27/11/2025
How One Farmer’s “Silo Sniper Nest” Ki**ed 28 German Officers... At 7:23 a.m. on June 18th, 1944, Sergeant Jacob Mertens stood in the third floor window of a half-destroyed farmhouse outside Cartown, France.
Through his CAR 98K scope, he watched an American machine gun nest 200 yd away.
The MG42 had killed six of his men in the last hour.
In the next 40 seconds, he would be dead.
Not from that machine gun, from a place he never thought to look.
Three miles west, Technical Sergeant Raymond Ray Kuzlowski sat motionless inside a grain silo.
Not near it, inside it.
He'd been there for 11 hours.
No food, no water, a bucket for waste.
His Springfield M1903 A4 rested on a sandbag.
He'd dragged up a rusted ladder in darkness.
Through a hole he'd cut with tin snips, he could see the entire German defensive line.
37 positions, 14 officers identified by insignia and behavior.
In the last 6 days, he'd killed 23 of them.
The Germans knew someone was hunting their leadership.
They'd sent patrols, searched buildings, questioned civilians.
They never looked up at the silos.
Farm equipment wasn't tactical terrain.
That assumption would cost them the cotentine peninsula.
Kuzlowski watched Merens through his scope, saw the sergeant's mouth move, giving orders.
The German leaned forward, pointing toward the American lines.
Kuzlowski's crosshairs settled on the iron cross below Mertens's collar.
He exhaled halfway, held, squeezed.
The Springfield kicked.
Mertens dropped.
The 24th kill.
What happened next wasn't in any army manual.
It was farm logic applied to warfare.
The kind of thinking that comes from fixing tractors, not from West Point.
By the time the 82nd Airborne pushed through Carantan, German command structure had collapsed.
Officers refused field positions.
Sergeants led from behind cover.
Radio discipline deteriorated into chaos.
All because one dairy farmer from Wisconsin understood something about elevation, patience, and rural infrastructure that no military strategist had considered.
This is the story of how an innovation born from agricultural life killed 28 enemy officers, saved an estimated 200 American lives, and created a doctrine the US Army still teaches today.
A doctrine they never officially credited to the man who invented it.
Raymond Klowski never received a medal for what he did in those silos.
He never wanted one, but other snipers wanted to know his secret.
And when he finally told them, it spread like a barnfire across the European theater.
Raymond Kolowski grew up in Shboan County, Wisconsin.
His father owned 80 acres of dairy land.
Ry was the second of five sons, which meant he did the work nobody else wanted.
Mcking stalls, fixing fence, climbing into silos to break up clogged grain.
That last job was the one everyone hated, dark, claustrophobic.
40 ft up a rusted ladder with a sledgehammer and a prayer that the silage wouldn't shift and bury you.
Ry did it without complaint.
He'd spend hours up there alone with his thoughts and the smell of fermented corn.
He learned to shoot groundhogs at his uncle's farm.
Pests that dug holes cattle could step in.
His uncle paid a nickel per tail.
Ray was 13 when he shot his first one at 200 yard.
His uncle checked the distance himself, walked it off, couldn't believe it.
By 15, Ray was the best shot in the county.
He won the state youth competition in 1937.
Took home a trophy his mother kept on the mantle.
His father was less impressed.
Said shooting was fine, but cows needed milking.
When war came in 1941, Ry was 22 and exempt.
Essential agricultural worker.
His father needed him, but three of Ray's cousins enlisted in the first month.
Full Detail in Cmt
