• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1107 0

axes between lakes, forests and swamps. Though the Finns had little artillery and few anti-tank weapons, so inept were the Soviet assaults that the defenders wreaked havoc on their columns with rifle and machine-gun fire. The snowy wastelands of eastern Finland were soon deeply stained with blood; some defenders succumbed to nervous exhaustion after mowing down advancing Russians at close range hour after hour. Soviet armour suffered 60 per cent losses, chiefly because tanks advanced without infantry support. Most fell victim to primitive weapons, notably bottles filled with petrol and capped with a flaming wick, which caused them to explode into liquid fire when smashed against a vehicle. Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet ‘Molotov bread-basket’, then ‘Molotov cocktail’, first entered the military lexicon.

Mannerheim observed dryly that the attackers came on ‘with a fatalism incomprehensible to a European’. A hysterical Soviet battalion commander told his officers: ‘Comrades, our attack was unsuccessful; the division commander has just given me the order personally – in seven minutes, we attack again.’ The Soviet columns lumbered forward once more – and were slaughtered. Some Finnish units adopted large-scale guerrilla tactics, striking at Soviet units from the forests, then withdrawing. They sought to break up the attackers’ formations then destroy them piecemeal, calling such encounters ‘motti’ – ‘firewood’ battles – chopping up the enemy. Among the heroes of the campaign was Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, who collapsed with a heart condition in the midst of one action, but somehow kept going. Like most of his fighting countrymen, Pajari was an amateur soldier, but he achieved a notable little victory against much superior forces at Tolvajärvi. During weeks of fighting at Kollaa, the Finns deployed two French 3.5? guns cast in 1871, which fired black powder charges. In the northern sector, the defence was supported by a 1918-vintage armoured train, bustling to and fro between threatened points.

The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men with a manual on ski tactics, but no skis; in the first weeks, Russian tanks were not even painted white. The Finns, by contrast, dispatched ski patrols to cut roads behind the front and attack supply columns, often at night. One Finnish Jaeger regiment was led by Col. Hjalmar Siialsvuo. A peacetime lawyer, short, blond and tough, he galvanised the protracted defence of Suomussalmi village, and eventually found himself commanding a division. The Russians were impressed by the proficiency of Finnish snipers, whom they called ‘cuckoos’. The chief of staff of Gen. Vasily Chuikov’s Ninth Army produced an analysis of Soviet failures which concluded that the offensive had been too road-bound: ‘Our units, saturated by technology (especially artillery and transport vehicles), are incapable of manoeuvre and combat in this theatre.’ Soldiers, he said, are ‘frightened by the forest and cannot ski’.

The Finns deplored everything about the manner in which their enemies made war. One desperate Russian general sought to clear a minefield by driving a herd of horses through it, and the animal-loving defenders were appalled by the resultant carnage. A man gazing on heaped Russian corpses in the northern sector said: ‘The wolves will eat well this year.’ Carl Mydans, a photographer for America’s Life magazine, described the scene on one frozen battlefield: ‘The fighting was almost over as we walked up the snow-banked path that led from the road to the river … The Russian dead spotted the ice crust. They lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters, with sausage and bread and shoes. Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow under the tall