The Other American Sniper
By Mark Howell
Now that the Oscar nominators and the movie-going public have become thoroughly besotted with a U.S. Army sniper, it’s time for Howelings to give an FBI sharpshooter, who died last year at the incredible age of 106, his due.
Colonel Walter Rudolph Walsh was born May 4 1907 — a year before the FBI was founded— and became an FBI agent, then a United States Marine Corps shooting instructor and ultimately an Olympic shooter.
It was in 1934 that he joined the FBI, at the height of the Public Enemy era. He took part in many of the showdowns with Prohibition-era gangs in battles that featured what the London Sunday Times obituary called “bank heists, store robberies, running-board shootouts and rub-outs.” In 1934, it was Walsh who discovered the body of Chicago gangster Lester Joseph Gillis, better known as Baby Face Nelson, a bank robber and murderer who is said to have shot down more FBI agents before or since. In November 1934, Nelson was wounded in a gun battle with G-men but managed to get away, clinging to the running board of a stolen V8 Ford as an accomplice drove him away from the scene. Nelson would subsequently die of his wounds at home in bed, but before that, following an anonymous tip, Walsh found his very much still-warm body wrapped in a blanket in a ditch next to a Roman Catholic cemetery, Nelson’s wife later explaining that she had wrapped him in a blanket there because “he always hated being cold.”
A few months later, Walsh would apprehend Arthur “Doc” Barker, criminal son of the notorious “Ma,” who was wanted for a series of bank robberies, murders and kidnappings. Then in 1937, the FBI got a tip that that its public enemy number one, Al Brady, head of a gang responsible for some 200 bank robberies and four murders, was holed up in Bangor, Maine, where Walsh bushwhacked him and his entire gang in their getaway car outside a gun shop they were preparing to rob. During the fracas that followed, Walsh was shot in the chest, shoulder and hand. J. Edgar Hoover himself t fetched Walsh’s pregnant wife and escorted her on a plane to Maine so that she could visit her husband in hospital.
It is believed Walsh was responsible for the shooting deaths of 11 gangsters. A left-hander, he was said to be able to hit a bull’s-eye at 75 yards with a rifle and hit moving targets with a pistol. During World War Two he served in the Marines and trained snipers before himself participating in the invasion of Okinawa. After the war he became a member of the U.S. shooting team at the1948 Olympics in London. He continued to compete and win handgun awards into old age and in 1994, at the age of 87, he captained the United States team at the world muzzle loading championships in Switzerland.
In 1936 he married Kathleen Barber, who died in 1980. He is survived by two sons and three daughters.
Quote for the Week:
“‘Listen to me everybody! If we want to be saved, we’ve got to go to the bottom!’
“ ‘Up to the bottom?!’
“‘Yes, up to the bottom! Because all the people who are down on top are dead! ‘We’ve got to work our way up to the propeller room!’
“‘Yeah? And what will we get there?’”
“‘The shaft! But it’s a sacrifice God wants us to make….’”
— Mad Magazine, Sept. 1973, from “The Poop-side Adventure,” a spoof of “The Poseidon Adventure,” cited by Rachel Kushner of The London Review of Books as a social metaphor for Carnival Corporation’s Costa Concordia.
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Thanks, Mark. RIP Colonel Walsh. He took out actual criminals , not women and children. Below is an excerpt from a “Vice” interview with Michael Moore after the tweet kerfuffle. Below that is the link to the entire interview, if you so desire…I always look forward to your column because I always learn a something. Thanks.
“Snipers were first called sharpshooters or marksmen, they weren’t called snipers until World War I, and it was really the Germans in World War I who perfected the concept of the sniper, not the Allies. And then that really carried over. In WWII, I think you can look this up, but two thirds of all kills from snipers occurred from German and Japanese soldiers. And as the war went on the Russians figured it out and how to do it. What Eisenhower did in 1956, 1957—we had the US sniper school in Camp Perry in Ohio—and he closed it down.
People should practice saying it [we lost]. We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan.
Why?
I don’t know. I mean I’ve been doing some research this week. It remained closed for 30 years until Reagan reopened it in 1987 at Fort Benning. There was a lot of talk after Korea—a vet told me this story—saying that it just didn’t feel like the American way. Snipers are really needed by the invading force. As defenders, you know, there’s all kind of preying that goes on—like if we were actually attacked we would all, as such, become snipers, if you wanted to use that word. But when the liberators come, it’s the snipers that’s taking out the liberators. And that’s the confusion of course when you watch FOX News. I mean, talking about American Sniper —they’re talking about American soldiers as the liberators of Iraq! We didn’t liberate anything. In fact we made it worse, and we lost the war! Write that in the loss column. And people should practice saying it. We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan. Why do we invent this fairy tale about ourselves? It does no good, and it is only going to get us into more trouble in the future.
http://www.vice.com/read/exclusive-interview-michael-moore-on-american-sniper-sarah-palin-and-ptsd-261