Inferno - Max Hastings [26]
The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men 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 black pines.”
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. Gen. 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 the 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.
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Marshal Mannerheim conducted his campaign to a meticulous personal routine: he was woken at 7:00 a.m. 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