NOTES OF A SNIPER

Book Type: S

By Vassili Zaitsev, This is the sniper that the movie Enemy At the Gates is based. Stalingrad is only one chapter in this book, the rest is just as fantastic. SPECIAL OFFER! If you don't have the movie Enemy At the Gates, you can buy it on dvd for only $8 when purchasing this book! Zaitsev titled the book Notes of a Sniper; For Us There Was No Land Beyond the Volga. Zaitsev details the battle from when he was first sent to Stalingrad, up until he was wounded by shrapnel in January of 1943. He heard the German surrender from his hospital bed in Stalingrad - he heard the captive German army marching past. If you are the sort of person who likes first person accounts by actual participants, this is the book for you - Zaitsev explains how he became a marksman in his youth, and then how he and a small band of Red Army snipers managed to terminate more than 1200 Nazis - mostly officers, sergeants, machine - gunners and artillery spotters. " Zaitsev is good writer who was there during the biggest battle of all time and he gives a blow by blow account of the dirt, the blood, the grime, the smells, when he first arrived he was a unit messenger and he only got the sniper assignment 4 or 5 weeks into the battle. Although he had high scores on the shooting range no one thought to make him a sniper until they saw him shoot a Nazi machine gunner and the Nazi's two loaders, at a range of 600 yards, using a gun with standard sights. Zaitsev reports that he had never seen a rifle with telescopic sights until he was in Stalingrad and he had no idea how to use a sniper rifle. He was a self taught marksman with only a few days of instruction from a graduate of the Moscow Army Sniper School. When his superiors saw his success they ordered him to create a sniper detachment in Stalingrad, and Zaitsev recruited his marksmen on the spot. 281 pp