SIMO HÄYHÄ
The White Death
It can be rather disconcerting. The face that stares out of the photograph seems to be that of someone who has barely reached adulthood. A smooth, boyish face, almost cherubic in appearance: the eyes closely set, the lips full. Seen full length, the impression of youth and innocence is scarcely reduced. At 1.60 metres (5 ft 3 in), hardly taller than the rifle he holds, Simo Häyhä looks every inch the boy sent to do a man’s job. It is hard to believe therefore, that he would become the most prolific sniper of the Second World War, the man with the most confirmed kills in any major war; the man dubbed by his contemporaries as ‘The White Death’.
For all his later fame, Simo Häyhä was a simple man. He was born – the seventh of eight children – in 1905 near the town of Rautjärvi in the south of the Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire. His early life was spent on the family farm, a modest affair with some sugar-beet fields and forestry, as well as a few horses and other livestock, and it was there that he learnt the basic skills of self-reliance and fieldcraft that would later serve him so well.
Like many of his generation, Häyhä would have imbibed the patriotic fervour that accompanied Finnish independence following the Russian collapse of 1917. A few years later, he was called upon to serve the new state himself, when – aged 17 – he joined the Civil Guard. Quiet, reserved and otherwise un remarkable, Häyhä quickly proved himself to be a natural with a rifle, achieving numerous successes in local and regional shooting competitions and being awarded the title of ‘Master Marksman’. In 1925, Häyhä was conscripted into the Finnish Army, in which he served for fifteen months, being promoted to the rank of corporal. Then, in 1927, he turned his back on military matters and returned to the family farm. He can have had little inkling of what fate would have in store for him.
In the inter-war years, Finland – like the other states that had emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire – endured a rather precarious existence. The Soviets viewed the outside world primarily through their own ideological prism – as opponents to be converted and territories to be gained – yet there was also a good deal of old-fashioned Russian nationalism mixed in with the revolutionary thinking; those territories – like Finland – that had once formed part of the Russian Empire were expected to be the first in line once circumstances allowed for a reordering of Soviet borders.
Finnish relations with the Soviet Union were outwardly correct, therefore, even occasionally cordial, but there was a pervasive domestic climate of anti-communism. A non-aggression pact between the two countries was signed in 1932 and renewed two years later, but, by the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union was increasingly making its presence felt and flexing its muscles, for instance by restricting Finnish merchant-ship traffic on the waterways between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. By the end of the decade, fear of Soviet expansion was common place across the eastern Baltic. Moscow was casting long shadows.
With the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and the outbreak of the wider European war, naked aggression became the order of the day. Finland, like its Baltic neighbours, soon found itself confronted with a new political reality. Under the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which was only made public after 1945, Finland and the Baltic States were consigned to the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. Accordingly, therefore, in late September 1939 the foreign ministers of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were invited to Moscow for ‘talks’, talks which resulted, the following month, in the signing of ‘mutual assistance’ treaties that would bind those countries ever closer to Moscow, and begin the process of their absorption into the Soviet Union. Finland was next in line.
On 5 October 1939, on the very same day as Hitler was reviewing his victorious troops in the Polish capital, Warsaw, Stalin extended an invitation to the Finns for ‘talks’ in Moscow. The Finns responded warily, sending the veteran negotiator Juho Paasikivi, to receive the Soviet proposals, which included a northward extension of the border in the Karelian isthmus, close to Leningrad, and a thirty-year lease on the port of Hangö, at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. Soviet logic was fairly straight-forward. Having abetted the Germans in launching the Second World War, even to the point of collaborating in the invasion of Poland that autumn, the Soviets intended to sit back and watch the capitalist Western powers fight each other to another bloody standstill – as in the First World War – thereby hastening the ‘inevitable’ triumph of communism. In the meantime, all Moscow had to do was to bolster its defences, marshal its forces and make a few adjustments to its frontiers.
