Mannerheim had not expected a serious Russian threat to materialize either on the road to Tolvajärvi or the road south from Suvilahti. When the Russians struck hard along the axes of both roads, they came close to upsetting the entire scheme of defense in the Finnish Fourth Corps sector, north of Lake Ladoga. The original plan for that sector had been to pin the enemy against a strong line of prepared positions anchored on Lake Ladoga and stretching north to Syskyjärvi, and then strike them on the right flank from the lake-spattered wilderness to the north.
Now that very wilderness had become a crisis spot. By the end of the second day’s fighting, Finnish intelligence realized that the lightweight border forces in that sector were facing two full Red divisions, both well supplied with artillery and armor. While the Russian 139th was systematically pushing back Task Force Räsänen on the Tolvajärvi road, its sister unit, the Fiftysixth Division, came storming across the border north and east of Suvilahti. If the Fifty-sixth continued its drive along the road from Suvilahti to Loimola, it would completely disrupt the planned counteroffensive on the north shore of Lake Ladoga. Even worse, it might take the main defensive line—Ladoga to Syskyjärvi—from behind and open the vulnerable “back door” to the Isthmus itself.
As it was, the unforeseen power of the Russian thrust at Suojärvi drew off a dangerous percentage of Fourth Corps’s strength and tied down many troops originally earmarked for use in the planned counterattack north of Ladoga. Not only was Suojärvi a junction for good roads leading to the north, west, and southwest of Finland’s interior, it was also the hub of a region of some economic importance to the Finns, home to a sizable complex of paper and lumber mills.
The national border east of Suojärvi, as it was drawn when Finland became independent, was a strange protuberance, shaped roughly like a hammer’s head and jutting into the Soviet Union like a peninsula thrusting into the sea. Surrounded on three sides by enemy territory, the place was patently indefensible, so when the Russian advance nipped off this little outcropping of Finnish soil, the only Finns caught by the encirclement were a few small groups of border guards. Many of these men were able to take advantage of their familiarity with the landscape to slip through enemy lines and rejoin friendly troops farther west. Those who did not make their escape suffered varying fates. Some were killed by the Russians; others succumbed to exposure and hunger. Incredibly, a few men managed to survive in that tiny pocket until the end of the war more than 100 days later, hiding out in remote farmhouses and logging camps and using their skills as woodsmen to elude enemy patrols.
On the day the war started, the Suojärvi front was defended by border guard detachments totaling about a battalion’s worth of troops, two regiments from the Twelfth Division (JR-34 and JR-36), a handful of light-to-medium artillery pieces, and an old armored train from the civil war days bristling with machine guns and French 75s in steel cupolas. This train proved to be quite effective in slowing the Russians’ advance. Hastening from trouble spot to trouble spot, it gave the Finns at least a token measure of mobile artillery support. Perhaps even more valuable than its firepower was the psychological effect on the defenders’ spirits as the train hove into sight, bellowing and roaring like some prehistoric monster, gushing angry smoke, knocking sheets of snow from the trees when it fired its main battery, its armored gunports blazing fire at the advancing Russians.
There were fierce delaying actions on all the approaches to Suvilahti, but the invaders’ numerical superiority and tanks enabled them to outflank or overwhelm each Finnish position. The defenders hung on to Suvilahti by their fingernails until just before midnight, December 2, when the last roadblock detachment, some of its men weeping from exhaustion, staggered back into the perimeter. The enemy was still very cautious about fighting at night, so the Suvilahti defenders were able to slip away without serious interference. Before leaving they burned every farm, factory, house, and wagon. As they retreated down the road toward Loimola, the flames spread to the lumberyards, igniting not only vast piles of raw planking but hundreds of nearby trees as well. The sky over the forest was smeared with concentric fans of red-orange flame boiling up through heavy rolls of smoke, and on the still winter air the retreating Finns could hear not only the roar and crack of the flames but also the screams of burning livestock.
December 3 dawned in a sky still greasy with smoke. One Finnish battalion had gotten only as far as Naistenjärvi and was regrouping near that frozen lake from the rigors of its night march. All the other Finnish units were strung out raggedly some six kilometers farther south, trying to scratch trenches into the hard ground on the southern bank of the little Piitsoinjoki River. They needed time to catch their breath. Once they had done that, they would be put into motion to carry out a bold and promising plan formulated during prewar maneuvers by the commander of JR-34, Colonel Teittinen.
Teittinen was a native of this region, and he knew its topography intimately. So far nothing except the size of the Russian attack had surprised him, and the numbers were not so disparate as to render his counterattack plan invalid. Teittinen knew that the geography of this region, the interaction of lake and road and river, was such that any attacker who stayed bound to the main roads would be at a great disadvantage compared to a defender who could utilize the whole landscape. He also knew how desperate things were up on the Tolvajärvi road. He therefore planned to leave a minimum defensive screen along the Piitsoinjoki River line and concentrate every available man and gun at Kivijärvi, a point equidistant from both the Loimola road and the Tolvajärvi road. Once gathered there, his force could strike at the flank or rear of either enemy force, depending on which one seemed to offer the best prospects of success. The woods around Kivijärvi were impenetrable to anyone who did not know the hidden paths, and Teittinen was certain he could escape detection and fall on the exposed enemy like a thunderbolt. As soon as the Russians were shattered on one road, he could then turn and strike the other. He hoped to have all the arrangements readied by December 6 at the latest.
