Winston Churchill was not making idle hyperbole when he spoke, in the closing months of World War II, of the Red Army’s having “clawed the guts out of” the Wehrmacht. By the time Berlin fell to Marshal Zhukov’s armies, the Soviet war machine had become a tidal wave of brute steel and inexhaustible human reserves. Even at the end, when they were maneuvering worn-out companies against armored divisions, the Germans outfought and outkilled their Soviet counterparts by a ratio of five to one, and still it made no difference. Any Western general who would not admit to being afraid of the Red Army by 1945, with the possibly pathological exception of George Patton, was either ignorant or a liar. Nothing that has happened since 1945 has altered that menacing image: waves of tanks, hordes of men, armadas of aircraft that darkened the sky. …
But in the early winter of 1939, those stereotyped images did not exist. The Red Army was an unknown quantity, not just to the West but also to its own commanders and strategists. Born in the helter-skelter campaigns of the civil war, when most of the action took place in the form of largescale partisan operations rather than conventional warfare, the Red Army was an untried, theoretically designed instrument. True, there had been a stunningly one-sided victory won by Marshal Zhukov against the Japanese at Khalkin Gol, in August 1939, but that had not been much of a contest. The Japanese were used to fighting barefoot armies of Chinese conscripts who had no air support and no significant armor; and the Japanese tanks were even more rickety, weakly armed, and mechanically unreliable than those of the Italians. Zhukov unleashed not only large formations of the latest Christie-designed armor but tactical air power on a scale the Japanese had not dreamed could exist, and he cut up their armies like so much warm butter. Moreover, all the fighting at Khalkin Gol had taken place on the open, treeless plains of Mongolia, ideal terrain for a Soviet-style blitzkrieg.
Finland would be a different story: it was the Red Army’s first campaign against a modern European foe, and it would be fought in terrain about as different from Mongolia’s as the surface of another planet. At least one Red Army strategist seems to have been aware of this: the chief of staff of the Red Army, General Shaposhnikov, studied the upcoming Finnish campaign with a cool, professional eye and did not like what he saw. He submitted a report to the Main Military Council that advocated a serious buildup, extensive logistical and fire-support preparation, and a rational, methodical order of battle, deploying the Red Army’s very best units, even if they had to be brought in from the Far East.
Stalin seems to have dismissed the report without much discussion, treating it in fact almost as a joke. He had been told by Zhdanov and Defense Commissar Voroshilov that the Finnish business could be taken care of by the resources on hand in the Leningrad Military District, and he believed them. After all, the Red Army had just finished inundating 200,000 square kilometers of Poland, inhabited by thirteen million people, at a cost of less than a thousand casualties. Stalin was not worried.
Zhdanov’s military commander, General Meretskov, at least had some doubts; in a report submitted just before the start of hostilities, he wrote, “The terrain of coming operations is split by lakes, rivers, swamps, and is almost entirely covered by forests. … The proper use of our forces will be difficult. … It is criminal to believe that our task will be easy, or only like a march, as it has been told to me by officers in connection with my inspection.”1
It does not appear, however, that Meretskov was entirely free to deploy his troops according to his own best judgment. Either that, or he just wrote the report in order to cover himself in case things went wrong. Motives, true feelings, and lines of responsibility are not very clear at this level of the Soviet command even today. The whole Finnish campaign was an embarrassment to the officer caste, and even half a century later there is little discussion of it in print on the Russian side.
Whatever his reasons, Meretskov publicly took the politically correct stance that the Finnish effort would be little more than a glorified police action, requiring two weeks at the most. By the time the fighting actually started, the only concern he expressed was for controlling his forward elements, lest some overzealous panzer commander blunder across the Swedish border.
Meretskov himself would have operational control over the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Fourteenth armies—the entire Karelian front. In 1939, he was forty-two years of age. Of peasant origins, he had joined the party early, in May 1917, straight from his job as a factory worker. He distinguished himself in battle as a Red Guard and was eventually promoted to political commissar in the Red Army. Diligent if uninspired, he kept his nose clean politically, survived the purges, and by 1938 had reached the zenith of his career when Stalin appointed him commander of the Leningrad Military District.
