I'll try and fill in some of the gaps for "Enemy at the Gates" (sniper duel set in Stalingrad for those who are unaware of it).
The balance of probabilities is that the whole story of a duel between the two central characters never took place. Where as Vassili Zaitsev definately existed, and was indisputably a very proficient sniper at Stalingrad, there is no record of a German called Major Koenig ever having been posted there. Neither is there a record for a 'super sniper' sent up from Berlin called Thorveld (the other name periodically assigned to the German opponent). Vassili Zaitsev himself only makes something of a half page concession to the event in his log and later publsihed diary, where he describes an exchange with a German sniper whom he clearly held in high regard as a very worthy adversary. The likelihood is that the Soviet propoganda machine had got to work on the detail, and Zaitsev would have been foolish to risk contradicting it any more than he really had an incentive to do so.
Having said that, there is no harm in making a flim about a story, the problem with this film is that it pretends to be the truth. The opening shots feature Red Army soldiers being moved from the east bank to the west of the Volga in daylight. Such movements only occurred under darkness.
There is the issue of the charge down a street against a heavily defended German position which saw the Red army soldiers getting mowed down. Contrary to popular myth, the Soviets had learned from their mistakes in WW1, and charging machine gun emplacements tended to only have one result. By the time the Germans had entered the city the fighting was done at very close quarters with the frontline typically being a hall in a house with one side in one room, and the other in the adjacent one, or the upstairs and down stairs of a building etc. There would have been no charges of this suicidal nature as depecited in the film. Also the main Red Army weapon was not a single bolt operated rifle which was seen being widley distributed to the army along with a single bullet. A long barrelled weapon of this nature wasn't to much use in the close quarter fighting, and very few photographs taken the Moisen although it would have been used by snipers. The Pulemet Shpagin (PPSh41) was the main issue to the infantry
Although it wasn't unheard of for Russian soldiers to have been sent into battle unarmed in the first world war, with the instruction to pick up a weapon from a fallen comrade etc, the practice had stopped by Stalingrad. Indeed, Soviet military production remained high, and they were quite capable of supplying their frontline soldiers to the extent that they weren't having to rely on 'bullet blockers'
Although soldiers were shot for dessertion, brave soldiers who had partaken in a charge of this nature and were beaten back by the weight of enemy firepower, weren't. Even Soviet Generals realised that you don't win wars by shooting your own side. The Soviet army did have a battalion (the name of it escapes me) whose job it was to stay in reserve and cajole retreating soldiers back to the front, but this wasn't necessarily done at the point of a gun, and more often than not, didn't involve executing those in retreat. Soldiers in retreat had often become disorientated in the confusion of war, and sensing that both their flanks were exposed, were simply falling back to find their own comrades. Very often it was just a case of information flows and explaining where they needed to be. Remember that captured Red Army soldiers had very little prospect of surviving inprisonment and so weren't likely to be easily cowed by their own side, nor were they big on the idea of surrender.
By the time the Germans had got to the tractor factory the battle in the air was even, and certainly nothing like the unopposed turkey shoot that the film portrays with no Soviet aircraft or ground absed AA fire. By the end of the Stalingrad campaign, the Soviets had achieved air supremacy over the luftwaffe. The close quarter fighting also meant that at this point the Stukas and Dorniers featured in the film had largely stopped dropping bombs on the frontline as they couldn't differentiate who they were landing on, although they continued to try and bomb the east bank.
The love interest featured Tania Chernova, who was a student in Zaitsev's snipping school. She was injured by a landmine and not shrapnel whilst overseeing her mothers evacuation as depicted. The operation was a botched atempt to hunt down and snipe Von Palus and went wrong when a lead sniper triggered a land mine causing her wounds. Far from being reunited with Vassili, they never met again after her hospitalisation as both lived in the believe that the other was dead. It was only in 1969 that an American journalist tracked down Tania and informed her that Vassili had survived the war and was in Kiev. They never met though.
Although the film portrays Vassili as a backward and slightly dim innocent of the evil and manipulative commisar those who served with him don't back this up, with many saying he was bright, extremely disciplined, and thorough in every thing he did with a ruthless intensity.
To watch the film you would think that Konig and Zaitsev were the only combatants at Stalingrad, the idea that they could move aroudn with such freedom is most unlikely. This becomes particularly laughable at the climax. The scene features the commisar having a white light moment and denouncing communism (it is Hollywood afterall) before noblely popping his head above a window to have it promptly blown off to give away Konigs position. A spectating commisar was shot on the third day of the cat and mouse game, but Zaitsev did nothing to assist him realising that doing so would likely lead to him being shot too. Unlike the Germans, Soviet snipper teams worked in pairs, with one spotting and the other shooting. It was Zaitsev's partner who drew the Germans fire by using a mit on a stick. After much observation of the no mans land Zaitsev had spotted a sheet of iron under which he felt the sniper might have been (this bit the film features). He wanted to test this theory out and thus used the mit to prove it, with Zaitsevs partner feigning injury with a convincing cry of pain the German raises his head very slightly to try and use his scope as a visual contact. The film prtrays him as climbing out of the fox hole and walking 100 yards across no mans land in broad daylight to claim his trophy. No sniper would ever do that without some very serious observation, and certainly not at Stalingrad where he'd be unlikely to get more than 1 yard. Zaitsev himself recounts that he waited until the afternoon when the sun was behind him and thus likely to catch the Germans telescopic sight before putting his plan into action. It was this glint in the glass that he used to take his aim from, and he wouldn't have altered his position to go and stand by a railway truck when he was better concealed where he was.
Anoraks of the world unite
