the sky.

Out here, in France, distances felt different. Cluttered. But the principles were the same.

Size and shape.

And wind.

The first Germans appeared as cautious dots near the rise, heads low, bodies hunched.

They weren’t walking this time. They were crawling.

They paused behind the crest, only helmets showing.

Harkins watched.

In his headset, Barnes’ voice cracked softly: “Hold your fire until they commit. Let them think it’s safe.”

It wasn’t safe.

Not with trained riflemen watching.

“Three on the left,” Eddie whispered. “Two on the right. One fiddling with something.”

The one fiddling with something was lifting binoculars.

Harkins shifted his point of aim a degree.

The shot was long, but not extreme. Four hundred and fifty yards, maybe.

For a man who’d spent endless days putting rounds into man-sized targets at five hundred on the range, it was just a question of staying boring.

He made boring holy.

Front sight. Rear sight. A breath. A press.

The binoculars jumped into the air as if slapped. The man behind them went limp, sliding down the back of the rise and out of sight.

Small victory.

Big effect.

The others froze.

That was their mistake.

Behind Harkins, an artillery observer saw the pause and called in a quick correction.

Ten seconds later, the rise itself vanished in a fountain of dirt as a 105 shell landed almost exactly on it.

“You see that?” Eddie whispered. “He had binoculars for that. You just were binoculars.”

“Stop talking,” Harkins said, but he felt his lips twitch.

The Germans tried again.

They shifted farther left, sending a squad through a drainage ditch that ran parallel to the road.

Harkins had seen that ditch an hour earlier. He’d put a mental circle around it.

Now, when the top of a helmet appeared just above the ditch line, he knew exactly how far away it was.

He fired.

The helmet collapsed into the ditch.

This time, the Germans didn’t freeze.

They fired back.

Bullets cracked overhead, snapping branches, showering bark.

Harkins stayed low.

“You good?” Eddie asked.

“Fine.”

“They’re learning,” Eddie murmured. “Means fewer easy shots.”

“Doesn’t change the fundamentals,” Harkins said.

He shifted his eye to the next gap.

Two men made a dash from the ditch to a crumbled wall near the culvert. They were fast and low.

He didn’t try for both.

He picked one, laid the front sight a step ahead of where the man’s chest would be by the time the bullet arrived, and squeezed.

The man pitched forward mid-stride, sliding into the grass and staying there.

The second reached the wall, pressed his back to it, and peeked.

Someone else got him with a burst from a BAR.

Teamwork, Harkins thought. This isn’t magic. It’s math and teamwork.

They held the junction.

The Germans tried to push infantry through three times.

Each time, they lost more men to accurate fire long before they reached the Marines’ main line.

Artillery did its part. Machine guns did theirs.

But afterwards, when they counted spent casings and swapped stories in the deepening dark, it was the precise, first shots that everyone remembered.

Like the one Harkins had put clean through the vision slot of a half-rolled-down hatch on a self-propelled gun, sending the crew inside into such a panic that they abandoned the vehicle.

“Witchcraft,” Morales said again later, sitting on an ammo crate and smoking a cigarette down to the filter. “That POW today? The lieutenant asked him why they kept trying to run that junction. You know what he said?”

“‘Orders’?” Eddie guessed.

“Well, yeah,” Morales said. “But after that. He said—how’d it go—‘We were told Marines are just men. But they’re not. They hit like ghosts. It’s like they see us before we exist.’”

He exhaled smoke.

“They think it’s something… beyond,” Morales added. “Can’t be training, so it must be… whatever their word is. Hexerei.”

Harkins cleaned his rifle, running the oiled patch down the bore until it came out mostly white.

“That’s the funny part,” he said softly. “It’s only training.”

Eddie looked at him.

“Only?” he said. “I remember wanting to throw this thing into the swamp the third time Turner made us fire in the wind. ‘Hold for quarter value! Half value!’ Like I’m supposed to see the flags and do math.”

“You are supposed to do math,” Harkins said. “You did. You just didn’t admit it.”

He thought about that day on the range when the wind had shifted halfway through a string and half the recruits’ rounds had walked off the target.

The instructors hadn’t slowed down.

They’d made them adjust, note impacts, correct.

Make the rifle an extension of your body.

Know the sights like you know your own hands.

Witchcraft was what people called that when they hadn’t put in the time.

The story spread.

Not just among American units, who were happy to repeat anything that made them sound ten feet tall, but among the Germans on the other side, who were less enthusiastic about having to cross ground watched by Marines.

Interrogation reports, when anyone in intelligence bothered to read them all the way through, gained the occasional colorful line.

“Unit reported suffering heavy losses to rifle fire at ranges previously thought ineffective.”
“Enemy marksmanship described by multiple prisoners as ‘unbelievably precise.’”
“One sergeant insisted we were using special weapons or occult assistance.”

Nobody in G-2 took the “occult” part seriously.

In the foxholes, though, the men joked about it.