Some idea of the optimistic mood that prevailed, and of the power wielded by political officers over their military counterparts, can be gleaned from an anecdote published in the memoirs of N. N. Voronov, a gentleman who, by World War II, had risen to the rank of chief marshal of artillery. Voronov was in charge of logistics for the guns, a task that would prove herculean, and it was in this capacity that he paid a visit to Meretskov’s headquarters during the waning days of November. Meretskov welcomed him, then kept his mouth shut; most of the talking was done by the artillery officer Kulik and a commissar named Mekhlis. These two asked Voronov what sort of ammunition stocks they could draw on during the coming campaign. “That depends,” replied Voronov: “Are you planning to attack or defend … and by the way, how much time is allotted for the operation?”
“Between ten and twelve days,” was the bland reply.
Voronov was not buying that estimate; all he had to do was look at a map of Finland. “I’ll be happy if everything can be resolved in two or three months.” This remark was greeted with “derisive gibes.” Then-Deputy Commissar Kulik then ordered Voronov to base all his ammo-consumption and fire-support estimates on the assumption that the entire Finnish operation would last twelve days, no more.2
Like everybody else in the military profession, Stalin’s generals had been deeply impressed by the success of the Germans’ blitzkrieg tactics. Armored spearheads had sliced through the enemy’s main line of resistance and spread havoc in its rear, followed by masses of infantry to exploit the breakthroughs and deal with bypassed pockets of resistance, the whole thing covered by an umbrella of tactical air support and lavishly supplied with artillery. In terms of hardware and manpower, Russia certainly had all the necessary ingredients to mount its own version of the blitzkrieg.
But German tactical doctrine had been tailored to very specific central European conditions: a familiar landscape with a network of modern roads. Finland was one of the worst places on Earth to attempt the application of a technique that was designed to win battles on the open, rolling, highway-veined topography of continental Europe. Much of the blitzkrieg’s effectiveness stemmed from the fact that armies fighting on mainland Europe had clearly recognizable centers of supply and communication, usually not far behind the lines, which made excellent objectives for armored spearheads. Finnish conditions offered scarcely any comparable targets. Behind the frontier forest there was only more forest. Centers of communication were deep inside the country, not just twenty miles behind the lines.
Nor did the Red generals appreciate the amount of trouble the Wehrmacht had taken to perfect tactical coordination between the component arms, to ensure a reliable and redundant network of communications, and to instill in its frontline commanders a sense of drive and individual initiative. Those very qualities, if displayed in the Red Army, were more apt to earn a man a trip to the gulag than a pat on the back. Many of the battalion and regimental commanders who would lead the Russian attacks were by this time little more than groveling flunkies whose every battlefield decision had to be seconded by a political commissar before orders could go to the troops.
The blitzkrieg, in short, had been perfected for a sleek, hard-muscled, superbly trained, and passionately motivated army, such as the German General Staff had fashioned during the decades between the wars. It was quite unsuited for a ponderous, top-heavy army of ill-trained soldiers led by timid officers, overseen by inexperienced party ideologues, and sent forth to conquer a country whose terrain consists of practically nothing but natural obstacles to military operations.
The Russian generals may have thought they were imitating the Germans, but what they actually unleashed was an offensive more in keeping with an older Russian tradition, whose crude tactics relied on masses of men and sheer weight of metal. The plan called for simply overwhelming, or overawing, the Finns with a massive ground onslaught at every place on the frontier where it seemed feasible to support an attack, coupled with air raids designed to hamper Finnish communications and spread terror among the civilian populace. That populace was supposed to be so restive already that Soviet planners expected their efforts to be augmented by a large “fifth column” deep inside the country.
