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Hey guys! Here is the YT edit for Enemy at the Gates, which will premiere shortly. Hope you enjoy! 

Direct link in case the above player doesn't work. 

Here is the full reaction to this movie. 

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[YT Edit] Enemy at the Gates

Comments

Anonymous

One of my favorite war movies. I love the back and forth battle of wits between the two snipers. Also great side stories.

Lamar Smith

I wanted Zero Dark to win but I am glad to delve into the History of this. So, this is loosely based on a real Russian sniper, the Soviet Union’s top scoring sniper at the Battle of Stalingrad. The first part of the movie is true enough; Vasily Zaitsev did learn to shoot from his grandfather in the Ural Mountains, records do exist that he crossed the Volga into Stalingrad without a weapon. Far larger than his personal kill total, however, was his impact as a sniper instructor. ‘Zaitsev’ means ‘baby rabbit’ or, more formally, ‘leveret’ and his pupils referred to themselves as his ‘baby rabbits,’ and a deadly bunch they were. I’m not at all sure about German snipers being shipped in from Germany’s shooting academies but, historically, firing for long-range precision especially whilst hidden has been an absolute mania for the Prussian, then German Armies for hundreds of years. Like Gettysburg and Bastogne, the importance of Stalingrad itself was absolutely minimal. We have copies of the original Barbarossa plans, the plans to invade the Soviet Union and it’s barely mentioned, except as a place on the way to the absolutely essential Caucasus oil fields. It was no more important back then as Bakhmut in the Ukraine is today. It only became important as a contest of wills between two tyrants. Possessing it brought neither side any closer to victory in the war. There is a famous hill in the center of Stalingrad, now renamed Volgograd, called the Mamayev Kurgan. The bones and ashes of the defenders of Stalingrad, including Zaitsev, are interred there and a large statue and mausoleum atop it today commemorates the sacrifice so many made. It was practically holy ground. How feelings are running there today about honoring Russian soldiers’ accomplishments and sacrifices is a different question.

Lamar Smith

Soviet snipers weren’t all male, either. A Ukrainian sniper Lyudmilla Pavlechenko was the female sniper with the highest kill total and earned her nickname as ‘Madame Death.’ Stalin sent her to the US to drum up American support for the war and she toured the US with Elenor Roosevelt giving speeches and shooting demonstrations.

Lamar Smith

Stalingrad proved something Army leaders already knew but re-learned at incredibly high costs: ‘field armies tend to have glass jaws.’ The Wehrmacht, the German Army in WWII was one of the most technically and tactically proficient forces ever fielded. When the Soviet Army faced them in battle on open terrain, the Wehrmacht swept the field of hundreds of thousands of them at a time. The fast-moving, close coordination between infantry, tanks, artillery, air assets, reconnaissance and engineering elements provided the Germans with huge advantages in speed and flexibility. The German Army was like a boxer that hit harder, moved faster and was much more intelligent all at the same time as its opponent. The best chance the Soviets had to defeat them was to find a way to make them fight in a slogging war of attrition at incredibly close quarters where their technical expertise no longer mattered. A shattered, rubbled city at the end of a supply line the better part of 1000miles long was one of the few scenarios that favored the Soviets. So long as the German Army stayed out of block by block, house by house, at times room by room fighting, they’d be fine. Add to that scenario trying to fight that kind of fight over a Russian winter and you enter ‘Avoid at all costs’ territory. Given the name of the town, however, and it was a honey pot that cost the Germans over 600,000 prisoners, of which less than 5000 ever made it back to Germany well over a decade after the war was over and only after Stalin himself died. It was stupidity to take an army into that bombed out town and even worse to keep feeding your men into that meat grinder where the average lifespan was measured in days.

Shawn Kildal

It's like The Hunt for Red October, I didn't get Sean Connery being cast as a Russian either. Like you, I just "rolled with it".

Lamar Smith

On the Prussian/German emphasis and training on precision shooting, in the 1800s the Prussians actually fielded a unit of snipers equipped with a very long, cumbersome rifle that was powered by compressed air rather than gunpowder. It was, effectively, silent, gave off no tell-tale puff of smoke and was quite deadly. The design of the rifle wasn’t practical in field conditions. The whole idea of sniping is the near surgical precision and the aspect of leaving your enemy with the feeling that he was being hunted. The word ‘sniper’ comes from an Indian bird that was particularly difficult to hit, requiring patience and exceptional shooting skills by the British colonizers. One with the field and shooting skills to hit a snipe was known as a ‘sniper.’ Snipers habitually carried a surprisingly small number of rounds into combat and, especially in Stalingrad, that meant intentionally passing up most targets. Zaitsev wrote that he’d never shoot any German below the rank of Sergeant and only those with great reluctance. He was habitually after officers. If you’re only going to fire one or two bullets every time you go out, you want to achieve the greatest impact for those shots. A good sniper relocates after each shot which takes time and planning and danger in moving about, so you don’t do that for some grunt.

Lamar Smith

The emphasis on field craft in the German Army persists to this day. While there’s no such thing as an easy Special Forces training in any Army worth it’s salt, amongst that community world-wide there’s general agreement that the Special Forces training in the modern German Army is especially rigorous. It’s heavily focused on exactly the sort of field craft, physical toughness and proficiency with weapons that translates to sniping skills. The Sniper school in the American Army, also, is particularly difficult. Snipers study with mathematical precision the flight characteristics of their bullets. It’s a matter of the application of physics. Rounds fired from a high powered rifle rise out of the barrel in their flight a little, then fall in a predictable parabolic arc. The sniper and his spotter calculate the effects of distance, temperature, barometric pressure (thick, wet air vs dry, thin air makes bullets behave differently), wind and, for particularly long shots, the rotation of the earth. The record for longest sniper shot belongs to, from memory, a Canadian Special Forces sniper operating in Afghanistan. He hit a target well beyond a mile away from one mountaintop to another.

Stretch

Helmets are not bullet proof in ww2, they are mainly to deflect shrapnel.

Anonymous

Dr. Strangelove really isn't a "war movie" in the Saving Private Ryan or Platoon sense, it's pretty much a straight-up comedy *set* during the Cold War.

Bill W

....except that the comedy itself is NOT straight-up. That's not confusing, right?

Bill W

Good on you for hanging in there Cassie. Quite a bit of brutality in this one. Not as much as Saving Private Ryan, but still.

Anonymous

It’s not well known in the west, the German army died in Russia. A much more accurate, but extremely brutal, depiction is Come and See. I hesitate to recommend it, because of how raw it is. The events in the movie Enemy at the Gates, take up maybe three pages in the book.

silverarrow06

Your totally right with everything about "Come and see". It's one of that movies you can only watch once, because you can never "unsee" it. I'm glad I watched it, but at the same time I'm not. Kinda like "The Grey Zone".

Ria Grix

The most unromantic, romantic thing ever. Lol