“Hey, Harkins,” Eddie said once, as they crouched behind a stone wall waiting to move. “You bring your witchcraft today?”

Harkins patted his rifle.

“Got all the spell components right here,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” Morales piped up. “And what are they?”

Harkins held up his fingers, counting them off.

“A front sight I actually cleaned,” he said. “Elbows on something solid. And not rushing the shot.”

Eddie laughed.

“Well,” he said, “that’s one ritual I can get behind.”

The closest Harkins ever came to meeting the “witchcraft” comment in person was on a gray morning after a hard week, when the line had moved past a village and left behind a half-collapsed farmhouse commandeered as a makeshift interrogation point.

He’d been sent back to bring forward more ammo when he heard raised voices in accented English from the open doorway.

“…I am telling you, it was impossible!” a German voice insisted. “We were behind the wall. No heads exposed. Still, my men fall. One puts helmet on stick. Helmet shot. Another puts canteen up. Canteen shot. No sound before, no sound after. Just crack and then… empty.”

A U.S. lieutenant, leaning against the doorframe, caught sight of Harkins and gave him a quick nod.

“You’re saying,” the lieutenant said, “that your men exposed equipment and it was hit at long range? Might have been luck. Might have been more than one man firing.”

The German officer shook his head, eyes wide.

“Not luck,” he said. “Twelve times. Helmet, canteen, sight tube, hand above trench… bullet every time, very fast, very precise.”

He leaned forward, lowering his voice.

“My men say these Marines… they practice this since they are children,” he said. “They say they… I struggle with the word… they summon bullets.”

Harkins almost laughed at that.

Summon bullets.

If only ammunition came that easy.

He shifted his weight, the floorboard creaked, and the German officer looked up.

Their eyes met for half a second.

Harkins saw a tired man in his thirties, uniform wrinkled, face lined.

The German saw a muddy Marine with a rifle sling over his shoulder and a expression that was more worn than angry.

For a heartbeat, the room telescoped.

Harkins thought of every muddy day on the range, every sore elbow from snapping-in practice where they’d pointed empty rifles at black silhouettes painted on a berm for hours.

The German thought—Harkins could only guess—of his own training. Maybe a bayonet course. Maybe firing from the hip in front of cheering instructors.

Then the moment passed.

The lieutenant cleared his throat.

“Rifles and practice,” he said. “Nothing occult about it. We just give our boys more bullets and more time on the range.”

The German glanced back at Harkins one more time.

“If that is true,” he said slowly, “then perhaps… that is worse.”

The lieutenant frowned.

“Worse?” he asked.

“Because then it is not… fate,” the German said. “It is simply that you cared more about hitting us than we cared about hitting you.”

He settled back in his chair.

“That,” he added softly, “feels like a different kind of curse.”

Harkins carried that line with him longer than he expected.

He thought about it when the war was done, when the rifle was cleaned and turned in and he was back in Kansas finding out that fields were somehow brighter and smaller and the sky was bigger than he remembered.

At the county fair one summer, a few years after he’d traded green for denim, he stopped by the shooting gallery mostly out of habit.

A row of tin ducks on a rail. A rack of .22s.

A teenager ahead of him fired a few shots, missing more than he hit. He laughed, shrugged, handed the rifle back.

“Wind,” he said to his girl, though there was barely a breeze.

Harkins took his turn.

For a moment, the noise and bright lights faded, replaced by the memory of rain on a French hillside.

Front sight. Rear sight. Bone support. Press.

Ting. Ting. Ting.

The gallery owner raised his eyebrows.

“Army?” he asked.

“Marines,” Harkins said.

“Makes sense,” the man replied. “You fellows always hit the ducks. Little bit spooky.”

Harkins smiled, just a little.

“It’s not spooky,” he said. “It’s just… we practiced.”

Later, sitting on the tailgate of his truck watching the sun set over fields that looked more peaceful than any horizon had a right to be, he thought again of the German officer’s words.

You cared more about hitting us than we cared about hitting you.

He didn’t like the idea of “caring” about killing.

That wasn’t quite right.

He cared about doing what he’d been asked to do so that the men to his left and right went home.

If that meant hitting a helmet at six hundred yards or clipping a canteen off a belt at five hundred, then yes.

He cared.

The Germans could call it witchcraft.

The Hollywood newsreels could call it heroism.

The posters could call it legend.

He knew better.

It was hours and hours of Sergeant Turner’s voice in his ear. It was sore shoulders and chapped hands and the sting of sand in his eyes on the firing line. It was arithmetic done without thinking—wind and distance and drop—and the discipline not to waste a bullet on something you hadn’t already understood.

It wasn’t magic.

But if the men on the other side wanted to believe it was, Harkins figured that was their business.

For him, it was enough to know that, when someone said “Hold this line,” he could put the front sight where it needed to be and trust that the years of drilling would do the rest.

That, he thought, wasn’t witchcraft.

It was just a promise kept.

THE END