Inferno - Max Hastings [24]
They were so young. As the eighteen-year-old Territorial soldier Doug Arthur paraded with his unit outside a church in Liverpool shortly before embarking for overseas service, he was embarrassed to be picked out by one of an emotional crowd of watching housewives: “Look at ’im, girls,” she said pityingly. “ ’E should be at ‘ome wit’ ‘is Mam. Never mind, son, yourse’ll be alrigh’. God Bless yer la’. He’ll look after yourtse, yer know, like. That bastard ’itler ’as gorra lot to answer for. I’d like to get me bleedin’ ‘ands on ’im for five bleedin’ minutes, the swine.”
President Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his London ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, on 30 October 1939: “While the [First] World War did not bring forth strong leadership in Great Britain, this war may do so, because I am inclined to think the British public has more humility than before and is slowly but surely getting rid of the ‘muddle through’ attitude of the past.” FDR’s optimism would ultimately prove justified, but only after many more months of “muddle through.”
The next phase of the struggle increased the world’s bewilderment and confusion of loyalties, for it was undertaken not by Hitler, but by Stalin. Like all Europe’s tyrants, Russia’s leader assessed the evolving conflict in terms of the opportunities it offered him for aggrandisement. In the autumn of 1939, having secured eastern Poland, he sought further to enhance the Soviet Union’s strategic position by advancing into Finland. The country, a vast, sparsely inhabited wilderness of lakes and forests, was one among many whose frontier, indeed very existence, was of short duration, and thus vulnerable to challenge. Part of Sweden until the Napoleonic Wars, thereafter it was ruled by Russia until 1918, when Finnish anti-Bolsheviks triumphed in a civil war.
In October 1939, Stalin determined to strengthen the security of Leningrad, only thirty miles inside Soviet territory, by pushing back the nearby Finnish frontier across the Karelian Isthmus and occupying Finnish-held islands in the Baltic; he also coveted nickel mines on Finland’s north coast. A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly. Arvo Tuominen, a prominent Finnish communist, declined Stalin’s invitation to form a shadow puppet government, and went into hiding. Tuominen said: “It would be wrong, it would be criminal, it was not a picture of the free rule of the people.”
At 9:20 a.m. on 30 November, Russian aircraft launched the first of many bomber attacks on Helsinki, causing little damage save to the Soviet legation and the nerves of the British ambassador, who asked to be relieved of his post. Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: “They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?” The nation’s defence was entrusted to seventy-two-year-old Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, hero of many conflicts, most recently Finland’s civil war. As a Tsarist officer posted to Lhasha, Mannerheim had once taught the Dalai Lama pistol shooting; he spoke seven languages, Finnish