The Finns, however, were not minded to accede to Soviet demands, which they viewed as the thin end of a communist wedge, and were unimpressed with what was on offer by way of recompense. Yet, they received little support from either their Scandinavian neighbours, or their German allies – who urged compliance. After over three weeks of inconclusive negotiations, therefore, the Finnish delegation returned home in mid-November, without any agreement having been reached. After the bluster and ‘negotiation’ had failed, Moscow had to find another way to force its will upon its neighbour. Before the end of the month, the two would be at war.
On paper at least, the Soviet invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939 should have been a straightforward affair. The 26 divisions and 1,000,000 soldiers deployed by the Red Army should have been sufficient to sweep the paltry 10 divisions and 300,000 soldiers of the Finnish Army aside. By every measure available, the Soviets had an overwhelming advantage: three times as many soldiers as their opponents, thirty times as many aircraft and a hundred times as many tanks. On the main front across the Karelian Isthmus, for instance, the Soviets could field 120,000 men, 1,400 tanks and 900 artillery pieces against Finnish defenders who numbered just 21,000, with 71 artillery pieces and 29 anti-tank guns.1 In addition, Moscow was confident that the Finnish working class would rise in support of their communist ‘liberators’ and serve as a fifth column behind enemy lines.
The reality was to be rather different, however. The material and numerical superiority of the Soviet forces counted for little in the extreme conditions of a Finnish winter. Much of the terrain through which those Red Army soldiers trudged was a trackless, snowbound wasteland of thick forests, criss-crossed by frozen lakes, rivers and swamps, which was largely impassable to a modern mechanized army. Moreover, in the south, across the Karelian isthmus, north of Leningrad – through which the main thrust of any Soviet attack was expected – Finnish engineers had constructed an extensive network of bunkers, trenches, obstacles and earthworks, which was known as the Mannerheim Line. In such circumstances, the material advantages held by the Soviets were effectively nullified.
In addition, the quality of the opposing troops also differed enormously from what had been expected in Moscow. Far from welcoming the Soviet Army, the Finns were highly motivated to defend their country. Their morale was high, as demonstrated by a quip that did the rounds that winter: ‘They are so many and our country is so small, where will we find room to bury them all?’2 The Finns were also able to draw on a substantial pool of trained reservists – like Simo Häyhä himself – to bolster their forces. Though many of them lacked modern equipment, and in some cases even rifles, these former Civil Guardsmen nonetheless often brought vital local knowledge with them, as well as fieldcraft and survival skills.
The Soviet Army, in contrast, was ill-prepared. Still reeling from the brutal purges of only a few years before, which had removed over 80 per cent of senior officers and divisional commanders, it was severely weakened, with low morale being exacerbated by defective training regimes and poor leadership. Though well-supplied in comparison to their opponents, Red Army soldiers nonetheless often lacked the winter clothing and camouflage equipment that would be vital for fighting in subarctic conditions. Most of the tanks and vehicles that rolled across the Finnish frontier that winter, for instance, bore the same olive-drab livery as the soldiers who manned them. They were certainly not difficult to spot against the blinding white of a Finnish winter.
Tactically, too, the Soviets were guilty of a surprising lack of guile and invention. In most instances, they sought simply to overwhelm their enemy with a massed frontal assault. Coupled with that, they often suffered from a distinct lack of martial dash, adopting an excessively cautious approach in which an advance could be held up for hours by the merest hint of Finnish resistance. Such tactics clearly played into Finnish hands. Given the conditions – with only a few roads and tracks providing a passage through largely impenetrable forest – Soviet assaults quickly turned into enormous traffic jams, with Finnish defenders able to contain the spearhead with relatively small numbers of personnel.
