David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

He paused. Every eye was on him. The soldiers craned for his next words.

Zaitsev looked at Danilov. The commissar’s pencil wiggled madly, recording these first sessions of the new Red Army sniper school. Vasily Zaitsev, head sniper, Danilov must be writing. Hero.

“As a Russian sniper, you’ll have the following duties when you return to your units. You will hunt the most important targets you can find in this order: officers, artillery observers, scouts, mortar crews and machine gunners, antitank riflemen, and motorcycle messengers. Never give up your position for a shot on a lesser target if you think an officer will come your way with a little more patience.

“Your company commanders will assign your platoon leader the day’s objective. You will advance to the front line and spearhead the attack by taking out the targets I just named in that order. After the attack has begun, you’ll move to the flanks to protect against machine guns and mortars.”

Zaitsev paused to let what he’d said sink in, though he knew he would have to repeat it several times before the day was out.

He rubbed his hands together. “Like the wolf in the taiga, the Red sniper has only one natural enemy.” He said this as if sharing a secret with fellow conspirators. “Your counterpart is the German sniper. He is your nemesis and you are his. Despite the list of targets I gave you, an enemy sniper is always a priority.”

He smiled at the Bear, who stood behind the men, smoking and looking into the distance as if across a great open span.

“Nothing,” Zaitsev said, reaching for the Moisin-Nagant to bring the sight up to his eye, “absolutely nothing will excite you and endanger you like a duel to the death with another sniper.”

Zaitsev squeezed the trigger. It clicked in the quiet chamber. “He is your worthiest opponent.”

Viktor spat on the concrete floor and rubbed it in with his foot. He stepped to the middle of the group and stood next to Zaitsev. The two linked arms.

“And we’re going to show you how to kill him,” Viktor said.

Zaitsev patted his large friend on the back. “One bullet,” he said, “one kill.”

THAT AFTERNOON, THE RECRUITS STUDIED WHAT ZAITSEV AND VIKTOR had learned about enemy sniper tactics and abilities. It had become clear that the Nazi sharpshooters were not trained for the urban devastation of Stalingrad but rather for operations as part of their blitzkrieg tactics. They were accustomed to moving fast and furiously across open fields and around deserted, bombed-out cities. Where do you learn patience, Viktor wondered aloud, when you’re simply running behind tanks, conquering whole nations at once, like Poland in a month or the useless, gutless French in a week?

The Germans made good use of darkening agents such as grease or dirt to deflect light and blend with their surroundings. They wrapped their muzzles with light or dark cloth. On one occasion, both Viktor and Zaitsev were fooled by a Nazi sniper who’d set up a false position by linking a wire to a rifle, then pulled his trigger from twenty meters away. Zaitsev had fired at the position, certain he had a kill. His reward was a bullet skipped off his helmet and a hard fall onto the seat of his pants.

The German snipers’ shooting skills were lethal to five hundred meters. Though deadly, the snipers could also be careless and overconfident, often neglecting to move after a shot. They didn’t husband their ammunition, sometimes firing two or three rounds at a single target from the same position, presenting a patient Red sniper with the chance to repay a miss with a hit. The Nazis frequently repeated deceptions, bouncing a helmet on a stick high above the breastwork three or four times an hour as if the Russian sniper were nothing more than a fish that would bite on any worm. At times Viktor had felt insulted by the Germans. They would smoke cigarettes or pipes after dark or throw dirt into the open while digging a shooting cell. They sometimes made unnecessary movements or noises. “Never rely on your adversary to make a mistake,” Zaitsev told the recruits. “But give him plenty of room to do so. Then punish him for it.”

Viktor reminded them: “No mistake is small if it gets your head blown off.”

The German sniper worked in relative safety, usually two to three hundred meters from the front line. His four-hundred-meter shot would therefore penetrate only a hundred or so meters into the Russian rear. This tactic posed little threat to Red Army officers, who stayed mostly far behind the lines. But the new Russian sharpshooter, with his greater fieldcraft skills, would prowl under the enemy’s nose along the front lines to reach an inattentive German colonel or general half a kilometer behind the action. “Because of this bold fact, even our women snipers,” Zaitsev said, “will make better men.”

The Nazi sharpshooters never worked at night, allowing the Russians to operate twelve hours a day without fear of being spotted. “I don’t like hunting after dark,” Zaitsev commented, but added with a laugh, “though Master Sergeant Medvedev is quite the night owl.” Viktor regularly took his toll on enemy machine gunners imprudent enough to fire tracers, or on artillery spotters who fancied the green and red flares they lofted above the Russian flotillas on the Volga.

Zaitsev believed the fiercer conditions under which the Russians worked kept them sharp. By contrast, the German snipers’ concentration was eroded by working exclusively from the rear and only under the sun. As an added benefit, the Red troops on the front line got a morale boost from fighting alongside their marksmen. The German foot soldier never saw his army’s snipers.

“The Nazi snipers think they’re safe just because they’re in trenches far behind the lines,” Zaitsev said. “They are not safe, even there. Why? Because they’re still in Russia.”

That’s enough for today, Zaitsev thought. I don’t know what else to tell them. In fact, I didn’t know I knew so much myself.

Zaitsev glanced across the room at Danilov. Incredibly, the commissar had scribbled all morning and afternoon. Danilov looked up to meet Zaitsev’s eyes. He closed his notebook and gave the OK sign. With both hands, he held up the notebook with satisfaction as if it were a trophy he’d won. Danilov hurried from the shop with his long coattails kicking up like dogs running at his sides.

Zaitsev clapped his hands. “Everyone up. We’ll start tomorrow with marksmanship. For now, the hares will come with me. The bears will go with Sergeant Medvedev. We’ll show you to your quarters. Let’s go.”

Fifteen recruits followed each of the sergeants up to the ground floor of the Lazur to separate corners of the building. Once the decision had been made to divide them, Zaitsev and Viktor wanted distinct identities for the two squads, with military objectives that best fit their physical abilities and personalities, and Danilov had approved of the idea. The bears would work more closely with the frontline troops, softening up resistance before attacks and protecting the 284th’s flanks during operations. Their weapons, in addition to the sniper rifle, would include the submachine gun and grenade. These large men would also be trained in night sniping operations, Viktor’s specialty. On the other hand, the hares were to be the division’s assassins, smaller, more mobile men—and women—with the nerve and fieldcraft, in Viktor’s words, to “crawl into the enemy’s mouth and shoot out his teeth.” The hares would learn Zaitsev’s abilities at dissolving into the front line with iron patience and unerring one-shot killing.

Zaitsev ushered his group into a large, windowless room with a blanket hanging in the doorway. A lantern glowed in a corner. Three buckets of water sat next to a tin washbasin. Beyond these, the room was empty.