The TERRIFYING Facts About Shotguns In Vietnam

In 1918, Germany filed an official diplomatic protest against the United States. They weren’t complaining about American tanks. They weren’t protesting aircraft or artillery. They were threatening to execute any American soldier caught carrying a shotgun. The German government called it a weapon of unnecessary suffering.

This from the nation that had introduced chlorine gas to modern warfare. Fast forward to 1965. American soldiers found themselves fighting a different kind of war in the jungles of Vietnam, and they discovered something that military planners had overlooked for decades. The rifle they’d been trained on, the weapon designed for 300 m engagements, was failing them at the ranges  where this war was actually being fought.

However, there was another weapon, one that military historian S.L.A. Marshall called the most effective close-quarters weapon fielded by American forces in Vietnam. This is the story of America’s jungle shotguns, the controversy they carried, and the soldiers who bet their lives on them. The M-16 rifle was supposed to be the future of infantry warfare.

Lightweight, high velocity, 20 rounds on tap, blah blah blah. Military doctrine assumed infantry combat happened at 200 to 400 m. Soldiers trained for precision shooting at distance. The rifle was designed for exactly that purpose. Vietnam wasn’t Europe. It sure as hell wasn’t Korea. The terrain was unlike anything the American military had even prepared for.

Roughly 20% of South Vietnam was covered in what soldiers called primary jungle, triple canopy forest so dense that visibility could shrink to just 3 to 5 m. You couldn’t see the enemy until you were close enough to touch them. And the enemy knew this. The Viet Cong and NVA developed what they called hugging tactics.

They would close to point-blank range specifically to negate American advantages in artillery and air support. You can’t call in an air strike when the enemy is 10 m away. Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall was the US Army’s chief combat historian. He had analyzed infantry engagements across World War II and Korea. In 1966, he went to Vietnam.

What he discovered challenged everything the military believed about rifle warfare. Marshall analyzed over 50 engagements, from platoon all the way up to division scale, and his findings were uncomfortable. The range between opposing forces in Vietnam firefights was somewhere between  10 and 30 m and almost never more than 100 m.

In primary jungle, soldiers had to close within 10 to 15 m before any fire could even penetrate the vegetation. But Marshall’s  most devastating finding, it wasn’t even about accuracy. When American soldiers suddenly encountered enemy fighters at close range, and we’re talking under 10 ft, they missed five out of six times.

Excitement, snap-shooting stress, and the tendency to fire high combined to produce an 83% miss rate at the most common engagement distances. And even when they hit, Marshall documented  a troubling pattern. A wounded Viet Cong soldier hit by an M-16 round, then diving into the bush, made a getaway three times out of four.

The Australian Army Research Center produced even harder data from First Australian Task Force operations. More than half of all ambushes occurred at 15 m or less. Nearly 80% of all contacts happened at 30 m or less. At those distances, the precision advantages of the M-16 become liabilities. But there was another weapon that addressed every single one of these deficiencies.

The US military deployed at least six primary shotgun models in Vietnam. Approximately 100,000 were procured under new contracts alone, plus thousands of refurbished  World War II era weapons. The workhorse was a Stevens Model 77E. Around 60,920  units were delivered between May 1963 and February 1964 at a rock-bottom cost  of $31.

50 per unit. Oh, but the weapon that earned legendary status was the Ithaca Model 37. Approximately 22,000 S prefix riot guns were manufactured under the first Vietnam era shotgun contract. Its defining feature was bottom ejection through a single loading port, which kept mud, dirt, and debris out of the action.

In Vietnam’s environment, this was critical. The 37 also lacked a trigger disconnector. This enabled slamfire. The shooter could hold the trigger down and pump the action to fire as fast as humanly possible. Eight rounds in approximately 2 seconds. Navy SEALs adopted it as their signature weapon.

