AlexG's Full Review: David L. Robbins and George Guidall - War of the R...
Stalingrad, 1942. The bloodiest and the most destructive battle in history. The final toll on both armies was an estimated 1,109,000 deaths. Just one of many tragedies in a war in which the Soviet Union lost over 20 million people—more than 10 dead soldiers and civilians, men and women for every meter of land between Moscow and Berlin.
Stalingrad. A city of 500,000 civilians before the war. Only 1,500 were alive after the battle.
In this carnage fight two extraordinary men—one Russian and one German—each the top sniper in his respective army: “One Bullet, One Kill” Russian Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Zaitsev and German SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald. Each man knows his counterpart and each man knows that his archenemy is looking for him. Their mission is to find and destroy each other. Two men, two destinies, one survivor.
The following pages contain only the preview to the plot of the book—just enough to catch your interest. I assure you that the following paragraphs reveal nothing that would interfere with your enjoyment of the novel should you decide to read it.
Vasily Zaitsev, the Russian supersniper, twenty-seven year old hunter from Siberia, had killed forty-two Germans in twelve days when he was summoned to the bunker of Colonel Batyuk, the commander of 284th Division. Batyuk was so impressed with Zaitsev’s skills and instincts that he asked Zaitsev along with his partner sniper, Viktor Medvedev, to start a sniper school for Russian soldiers. “We’ll train them to make every Nazi in Stalingrad afraid for his life twenty-four hours a day, on the front line or deep in their rear. The Germans will be scared to lift their heads for fear of having them blown off…”
In order to stop the heavy daily human losses and increasingly low morale caused by the invisible Russian sniper fire, the Germans dispatched SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald—the Headmaster of sniper school in Gnossen, the suburb of Berlin—the best sniper in German army. Thorvald, in his mid thirties, an aristocrat with a passion for opera more than war, had spent less than two weeks on the battlefields during Hitler’s Eastern European campaign. In this short period of time, Thorvald amassed more than three hundred kills—all from a sniper rifle.
And then there is Tania Chernova—an American young woman from New York, a daughter of Russian immigrants, who goes back to her native Minsk to take her grandparents to America. When the Germans kill Tania's grandparents, she decides to stay in Russia and fight to avenge their death. She eventually ends up in Stalingrad, where she joins Zaitsev’s sniper school and becomes one of his most talented students and perhaps his greatest weakness.
Based on a true story (though researchers are divided on its true extent), War of the Rats, by David L. Robbins, is a gripping read from the beginning to the end. The author carefully builds the momentum in the duel without taking sides, going back and forth between the Russian camp and the German camp, between Zaitsev’s tactic and Thorvald’s tactic. The love story that unfolds parallel to this death match, though captivating and enjoyable, never exceeds the importance of the breathtaking duel.
On March 16, 2001, a major motion picture “Enemy at the Gates” opened in theaters nationwide, starring Jude Law and Ed Harris. At $85 million, this is the most expensive movie ever produced in Europe. “Enemy at the Gates,” is based on the 1973 book of the same name, by William Craig, where the story of the duel is lightly sprinkled across a documentary book about the Stalingrad battle. I haven’t seen a single mention of War of the Rats in all the previews of the movie that I read.
Recently I stumbled upon the interview with David L. Robbins, the author of War of the Rats, who had read thirty-five books on the subject while doing the research for his novel. This is what he had to say about the upcoming movie: “The producers have, for reasons of their own, diverted far afield from the actual tale. I admit I am at a loss to understand how anyone could believe he might imagine a more compelling and thrilling story than what actually happened in Stalingrad between Tania, Vasily and the Headmaster.”
I don’t understand that either. I highly recommend you read the book first.
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UPDATE: I decided to add the following excerpt from the interview with David L. Robbins, because I believe it will be interesting for anyone who has read "War of the Rats" or seen the movie "Enemy at the Gates"...
Q: What question do readers most often pose to you?
A: Readers want to know what happened to Tania at the end of War Of The Rats. Does she live or die? Does Zaitsev ever see her again? The answers are: yes, she lives, but she is terribly wounded. The young girl is surgically menopausal at the age of twenty-two, and her health throughout the rest of her life reflects this. Zaitsev, in real life, never does see Tania again. He was blinded rounding up surrendering Germans in the Kessel when a phosphorus bomb blew up near him. The wounds were temporary and he regained his sight. Zaitsev went on to fight all the way to Berlin with the Red Army, achieving even more heroic status. After the war, he married and became a civil engineer in Kiev, where he had three daughters. Tania loved him, and she was wrongly told he had been killed. Tania went into a severe depression over her loss and her own wounds. In 1969, she learned he survived when a foreign reporter asked her about her time in the Hares. She asked how this man knew of her, and he replied that Zaitsev had spoken of her. Then Tania knew that Vasily had never come back for her and her heart was broken afresh. Zaitsev himself told me years later that he tried to find Tania, but that records were scarce in Russia after the war. He lost track and, saddened, went on his way.
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