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The Finnish Campaign

Around the world, the Soviet assault inspired bewilderment, increased by the fact that the swastika was a Finnish good-luck symbol. Popular sentiment ran strongly in favour of the victims: in fascist Italy, there were pro-Finnish demonstrations. The British and French saw Stalin’s action as further evidence of the Russo-German vulture collaboration manifested in Poland, though in reality Berlin was no party to it. There was a surge of Allied enthusiasm for dispatching military aid to Finland. French general Maxime Weygand wrote to Gamelin urging this course, which in French eyes had the supreme virtue of moving the war away from France: ‘I regard it as essential to break the back of the Soviet Union in Finland … and elsewhere.’ But, while there was intense discussion of possible Anglo-French expeditions to Finland during the months that followed, the practical difficulties seemed overwhelming. If Winston Churchill had then been British prime minister, it is likely that he would have launched operations against the Russians. But the Chamberlain government, in which as First Sea Lord Churchill represented a minority voice for activism, had no stomach for a gratuitous declaration of war on the Soviet Union when the German menace was still unaddressed.

Marshal Mannerheim conducted his campaign to a meticulous personal routine: he was woken at 0700 in his quarters at the Seuranhoe Hotel in Mikkeli, some forty miles behind the front, appeared immaculately dressed for breakfast an hour later, then drove to his headquarters in an abandoned schoolhouse a few hundred yards distant. In the tiny, intimate society of Finland, he insisted upon having casualty lists read aloud to him, name by name. During the first weeks of war, knowing the limitations of his army, he resolutely resisted subordinates’ pleas to advance and exploit their successes, but on 23 December a Finnish counter-attack was indeed launched across the Karelian isthmus. Infantry charged forward crying ‘Hakkaa paale!’ – ‘Cut them down!’; lacking artillery and air support, they were repulsed with heavy losses.

The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice. Stalin’s response to the setbacks, indeed humiliations, of the December offensive was to replace failed senior officers – one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag – and to commit massive reinforcements. Ice roads capable of bearing tanks were built by laying logs on trampled snow, then spraying them with water which was allowed to freeze. The Finns had started the war with three weeks’ supply of artillery ammunition, and fuel and small-arms ammunition for sixty days; by January, these stocks were almost exhausted.

The world greeted Finland’s initial successes with awe: Mannerheim became a popular hero in western Europe, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier promised the Finns reinforcements of a hundred aircraft and 50,000 men before the end of February, but never lifted a finger to make good on his pledge. The writer Arthur Koestler, in Paris, wrote contemptuously that French excitement about Finnish victories recalled ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’. In Britain the left, represented by its weekly organ Tribune, at first offered reflexive support to Moscow’s cause, then abruptly switched allegiance to back the Finns.

Churchill regarded Soviet action as direct kin to Nazi aggression. Britain’s First Sea Lord exulted in Stalin’s failure, declaring in a broadcast on 20 January: ‘Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army