One SEAL in particular became synonymous with it. Chief James “Patches” Watson was a founding member of SEAL Team Two. He carried a custom Ithaca 37 he named Sweetheart through three combat tours in Vietnam, earning 16  combat decorations, including four Bronze Stars with Combat. Watson habitually took point position on behind enemy lines missions, even after promotion to chief.

His shotgun was customized at Frankford Arsenal with an extended seven-round magazine, >>  >> a duckbill spreader choke that compressed the shot pattern into a horizontal oval, and a parkerized finish. Watson’s reasoning was direct.  In his memoir, Point Man, he explained his philosophy. An inch  miss with an M-16 could mean a complete miss.

An inch miss with a shotgun might mean four or five bullets still hitting the threat. >>  >> The mathematics were simple. A single trigger pull of standard double-aught buckshot delivered nine .33 caliber projectiles. That’s the equivalent of nine simultaneous handgun hits. At 20 yd, which Watson considered long range for his missions, the spread pattern compensated for the aiming errors that were universal under combat stress.

But perhaps the most decorated shotgun-carrying soldier wasn’t a SEAL. He was a Green Beret. During the Battle of Khe Sanh on March 9th through 12th, 1966, Sergeant First Class Bennie Adkins fought through 38 hours of continuous battle, followed by 48 hours of escape and evasion through triple canopy jungle.

He sustained 18 separate wounds while killing an estimated 135 to 175 enemy fighters. Among his weapons was a 12-gauge shotgun he had personally sawed off, cutting the barrel and removing the stock to create a devastating close-quarters sidearm. In interviews, Adkins acknowledged he still isn’t sure how that weapon squared with the laws of war and the Geneva  Conventions, but added simply, “I did use it.

I did, and a lot of hand grenades.” Originally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Adkins’ decoration was upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Obama in 2014, 48 years after the battle. During his escape through the jungle, an Indochinese tiger stalked Adkins’ group at night. The predator’s presence caused nearby NVA soldiers to back away, inadvertently giving the Americans room to escape.

The controversy surrounding combat shotguns didn’t begin in Vietnam. It started in the trenches of World War I. On September 19th, 1918, Frederick Odelland presented Secretary of State Robert Lansing with a German cablegram. Germany declared that any American prisoner found carrying a shotgun or shotgun ammunition forfeits his life.

They cited Article 23E of the 1907 Hague Convention, which prohibits arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. I mean, the irony here was staggering. Germany had introduced chlorine gas to warfare. They had used flamethrowers, sawtooth bayonets, unrestricted submarine warfare, but somehow they drew the line at buckshot. Brigadier General Samuel T.

Ansell, the acting Judge Advocate General, produced a five-page rebuttal. His core argument was that Article 23E is not aimed at efficiency in killing,  but against cruelty and terrorism. Each double-aught buckshot pellet measured 8.4 mm, scarcely larger than a rifle or machine gun bullet. His conclusion was blunt.

The protest is without legal merit. Coming from our present enemy, it is destitute of all good faith. Secretary Lansing warned that if Germany executed a single American prisoner for carrying a shotgun, the United States would make such reprisals as will best protect the American forces. Germany never responded.

No American soldiers were executed. The war ended 44 days later. Now, this precedent carried directly into Vietnam. In 1961, as advisors deployed to Southeast Asia, the Judge Advocate General confirmed no conventional or customary international law prohibited shotgun use. Today, combat shotguns are universally considered lawful under international humanitarian law.

They’re also fielded by virtually every single NATO military, including modern-day Germany’s. The Vietnam shotgun story reveals a persistent tension in military thinking, the gap between the cult of precision at range and the brutal reality of close combat. Every major study pointed to the same conclusion.

At the distances where most jungle fighting actually occurred, the shotgun was the superior infantry weapon. The British Joint Service Combat Shotgun Program, drawing on data from Bernie’s Operation Clarit, quantified the advantage. Shotgun hit probability was 40% greater than a submachine gun firing five-round bursts,  and twice as great as an assault rifle firing three-round bursts at ranges up to 30 yards.

