The Greatest Sniper Duel In History Is A Myth -- Michael Peck, War Is Boring
How we know the Stalingrad sniper battle probably never happened
In the blazing ruins of Stalingrad, where men hunted men with such savagery that even the dogs fled howling into the night, occurred the greatest sniper duel in history.
Too bad it’s more myth than history.
On one side was Vasily Zaitsev, the Soviet army’s deadliest sniper, with some 400 kills. On the other was one “Major Konig,” the head of the German army’s sniper school in Berlin, whom the Nazi high command had dispatched to Stalingrad to hunt down Zaitsev. They met on a fateful afternoon—two marksmen stalking each other on the battlefield. Only Zaitsev survived. Or so the popular retelling would have you believe.
This epic contest between two supersnipers has been immortalized in numerous books and most in the 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates. In his autobiography Notes of a Russian Sniper, Zaitsev himself describes how he carefully studied the battlefield until he deduced that Konig was hidden under a sheet of iron surrounded by a small pile of bricks, in the no-man’s-land between the German and Soviet lines.
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My Comment: I grew up in Russia reading about this "duel" .... it was one of the reasons why I started to shoot a rifle .... I wanted to know what it felt like to be a sniper. But was this all a myth? Tell me it is not so. :(
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