Shaken survivors of the Las Vegas massacre described a scene of both desperation and courage — with terrified concertgoers heroically aiding each other, first responders using luggage carts as gurneys, and cops hunting the gunman under a hail of bullets.

“I saw guys plugging bullet holes with their fingers,” one witness, Russell Bleck, told NBC’s “Today” show.

“While everyone else was crouching, police officers [were] standing up [as] targets, just trying to direct people, tell them where to go. The amount of bravery I saw there, words can’t describe what it was like.”

Bleck was with his fiancée Sunday night in a VIP tent at the Route 91 country music festival when sniper Stephen Paddock began firing shots.

“He was just spraying the crowd. He was relentless. There was no stopping,” he said.

“You had five, maybe eight seconds to move from cover to cover to try to move and get out of there as he reloaded.”

The shooting was aimed at the front of the stage, where thousands of people were jammed together listening to country singer Jason Aldean, according to eyewitnesses.

“It was ringing off the top of the stage. You could hear it hitting trailers, people scattering and it was chaos,” singer Jake Owen, who performed before Aldean, told CNN.

“Next thing you know, it was just unloading, like no doubt an automatic-sounding rifle or some sort of machine gun or something. And at that point is when you could tell the chaos and the fear in everyone’s eyes and their demeanor was changed and everyone just started scrambling for any sort of cover.”

Many initially mistook the gunfire for fireworks.

“The people who started falling were all in the front, closer to the stage, where it was very crowded. He couldn’t miss hitting someone, it was so crowded,” a former New Yorker and festival attendee told The Post.

“At first, we thought it was fireworks, then I looked up there was no fireworks. People just started running and screaming, stepping all over each other.”

Terrified couples held hands as they fled, while parents shielded their children from the barrage of bullets. Some concertgoers were trampled in the panic.

“It was the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” said Kodiak Yazzie, 36. “You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash, flash, flash, flash.”

Chaos ensued as some 22,000 people scrambled to flee the outdoor concert area — or hide under the bleachers, vendor booths, the stage and vehicles — as bodies fell around them, witnesses said.

“You had no idea where the shots were coming from or how many shooters there were,” Chrisanna Roberts, 26, told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

“But you just saw people start, like, dropping. You’d be running next to somebody and then they’d just fall. Dead.”

The stampede flowed into nearby casinos.

“The bottom floor of MGM [Grand] is massive, there were tens of thousands of people running inside, some with blood over their face, some with blood over their arms,” Australian tourist Melinda Simpson told ABC.

“There was a woman with ripped jeans and blood on her knees. I said to her, ‘You OK?’ She just yelled at me and said, ‘People don’t f–king care, they tried to squash me to get out.’ ”

One stunned survivor called her dad and described the bloodbath live from the scene.

“Everyone is dying around me. They are shooting my friends. My friend just got shot. Everyone is dying,” Lexi Cheplak, 25, told her dad, Jon, in what he called a “bone-chilling” call, according to South West News Service.

The cocktail waitress phoned back later to say she’d made it out — but many others had not.

“She told me she was running away and a couple of guys said, ‘Hey, come stand behind us,’ and boom, they went down. She had to crawl from behind them and she was running out, people were running with her. She was watching people die in front of her,” Jon said.

Chilling police audio released Monday further paints a picture of carnage and chaos.

In parts of one recording, responders can be heard calling in reports of gunshot-wound victims as gunfire pops in the background.

“We can’t worry about victims!” one officer snaps in the audio, which was obtained by The Blast, an entertainment news website. “We need to stop the shooter before we have more victims! Anyone have eyes on this shooter?”

Soon after, a dispatcher pleads, “Hey officers, please stay calm! Just relax. We’re trying to get this set up. Just stay calm.”

Another officer reports: “Gunfire — it’s going right over our heads! There’s debris going over our heads!”

Disturbing calls continued to pour in of injured victims, while someone else warned that responding cops risked being shot at “in plain sight.”

“Every officer that comes up is going to be a target if they’re driving on Las Vegas Boulevard because it’s coming from Mandalay Bay on the boulevard side,” the person advises.

The pandemonium continued at overwhelmed local hospitals, where victims were wheeled in on wheelbarrows, office chairs and luggage carts.

“It was like a war zone,” University Medical Center trauma surgeon Jay Coates told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“Every bed in trauma bay was occupied . . . People were lined up in hallways for procedures.”

“It was the most patients UMC has ever seen at one time,” added hospital spokeswoman Danita Cohen.

Additional reporting by Danika Fears, Yaron Steinbuch and Larry Celona

With wire services