Yet, the shotgun remained a niche weapon, one per squad, selected issue, never general issue. The reasons were practical: limited range, small magazine capacity, heavy ammunition  compared to rifle cartridges. The M-16, for all of its close-range shortcomings, could reach out to 300 m when the jungle opened up.

It offered 20 rounds on tap versus five or six. The approximately 60,920 Stevens 77E’s, 22,000 Ithaca 37’s, and 16,500 Winchester 1200’s procured under new contracts constituted a significant, but secondary, arsenal. Their legal status, settled by the 1918 Ansel memorandum and reaffirmed by three subsequent JAG opinions, was never seriously challenged during Vietnam.

Now, this is notable, given that virtually every other American weapon system drew intense international scrutiny during that conflict: napalm, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, but not the shotgun. For a weapon Germany once called too cruel for warfare, it passed through Vietnam’s controversies in relative silence.

The men who carried these shotguns, Watson’s with his sweetheart, Adkins with the sawed-off 12-gauge, the tunnel rats making impossible choices about what to carry into darkness, they understood something that doctrine had missed. Wars aren’t fought on paper. They’re fought in the mud, in the jungle, in the spaces where training meets chaos.

If you want to see how another controversial weapon changed the course of Vietnam, that video’s on screen now. Subscribe for more untold stories from military history.

The TERRIFYING Facts About Shotguns In Vietnam – YouTube

Transcripts:

In 1918, Germany filed an official diplomatic protest against the United States. They weren’t complaining about American tanks. They weren’t protesting aircraft or artillery. They were threatening to execute any American soldier caught carrying a shotgun. The German government called it a weapon of unnecessary suffering.

This from the nation that had introduced chlorine gas to modern warfare. Fast forward to 1965. American soldiers found themselves fighting a different kind of war in the jungles of Vietnam, and they discovered something that military planners had overlooked for decades. The rifle they’d been trained on, the weapon designed for 300 m engagements, was failing them at the ranges  where this war was actually being fought.

However, there was another weapon, one that military historian S.L.A. Marshall called the most effective close-quarters weapon fielded by American forces in Vietnam. This is the story of America’s jungle shotguns, the controversy they carried, and the soldiers who bet their lives on them. The M-16 rifle was supposed to be the future of infantry warfare.

Lightweight, high velocity, 20 rounds on tap, blah blah blah. Military doctrine assumed infantry combat happened at 200 to 400 m. Soldiers trained for precision shooting at distance. The rifle was designed for exactly that purpose. Vietnam wasn’t Europe. It sure as hell wasn’t Korea. The terrain was unlike anything the American military had even prepared for.

Roughly 20% of South Vietnam was covered in what soldiers called primary jungle, triple canopy forest so dense that visibility could shrink to just 3 to 5 m. You couldn’t see the enemy until you were close enough to touch them. And the enemy knew this. The Viet Cong and NVA developed what they called hugging tactics.

They would close to point-blank range specifically to negate American advantages in artillery and air support. You can’t call in an air strike when the enemy is 10 m away. Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall was the US Army’s chief combat historian. He had analyzed infantry engagements across World War II and Korea. In 1966, he went to Vietnam.

What he discovered challenged everything the military believed about rifle warfare. Marshall analyzed over 50 engagements, from platoon all the way up to division scale, and his findings were uncomfortable. The range between opposing forces in Vietnam firefights was somewhere between  10 and 30 m and almost never more than 100 m.

In primary jungle, soldiers had to close within 10 to 15 m before any fire could even penetrate the vegetation. But Marshall’s  most devastating finding, it wasn’t even about accuracy. When American soldiers suddenly encountered enemy fighters at close range, and we’re talking under 10 ft, they missed five out of six times.

Excitement, snap-shooting stress, and the tendency to fire high combined to produce an 83% miss rate at the most common engagement distances. And even when they hit, Marshall documented  a troubling pattern. A wounded Viet Cong soldier hit by an M-16 round, then diving into the bush, made a getaway three times out of four.

