The Enemy at the Gates and the Battle of Stalingrad

This entry is a variation of my paper on Enemy at the Gates, one of our optional films. The assignment for the paper was to talk about Godfrey Cheshire’s review of the movie and how one might agree or disagree. I found his review had little to say about the movie, but a lot to say about Cheshire’s views about Communism, Fascism, and France. The review was so lop-sided I was almost forced to ignore the movie and respond to prejudices the critic exposed. This BLOG entry is about some aspects of the movie, with a small excursion into facts about the Battle of Stalingrad.

I’m a bit of a military history buff, and a some-time student of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, so Enemy at the Gates seemed right down my alley. I preparing the paper, I did a lot of research into the Battle of Stalingrad. Most of that was not useful for the paper, but I found it interesting, and will share it here.

• I’ve always viewed Russia’s history as a mix of the equivalent of Viking epics, the American Old West, and Gone with the Wind. It has the richness, the violence, the drama, the battles, and all the strange types of madness found in those stories.

In mid 1941, Germany and its Axis allies had invaded the Soviet Union, advancing rapidly, inflicting multiple defeats against its Soviet enemies. The Soviets counter-attacked in the fall, and while the outcome was not clear, the Germans were exhausted and not prepared for a winter war in the Soviet Union, with much stretched supply lines. By spring, the German forces were ready to continue their thrust into the Soviet Union. The German High Command wanted to do something that was not expected, and Hitler wanted to end the war on the Eastern Front before the US could get fully involved in the war in Europe. A quick major victory in the East was needed. Stalingrad was a good target.

The movie Enemy at the Gates is set in Stalingrad in late ’42 or early ‘43. The battle had begun in late August ’42 when the German Army Group South (B) moved toward the Volga and Stalingrad from the West. Hitler, who considered himself a great military strategist, had previously split the German Army Group South into two units, leaving the second (B) unit to attack Stalingrad.

The original plan had been to start the attack in May, but a number of the units had been heavily engaged in earlier combat, and needed time to refit and re-equip. When the forces were ready to move, they found that their large number of vehicles couldn’t advance quickly, because the limited network of rudimentary roads and highways in the region simply weren’t up to the task of support and troop movements needed by Germany’s battle plans. Terrible road blockages and traffic snarls impeded transit and slowed progress. By July, the Germans were only a few kilometers from Stalingrad, and new armored units in the south turned north to help in the attack. The Soviet hierarchy could now clearly see what was coming and made rapid moves to defend Stalingrad, assigning General Chuikov to defend Stalingrad at all costs.

Much of Germany’s military success was based on its Blitzkrieg (lightning war) techniques, in which rapid tank advances, supported by precision bombing, air-to-ground support, and artillery, was used to rapidly engage and overwhelms defensive forces. The attack on Stalingrad began with massive bombing raids, with heavy damage inflicted on the city. Stalin apparently prevented many civilians from leaving the city, believing that their presence would give defending soldiers more incentive than empty buildings.

Early in the struggle, the German Air Force bombed Stalingrad, destroying roughly eighty percent of the living space. A massive firestorm, created by the bombing, killed thousands of civilians.

Civilian militias, including an anti-aircraft gun regiment made of primarily of inexperienced women provided much of the initial defense of Stalingrad, and the Germans were forced to overrun all 37 anti-aircraft positions, which were being used against the tanks.

Both Hitler and Stalin were brutal with the soldiers in the fight. Fighting was fierce – and life expectancy was short. Stalin decreed that any officer who ordered an unauthorized retreat would be subject to a military tribunal, and that would generally result in a death sentence. “Not a step back was the slogan.” Germans pushing into Stalingrad suffered heavy casualties.

The outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad was arguably determined by Marshal Chuikov’s strategy to offset the German force advantage: he pushed his soldiers to seek hand-to-hand combat at every opportunity – a strategy that limited the ability of the Germans to call in air strikes or artillery support without hitting their own men. The German Blitzkrieg tactics, which had worked so well for them elsewhere, were nullified, and the Battle for Stalingrad was reduced to thousands of small unit skirmishes where guts and individual effort mattered more than firepower.

This is where the movie Enemy at the Gates opens – and the role of the sniper becomes of interest.

In the movie, we see Vasiliy Zaitsev, a new conscript, being rushed into Stalingrad with thousands of other conscripts. (One source says that the life expectancy of a new Soviet soldier in Stalingrad, at this time was roughly 24 hours, while the life expectancy of a Soviet officer was 3 days. Times were hard.) We see them all pushed into battle, with every other man issued a rifle, and all issued a clip of ammunition. They were told to pick up a gun as the men in front of them were knocked down. The hero of the story, Vasiliy Zaitsev, a real-life character, did just that – and in an unusual situation, was able to shoot five German staff officers and escape. (Vasiliy has grown up hunting and learning the skills that made him a great sniper, so his success was not a surprise.) The Soviets understood the power of the sniper – and made a hero of Zaitsev to give their troops comfort and to put fear into the hearts of the Germans. The Soviets had, a few years earlier, learned of the powerful impact a single sniper could have on troops:

• During the Winter War in Finland, a single Finnish sniper, Simo Hayha, using a rifle with open sights (i.e., not the telescopic sight used by Zaitsev), killed more than 400 Soviet soldiers, one at a time. He later killed another 200 Soviets with a faster-firing (sub-machine gun) sniper weapon. He did this all in the short span of four months, from late 1939 to early 1940. He was finally knocked out of the war by a German counter-sniper.