As the Soviet advance stalled, the Finns moved to counterattack, using small groups of mobile ski troops to outflank the invaders and isolate them from their supply columns. The long nights of the Scandinavian winter were also exploited to maximum effect, with Finnish forces specializing in harrying and ambushing their foes under cover of darkness, often using improvised explosives, such as satchel charges, or the famed ‘Molotov cocktail’. There were also rather more unorthodox methods employed. Finnish troops would often target field kitchens, for instance, thereby exposing their remaining enemies more swiftly to the ravages of hunger. In time, Finnish methods evolved into a recognized tactic, by which Soviet forces would be isolated and contained, before being systematically reduced by the combined effects of constant counter-attacks and the harshness of the winter weather, in which temperatures could fall as low as -25 ºC. This tactic became known as the motti, from the Finnish term for a measurement of cut timber, to be used as firewood. The sinister implication was that Soviet forces thus encircled, were merely waiting to be burned.
In this way, the Finns scored some notable successes: on Christmas Eve 1940 both the Soviet 139th and 75th Divisions were wiped out, whilst the 163rd and 44th Divisions were annihilated in early January.3 In the latter example, the Soviet 44th Division was ordered to advance in support of the 163rd, which had encountered stiff resistance near Suomussalmi. Soon, the 44th faced a similar fate: strung out for over 30 kilometres along a narrow road, hemmed in by lakes and thick forests, its forward progress was halted by a fortified road-block. Harassed by fast-moving ski-troops, the column was gradually broken up into smaller and smaller sections, whilst the cold and hunger did their work on the encircled soldiers. Each dwindling pocket was then wiped out, one by one.4 In the aftermath, the Finns gained vital additions of materiel, including 43 tanks, 50 field guns, 270 motor vehicles and over 6,000 rifles. Around 40,000 Soviet soldiers from the two divisions are thought to have perished.5
Another tactic in which Finnish forces specialized was the use of snipers. Given the largely static nature of the conflict, as the initial Soviet advance had stagnated, sharpshooters were used to great effect both at the front line and in the reduction of the various motti encirclements. Their deployment in reducing the motti also had an important tactical and psychological aspect: snipers were well able to maximize the mental anguish suffered by encircled troops, by targeting commanding officers, for instance, or by concentrating their fire on those men who huddled around a camp fire. It would be as a sniper that Simo Häyhä would make his name.
On returning to the Finnish Army, Häyhä was assigned to the 34th Jäger Regiment in the heavily forested area to the northeast of Lake Ladoga, about 280 kilometres north of Leningrad. It was a vitally important area, protecting the Karelian Isthmus from an attack around the northern shore of the lake, which would outflank the Finnish defences on the Mannerheim Line. Though vastly outnumbered, the Finns had managed to stabilize the front, with the line running approximately north to south along the Kollaa River, with the Soviets to the eastern side. Though a secondary theatre, compared to the Karelian Isthmus, the Kollaa Front would become iconic as a symbol of Finnish resistance.
Initially, Häyhä fought on the Kollaa as a simple infantry man, but it did not take long before his outstanding ability with a rifle was noticed by his superiors. Already an experienced hunter and marksman, he was quickly singled out for more specialist tasks. In one of his first actions, he was called upon to eliminate a Soviet sniper, who had already killed three Finnish platoon leaders and an NCO. Meeting the challenge, Häyhä showed all the qualities of patience and meticulous preparation that would become his hallmarks. After scouting for a favourable firing position, he sat almost motionless wrapped up warm in camouflage fatigues, watching over the sights of his rifle. Several hours later, as the daylight faded and the day drew to a close, he finally had his opportunity. When a glint of sunlight from the telescopic sight momentarily betrayed his target’s position, Häyhä saw the Russian rise, rather carelessly, from his hide, doubtless believing that the coming dusk would harbour no threat. A single shot to the head from Häyhä’s rifle would prove him wrong.6
As time went on, Häyhä’s sniping technique developed. In many ways, it was very similar to that of other specialist marks-men, drawing heavily on his skills and experience as an outdoors man, hunter and trapper. There is a marked similarity, for instance, between Häyhä’s background and that of his great Soviet rival, Vassili Zaitsev: both men had been raised in the countryside and were very close to nature, and both were gifted trackers and hunters. With this background, Häyhä found the essentials of observation and concealment to be second nature. He paid particular attention, for instance, to finding good shooting positions – locations overlooking enemy outposts or thorough fares, from where he could see but not be seen, and where he would not be silhouetted by his surroundings or by a change in the light. His small stature also meant that he had little difficulty in using the natural hiding places that the forest offered.
