Notes of a Sniper - Vassili Zaitsev. The book that inspired Enemy At The Gates and War Of The Rats. 

Zaitsev titled the book Notes of a Sniper; For Us There Was No Land Beyond the Volga. Zaitsev details the battle from when he was first sent to Stalingrad, up until he was wounded by shrapnel in January of 1943. He heard the German surrender from his hospital bed in Stalingrad - he heard the captive German army marching past. If you are the sort of person who likes first person accounts by actual participants, this is the book for you. Zaitsev explains how he became a marksman in his youth, and then how he and a small band of Red Army snipers managed to kill more than 1,200 German soldiers - mostly officers, sergeants, machine - gunners and artillery spotters.

Zaitsev is good writer who was there during the biggest battle of all time and he gives a blow by blow account of the dirt, the blood, the grime, the smells, when he first arrived he was a unit messenger and he only got the sniper assignment 4 or 5 weeks into the battle. Although he had high scores on the shooting range no one thought to make him a sniper until they saw him shoot a German machine gunner and two loaders, at a range of 600 yards, using a gun with standard sights. Zaitsev reports that he had never seen a rifle with telescopic sights until he was in Stalingrad and he had no idea how to use a sniper rifle.

He was a self taught marksman with only a few days of instruction from a graduate of the Moscow Army Sniper School. When his superiors saw his success they ordered him to create a sniper detachment in Stalingrad, and Zaitsev recruited his marksmen on the spot. In total he killed 225 soldiers and officers including 11 enemy snipers. Prior to that he had already killed 32 soldiers with the standard-issue Mosin-Nagant rifle. Between October 1942 and January 1943, Zaitsev had made 242 verified kills, but the real number may be much higher. Some argue it might have been as many as 500.