This link quotes from the U.S. Army field manual on sniper tactics. I'm extrapolating from this part of the sniper's mission statement (emphasis mine): "... the sniper creates casualties among enemy troops, slows enemy movement, frightens enemy soldiers, lowers morale, and adds confusion to their operations." Leaving a sniper behind would accomplish the goal of slowing enemy movement. If you are withdrawing from an area, it would be to your advantage to slow down your pursuers. War movie depictions of combat aren't realistic, they're dramatic entertainment. In real combat, no soldier wants to die, and incoming sniper fire would cause advancing troops to halt their advance and seek cover and concealment while they locate and remove the threat, which could take hours or longer.

Another quote from the manual: "A sniper team must never become decisively engaged with the enemy." The manual then goes on to describe how the sniper team should disengage from the enemy and avoid prolonged combat. I interpret this to mean the famous "shoot and scoot". If the objective is to delay enemy troops, fix them in position for a larger attack, and lower morale, then just a few shots/hits are all that's needed. I suspect it's even better tactically if the sniper withdraws before being located - it leave the enemy wondering where and when the next shots will come from. Locating and eliminating the sniper permits the sniper's adversaries to regain mobility and confidence, and thus a sniper "suicide mission" is probably less effective than if the sniper makes his kills, then withdraws to fight again later.

Watching BoB recently myself I was wondering the same thing. As another question, would the snipers instead surrender instead of essentially suiciding? How would their COs know if they did or were captured?

Do films and TV series accurately portray the plight of snipers during WWII?

I'd say they do. Certainly they do not go very much in depth, but what they show(there's a great amount of artistic licensing but still), seems to be fairly accurate. "Enemy at the Gates" is the best movie(I've seen) which deals with the issue of sniping in Stalingrad and I'd say it's pretty accurate.

As most WWII depictions that I've seen are from an Allied POV, it's usually German snipers that are left behind in towns occupied by the Allies. Was this a common tactic for Allied snipers as well?

Not sure about them being left behind in occupied towns, but it is historically accurate that snipers would often operate behind enemy lines. I guess sometimes they would be left behind enemy lines, sometimes they would crawl for entire kilometers to get behind enemy lines. In the jungles of the Pacific Islands Japanese snipers were notorious for tying themselves to the higher branches of trees and sit quietly while the enemy was passing them by and then they would shoot the American soldiers from behind.

Now regarding German snipers: they saw plenty of action after D-Day, in the French country side so it is likely they did adopt that tactic.

Regarding Allied snipers: There was plenty of sniper activity after the collapse of France and the retreat to Dunkirk. What you are describing is a defensive tactic and after D-Day the Allies were on the offensive, so I would presume no. [with the exception of the Soviets on the Eastern front. The ruined city of Stalingrad was a perfect location for snipers. There were Russian snipers peppered throughout the city that made movement about the city difficult for the Germans.

If a sniper is left alone in a town occupied by hundreds or thousands of enemy soldiers, he will surely meet his demise if he starts shooting. How did they get snipers to engage in such suicidal behavior?

Well, firstly, you could say it was not hard for the Japanese Empire. Their culture encouraged extreme loyalty to the Emperor, thus suicidal behaviour was not a rarity.

In the European Front: If you think about it, it is not so suicidal. Soldiers were particularly afraid of snipers, mostly due to the fact that they did not know where the shots were coming from. I am not certain what you have seen in the movies, but the most important thing for a sniper was to not be found. If he was found, he was dead. Enemy soldiers could either flank his position or counter snipe him. But it is hard to locate a sniper. After a sniper fired his shot and killed an enemy soldier, the remaining men would immediately fall to the ground, to avoid being killed, or they would run to cover, they would not immediately run after the sniper. How could they, if they didn't know where he was? Therefore the sniper had plenty of time to either abandon the area(more difficult is the town was fully occupied, but still not impossible, they were masters of stealth) or relocate. Relocation was a common tactic for snipers. They would constantly change position after firing a few shots to avoid being found. So you can see, this behaviour was not 'suicidal', since it wasn't easy to find them.

(Okay after seeing your Band of Brothers scene, I have some comments. The movies were not that accurate, after all.

1. You can see how soldiers quickly rush to cover after the sniper fires, but one would be foolish to stick his head out like that to try and find the sniper. That almost didn't happen, you just couldn't risk it. After everyone hides, the sniper is focusing at those corners. The second you stuck your head out...you were dead.

2. Sniper hid themselves better than that. No self-respecting sniper sticks that close to the window and let the barrel of the gun stick out of the window. A passing enemy soldier can spot the barrel, hurl a grenade in the room and he's dead. Instead snipers fire from the center or the back of the room. Making it much more harder to spot them.