Camouflage, too, was vital and, as well as his snowsuit, Häyhä used white gauze to wrap around the stock and barrel of his rifle. He preferred to leave his hides as ‘natural’ as possible, meanwhile, using only the surrounding snow as his camouflage; though he did take care to pat down the snow in front of his hide, so as to prevent a puff of white upon firing, which might betray his position.
Patience was another essential attribute. Häyhä would often spend all of the short winter days in position – moving to and from his hide only under cover of darkness. With just sugar lumps for sustenance, he avoided any unnecessary movement, often sitting motionless for hours on end. He would observe the enemy closely, learning their behaviour, their routines and their habits, biding his time until a suitable target came into view. His opponents never knew of his presence, until the first shot was fired.
Yet, aside from these conventional skills, Häyhä was not short of idiosyncrasies. For one thing, he only occasionally used a spotter – a certain Corporal Malmi – generally preferring to work alone. It is not immediately clear from the few sources available on Häyhä’s life why this should be so, but it may be that the necessary arts of movement and concealment were simply easier to achieve by one man rather than two.
The weapon that Häyhä used is also surprising. The M/28-30 was a Finnish variant of the venerable Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle, which had made its first appearance in the last decade of the nineteenth century. More remarkably still, it was a rifle without telescopic sights. Though such technology was reasonably well advanced by 1940, the Finnish Army suffered from a lack of higher-specification equipment. Thus, Häyhä was obliged to eschew such technological advantages in favour of the basic iron sights that his stock rifle carried. He made a virtue out of necessity, however, asserting that the iron sights allowed him to present a much less prominent target to an opponent, whilst a marks man using telescopic sights was obliged to hold his head higher and so was much more vulnerable.
By way of compensating for this apparent technological disadvantage, Häyhä was obsessional about maintaining his rifle, spending the remainder of his waking hours, when not in the field, stripping, cleaning and oiling his weapon to keep it in perfect working order. He was also fastidious about zeroing his rifle for differing distances. This was a task that he carried out in the field as a matter of course, and was essential to maintaining his accuracy.
Using these techniques, Häyhä scored numerous successes, often eliminating more than ten enemy soldiers per day. Occasionally, where circumstances and fortune allowed, his totals were greater than that. In one three-day period in December 1939, he accounted for fifty-one Soviet soldiers; and later in that month scored his highest total for a single day – twenty-five confirmed kills. His skills as a hunter and outdoors-man served him well. On one day in early February 1940, for instance, he spotted a newly constructed network of accommodation bunkers close to the front line, but not far from one of his observation posts. Advancing stealthily through the under-growth with his spotter, he set up a firing point about 150 metres from the bunkers: ‘we spent the whole day in our position’, he later recalled, ‘and killed nineteen Russians. They never learned where we were.’7
On some occasions, however, the Soviets were very much aware of Häyhä’s position and did everything they could to fight back. Given his prolific nature, Häyhä was soon a marked man and would later suspect that a price had been put on his head. As a result, he found himself engaged in a number of sniper duels during his time on the front line. It was also not uncommon for the Soviets to call in artillery strikes or mortar bombardments in response to Häyhä’s sniping, in an effort to eliminate him. In one instance, Häyhä found himself under heavy artillery fire after attempting to knock out a Soviet forward observation post, which was equipped with a periscope. Though peppered with shrapnel and flying debris, he nonetheless survived and was able to withdraw unscathed. Later that day, he returned to the location, approaching from a different angle and finding a new position for himself. On this occasion, he was successful; the periscope was destroyed.8
In time, Häyhä’s reputation also grew amongst those on his own side. He began to garner plaudits and gifts in equal measure, with many of the latter being donated by ordinary Finnish civilians who had heard of his deeds. Official and unofficial awards followed, and in time Häyhä would be awarded both classes of the Medal of Liberty and two classes of the Order of Liberty. Most famously, perhaps, in mid-February 1940, Häyhä was awarded an honorary M/28 rifle, made by the Finnish manufacturer Sako, and donated by a Swedish benefactor. Despite the award, Häyhä continued using his trusty M/28-30, the weapon with which he would ultimately dispatch an astonishing 542 Soviet soldiers.9