What happened was something very different. Lacking the freedom to exercise initiative, Russian field commanders relied on mass frontal attacks to obliterate even minor nests of opposition, incurring thousands of needless casualties in the process. Leadership beyond the NCO level was brittle, sluggish, and marked by a rigid adherence to the same primitive tactics over and over again, no matter what the actual situation. The standard of training varied wildly from unit to unit: some regiments were crack troops, well trained and supplied, while others, often thrown in at their side, were scratch units made up of raw draftees, many of whom were so ignorant they didn’t even know the name of the country they were invading.
Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands. Into some of the densest forests in the world, they brought hundreds of flat-trajectory field guns, useless except at very close range, and relatively few howitzers—guns that could shoot over the trees. Each Russian column lugged into the forest a full complement of modern antitank guns, even though Soviet intelligence must have known the Finns had no operational armor. Virtually useless as field guns, dozens of these weapons were captured intact by the Finns and rapidly redeployed against their former owners.
Most glaring of all, the invading troops were unprepared for winter. It was not until after the first assaults on the Mannerheim Line had been bloodily repulsed that the Russians caught on to the idea of painting their tanks white to match the environment, or of dressing their infantry in snow capes. The invaders had almost no ski training, even though some units received truckloads of wildly unreliable ski-combat manuals just before they crossed into Finland. Apparently the men were expected to become experts in their spare time.
Yet for all its glaring faults, the Russian scheme did have a few things going for it. It was early enough in the year so that conditions, on the Karelian Isthmus at least, were favorable. The surfaces of most of the bogs and smaller lakes had frozen hard enough to present no obstacle to troop movements, but little snow had fallen. There were good roads on the Isthmus, and much of the land was only lightly wooded. But the weather conditions were fickle, and if Meretskov’s troops did not clean out the Finns in two weeks’ time, the full fury of the subarctic winter could be counted on to ruin all timetables. Logic dictated a swift, all-out, thunderclap assault straight across the Isthmus.
But in actuality the advance on the Isthmus was cautious and poorly led. Entire columns were halted, sometimes for hours, by the merest display of Finnish resistance from a few rearguard snipers. North of the Isthmus the Russians wasted thousands of men in operations against the midsection of Finland; these seem to have been planned in the most criminally offhanded manner and then conducted for the most part with glaring incompetence.
The key to Finland was the Isthmus and only the Isthmus; the Finns knew that, and they were surprised that the enemy did not. The reason for this may not be apparent from looking at a map. The Karelian Isthmus appears narrow and sliced up by waterways, lakes, and bogs, altogether a very limited “gateway” for a mechanized invader. In contrast, the same map shows vast, thinly populated regions north of Lake Ladoga, which seem to offer enormous amounts of elbow room and opportunity for maneuver—on paper a much more attractive theater than the cramped, channelized Isthmus. The whole country, in fact, gets quite narrow, and the concept of cutting Finland in two at the “waist” looks very inviting.
But only on paper. As confined as the Karelian Isthmus is, it still offers much better terrain for a modern army than anything north of Lake Ladoga. Up there in the narrower part of Finland the forests are more dense, more primitive than words, maps, or even pictures can convey. Roads there were little better than one-lane wagon tracks, and those were often many miles apart. There was no shelter except for a few scattered farms and logging towns, set in clearings hacked out of the trees. Lateral passage between the roads was possible only for trained men on skis; men on foot could scarcely make any progress at all in midwinter, for the snowdrifts that pile up between the trees are tall enough to bury a man in a standing position.
Once committed to these regions, the invading columns would be hopelessly road bound. No matter how strong they were, a defender made mobile by skis could dance circles around them. What the Russians should have done in these areas was to infiltrate small units of ski guerrillas, which might well have slipped undetected through the forest and worked great damage in the more populated interior. But instead of small, mobile, specialist units, the Russians committed elephantine masses of conventional infantry and armor, which had no choice except to crawl westward along whatever roads they could find. The results of this strategic blundering were some of the most one-sided defeats ever inflicted on Russian troops.
