The Suomi Submachine Gun by Leroy Thompson

Author:Leroy Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472819666
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Members of a ski patrol; the men on the left and right are armed with KP/-31 SMGs while the man in the middle is armed with a rifle. Note that the Suomi may be slung in front ready for immediate action if an enemy is encountered. (SA-kuva)

Attacking with light machine guns, mortars, and hand grenades, the ski troopers would surge out of the forest to cut the road at that point, quickly disappearing on the other side of the road. They would be followed by Finnish combat engineers who would widen and fortify the breach, decisively cutting off one piece of the enemy column from the other. Once the Soviet division was split up into these smaller and more manageable pockets of enemy troops, the mottis could then be dealt with individually by concentrating forces on all sides against an entrapped unit. Surrounded and pinned down by Finnish snipers, the invaders froze or starved to death if they didn’t first succumb to rifle fire and wounds.

The deep cold at Suomussalmi that winter was so intense that almost any wound was fatal, and the instant a man was hit by a bullet and his circulation slowed, his body would freeze in the very posture that he was standing in when he was hit. A macabre legend of the Winter War tells of a surreal scene in still life: a Soviet patrol standing by the side of the road, the men upright and frozen stiff in the snow, a Soviet officer beside them with a loaded pistol in hand; all had had their throats neatly cut, without a single shot fired from the officer’s pistol. They never saw the freedom fighters who had snuck up on them to deliver the silent death of the puukko – a traditional Finnish hunting knife that emerged as the Finns’ close-combat weapon of choice during the Winter War. (Bendiken 2010)

As this narrative and many other accounts of the Winter War illustrate, although the Suomi was one of the most effective weapons the Finns employed in close combat, grenades and puukko knives were employed equally effectively. In an analysis of the fighting at Suomussalmi, Dr Allen Chew emphasizes the importance of the Finns’ ability to fight in cold weather and to use the Suomi to best effect:

In contrast, all of the Finns were experienced skiers and thus able to keep the 44th Division under constant surveillance. They also harassed it night and day with hit-and-run attacks on both of its vulnerable flanks, which stretched nearly twenty miles [32km] from the roadblock to the border. Approaching silently on skis and camouflaged in their white snowsuits, the Finnish raiders often achieved complete surprise. When they opened fire from the woods at close range, their Suomi submachine guns (firing seventy rounds per magazine) were especially effective. (Chew 1981: 20–21)

In a footnote Chew also points out that, ‘Each Finnish division was authorized 250 of these weapons [the Suomi], ideal for forest fighting which is necessarily at close range. The Russian forces in Finland had nothing similar until February, 1940’ (Chew 1981: 21).

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