The Australian Army Research Center produced even harder data from First Australian Task Force operations. More than half of all ambushes occurred at 15 m or less. Nearly 80% of all contacts happened at 30 m or less. At those distances, the precision advantages of the M-16 become liabilities. But there was another weapon that addressed every single one of these deficiencies.

The US military deployed at least six primary shotgun models in Vietnam. Approximately 100,000 were procured under new contracts alone, plus thousands of refurbished  World War II era weapons. The workhorse was a Stevens Model 77E. Around 60,920  units were delivered between May 1963 and February 1964 at a rock-bottom cost  of $31.

50 per unit. Oh, but the weapon that earned legendary status was the Ithaca Model 37. Approximately 22,000 S prefix riot guns were manufactured under the first Vietnam era shotgun contract. Its defining feature was bottom ejection through a single loading port, which kept mud, dirt, and debris out of the action.

In Vietnam’s environment, this was critical. The 37 also lacked a trigger disconnector. This enabled slamfire. The shooter could hold the trigger down and pump the action to fire as fast as humanly possible. Eight rounds in approximately 2 seconds. Navy SEALs adopted it as their signature weapon.

One SEAL in particular became synonymous with it. Chief James “Patches” Watson was a founding member of SEAL Team Two. He carried a custom Ithaca 37 he named Sweetheart through three combat tours in Vietnam, earning 16  combat decorations, including four Bronze Stars with Combat. Watson habitually took point position on behind enemy lines missions, even after promotion to chief.

His shotgun was customized at Frankford Arsenal with an extended seven-round magazine, >>  >> a duckbill spreader choke that compressed the shot pattern into a horizontal oval, and a parkerized finish. Watson’s reasoning was direct.  In his memoir, Point Man, he explained his philosophy. An inch  miss with an M-16 could mean a complete miss.

An inch miss with a shotgun might mean four or five bullets still hitting the threat. >>  >> The mathematics were simple. A single trigger pull of standard double-aught buckshot delivered nine .33 caliber projectiles. That’s the equivalent of nine simultaneous handgun hits. At 20 yd, which Watson considered long range for his missions, the spread pattern compensated for the aiming errors that were universal under combat stress.

But perhaps the most decorated shotgun-carrying soldier wasn’t a SEAL. He was a Green Beret. During the Battle of Khe Sanh on March 9th through 12th, 1966, Sergeant First Class Bennie Adkins fought through 38 hours of continuous battle, followed by 48 hours of escape and evasion through triple canopy jungle.

He sustained 18 separate wounds while killing an estimated 135 to 175 enemy fighters. Among his weapons was a 12-gauge shotgun he had personally sawed off, cutting the barrel and removing the stock to create a devastating close-quarters sidearm. In interviews, Adkins acknowledged he still isn’t sure how that weapon squared with the laws of war and the Geneva  Conventions, but added simply, “I did use it.

I did, and a lot of hand grenades.” Originally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Adkins’ decoration was upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Obama in 2014, 48 years after the battle. During his escape through the jungle, an Indochinese tiger stalked Adkins’ group at night. The predator’s presence caused nearby NVA soldiers to back away, inadvertently giving the Americans room to escape.

The controversy surrounding combat shotguns didn’t begin in Vietnam. It started in the trenches of World War I. On September 19th, 1918, Frederick Odelland presented Secretary of State Robert Lansing with a German cablegram. Germany declared that any American prisoner found carrying a shotgun or shotgun ammunition forfeits his life.

They cited Article 23E of the 1907 Hague Convention, which prohibits arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. I mean, the irony here was staggering. Germany had introduced chlorine gas to warfare. They had used flamethrowers, sawtooth bayonets, unrestricted submarine warfare, but somehow they drew the line at buckshot. Brigadier General Samuel T.