At the start of hostilities, Russian forces were positioned as follows:
1. Seventh Army: On the Karelian Isthmus, under Meretskov; comprised of between twelve and fourteen divisions, with three tank brigades and a mechanized corps attached (1,000 tanks and other vehicles); its artillery strength was much augmented, even at the start; several divisions were still in the process of forming up when hostilities began; the objective was Viipuri, the breaching of the Mannerheim Line, and, ultimately, a sweep westward to Helsinki. Later on, for purposes of better operational control, this force was divided into the Seventh and Thirteenth armies.
2. Eighth Army: North of Lake Ladoga, in Ladoga-Karelia, facing the Finnish Fourth Corps under General Hägglund; composed of six rifle divisions and two tank brigades. Its mission was to turn the northern flank of the Isthmus defenses by circling around Lake Ladoga’s north shore, breaking through the relatively thin Finnish lines there, and striking south, to take the Mannerheim Line from the rear. The strength the Russians managed to deploy here was considerably more than the Finns had thought possible and was one of the nastier surprises of the war for them.
3. Ninth Army: Five rifle divisions with a motley and not well documented assortment of attached armored units. This army’s mission was to thrust westward, to reach as many centers of communication as possible, and to cut Finland in half if it could. Each of these divisions, however, went in unsupported, on poor and widely separated roads, with results that ranged from disappointing to disastrous.
4. Fourteenth Army: Three mediocre divisions with attached armor, based in Murmansk, intended to capture the arctic port of Petsamo and, eventually, the Lapland capital of Rovaniemi, which was Finland’s only significant center of communications in the far north.
The overall concept of the Russian plan was simple: push the Finns as hard as possible from eight different directions, by means of a coordinated westward advance. The Mannerheim Line would be hammered from the front by the Seventh Army and taken in the rear by the Eighth Army, while the Ninth Army would cut Finland in two and sever its communications with Sweden. In the far north, the Fourteenth Army would prevent any help from reaching Finland through Petsamo. It must be said that if the Russians had planned their offensive carefully, and if their troops had been better prepared for the tasks assigned to them, the plan might have worked.
The strategy Mannerheim and his staff had devised for Finland was predicated on some very harsh realities. Obviously Russia was the only likely opponent, and it was a delusion to think that Finland could successfully defend itself against the Red Army for an indefinite period of time. In the long run, Finland’s only real guarantee of continued existence was the conscience of Western civilization. Finland, it was hoped, would be regarded as a vital outpost of everything the Western powers stood for, and as such the country would not be allowed to vanish from the map. Thus was born a strategy designed to enable Finland to hang on long enough for outside aid to reach it. If that hope proved chimerical, the only thing left to do was to resist so fiercely that Stalin would opt for a negotiated settlement rather than total conquest. If Stalin did seek total subjugation, the Finns would fight to the last man and bullet. Mannerheim’s plans, therefore, were not based on the absurd hope of outright victory, but on “the most honorable annihilation, with the faint hope that the conscience of mankind would find an alternative solution as a reward for bravery and singleness of purpose.”3
Russia’s initial invasion force, already vastly superior in numbers and equipment, could of course draw on a virtually limitless reservoir of replacements, whereas Finland’s army would be fully extended almost from the start. Foreign military attachés in Helsinki believed that the Finns would fight stoutly, but in the face of the on-paper odds, most of them wrote off Finnish resistance as a heroic gesture that could not possibly stave off defeat for longer than a week or two.
The average Finnish soldier looked at matters much differently. He knew, in his bones, that on a man-to-man basis he was worth several of his opponents. His ancestors, as far back as recorded Finnish history existed, had fought Russians on this same soil and usually won. The Finn knew what he was fighting for and why. His stereotyped view of the Russian soldier was not flattering: Ivan was stupid, lazy, dirty, incapable of initiative, and mentally oppressed by the same forest environment that was second nature to the Finns. To be sure, the Finnish soldier was aware of the numerical odds against him, but he rendered those odds less terrible by cracking jokes about them: “They are so many, and our country is so small, where will we find room to bury them all?”
