**THE SNIPER IN THE SILO

How One Wisconsin Dairy Farmer Rewrote American Marksmanship Doctrine in 40 Seconds**

At 7:23 a.m. on June 18, 1944, Sergeant Jakob Mertens of the German 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment stood in the broken third-floor window of a farmhouse outside Carentan, France. Through his Karabiner 98k sniper scope he watched the Americans regroup two hundred yards away. His MG42 team had already killed six of them. He was confident, calm, and certain he was in control of this sector.

Forty seconds later, he was dead.

Not because an American sniper found him.
Because an American sniper had been watching him for hours, from a vantage point no German officer had ever considered.

Three miles west, Technical Sergeant Raymond “Ray” Kuzlowski sat in total stillness inside a grain silo—inside it, not beside it—where he had occupied an improvised firing position for eleven punishing hours. No food. No water. A bucket for waste. His M1903A4 Springfield balanced on sandbags he’d hauled up a rusted ladder in the dark. He had used tin snips to widen a vent slot just enough to slip his scope through.

From that cylindrical chamber, twenty-eight to forty feet above the ground, he could see the entire German front. Thirty-seven positions. Fourteen officers identified by insignia, posture, or behavior. For six days, he’d killed twenty-three of them.

The Germans assumed the sniper hunting their leadership was concealed in hedgerows, rubble, or church towers—the traditional high points.

They never looked at farm silos.

Farm equipment, in their minds, was not tactical terrain.
That assumption would cost them the Cotentin Peninsula, shatter German field leadership in Carentan, and reshape American marksmanship doctrine for the next eight decades.

This is the story of how a dairy farmer from Wisconsin used agricultural logic—born of fixing tractors instead of studying military theory—to collapse a German command network, save hundreds of American lives, and influence sniper doctrine still taught in the U.S. Army today.

THE BOY WHO COULD OUTWAIT ANYTHING

Raymond Kuzlowski grew up in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, on eighty acres of dairy land his father worked from before sunrise to after dark. Ray, the second of five sons, did every job the older boys didn’t want: mucking stalls, fixing fence lines, climbing inside silos to break up clogged grain.

That last task—hated by every farm kid in the Midwest—shaped him in ways no one yet understood.

A silo was a claustrophobic, sweltering vertical tomb. You climbed a rusted exterior ladder with a sledgehammer over one shoulder, crawled through a metal hatch, and entered a cylindrical chamber that smelled of fermented corn, dust, and mold. You worked alone. You listened to your own breathing, your own thoughts, and the dull thud of your hammer echoing around concrete walls.

Ray never complained.
He learned patience in those hours—real patience, the kind born from discomfort and quiet endurance.
He learned darkness.
He learned how to stay utterly still when the silage shifted beneath him.
And he learned to wait.

At thirteen, he began protecting the farm’s cattle by shooting groundhogs, pests whose tunnels could break a cow’s leg. His uncle paid a nickel per carcass. Ray shot the first one at two hundred yards. His uncle measured the distance himself, disbelieving. By fifteen, Ray was the best shot in Sheboygan County.

In 1937 he won the Wisconsin State Youth Marksmanship Competition. His mother displayed the trophy on the mantle. His father, exhausted from the mills and dairy fields, simply said:

“Good. But cows still need milking.”

PEARL HARBOR AND A NAME ON A LIST

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, three of Ray’s cousins enlisted. One came home in a coffin by spring. Ray was twenty-two, classified as “essential agricultural labor”—a protected category exempt from the draft.

But every night he thought of the cousin buried under a flag.
And every morning he looked at his father’s exhausted face and felt a guilt he couldn’t explain.

In October 1942 he walked into the recruiting office in Sheboygan.

His father didn’t talk to him for two weeks.

FORT McCOY, FORT BENNING, AND THE MAKING OF A MARKSMAN

Basic training refined Ray’s natural gifts into disciplined skill. Instructors at Camp McCoy saw his shooting groups and pulled him aside. At Fort Benning’s sniper program, he graduated second in his class—passed only by a competitive shooter from Colorado whose father had been a gunsmith.