Häyhä’s attitude to his deadly task was a curiously – if necessarily – detached one. He evidently bore no particular malice towards the Soviet invaders of his country, and took no notice or pleasure in his mounting tally of kills, even refusing to be drawn on the subject in later life. His attitude was much more that he had been given a job to do and he would do it to the very best of his ability. Apparently untroubled by the lethal role that he played in the Winter War, Häyhä claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep over it, either during the conflict or subsequently.10
Despite his efforts, the wider war would slowly turn against Häyhä and his Finnish comrades, with ever-larger numbers of Soviet reinforcements threatening a decisive breakthrough. On the Kollaa Front, as elsewhere, the Finns were already vastly outnumbered, with barely four battalions facing fully two divisions, as well their attendant armour and artillery.11 January 1940 would bring further disparity, as additional artillery batteries brought the Soviet total in that sector to around 200 pieces, ten times the number available to the Finns. Despite their superiority in men and materiel, however, Soviet tactics remained stubbornly pedestrian, consisting mainly of headlong, frontal assaults on fortified Finnish positions. Perhaps the most famous example of this approach was the battle of ‘Killer Hill’, where a single platoon of barely thirty Finns held an entire regiment of 4,000 Soviet soldiers.12
Yet, for all their determination and ingenuity, the Finns could not hold out for long against such overwhelming odds. By late February, with Finnish resources running perilously low, and with the once impenetrable forest reduced to a moonscape of shell craters and splintered, broken trees, the numerical advantages of the Soviets finally began to tell. Under such conditions, the static war in which the Finns had specialized began to become more fluid, and though the lines held both on the Kollaa and the Karelian Front, isolated positions were increasingly being overrun, foreshadowing a more general collapse.
Tellingly, perhaps, the end for Simo Häyhä would come as an ordinary infantryman, rather than as a sniper. Commanding a squad of soldiers in early March 1940, he was ordered to resist an advance by the Soviet 128th Division in the forests of Ulismainen on the Kollaa Front. Characteristically, that Finnish defence took the form of a counter-attack. As Häyhä himself recalled:
We moved to our starting positions in early dawn, about five–six in the morning. There was a swamp, some 300 metres wide which we managed to cross without difficulty as our own machine guns gave us protection. Once over the swamp, we charged against the enemy who were really close to us. My rifle functioned very well; we were so close to the enemy that they were sometimes even only some two metres from me. The enemy were forced to withdraw, but some brave soldiers remained behind to cause havoc amongst us. Suddenly there was a shot, maybe 50–100 metres away and I felt I was hit. I just felt a suppressed bang in my mouth and I lost consciousness.13
Häyhä had been shot in the mouth with an explosive bullet, which had entered through his upper lip and exited through his left cheek. The impact had torn away all of his upper left jaw and had shattered his lower left jaw. When he briefly regained consciousness, he later recalled, his mouth was full of bone fragments, broken teeth and blood; he remembered his men frantically calling for a medic, before placing him on a simple sledge and carrying him to the rear. Soon after, he passed out again. He would remain in a coma for a week, only waking up on 13 March, the day that the armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed.
Häyhä’s recovery was extremely difficult. At one point, at a field hospital not long after his evacuation from the front, he was left on a pile of corpses when a medical orderly mistakenly thought his injuries to have been fatal. After his condition had been stabilized, he was moved to a military hospital in central Finland, where his treatment could start in earnest. Häyhä would endure as many as twenty-six operations to rebuild his face. His jaw and palate had to be reconstructed – with sections of bone for the purpose being taken from his hip – and for many months he was unable to speak or consume anything but liquid food. Despite his surgeons’ best efforts, the severity of his wounds meant that he would be left with severe scarring and disfigurement to the left side of his face for the rest of his life. He was finally discharged from hospital in May 1941, fourteen months after his injury. He returned to the land, taking on a farm in the lakeland of Ruokolahti in south Karelia, where he would breed dogs and work the forest.