Most Finnish units were made up of men from the same geographical regions. Some of these units found themselves in action literally on their home ground, but nearly everyone fought on terrain very similar to the land he had known since childhood. Company-, platoon-, and battalion-level officers were usually well known to their men from peacetime and were often addressed by their first names or nicknames during combat. There was probably less saluting and less parade-ground spit and polish than in any other army in Europe. Finnish troops knew they were in the army to fight, not to march in parades, and in the kind of war they were called upon to fight, that was precisely the right set of priorities.
Before 1918, of course, there was formally no such thing as “the Finnish Army”—Finnish nationals gained experience in the tsar’s service and, during the years immediately preceding independence, the army of Imperial Germany. Both of those nations maintained conventional armies of the type most European nations supported in the years before World War I. The Finns serving in them would have received training designed to prepare a soldier to function in a large, carefully structured organization, whose combat arms were backed by a full array of service and support elements. Operating procedures in such armies were formalized by many years of historical tradition; things were done, in short, “by the book.”
The Finnish civil war of 1918 was fought, by both sides, largely on an ad hoc basis, using whatever forces and equipment were available from week to week. The Finnish Army that emerged from that violent field was a motley agglomeration with no real personality of its own. Its units had fought with tactics and weapons borrowed from Russia one time, from Germany the next, and with an improvisatory dash of Finnish barroom savagery thrown in for good measure. Its officers were mainly veterans of the Prussian General Staff school of warfare, trained only to lead units in a large, complex, European-style standing army, complete with a full line of specialized services and support units. Their tactical training had presumed the “givens” of such an army, envisioning each unit as a component in vast 1918-style operations, which involved tens of thousands of men, hundreds of guns firing millions of stockpiled shells, each troop movement and tactic scheduled weeks in advance, the whole effort backed up by a modern industrial economy with all its ancillary networks of transportation and communications.
None of the above applied to Finland in 1918, and not much more by 1939. No matter how the new nation developed its resources, no matter how sound its economy was, no matter how its balance of trade improved, nature had still set rigorous, Spartan limits on what was possible in Finland. Its population would never be large enough to generate the manpower needed to field a massive European-style army, nor would its economy ever be rich enough to provide for the technological and logistical luxuries enjoyed by the armies of Britain, France, or America.
These conditions, far from daunting the architects of Finnish defense strategy, had an invigorating effect on their intellects. They were forced to throw out “the book” and find solutions to problems for which their professional training had not prepared them. Their task was rendered much more difficult by the parsimonious nature of the defense budgets they had to work with. In so far as it was a conscious process, their basic concept seems to have been to concentrate on the ways in which Finland’s geography and national character could be developed into military assets rather than liabilities.
Infantry training was stripped to its essentials. Officers and men worked together to develop tactical doctrine and training methods specifically adapted to Finnish terrain. The forest itself dictated a heavy emphasis on individual initiative and small-unit operations, quasi-guerrilla style. Marksmanship, mental agility, woodcraft, orienteering, camouflage, and physical conditioning were stressed, and parade-ground niceties were given short shrift. Unconventional tactics—ambushes, long-range patrols, deceptions, raids—were enshrined as doctrine and refined until they fitted into the overall national strategy.
The artillery branch concentrated its attention on mortars and howitzers, the kind of light, high-angle weapons that were best suited for the terrain. The gunners developed new techniques intended to compensate for the limitations the forest placed on range-finding and observation. Every part of Finland that might eventually become a target for Finnish gun crews was meticulously mapped and ranged, to the inch, from probable battery positions. The precision and economy of their fire-control procedures would give the ammunition-starved Finnish gunners a slight edge over their more lavishly equipped Russian counterparts when the shooting started.
Finland’s population was sufficient to permit a standing army of fifteen infantry divisions, each numbering 14,000 men. Because of prewar funding problems, however, there were only ten fully equipped divisions when war broke out. An eleventh division had been formed, but it had no heavy equipment; there was enough manpower on hand for two others if equipment could be found to outfit them.
