God, how I hate the opening scene of Enemy of the Gates for its unashamed historical inaccuracy (the rest of the movie is just stupid Hollywood fluff). It has seemingly managed to skew Western audience's overall perception of the entire Eastern front.
Take the "one man gets a rifle, the other a 5-round stripper clip" trope...in 1942, the Soviets had more Mosin Nagant rifles available than men on the frontlines to use them. Even rear-echelon troops were given the comparative luxury of a handier M38 carbine. It is pure Hollywood fiction that the Soviets commonly had issues with arming men fighting on the front lines. The ONLY Soviet soldiers ever sent into battle unarmed were the poor bastards sent to the penal battalions.
The opening scene of Enemy at the Gates is just openly offensive to all those old Russian veterans. According to Hollywood, Russians are so cowardly that they need to be locked into their transport trains, will abandon ship at the first sign of danger and are stupid enough to organize a frontal charge against tanks, entrenched infantry and MG emplacements along a narrow urban corridor, where half the attackers are unarmed.
...The Russians fighting at Stalingrad were not fighting for Stalin or some ideology, they were fighting for each other, their country and their families...like any soldier. The opening scene was the equivalent of Speilberg's Saving Private Ryan depicting a bunch of US infantrymen cowardly abandoning the fight on the approach to Omaha beach.
While I would put the NKVD on a similar level of barbarism as Germany's SS, the depiction of indiscriminate executions by Commissars in the middle of a firefight and a NKVD barrier unit positioned on the frontline to gun down retreating troops is not based in any recorded historical fact. The NKVD butchers killed thousands upon thousands of their own, but it wasn't commonly done on the battlefield, it was done out of sight to avoid damaging unit morale.
During the initial German advances in Stalingrad: August 1 - October 15, 1942
140,775 servicemen were detained
3,980 were arrested
1,189 were executed by shooting
2,961 were sent to Penal battalions
97% of those detained for retreating or similar behaviour were sent back to the front without any punishment. It takes combat veterans to win battles, you don't build up a core of senior NCOs by executing an entire unit after every failed attack.
Overall, Enemy at the Gates was about as concerned with accuracy as The Patriot (the one where British troops murder an entire town by burning them alive in a church...an atrocity that was actually carried out by the Nazis...). Most of the time, Hollywood and history are like oil and water.
TLDR: Fuck Enemy at the Gates and the people who made this movie.
Take the "one man gets a rifle, the other a 5-round stripper clip" trope...in 1942, the Soviets had more Mosin Nagant rifles available than men on the frontlines to use them. Even rear-echelon troops were given the comparative luxury of a handier M38 carbine. It is pure Hollywood fiction that the Soviets commonly had issues with arming men fighting on the front lines. The ONLY Soviet soldiers ever sent into battle unarmed were the poor bastards sent to the penal battalions.
The opening scene of Enemy at the Gates is just openly offensive to all those old Russian veterans. According to Hollywood, Russians are so cowardly that they need to be locked into their transport trains, will abandon ship at the first sign of danger and are stupid enough to organize a frontal charge against tanks, entrenched infantry and MG emplacements along a narrow urban corridor, where half the attackers are unarmed.
...The Russians fighting at Stalingrad were not fighting for Stalin or some ideology, they were fighting for each other, their country and their families...like any soldier. The opening scene was the equivalent of Speilberg's Saving Private Ryan depicting a bunch of US infantrymen cowardly abandoning the fight on the approach to Omaha beach.
While I would put the NKVD on a similar level of barbarism as Germany's SS, the depiction of indiscriminate executions by Commissars in the middle of a firefight and a NKVD barrier unit positioned on the frontline to gun down retreating troops is not based in any recorded historical fact. The NKVD butchers killed thousands upon thousands of their own, but it wasn't commonly done on the battlefield, it was done out of sight to avoid damaging unit morale.
During the initial German advances in Stalingrad: August 1 - October 15, 1942
140,775 servicemen were detained
3,980 were arrested
1,189 were executed by shooting
2,961 were sent to Penal battalions
97% of those detained for retreating or similar behaviour were sent back to the front without any punishment. It takes combat veterans to win battles, you don't build up a core of senior NCOs by executing an entire unit after every failed attack.
Overall, Enemy at the Gates was about as concerned with accuracy as The Patriot (the one where British troops murder an entire town by burning them alive in a church...an atrocity that was actually carried out by the Nazis...). Most of the time, Hollywood and history are like oil and water.
TLDR: Fuck Enemy at the Gates and the people who made this movie.
