A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 by William Trotter

Author:William Trotter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: eBook, Finland, Russo-Finnish War, WWII, Russian, ETO
ISBN: 9781565122499
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2000-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

PART III

The White Death

An Arctic war … like an endless showing of underexposed film.

—Carl Mydans, Life magazine, after a walking tour of the Kemijärvi battlefield

CHAPTER 12

The Winter Soldiers

No aspect of the Winter War so stirred the emotions of the outside world as did the Finnish victories in the great forest battles north of Fourth Corps’s sector, especially that Tannenburg-in-miniature at Suomussalmi. In part it was the landscape in which those battles were fought: vast, dense deciduous forests carved by prehistoric glaciers into a patchwork of 10,000 lakes, often channeled by raw, thin evergreen-clad ridges of reddish gray granite. In part it was the fantastic disparity of numbers between the two armies involved, the whole David-and-Goliath nature of the struggle, combined with the numbing viciousness of the fighting itself, the dash and brilliance of Finnish tactics, and the staggering one-sidedness of their victories. Indeed, the first reports of Suomussalmi were greeted with skepticism, until eyewitness reports began coming back from reliable correspondents, along with photos that haunt the imagination of anyone who has ever seen them.

These victories in the northern wilderness were the most spectacular achievement of Finnish arms. Reading about the obliteration of two whole Soviet divisions by a few battalions of intrepid skiers, the American or English citizen could savor a moment of idealistic rejoicing. For the first time in many years, free men had triumphed. It does not detract from the Finns’ accomplishment, however, to state that the psychological effect of these lopsided victories was not wholly positive, in that they led the outside world to expect a miraculous Finnish victory and may therefore have taken some urgency from the efforts of those who might otherwise have expedited the dispatch of military aid to Finland. The sad fact of the matter was that all of those spectacular victories combined had only the most marginal influence on the really crucial campaign: the struggle for the Karelian Isthmus. Mannerheim and his staff knew that cruel truth, even if most people in Helsinki or London did not.

One of the more curious things about the wilderness battles is that they ever came to be fought at all. The concept of “cutting Finland in two at the waist” may look inviting on paper, but the reality is much different. To be sure, an invader able to debouch from the frontier wilderness into the heavily farmed, more piedmont-like western half of Finland would be in a position to ruin the country’s internal communications, as well as choke off one of its main points of contact with Sweden. The problem lay in getting that far, in successfully crossing the vast tract of virgin forest that protected the developed regions of Finland.

About all that the Soviet attacks had going for them was the fact that they were unexpected. Mannerheim had reasoned that the Russians would never send large conventional forces into such terrain. But once the Finns recovered from their shock and realized that the invaders had done just that, it was imperative that the enemy columns be stopped as quickly as possible.

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