GUNS Magazine January 1957

J
Favorite dog and gun accompany Askins on b- auuot in
Southwest where he learned hunting from his famous
father, Major Charles Askins Sr., top shotgun authority.
Misses played small part in winning these handgun
!: trophies, collected during Asians' swift rise to world
champion target pistolman before entering army service.
22
soup and bully beef. I sallied forth one morn in May
when day blossomed about 3:30 A.M. I got into a herd
of the tiny deer by good light and singled out a handsome
buck at a distance of not more than 40 paces. He stared
at me with that "there's another of those bloody Yanks"
expression on his face, and I aimed to part his hair just
above his cowlick. But something went wrong. As the
carbine cracked, he swapped ends like a cutting horse and
got yonder. I'd missed him, clean as a whistle, at a range
just a mite long for a Daisy air rifle.
In Africa, I shot gazalle on the Sahara, Barbary goats
(he's cded a sheep but the stinker is a goat) in the Atlas
Mountains, and pigs in the cork forests near Philipville.
I hit some of these targets, missed others. Much later, we
crossed the beaches, negotiated the apple orchards and
hedgerows of Normandy, sampled calvados (a dainty liba-
tion to make vodka, resemble ginger tea), and fetched up
in the great Forest of the Ardennes, home of the great Red
Stag, and roebuck by the thousands-and boar.
I recollect most vividly my first pig.
I was not exactly a tyro when it came to gunning boar.
I'd killed nine among the cork trees of Algeria. But the
swine of the Ardennes taught me a thing or two. I was
stationed in a fire lane, a channel some 20 meters in width
stretching for miles through the black spruce. I had
located myself where the lane formed an elbow and, safely
tucked away beneath a dripping conifer, I watched the
unbroken wall of foliage before me.
Suddenly, without so much as a sound or the rustle of
a single branch, a great boar burst into the clearing. He
was in seventh forward speed. Mouth open, great tusks
bared, he trod the spongy turf as silently as a hunting
leopard. He was there and gone. The hasty shot I snapped
after him was so wide of the mark that, to my slightly
popeyed gaze, no acceleration in the game was visible.
I was pretty indignant at this schwein. I somehow had
the idea that these continental aristocrats would be more
gentlemanly. This hoary old tusker, and certain adven-
tures I" had with the hirsh, the Red Stag of the Ardennes
and later in that gloomy German wood known as the
Forest of the Hurtgen, taught me different.
We traversed the Hurtgen (and a bloody passage it was)
and finally fetched up on the banks of the Roer. The river
had been flooded by the Whermacht in anticipation of our
arrival. It was done simply by throwing open a series of
dams just above the village of Schmidt. Schmidt had cost
the 28th (Pennsylvania) Division 2600 casualties over the
Thanksgiving holiday and was unpleasantly remembered by
all of us.
The Roer flowed hard by Duren, a town once boasting
,25,000 population and said to have contained more mil-
lionaires per capita than any burg of similar size in all the
fatherland. On our side of the Roer was a village, and
from the houses lining the bank to the Duren village square
was about 320 yards. This was long range for a sixgunner
like me, but I climbed into the third story of a sizeable
mansion and studied the Durenstrasse through a 20X spot-
ting scope. Precisely in the middle of the intersection was
an heroic monument to that old warrior, Bismarck. The
100-bomber run made on the town the week before had
lifted the statue and turned it precisely 180 degrees.
Where once the old kraut had looked greedily toward little
Belgium and hated France, he was now facing the Rhine.
It must hare been an omen to shake even the most phleg-
matic villagem to dig out after (Continued on page 42)