Enemy at the Gates/Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Vasily and Danilov are lying in between dead soldiers in a fountain when they spot a group of five Nazi officials in a nearby building. Danilov wants to shoot them, but he doesn't know how to operate the bolt-action rifle; Vasily takes it, loads five cartridges, and proceeds to score five headshots in twenty seconds or so, timing the shots to coincide with the church bell so the enemy can't hear them. Danilov himself considers the feat awesome enough that he makes a hero out of Vasily.
    • And later became one himself, when he helped Vasili pinpoint the German sniper's location by raising his own head up from cover and letting himself be shot and killed. Definitely a posthumous CMoA award.
  • Danilov gets one just after the first entry, when he speaks up to Khrushchev about the need to inspire their soldiers instead of just terrorizing them. Considering that Khrushchev's predecessor has just blown his brains out in the other room, and the fact that the Red Army wasn't exactly known for letting its officers speak their minds, and that Khrushchev is taking charge on the authority of Stalin himself, it took no little courage to speak out like that.
  • When Vasily is trapped by Konig in an abandoned warehouse, hiding behind an old oil drum and unable to move without getting himself shot, we get one for each character. First, Vasily had dropped his rifle out of reach, and was throwing his pocket knife attached to a string to retrieve it. He caught it, and started pulling it toward him...only for Konig to shoot the string in half. Then Tania, who followed Vasily, temporarily blinds Konig with the reflection of the sun off a piece of broken glass, and Vasily gets off a shot that hits Konig's trigger hand.