They Mocked the Farm Boy’s ‘Backyard’ Rifle — Until It Took Out 6 German Officers in 2 Days

Discover the astonishing untold story of Corporal Daniel Webster Hale, the quiet Pennsylvania farm boy whose “toy” Winchester Model 70 hunting rifle humiliated German command, rewrote expectations of infantry firepower, and forced the U.S. Army to bend its own rules in the frozen, shattered streets of Kommerscheidt in November 1944. While every other GI in the 28th Infantry Division carried standard-issue M1 Garands, Hale clung to his customized civilian rifle – a hand-bedded, heavy-barrel .30-06 topped with a Lyman Alaskan scope and tuned to a two-pound trigger in a barn workshop outside Gettysburg – a weapon First Sergeant Mitchell tried to confiscate and officers dismissed as “that damn toy gun” until it began dropping German soldiers with eerie, single-shot precision at 500 yards and beyond. This meticulously researched documentary follows Hale from his teenage years hunting groundhogs at 400 yards because “ammo costs money and you don’t get a second shot,” through basic training where his marksmanship stunned range officers, to the brutal Hürtgen and Kommerscheidt campaigns, where his backyard rifle quietly became Company G’s most feared asset. Over 48 cold, fog-choked hours in November 1944, Hale set up in a wrecked barn’s hayloft and turned a regimental headquarters into a deathtrap, methodically eliminating six key German officers – including the regimental commander, operations officer, and intelligence chief – with six shots at 520 yards, paralyzing enemy command and control without a single American or civilian casualty while German counter-snipers and artillery barrages flailed helplessly at a position they never managed to find. Drawing on after-action reports, interrogation summaries, and postwar doctrinal studies, this video reveals how Hale’s eventual 78 confirmed kills, all first-round hits with his Winchester, forced Major General Norman Cota to issue a personal written exemption authorizing the non-standard weapon, created one of the U.S. Army’s first proto–designated marksman roles, and later influenced Cold War doctrine that led to purpose-built precision rifles and marksman programs. Beyond the numbers, we explore the psychological shock inside the German ranks as a single unseen shooter made windows and doorways lethal, the bureaucratic fights over whether one farm boy’s rifle should be allowed to break regulations in the name of results, and Hale’s own postwar reckoning as he returned to the same Pennsylvania fields, using the same rifle on groundhogs while quietly admitting that “every German I shot was someone’s son.” From the first mocked appearance of a civilian rifle on a European battlefield to the moment the Army Ordnance Museum tried and failed to take it away because Hale still considered it just “a working tool,” this is the forgotten saga of how a $170 backyard build outperformed every official sniper rifle in its theater, proved that practical skill and individual initiative can be more decisive than standardized equipment, and showed that sometimes the most devastating weapon in a world war is the one a stubborn farm kid brings from home and refuses to surrender.