Ansell, the acting Judge Advocate General, produced a five-page rebuttal. His core argument was that Article 23E is not aimed at efficiency in killing,  but against cruelty and terrorism. Each double-aught buckshot pellet measured 8.4 mm, scarcely larger than a rifle or machine gun bullet. His conclusion was blunt.

The protest is without legal merit. Coming from our present enemy, it is destitute of all good faith. Secretary Lansing warned that if Germany executed a single American prisoner for carrying a shotgun, the United States would make such reprisals as will best protect the American forces. Germany never responded.

No American soldiers were executed. The war ended 44 days later. Now, this precedent carried directly into Vietnam. In 1961, as advisors deployed to Southeast Asia, the Judge Advocate General confirmed no conventional or customary international law prohibited shotgun use. Today, combat shotguns are universally considered lawful under international humanitarian law.

They’re also fielded by virtually every single NATO military, including modern-day Germany’s. The Vietnam shotgun story reveals a persistent tension in military thinking, the gap between the cult of precision at range and the brutal reality of close combat. Every major study pointed to the same conclusion.

At the distances where most jungle fighting actually occurred, the shotgun was the superior infantry weapon. The British Joint Service Combat Shotgun Program, drawing on data from Bernie’s Operation Clarit, quantified the advantage. Shotgun hit probability was 40% greater than a submachine gun firing five-round bursts,  and twice as great as an assault rifle firing three-round bursts at ranges up to 30 yards.

Yet, the shotgun remained a niche weapon, one per squad, selected issue, never general issue. The reasons were practical: limited range, small magazine capacity, heavy ammunition  compared to rifle cartridges. The M-16, for all of its close-range shortcomings, could reach out to 300 m when the jungle opened up.

It offered 20 rounds on tap versus five or six. The approximately 60,920 Stevens 77E’s, 22,000 Ithaca 37’s, and 16,500 Winchester 1200’s procured under new contracts constituted a significant, but secondary, arsenal. Their legal status, settled by the 1918 Ansel memorandum and reaffirmed by three subsequent JAG opinions, was never seriously challenged during Vietnam.

Now, this is notable, given that virtually every other American weapon system drew intense international scrutiny during that conflict: napalm, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, but not the shotgun. For a weapon Germany once called too cruel for warfare, it passed through Vietnam’s controversies in relative silence.

The men who carried these shotguns, Watson’s with his sweetheart, Adkins with the sawed-off 12-gauge, the tunnel rats making impossible choices about what to carry into darkness, they understood something that doctrine had missed. Wars aren’t fought on paper. They’re fought in the mud, in the jungle, in the spaces where training meets chaos.

If you want to see how another controversial weapon changed the course of Vietnam, that video’s on screen now. Subscribe for more untold stories from military history.

The TERRIFYING Facts About Shotguns In Vietnam

In 1918, Germany filed an official diplomatic protest against the United States. They weren’t complaining about American tanks. They weren’t protesting aircraft or artillery. They were threatening to execute any American soldier caught carrying a shotgun. The German government called it a weapon of unnecessary suffering.

This from the nation that had introduced chlorine gas to modern warfare. Fast forward to 1965. American soldiers found themselves fighting a different kind of war in the jungles of Vietnam, and they discovered something that military planners had overlooked for decades. The rifle they’d been trained on, the weapon designed for 300 m engagements, was failing them at the ranges  where this war was actually being fought.

However, there was another weapon, one that military historian S.L.A. Marshall called the most effective close-quarters weapon fielded by American forces in Vietnam. This is the story of America’s jungle shotguns, the controversy they carried, and the soldiers who bet their lives on them. The M-16 rifle was supposed to be the future of infantry warfare.

Lightweight, high velocity, 20 rounds on tap, blah blah blah. Military doctrine assumed infantry combat happened at 200 to 400 m. Soldiers trained for precision shooting at distance. The rifle was designed for exactly that purpose. Vietnam wasn’t Europe. It sure as hell wasn’t Korea. The terrain was unlike anything the American military had even prepared for.