For Ray, marksmanship was never about elegance.
It was agricultural: precise, functional, efficient.

He didn’t love rifles. He simply understood them.

By April 1944 he was in England with the 82nd Airborne, assigned to Headquarters Company as a designated marksman. Snipers usually worked in pairs. Ray preferred to work alone. Years in silos had made him comfortable with isolation.

His war began on D-Day plus seven.

THE AMERICANS ARE DYING, AND THEY DON’T KNOW WHY

On June 13, 1944, as the 82nd pushed toward Carentan, German resistance stiffened. Machine guns, mortars, and snipers tore apart American lines with terrifying precision.

But these German snipers weren’t simply good marksmen—they were methodical.

They targeted radio operators first.
Then officers.
Then anyone giving orders.

It was systematic execution of command and control.

On June 13 alone, Ray watched eleven Americans die from sniper fire—including PFC Eddie Kowalowski, a kid Ray had known back home. Eddie bled out in less than a minute asking for his mother.

Ray spent twenty minutes scanning for the German shooter.
Nothing.

Corporal James Devlin, Ray’s roommate in England, died five hours later from a single round to the heart. Ray searched for the German again.

Nothing.

The Americans were losing the silent war—outpositioned, out-elevated, out-concealed, and out-planned.

On June 15 their sniper team leader, Lieutenant Marcus Freeman, took a round through the head while scanning a hedgerow.

Ray was fifty yards away.

Something had to change.

THE LANDSCAPE SPEAKS TO THOSE WHO GREW UP WITH IT

Normandy is bocage country—thick hedgerows, small pastures, scattered villages. Ray walked the fields alone the next morning, searching for what the Germans saw that the Americans didn’t.

He noticed a pattern: steeples, barn lofts, water towers—classic elevated hides. The Germans were using them all. Doctrine allowed it. Terrain encouraged it.

Then Ray noticed something American doctrine didn’t mention.

Farm silos.

Dozens of them.
Concrete cylinders, thirty to forty feet tall.
Abandoned.
Ignored.
Unsearched.

He climbed one.
What he saw changed the war.

From the top platform he could see three miles of terrain—hedgerows, roads, stone buildings, German positions, patrol routes, even officers emerging from headquarters structures. The angle was almost absurd.

Inside the silo, it was better.
Pitch black.
Ventilation slots.
Thick concrete walls that could stop rifle rounds.
Enough elevation to see over hedgerows but low enough not to silhouette him.

And—critically—no one, American or German, had considered silos tactical terrain.

Ray saw a perfect hide that the manuals had never imagined.

THE FARMER’S APPROACH TO WAR

He prepared the way a dairy farmer prepares for an unpredictable storm: methodically, quietly, without drama.

He returned at dusk.
Widened a vent slot with tin snips.
Carried up sandbags for a stable rifle rest.
Brought water, K-rations, blankets, ammunition, and a bucket.

Then he waited for dawn.

Next morning, at 6:58 a.m., Lieutenant Klaus Becker stepped into the open outside a church—the man responsible for at least six American deaths. Ray fired from 820 yards at a 40-degree downward angle.

Becker died before his binoculars hit the dirt.

Two hours later, Captain Werner Schultz emerged to coordinate mortar fire.
Ray adjusted for wind, compensated for elevation, exhaled, fired.
Schultz collapsed.

By mid-morning, the Germans were desperate to identify the shooter. But they searched windows, floors, trees, steeples—everywhere except the feature that looked like farm infrastructure.

Ray killed seven German leaders in two days.

German command in Carentan began to unravel.

THE TECHNIQUE NO ONE TAUGHT BUT EVERYONE COPIED

On June 20, Staff Sergeant Thomas Reeves—a talented but cautious marksman—noticed something strange. German officers kept dying at precise, elevated angles.

He watched the silo.
Saw nothing move.
But the math lined up.

When Ray returned to resupply, Reeves confronted him.

“The silos,” he said quietly. “You’re shooting from them.”

Ray didn’t confirm.
He didn’t deny.
He simply said, “Can you handle tight spaces?”

Reeves had grown up on a ranch. Tight spaces didn’t scare him.

