Sniper Anthology by Martin Pegler

Author:Martin Pegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2001-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

VASSILI ZAITSEV

The Sailor of Stalingrad

As had been the case for the generation that preceded his, Zaitsev and his contemporaries seemed to have been born with war as their ultimate destiny. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the fledgling Soviet state dedicated itself to a radical overhaul of the armed forces, determined to place Russia on a par militarily with its European neighbours. There is no question that such a reform was long overdue, for the old Russian Army had been woefully under-equipped, poorly trained and indifferently led by an officer elite who regarded the average Russian peasant soldiers as no more than ignorant beasts of burden. During the First World War, the German and Austrian armies had fielded very large numbers of snipers along the Eastern Front and they exacted a terrible toll on the hapless Russians who, despite fielding a huge army, had no snipers or telescopic-sighted rifles and were impotent to respond. Many of the soldiers who survived the terrible fighting on that front were to become the senior NCOs and officers of the new Soviet Army, and they did not forget the hard lessons they had learned in the trenches.

Russia thus set about transforming what was effectively a feudal nineteenth-century army into the largest, most modern and best equipped armed force in Europe. Because of its size (in 1925 the army numbered 560,000 but by 1935 it comprised 1.3 million men) re-arming posed a considerable problem, both logistically and financially. On the thorny question of what to do about re-arming, General Alexei Brusilov (1853–1926), then in overall command of the Red Army, decided that it would retain its old Mosin-Nagant Model 1891/30 rifles (which were adequate if not outstanding] but that a new dedicated sniper rifle would be manufactured.

This was a relatively straightforward process, as from 1926 the Red Army had begun producing good copies of German scopes based on the Zeiss/Kahles and Emil Busch patterns and, with a little modification, the Mosin could be adapted to enable the scope mounts to be fitted to the left side of the receiver. By 1932 the first of these rifles were becoming available to army units.

The new telescope, the 4-power PE, was uniquely fitted with both windage and elevation drums making it easy to use even with gloved hands and between 1932 and 1938 over 54,000 were produced. It proved to be a competent set-up, the rifles being capable of grouping 10 shots into 3.6 cm at 100 metres and 34 cm at 550 metres using ordinary 7.62 x 54mm military ball ammunition and a 13.6-gram spitzer boat-tailed bullet. Later use of a heavier armour-piercing bullet tightened the groups and gave a slightly improved range, with 700 metres being about the maximum for accurate shooting. In 1936 the scope design was simplified and a smaller, lighter scope, the PU, was introduced and this was to become the mainstay of the Soviet sniper through the Second World War and well into the Cold War era.

While it was all very

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