Australia's Gallipoli Sniper: Billy Sing: 1915 World's Most Lethal Military Sharpshooter?

MELBOURNE, Australia, Feb. 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- An Anzac Light Horseman from Queensland, Australia, Billy Sing, may hold the world record as the most lethal military sharpshooter, from WW1.

Billy Sing was the most successful and feared sniper of the Gallipoli campaign and was almost unique among the Australian troops in having a Shanghainese-born father and English mother. A combination of patience, stealth and an incredible eye made him utterly deadly, with over 200 credited "kills", but a possible 300, all while using a .303 calibre rifle and being meticulously hunted by an enemy sniper.

The sniper has always caused terror on the battlefield. He stalks and chooses his target without the victim knowing. Suddenly, everyone is the target. The bullet comes out of nowhere. Where will he strike and who will be next? The question is as old as history and as modern as today.

Sing became famous on Gallipoli, an individual legend among the men on the heights who called him The Assassin. Everyone remarked on his patience. The sniper always took his time about killing. Time enough to find the target through the folding brass telescope, time for him to carefully centre the foresight of his rifle in the V, time for him to gently take up the pressure on the trigger, time to squeeze off a single shot.

Yet he was a man with a sense of humour, a man who'd dig people in the ribs to share a laugh, a man who, according to the old timers who could still remember him after the war, had a very distinctive high-pitched laugh.

He had begun his working life as a tough, laconic station stockman and then became a hardened cane cutter. He'd grown up in the outback and was said to be a deadly shot. Why, while still a boy, so the story went, he could shoot the tail off a piglet at 25 paces with a .22 rifle. His name was William Edward Sing. Everyone called him Billy.

It is also the story of a soldier coming home, a celebrated killer trying to return to the ways of peacetime, and the struggles he faced before disappearing, forgotten, his resting place a pauper's grave.

GALLIPOLI SNIPER, THE LIFE OF BILLY SING, by John Hamilton is an extraordinary account of a hidden side of the Gallipoli campaign – the snipers' war.

Following Sing from his recruitment onwards, Hamilton takes us on a journey into the squalor, dust, blood and heroism of Gallipoli, seen from the inimitable viewpoint of a sniper.

About the author:

Former White House correspondent, John Hamilton, an international newspaperman of 50 years, was Washington Bureau Chief for the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times in Washington D.C. in the 1970s, and his "Farewell to America" was published in the Congressional Record in 1979.

Hamilton's three meticulously researched books about the fate of the Australian Light Horse in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during WW1, are current best selling books published by Pan Macmillan in Australia and New Zealand entitled "Goodbye Cobber, God Bless You" "Gallipoli Sniper, The Life of Billy Sing" and "The Price of Valour."

All three will be published in April 2015 by Frontline Books/Pen and Sword

UK entitled: "Gallipoli Sniper, the Remarkable Story of Billy Sing", "Fatal Charge at Gallipoli" and "Gallipoli Victoria Cross Hero".

For further information, please contact:

Kay Hamilton
Director, Kay Hamilton & Associates
[email protected]
http://www.kayhamilton.com.au

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SOURCE Frontline Books

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