Nevertheless, there were cases when relocating or escaping was difficult or impossible for the sniper. There are instances when German snipers, after firing all their bullets or running out of food, they would simply give up and be taken prisoner.. So you can see they did not fight to the death. However they were not treated like other prisoners or war.

Were captured snipers more likely to be poorly treated by their capturers than other POVs? This book[1] claims that soldiers "have a special hatred for enemy snipers" and that they might consequently be treated less humanely.

Yes, indeed, snipers were very much hated, not only by enemy soldiers, but by their fellow one as well. There were plenty of reasons for that:

-Soldiers felt that snipers were not playing a fair game. The usual soldier can see the enemy soldier and vice versa. A shootout proceeds and the best one is the winner. The snipers, according to soldiers, were not playing by the book, by hiding and stalking their prey.

-Soldiers were very afraid of them. Fear of snipers was second to fear of artillery shelling only. Watching your comrades getting their brains blown away around you and not knowing where the fire was coming from was particularly terrifying and this fear was turned into hatred whenever a sniper was caught.

-They were hated even by their fellow soldiers because snipers were not usual soldiers. All the vulgar tasks of the usual soldier such as: digging(there was plenty of digging), pushing artillery or tanks when stuck in mud, clearing an area of corpses etc. A sniper was not expected to do all this. Snipers also were not very disciplined. The nature of their job required them to work independently, so the discipline that existed among soldiers, the fear when an officer screamed at you was lacking in snipers. Snipers were very much separated from regular soldiers. They operated alone or in small groups of 2 people and they were mostly out of the camp, in enemy territory, so there was not much chance for bonding.

All these factors made snipers hated by enemy soldiers and despised by even their fellow ones.

Because of that when snipers surrendered or were caught, they were treated much more roughly then common POWs. The case I mentioned above was not uncommon: a sniper surrendering when he ran out of food or ammunition after having picked off a few enemy soldiers. How can you expect the soldiers to treat this sniper with decency after he was picking off his comrades a few hours ago?

Because snipers often caused an advancing force to halt or slow down and because usually snipers would pick off high ranking officers, high ranking military men were not fond of snipers as well. As such they pulled a blind eye when they saw a sniper POW being treated roughly.

Hope that was helpful!

Follow up question: I remember reading that one counter-sniper tactic used by the Allies was to use tanks to shell any building with snipers in it regardless of any civilians inside. This led to the civilian populace basically killing any German sniper that tried to use their building and throwing his body out the window to avoid being shelled. Is there any truth to this?

Related but (very) interesting is sniping during WWI - many of the other replies mention the two-man team, this wasn't something new that appeared in WWII, but rather was already commonplace in WWI.

The book "Sniping in France" by Major Hesketh-Prichard is a fascinating look at how sniping developed in a modern army. It's available free online, the following version includes all the text but is missing some of the pictures. There's a better version on Google Books somewhere, but I can't find the link:

http://www.allworldwars.com/Sniping%20in%20France%20by%20Major%20Hesketh-Prichard.html

In that scene, I remember them narrating it as if it were a real, specific event "We lost X men at Foy, and if it weren't for the sharpshooting of Shifty Powers and the bravery of Captain Sergeant Lipton and Lieutenant Speirs we would've lost many more" or something like that.

Anybody have a copy of the Ambrose book to check if that part is actually reported to have happened as depicted in the miniseries?

I've read accounts of both Germans and Japanese deploying what American forces seem to have referred to as "machine gun snipers" which deployed into areas that allied troops were about to occupy. In "Here Is Your War," Ernie Pyle, the legendary war correspondent, writes about being harassed by such a soldier while trying to write his column. That was, as I recall, a German soldier in North Africa. Later, in the Pacific, he died in similar circumstances.

Here's the writeup at the time: http://www.military.com/HomePage/TitleHistories/1,10982,713069|768542,00.html The wiki page on Ernie Pyle says that the road he was hit on had been traveled safely quite a bit, so it sounds like the Japanese were operating behind the lines. One of the soldiers there that day shared his recollections much later: http://www.woonsocketcall.com/node/1967 The later recollection indicates machine gun plus sniper. So, in summary, there's a bit of dispute as to whether it was a machine gun behaving in a role that soldiers at the time called sniping or a machine gun in concert with a sniper.

In the latter stages of the battle of Kokoda in the Pacific, Japanese snipers were sometimes left in trees to slow the Australian advance in situations that could be regarded as practically suicidal according to Peter Fitzimmon's book Kokoda