Roughly 20% of South Vietnam was covered in what soldiers called primary jungle, triple canopy forest so dense that visibility could shrink to just 3 to 5 m. You couldn’t see the enemy until you were close enough to touch them. And the enemy knew this. The Viet Cong and NVA developed what they called hugging tactics.

They would close to point-blank range specifically to negate American advantages in artillery and air support. You can’t call in an air strike when the enemy is 10 m away. Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall was the US Army’s chief combat historian. He had analyzed infantry engagements across World War II and Korea. In 1966, he went to Vietnam.

What he discovered challenged everything the military believed about rifle warfare. Marshall analyzed over 50 engagements, from platoon all the way up to division scale, and his findings were uncomfortable. The range between opposing forces in Vietnam firefights was somewhere between  10 and 30 m and almost never more than 100 m.

In primary jungle, soldiers had to close within 10 to 15 m before any fire could even penetrate the vegetation. But Marshall’s  most devastating finding, it wasn’t even about accuracy. When American soldiers suddenly encountered enemy fighters at close range, and we’re talking under 10 ft, they missed five out of six times.

Excitement, snap-shooting stress, and the tendency to fire high combined to produce an 83% miss rate at the most common engagement distances. And even when they hit, Marshall documented  a troubling pattern. A wounded Viet Cong soldier hit by an M-16 round, then diving into the bush, made a getaway three times out of four.

The Australian Army Research Center produced even harder data from First Australian Task Force operations. More than half of all ambushes occurred at 15 m or less. Nearly 80% of all contacts happened at 30 m or less. At those distances, the precision advantages of the M-16 become liabilities. But there was another weapon that addressed every single one of these deficiencies.

The US military deployed at least six primary shotgun models in Vietnam. Approximately 100,000 were procured under new contracts alone, plus thousands of refurbished  World War II era weapons. The workhorse was a Stevens Model 77E. Around 60,920  units were delivered between May 1963 and February 1964 at a rock-bottom cost  of $31.

50 per unit. Oh, but the weapon that earned legendary status was the Ithaca Model 37. Approximately 22,000 S prefix riot guns were manufactured under the first Vietnam era shotgun contract. Its defining feature was bottom ejection through a single loading port, which kept mud, dirt, and debris out of the action.

In Vietnam’s environment, this was critical. The 37 also lacked a trigger disconnector. This enabled slamfire. The shooter could hold the trigger down and pump the action to fire as fast as humanly possible. Eight rounds in approximately 2 seconds. Navy SEALs adopted it as their signature weapon.

One SEAL in particular became synonymous with it. Chief James “Patches” Watson was a founding member of SEAL Team Two. He carried a custom Ithaca 37 he named Sweetheart through three combat tours in Vietnam, earning 16  combat decorations, including four Bronze Stars with Combat. Watson habitually took point position on behind enemy lines missions, even after promotion to chief.

His shotgun was customized at Frankford Arsenal with an extended seven-round magazine, >>  >> a duckbill spreader choke that compressed the shot pattern into a horizontal oval, and a parkerized finish. Watson’s reasoning was direct.  In his memoir, Point Man, he explained his philosophy. An inch  miss with an M-16 could mean a complete miss.

An inch miss with a shotgun might mean four or five bullets still hitting the threat. >>  >> The mathematics were simple. A single trigger pull of standard double-aught buckshot delivered nine .33 caliber projectiles. That’s the equivalent of nine simultaneous handgun hits. At 20 yd, which Watson considered long range for his missions, the spread pattern compensated for the aiming errors that were universal under combat stress.

But perhaps the most decorated shotgun-carrying soldier wasn’t a SEAL. He was a Green Beret. During the Battle of Khe Sanh on March 9th through 12th, 1966, Sergeant First Class Bennie Adkins fought through 38 hours of continuous battle, followed by 48 hours of escape and evasion through triple canopy jungle.

