In the past I’ve written about Col. Rex Applegate, whose “Kill or Be Killed” shooting book was perhaps the most influential handgun book of the 1940’s. I recently shared an article from the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine that provided details about his “House of Horrors” shoothouse.

Applegate’s House of Horrors (1945)

Applegate was influenced by Fairbairn, whose book ‘Shooting to Live” was the other major handgun book from the 1940’s.

Book Review (Historical Handgun) – Shooting To Live (1942, Fairbairn & Sykes)

Claude Werner put out a revised version of the shooting drills from Fairbairn’s book, and I went out and shot the drills on video.

Fairbairn “Shooting to Live” drills

Applegate’s techniques were adopted by the U.S. Army, and you can see them explained and demonstrated in this classic Army training film.

World War 2 was the largest firearms training program in US history. Most able-bodied men, and many women were trained to shoot pistols, using these techniques and traditional one handed bullseye techniques. This influenced conventional wisdom about “proper handgun technique” from the end of WW2 until the mid 1960’s.

In 1944, Applegate summarized his pistol training program in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.

The common response of the modern shooter, when introduced to Applegate’s techniques, is to consider them outdated and wrong. But to give his material an honest evaluation, start by looking at the tiny sights that were issued on the military grade 1911.

Even the modern “mil spec” 1911’s that claim to be an exact replica of the WW2 guns have taller sights, as shown in the pictures in this article.

Review: Springfield Armory 1911 Mil-Spec .45

Learning to use the slide itself as a giant sight was also taught by Fairbairn, and later in the 1980’s Jim Cirillo taught the concept as well. For distances 5 yards and closer, that type of rough aiming can be good enough to get acceptable hits, but success using that technique at longer distances requires a lot of work. Variants of that approach I’ve seen and/or tried includes taping over the rear sight so that the front sight sticks up over the rear sight, and in more recent times, turning off or taping over the rear window of a slide mounted red dot optic (the end closest to the shooter) learning to use either the frame of the optic or the view through the tube (with dot off) as a very coarse sighting system. If you haven’t ever tried these alternative methods, putting a B8 target or 8.5×11 sheet of paper at 5 yards and running some drills can be interesting and fun. If you have a good initial index of the gun to the target, and a good trigger press that isn’t corrupted by moving the gun offline as you fire (by unnecessary movement of any or all of the other 9 fingers), a skilled shooter can get decent results. Those that can’t shoot well with the dot or high visibility irons should not waste range time learning how to aim less. That time should be spent fixing trigger press errors until a 1-2″ group can be shot at the 5 yard line using modern aiming techniques.

If the range you use will allow it, give the techniques shown in Applegate’s article a try, and compare them to more modern techniques using aimed fire. Another way to experiment with these historical techniques is to use a SIRT pistol or any other laser-firing training tool.

Prior to Applegate and Fairbairn, the only two methods commonly used were hipshooting, which worked great for Jelly Bryce and poorly for everyone else, and one handed slow fire bullseye, which had limited value in typical pistol fights. Their work eventually led to the big breakthroughs by Cooper and Weaver, specifically running a pistol with higher visibility target sights up to the eye target line, seeing a flash sight picture that provided better alignment of the gun than slide-aiming techniques did.