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English vs. Polish hostility [323]
a chubby 30 something ex sailor in the red fleet
The movie Enemy at the Gates, is a fictionalized account of the true story of Vasilii Zaitsev,
He is portrayed as a callow young man, though he was older than average, being born in March 1915 making him 27 years old during the battle. He had been serving in the Navy since 1936, held the rank of Junior Lieutenant
On the far shore of the Volga men are rushed straight into battle after
a small number of them are given rifles and the rest one clip of ammunition with instructions for the unarmed to pick up the rifles of the fallen - this inspired by Gabriel Temkin's My Just War: the Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier
What those unfamiliar with the Soviet side of Second World War will learn from this movie is that the director got many aspects correct in a general sense.
Men were often thrown into combat from the march with little or no orientation to the combat situation or formal integration into a unit
and that attacks made under such circumstances usually failed with catastrophic loss of life.
They will learn that junior ranking political officers served in the front lines and suffered the same fate as officers and men.
That women served alongside men at the front and did become entangled in romantic relationships is also accurate.
Also true was the use of blocking detachments of troops of the Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) to shoot soldiers retreating without authorization
On the other hand, this movie gets some things wrong.
The director has Nikita Khrushchev in charge of the battle from a bunker in Stalingrad. True, Khrushchev was on the military soviet of the Stalingrad Front,
but he did not play a role in orchestrating the battle
There is no mention of Marshal Yeremenko who did command the front
or of General Chuikov who directed the 62nd Army in the battle for Stalingrad.
Although NKVD blocking detachments
had existed from the beginning of the war,
Only in August 1942, weeks before the battle for Stalingrad began,
Did Stalin issue the highly unpopular Order no. 227 for "not one step backward" Requiring the army to form its own blocking detachments in each regiment.
One more inaccuracy is. Although two women snipers are depicted,
They never actually shoot anyone,
Whereas in fact Soviet women snipers are credited with over ten thousand enemy killed.
( Another Obessesive )