He sustained 18 separate wounds while killing an estimated 135 to 175 enemy fighters. Among his weapons was a 12-gauge shotgun he had personally sawed off, cutting the barrel and removing the stock to create a devastating close-quarters sidearm. In interviews, Adkins acknowledged he still isn’t sure how that weapon squared with the laws of war and the Geneva  Conventions, but added simply, “I did use it.

I did, and a lot of hand grenades.” Originally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Adkins’ decoration was upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Obama in 2014, 48 years after the battle. During his escape through the jungle, an Indochinese tiger stalked Adkins’ group at night. The predator’s presence caused nearby NVA soldiers to back away, inadvertently giving the Americans room to escape.

The controversy surrounding combat shotguns didn’t begin in Vietnam. It started in the trenches of World War I. On September 19th, 1918, Frederick Odelland presented Secretary of State Robert Lansing with a German cablegram. Germany declared that any American prisoner found carrying a shotgun or shotgun ammunition forfeits his life.

They cited Article 23E of the 1907 Hague Convention, which prohibits arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. I mean, the irony here was staggering. Germany had introduced chlorine gas to warfare. They had used flamethrowers, sawtooth bayonets, unrestricted submarine warfare, but somehow they drew the line at buckshot. Brigadier General Samuel T.

Ansell, the acting Judge Advocate General, produced a five-page rebuttal. His core argument was that Article 23E is not aimed at efficiency in killing,  but against cruelty and terrorism. Each double-aught buckshot pellet measured 8.4 mm, scarcely larger than a rifle or machine gun bullet. His conclusion was blunt.

The protest is without legal merit. Coming from our present enemy, it is destitute of all good faith. Secretary Lansing warned that if Germany executed a single American prisoner for carrying a shotgun, the United States would make such reprisals as will best protect the American forces. Germany never responded.

No American soldiers were executed. The war ended 44 days later. Now, this precedent carried directly into Vietnam. In 1961, as advisors deployed to Southeast Asia, the Judge Advocate General confirmed no conventional or customary international law prohibited shotgun use. Today, combat shotguns are universally considered lawful under international humanitarian law.

They’re also fielded by virtually every single NATO military, including modern-day Germany’s. The Vietnam shotgun story reveals a persistent tension in military thinking, the gap between the cult of precision at range and the brutal reality of close combat. Every major study pointed to the same conclusion.

At the distances where most jungle fighting actually occurred, the shotgun was the superior infantry weapon. The British Joint Service Combat Shotgun Program, drawing on data from Bernie’s Operation Clarit, quantified the advantage. Shotgun hit probability was 40% greater than a submachine gun firing five-round bursts,  and twice as great as an assault rifle firing three-round bursts at ranges up to 30 yards.

Yet, the shotgun remained a niche weapon, one per squad, selected issue, never general issue. The reasons were practical: limited range, small magazine capacity, heavy ammunition  compared to rifle cartridges. The M-16, for all of its close-range shortcomings, could reach out to 300 m when the jungle opened up.

It offered 20 rounds on tap versus five or six. The approximately 60,920 Stevens 77E’s, 22,000 Ithaca 37’s, and 16,500 Winchester 1200’s procured under new contracts constituted a significant, but secondary, arsenal. Their legal status, settled by the 1918 Ansel memorandum and reaffirmed by three subsequent JAG opinions, was never seriously challenged during Vietnam.

Now, this is notable, given that virtually every other American weapon system drew intense international scrutiny during that conflict: napalm, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, but not the shotgun. For a weapon Germany once called too cruel for warfare, it passed through Vietnam’s controversies in relative silence.

The men who carried these shotguns, Watson’s with his sweetheart, Adkins with the sawed-off 12-gauge, the tunnel rats making impossible choices about what to carry into darkness, they understood something that doctrine had missed. Wars aren’t fought on paper. They’re fought in the mud, in the jungle, in the spaces where training meets chaos.

If you want to see how another controversial weapon changed the course of Vietnam, that video’s on screen now. Subscribe for more untold stories from military history.