Finland’s troubles were far from over, however. By the Moscow Treaty of March 1940 Finland had been forced to cede 11 per cent of its territory and 30 per cent of its economic assets to the Soviet Union. Moreover, few Finns believed that the aggressive intentions of the Soviets were sated, and many argued for a reopening of hostilities to regain the lands that had been lost. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, therefore, the Finns followed suit, advancing to the line of the 1939 border in what became known as the ‘Continuation War’. Häyhä volunteered for service in the new conflict, but his wounds were so severe that he was rejected.
In the years that followed, Häyhä lived an ordinary life. The family farm was lost after 1944, when the region was ceded to the Soviet Union, but Häyhä carried on working the 50 hectares of land on his own farm in Utula, 50 kilometres from the Soviet frontier, north of Leningrad. Always active, he enjoyed hunting, skiing and fishing, and otherwise kept himself busy on the farm or in the forests.
Häyhä had no desire to be in the limelight and kept very much to himself; his natural reserve, humility and shyness were compounded by the difficulty in speaking caused by his injury. He never married, preferring the company of his dogs and the proximity of the forest, with which he always felt a special affinity. Nonetheless, he was fêted by the Finnish military and by the Finnish Snipers’ Guild, which would organize a sniping competition in his honour in 1978, to be held annually and open to both civilians and military personnel. In later years he was also visited on occasions by sniping enthusiasts from the United States and elsewhere, who were keen to hear of his techniques and experiences. He also collaborated with a Finnish Army officer, Tapio Saarelainen, in telling the story of his life. Simo Häyhä died in April 2002, aged 96.
It is perhaps easy to imagine – especially given his own modesty – that Häyhä’s achievements during the Winter War were less than remarkable. One might conclude that Häyhä was an effective proponent of the sniper’s art, but little more beyond that. This would be wrong, however. There are a number of factors – aside from the astonishing number of kills that he scored – that serve to make Häyhä’s story truly exceptional. For one thing, and in contrast to many of his rival snipers from the Second World War, he scored over 500 kills using a rifle equipped only with standard iron sights. For another, he was operating in the harshest environment imaginable – the depths of a Scandinavian winter – conditions that would test man and machine, friend or foe, to the utmost.
Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is the fact that the Winter War lasted less than four months, from late November 1939 to mid-March 1940, and Häyhä was invalided out of the war after less than 100 days in the front line. On average, therefore, he scored over five kills every day for the entire time that he fought. For all his natural modesty, therefore, that slightly-built man with the boyish face, truly deserves the title of the most prolific sniper of the Second World War.
Notes
1. Philip Jowett & Brent Snodgrass, Finland at War 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2006), p. 6.
2. William R. Trotter, A Frozen Hell (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 40.
3. See, for instance, Robert Edwards, White Death (London, 2006), pp. 162–7, & I. C. B. Dear (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford, 1995), p. 374.
4. See Trotter, pp. 162–3.
5. Jowett & Snodgrass, p. 8.
6. Tapio Saarelainen, Simo Häyhä – The Sniper (Tampere, 2008), p. 29.
7. Ibid., p. 32.
8. Ibid., p. 30.
9. This figure is disputed, with some sources stating that Häyhä killed as many as 800 Soviet soldiers with his rifle. The figure of 542 is cited in the most authoritative account of his life, Tapio Saarelainen’s Simo Häyhä – The Sniper (p. 128). In addition to this figure, Häyhä is thought to have scored around 200 kills with his Suomi submachine gun in infantry combat.
10. Ibid., pp. 32 & 64.
11. Edwards, pp. 205–6.
12. Trotter, p. 130.
13. Quoted in Saarelainen, p. 42.