Mannerheim’s mobilization scheme worked tolerably well, thanks to the advance warning the Finns had. There were some problems, however, because full-scale mobilization of entire divisions had almost never been allowed during peacetime. Officers suddenly found themselves commanding larger units than they were used to. Cadre officers who had led companies in peacetime (and who had usually known most of their men by name) were suddenly thrust into the role of battalion commander, while peacetime battalion commanders suddenly found themselves leading regiments. The duties of these new ranks had to be mastered on the job, and the remarkable success of so many Finnish captains and lieutenants in doing so is a testament to the soundness of their prewar training.
All those years of having to wring every ounce of value from every penny of the defense budget actually had some positive effects. The Finnish Army was “lean and mean,” experienced at getting the maximum effectiveness from its limited resources. Man for man, on its home ground, it was one of the toughest, best-led, most adaptable armies in the world. In spite of the scarcity of modern equipment, a spirit of calm confidence prevailed throughout the ranks. The men believed in themselves and their cause, and to an unusual degree they seem to have trusted their officers not to throw their lives away.
Geography dictated the basic Finnish strategy. The frontier with Russia was a thousand kilometers long, but the biggest stretch of it, from Lake Ladoga’s northern shore to the Arctic Ocean, was quite impenetrable except along a handful of unpaved roads. This fact alone helped to mitigate the Russians’ numerical advantage: it meant that the Finns could concentrate their strongest forces on the Karelian Isthmus and in the area immediately north of Ladoga, to prevent the outflanking of the Mannerheim Line.
In their prewar calculations the Finns had envisioned the deployment of seven Russian divisions on the Isthmus and no more than five along the whole border north of Lake Ladoga. If that had been the case, and given the conventional three-to-one ratio needed for an attacker to overcome a well-entrenched defender, then the simple numbers did not look all that disastrous for the Finns. Their main problem would be attrition over a long period of time, but there was always the hope that outside help would arrive before matters reached a crisis.
In reality, and from the very start, the situation was much grimmer. The war in Europe made the prospects of outside aid very dim indeed, and longterm attrition made eventual defeat a certainty. Finnish strategy was also undercut by the extensive preparatory work the Russians had done on their side of the border. Mannerheim had known about some of these construction projects, but many others had been carried out without the Finns catching on. Instead of the five divisions Finnish intelligence had predicted north of Lake Ladoga, the Russians deployed twelve. If Russian competence had been equal to Russian planning, the Finns would have been in serious trouble from the start.
At the beginning of the war, Mannerheim’s biggest problem was not men but matériel. Shipments of antitank and antiaircraft guns were arriving in small quantities and at a glacially slow pace. The ammunition situation was alarming. At the start of hostilities, Finnish stockpiles for some essential supplies were woefully inadequate:4
|
Cartridges for rifles and light automatics |
60 days |
|
Shells for light fields guns |
21 days |
|
Shells for 122 mm. howitzers |
24 days |
|
Shells for heavy and coastal artillery |
19 days |
|
Gas and oil for ground units |
60 days |
|
Aviation fuel |
30 days |
On paper, each Finnish division could count on the support of twenty-four field guns and a dozen howitzers. Even for an army trained to do without artillery support, those numbers were just barely adequate. In reality, many of the weapons were long overdue for retirement—museum pieces dating from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 were counted as well as modern cannon. Each division was also supported by two dozen 81 mm. mortars. Soviet artillery was not organic to a division; it was tacked on in regimentsized packets, usually two artillery regiments for each regiment of infantry, or about three times as many guns as the Finns could field.
Russian infantry units had about the same number of light mortars as their Finnish counterparts, but each infantry regiment could also call on support from batteries of powerful 120 mm. heavy mortars. Despite the Finns’ superior fire control and accuracy, their chronic ammunition shortage seldom allowed them the luxury of counterbattery or saturation fire. The Russians could afford to fire more shells of a single caliber, on a single day, than were contained in the entire Finnish reserves.
Finnish tank forces were operationally nonexistent. Antitank training had been attempted with some clattery old Renaults dating from 1918, but most Finnish soldiers had no realistic idea of what it was like to face modern panzers. Their first confrontations with Soviet armor would be traumatic.
