The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [21]
Although the Soviet forces were staggeringly badly led at the outset of the Winter War, they learnt quickly. A trusted member of the Supreme Soviet from its creation in 1937, General Semyon Timoshenko was sent to take over on 8 January, and after four or five attacks a day he broke through the Mannerheim Line on 13 February. In Finland the Soviets came to understand the importance of co-ordinating armour, infantry and artillery. However heavy the Russian losses, there were always fresh troops to fling into the struggle. As one Finn put it after the battle of Kuhmo, ‘There were more Russians than we had bullets.’ When the fighting became purely attritional on the Isthmus, the Finns simply could not carry on bleeding like the Russians could. Furthermore, the Winter War showed that men fought harder when patriotically defending the Soviet Motherland than when in attack. (That was eventually to apply to the German Fatherland too.) Instead of these lessons, Hitler learnt the almost banal one that Stalin had shot a lot of good generals in the late 1930s. He was not the only one, however; on 20 January 1940 Churchill said that Finland ‘had exposed for all to see the incapacity of the Red Army’.
On 11 February the Russian 123rd Division broke through the Mannerheim Line close to Summa, leading much of the Seventh Army through two days later. They then moved on to Viipuri. With neutral Norway and Sweden denying access across their territory to the Allies, Petsamo in Russian hands and Hitler closing off the eastern Baltic, no significant help was likely from the West. Since by March as much as one-fifth of his army had become casualties, and there were only 100 Finnish planes left to fight 800 Russian, Mannerheim urged the Government to negotiate, and the Treaty of Moscow was signed on 13 March, while Russian and Finnish troops were still engaged in hand-to-hand combat in central Viipuri. Except for the loss of the whole Karelian Isthmus, the terms were not very much worse from those demanded by Stalin and Molotov in November, before around 200,000 Russians and 25,000 Finns had died, and 680 Russian aircraft and 67 Finnish had been destroyed.30 Yet Russian military prestige had been severely damaged, and Stalin had created a situation on his north-western border that would require fifteen divisions to police. The moment that Finland sniffed her opportunity for revenge, at the time of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, she seized it.
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The six-month hiatus on land between the end of the Polish campaign in October 1939 and Hitler’s sudden invasion of Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940 is known as the Phoney War. With little going on in the West on land and in the skies, the British and French publics were lulled into thinking that the war was not truly a matter of life and death for them in the way that it obviously was for the Poles, and their daily existence was carried on substantially as usual, in all its bureaucracy, inefficiency and occasional absurdity. The National Labour MP Harold Nicolson recorded in his war diaries that the Ministry of Information censors had refused to publish the wording of a leaflet, of which two million copies had been dropped over Germany, on the grounds that ‘We are not allowed to disclose information that might be of value to the enemy.’31
There was nothing phoney about the war at sea, however. It was perfectly true that the British Air Minister Sir Kingsley Wood made the asinine remark that the RAF should not bomb munitions dumps in the Black Forest, because so much of it was private property, but at sea no such absurdities pertained.32 As early as 19 August, U-boat captains were sent a seemingly anodyne signal about the scheduling of a submarine officers’ reunion, which was the coded order to take up their positions around the British Isles in readiness for imminent action. Within nine hours of the declaration of war, the 1,400 passengers aboard a blacked-out British liner SS Athenia were torpedoed on their way from Glasgow