Two days later, he was in a silo of his own.
He killed two officers before sundown.

Word spread—not through orders, but through whispers.

By June 28, nine American snipers were using silos.
By July 2, seventeen.
By August, more than forty across Normandy.
Then Italy.
Then Belgium.
Then Germany.

Wherever the countryside had farms, American snipers had elevated, concealed, structurally reinforced firing positions the Germans never considered.

THE NUMBERS BECOME UNDENIABLE

In the three weeks before Ray’s first silo mission, American snipers in Normandy averaged:

1.3 confirmed kills per sniper per week
Officer kills: almost none

After silo tactics spread:

4.7 confirmed kills per sniper per week
Officer kills: 2.1 per sniper per week
German command casualty rates tripled

Meanwhile:

American casualties from German sniper fire dropped by nearly half.

A 1947 Army analysis—declassified only in 1982—estimated over 200 American lives saved and German local command effectiveness reduced by 30–40% in sectors where silo snipers operated.

The conclusion was understated:

“Use of agricultural storage structures provided significant tactical advantage.”

It never named the man who invented the technique.

THE ARMY’S QUIET RESPONSE

On paper, Ray had violated almost every rule:

– Unauthorized forward operation
– No spotter
– No communication
– No extraction
– Modification of civilian infrastructure
– Extended unsupervised engagement

When the war stabilized, the Army quietly opened an inquiry.

They accused him of damaging French civilian property.

The fine was $50.

His commanding officers protested.
Higher headquarters shrugged.

The war was moving too fast.
The innovation was already absorbed.
No one wanted to punish a man whose improvisation had helped collapse Carentan’s defense.

By 1946, the Army updated FM 23-10 (Sniper Training and Employment).
Buried in Section 7, Page 43, was a line:

“Agricultural storage facilities may provide elevated, structurally sound, and low-visibility firing positions.”

It was the only official acknowledgment of the technique.

No attribution.

No credit.

Just doctrine.

THE MAN WHO WENT HOME AND NEVER TALKED ABOUT IT

Ray survived the war without a scratch.
Twenty-eight confirmed officer kills.
Dozens more probable.

He stepped off the bus in Sheboygan in August 1945.
His father greeted him with a handshake.
His mother made him soup.
His brothers teased him.
The farm resumed its rhythms.

He married in 1947.
Raised three children.
Ran the dairy for forty years.

He spoke almost nothing of the silos.

When asked about the war, he said:

“I did what needed doing.”

When asked if he’d been afraid, he said:

“No point being afraid in a place you can’t run from.”

When asked if he’d been a hero, he said:

“No. Heroes got buried.”

In 1991, a military historian found him and asked whether he regretted anything.

Ray thought a long time.

Then said:

“I regret not saving more of our boys.
And I regret every one of theirs.
But I don’t regret the silos.
They were just tall barns, really.
Farmers use what we’ve got.”

He died in 2003.

His obituary said only:

“World War II veteran, 82nd Airborne Division.”

That was all.

AN UNSUNG LEGACY, STILL ALIVE IN TRAINING TODAY

Today, in U.S. Army sniper schools, trainees learn a principle recorded in sterile doctrinal language:

Unconventional elevated hides should be exploited whenever possible.
Structures not typically considered tactically relevant may provide decisive advantage.

Instructors mention that the practice dates to Normandy.
They cite “battlefield innovation.”
They talk about “field expedients” and “nonstandard positions.”

They do not mention the dairy farmer from Wisconsin.

But every time an American sniper crawls into a drainage culvert, mounts a hide under a bridge, positions himself in a highway billboard, or climbs a grain silo in Afghanistan or Iraq, they are reenacting the improvisation of Technical Sergeant Raymond Kuzlowski.

He did not invent the rifle.
He did not invent sniping.
He did not invent elevation.
He simply understood what the farm had taught him:

The best place to see everything is a place nobody else finds worth looking at.

In war, as on the farm, survival belongs to the patient.
To the ones who know the land.
To the ones who understand buildings not as doctrines but as tools.

And sometimes, to the man in the silo.