The army’s first antitank guns, 37 mm. Bofors weapons from Sweden, were uncrated just weeks before the war broke out. Few of their crews had had time even to face a dummy tank in training before they were called on to fight large formations of the real thing. The total number of Bofors guns available was so small that they were parceled out two or three to a regiment. There had been long discussions about what sort of antitank weapons should be issued to the infantry at the platoon level. The weapons finally chosen, 20 mm. Lahti antitank rifles, did not in fact reach the troops in significant numbers until after the war was over.
Finnish small arms were at least as good as those found in the Red Army. The standard infantry rifle was one of several versions of the basic Russian Moisin/Nagant design, modified in some details by Finnish ordnance experts and of overall higher manufacturing quality than its Russian counterpart. This rifle fired a 7.62 mm. round; it was a sturdy, rugged, bolt-action piece noted for its accuracy. Although the basic Moisin action had been adopted by the Russians as far back as 1891, the design was so sound that some Soviet satellite armies could still be seen using it through the 1950s.
The Finns’ basic heavy machine gun was a water-cooled version of the classic Maxim gun from the Great War era. These were cumbersome and brutally heavy weapons, but they were rugged and dependable, even under severe winter conditions. The light machine gun—equivalent in its role to the American Browning Automatic Rifle of that day—was the 7.62 mm. Lahti/Saloranta, considered by firearms experts to be one of the first really practical “light” automatics to enter service after World War I. Indeed, photos of the weapon reveal a striking resemblance to many contemporary designs. It was a fairly heavy weapon for its day—twenty-three pounds with loaded magazine—but it could be fired from a bipod or from the shoulder, using either a twenty-round box magazine or a seventy-five-round drum. The Lahti was air cooled and recoil operated, and was one of the few automatics in service anywhere at that time that permitted its gunner to switch from single shot to full automatic. In the latter mode it had a cyclic fire rate of 500 rounds per minute. It was a powerful weapon, with a muzzle velocity of 2,625 feet per second, comparable to some of today’s streamlined assault rifles.
Originally, the Lahti had been designed as an export weapon, Finland’s entry into the international arms market. As far as can be determined, however, the only foreign army that purchased a significant number of them was, rather oddly, the Chinese. It was not, therefore, a weapon designed for specifically Finnish conditions. Its one weakness was a certain degree of over-manufacture in its moving parts, tolerances too fine and too numerous, so that it sometimes froze in severe cold, precisely the kind of weather it would be used in. When that happened, it was sometimes possible to reactivate a frozen Lahti by the simple expedient of urinating on it.
The most interesting weapon in the Finnish arsenal, however, was the famed “Suomi” submachine gun, or “machine pistol” (koonipistolit in Finnish). The Suomi was one of the least-known submachine gun designs of its day, but it was actually rather influential. So effective was it in the Winter War that the Soviets paid it the ultimate compliment of copying it for their famous PPSh “burp gun” design, which would be the mainstay of Communist Bloc armies until the advent of the AK-47.
The Suomi was a splendid weapon for the kind of small-unit, bushwhacking tactics the Finnish Army excelled in. A ski patrol deep in the forest, where encounters with the enemy were likely to be sudden, close-range affairs, didn’t need an accurate long-range rifle; what was needed was a meatchopper, and the Suomi filled the bill. It had half again as much muzzle velocity as a Tommy Gun (1,300 feet/second as opposed to 920) and spewed out its 9 mm. slugs at a sizzling rate of 800–900 rounds/minute. One area where it lost out against the Thompson or the German “Schmeisser” was appearance: in terms of its lines, the Suomi was as brutal looking as an ox.
Ruggedly designed, operating on the “blowback” principle, it was short enough to dangle conveniently from a skier’s shoulders and could be brought into action from that position in a split second. It also had a single-shot option for aimed fire, although it was not terribly accurate beyond 100 yards in that mode. Up close, however, it was lethal. The Russians feared and hated Suomi gunners, and with good reason—one Finnish soldier would be decorated for scoring over 200 confirmed kills with his Suomi during the motti battles in the central forests. The preferred method of ammo feed was a seventy-round drum; the caliber was 9 mm. Twenty- and fifty-round box magazines were also available for this weapon, but they do not seem to have been used as much in the Winter War as they would be during the later “Continuation War,” when a much higher percentage of Finnish soldiers were armed with rapid-fire weapons than was the case in 1939.