In the movie, the hero’s love interest was another sniper named Tania. She was a Jewish intellectual who became a sniper after coming to Stalingrad. Interestingly, there was a Tania in the real Battle of Stalingrad, too -- and she was a sniper. She was, however, neither a Jewish intellectual nor a resident of the city. Tania Chernova, who had once aspired to be a ballerina, was a hardened partisan fighter from Belarus. She came to Stalingrad to kill Germans, traveling through the German lines and the sewers of Stalingrad to join the Soviets. Her hatred of the Germans was so intense she did not consider them human -- she called them “sticks.” Chernova knew Zaitsev, but there is no hint of a close friendship or romance.

From watching the movie, one might infer that snipers turned the tide of battle in Stalingrad. In fact, the fight for Stalingrad was an intense day-to-day struggle of house-to-house, hand-to-hand urban combat, with snipers being little more than grace notes in a larger theme. The movie failed to show the horrible intensity of the ongoing, daily combat in Stalingrad.

• Hitler, perhaps demonstrating the early stages of the madness that would later consume him, refused to allow the German forces in Stalingrad to withdraw, even though they could easily have done so when the tide of battle began to turn. Had the German Army withdrawn, Germany would have been left with an effective fighting force on the Eastern Front. Instead, Hitler ordered the Germans troops to fight to the last bullet, which they did. They finally surrendered when food, ammunition, and hope were exhausted. Because of Hitler’s decision, Germany lost a complete Army Group, with more than 90,000 men taken prisoner. The German military never recovered from the loss. The Battle of Stalingrad was a major turning point of the war.

The movie was focused on a sniper battle – between Vasiliy Zaitsev and a German major named Koenig. Anecdotal stories tell us that Zaitsev killed the German sniper instructor Major Thorvald (also called Koenig in some accounts) after a protracted sniper-sniper duel. The historicity of the Thorvald/Koenig story, however, is open to question. All accounts of the duel came from two Soviet sources, and they differed in important details – one naming Zaitsev, the other Koenig, but neither naming both. While it is very likely there was a sniper/sniper duel – such duels were common – it seems more likely that Major Thorvald/Koenig was the creation of the Soviet propaganda machine, intended to bolster Soviet morale in Stalingrad. Analysis of both German and Soviet archives do not support the story. And, while Zaitsev’s biography on the official Russian War Heroes website7 does speak of Zaitsev’s duel with Koenig, Zaitsev’s autobiography speaks only of a duel with a sniper from Berlin.

The art of the Sniper is only superficially addressed in Enemy at the Gates. Over the years, I spent a lot of time discussing unconventional warfare with two close friends, both retired U.S. Army Special Forces Non-Coms and graduates of the U.S. Army Sniper School. From these two men I learned that snipers typically spend long hours getting into position, and would never risk being caught in the open, especially in daylight – something seen frequently in the movie.

Snipers sometimes worked alone, sometimes in a team of two, but almost never in larger groups – yet we saw that in the movie, too. I would argue, too, that few snipers would, as we saw in the movie, risk retrieving the German equivalent of a dog tag to prove a kill to their superiors – that would be a sure way of getting a sniper killed.

A sniper’s most important skills are stealth and the ability to see without being seen. Camouflage skills are nearly as important as marksmanship. It is only when the sniper is finally in position, ready to shoot, that marksmanship becomes critical.

A lot of factors contributed to the Soviet success in Stalingrad: Chuikov's tactics, alreadymentioned were key. But, Hitler’s refusal to allow the German troops to withdraw was part of it, too -- as was a very severe Soviet winter. Still more important was the dogged determination and courage of many thousands of Soviet men and women, who fought in unbelievably harsh conditions, for long periods, with little hope of relief or success.

Of the 91,000 Germans who surrendered to the Soviets, only 5,000 survived to return home after the war. Prisoners already weakened by disease and starvation, and no medical care, were sent to labor camps throughout the Soviet Union, where most died of overwork and malnutrition.

Stalingrad was a terrible battle. It is believed that the Axis forces had more than 850,000 casualties. The Soviets had more than 1.2 million casualties, including almost 500 thousand killed. In one week of German bombing, it is believed that more than 40,000 civilians in Stalingrad were killed. I doubt that anyone knows how many civilians were lost.

Enemy at the Gates was a good movie, but not a great one. It dealt with some of the history of the Battle of Stalingrad correctly, and took liberties with others aspect of that battle – but few movies about historical events do otherwise. By focusing on a simple love story and a battle between two snipers, the movie overlooked a much grander story of human endeavor, profound struggles, great achievements and greater failures. The story of Stalingrad needs to be better understood by people in the West -- and knowing the story will help us to understand why the Soviet Union was so formidable an adversary during the Cold War, and why modern day Russia cannot be ignored or considered a second rate power. The seeds of greatness are still there.