Because the Suomi burned ammo at a furious rate, only a few hundred of them were issued per division at the start of the war. Under combat conditions, of course, many men managed to “acquire” Suomis to replace their bolt-action rifles. In the beginning, though, only the coolest and most intelligent troopers were issued the gun; to be designated a Suomi gunner was an honor almost the equivalent of another stripe.
Interestingly, the Russians had a chance to look at the Suomi before the war and turned it down. As Marshal of Artillery Voronov tells it:
Way back in the beginning of the 1930s, we had acquired a model of the “Suomi” submachine gun. It was even tested by a commission of specialists on infantry weapons. The commission decided that it was a “police” weapon, unsuitable for military combat operations. The design and production of such submachine guns was considered superfluous. Acting on his own initiative, the Soviet designer V. G. Federov designed during those years a low-powered submachine gun which used Nagant revolver bullets. After being tested, this submachine gun was also rejected. Now, having encountered the widespread use of submachine guns in the Finnish Army, we bitterly regretted these miscalculations.5
Official Red Army doctrine in 1939, Voronov goes on to say, still emphasized massed volleys of rifle fire. It was feared that if the poorly educated recruits got hold of automatic weapons, they would waste too much ammo.
There was another weapon in the Finns’ arsenal, one that occasioned any number of colorful newspaper yarns, and that was the puukko knife, a Lapp blade about the size and heft of a Bowie knife. Most of the tales about single-handed Finns dispatching whole squads of Russians with their puukkos were obviously concocted by correspondents in the bars of the Helsinki hotels. The weapon did find employment from time to time in desperate situations, but the Finnish soldier no more went looking for hand-to-hand combat than did the average soldier in any army.
The wartime Finnish division had a paper strength of 14,400 men. The average Red Army division was officially supposed to number 17,000, but the varying additions of tank and specialist troops during the Winter War make that figure only a rough approximation.
At the beginning of the war, Mannerheim’s forces were deployed as follows:
1. Army of the Karelian Isthmus: Six divisions under the command of General Hugo Viktor Östermann. On the right, the southwest Isthmus, was Second Corps, under General Öhquist, composed of the Fourth, Fifth, and Eleventh divisions, along with three groups of “covering troops” operating forward of the Mannerheim Line in early December. On the left flank, from the Vuoksi Waterway to Lake Ladoga, was Third Corps, commanded by General Heinrichs, comprised of the Ninth and Tenth divisions and one detachment of covering troops.
2. Fourth Corps: Two divisions, manning a sixty-mile line extending in a roughly concave crescent from the north shore of Lake Ladoga, commanded by General Hägglund.
3. North Finland Group: Covering the remaining 625 miles to the Arctic Ocean, this collection of Civic Guards, border guards, and activated reservist units was led by General Tuompo. Its southern unit boundary with Fourth Corps ran through the town of Ilomantsi.
Mannerheim had established his wartime headquarters in the town of Mikkeli (St. Michael). He seems to have liked the symbolism. He knew the place well, for he had mounted his final campaigns against the Reds from there in 1918. Nostalgia and symbolism aside, the village was about equidistant from the Isthmus and from Fourth Corps’s zone of operations and was thus a logical choice. Mannerheim had two divisions in strategic reserve, one near Viipuri at work building fortifications, and the other based at Oulu, on the Gulf of Bothnia. Both units were woefully underequipped with mortars, machine guns, radios, even skis, and not a man could be moved without Mannerheim’s personal order.
1Chew, Allen F., The White Death (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971), 256.
2Bialer, Seweryn, ed., Stalin and His Generals (New York: Pegasus Books, 1969), 132.
3Langdon-Davies, John, Invasion in the Snow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941), 7.
4Mannerheim, 324.
5Bialer, 132.