But Mannerheim’s headquarters intervened on December 3. The high command wanted a strong counterattack mounted back up the Loimola road in the direction of Suvilahti. Both JR-34 and JR-36 were ordered to mount the attack, supported by a paltry two batteries of artillery. The time allotted to prepare for this operation was only five hours.
The order landed on Teittinen’s command post with the impact of a howitzer shell. Both regiments had been under fire since the first day of the war, had just completed a dangerous and exhausting night withdrawal under hazardous conditions, and as a consequence were both weary and disorganized. It seemed quite unreasonable to expect these troops to reform, resupply, make plans, and launch a coordinated, controllable counterattack in the space of five hours. To make matters worse, large quantities of the Twelfth Division’s winter equipment, including many of its skis and supply sledges, had only just arrived by train in Loimola and could not possibly be distributed to the troops within that space of time.
Teittinen issued the necessary orders but continued to put calls through to Mannerheim’s headquarters in a vain attempt to convince the high command that the attack was hopeless. His calls were received with patronizing skepticism. Only a few minutes before the designated jumping-off time for the attack, he made one final effort to get through to Mannerheim himself, hoping that the Marshal’s sense of realism would prevail and the counterattack order be rescinded. The call never got through. The last person Teittinen spoke to was a staff orderly who listened to his pleas in cold silence, then archly informed him that Mannerheim was asleep and could not be wakened for matters of less than apocalyptic urgency.
All Teittinen could do was scrape together a disorganized mob of tired, hungry, frightened, resentful men and shove them back up the road, straight into the teeth of the Soviet formations that had pursued them the night before. What transpired was pathetically predictable. Most of JR-34 simply could not make the effort. One company commander was heard to remark that Mannerheim could come up there and personally threaten to shoot everyone in the regiment, for all the good it would do. The men were punchy with fatigue and stumbled when they walked. Two battalions of JR-36, somewhat better rested than the others, were herded into a semblance of organization. Their officers begged and borrowed hundreds of pairs of skis from neighboring units. Incredibly, there were still several hundred men in these two regiments who had not yet been issued personal weapons; the rifles were still in warehouses in south-central Finland. Before the war the Twelfth Division’s commander had been informed that a rifle for every soldier was a luxury Finland could not afford in peacetime. Indeed, some men in the division never received weapons; hundreds of Twelfth Division soldiers fought the remaining engagements of the war with captured Soviet arms.
To the surprise of no one on the scene, the attack finally jumped off much later than its ordained starting time of 6:00 A.M. JR-36 led the advance, its Third Battalion on the right, following the highway and rail line, its Second Battalion on the left, both being led by a reconnaissance detachment. At first it seemed as though luck was with the Finns; the enemy appeared to have withdrawn during the night. In reality the Finnish counterattack had started at precisely the time the Russians were rotating their decimated forward units and replacing them with fresh troops. The forward elements of JR-36 got as far as Liete village, about five kilometers northwest of Suvilahti, before encountering any resistance.
When the enemy did make its first appearance, it was dramatic. Soldiers from the reconnaissance detachment suddenly appeared, backs to the enemy, screaming, “Tanks, tanks, tanks!” Twenty Soviet vehicles came rumbling into view around a distant curve in the road. The sight of them was enough to disrupt the Finnish counterattack. Both battalions of JR-36 took to their heels in headlong panic.
No infantry were seen operating with the tanks, and the tankers were not very keen in their pursuit. They followed the fleeing Finns cautiously down the Loimola road, hurling desultory rounds at their backs now and again.
The rout was stopped by the reserve battalion of JR-36, which had been digging in at Lake Naistenjärvi. The broken battalions fled back through the First Battalion’s line and were cursed, kicked, and cajoled into some kind of order by their officers. A small highway bridge between Naistenjärvi and the Russian armor, wired for demolition the day before, was blown up. Red infantry now hastened forward to join the tanks, but meantime the faithful armored train had arrived on the Finnish side of the blown bridge. It laid down a blistering barrage of cannon and machine-gun fire, effectively checking the Russians long enough for 1/JR-36 to finish digging in, positioning its heavy weapons, and restoring discipline to its sister units.
Tank terror still gripped the survivors of JR-36; the men’s hands trembled and their voices cracked when they spoke of the armored monsters. Next time all it took was the rumor of tanks, not their actual appearance, to shatter their nerves. This time the fleeing men did not rally until they reached Loimola itself.
The fear of armor had not communicated itself to JR-34. There is some indication that Colonel Teittinen’s men had their spines stiffened by the spectacle of what had happened to their sister regiment and had spontaneously resolved that it would not happen to them. With one entire regiment caved in, there was no point in trying to hold the line at the Piitsoinjoki River. Teittinen led his regiment about six kilometers back to the line traced by a small stream known as Kollaanjoki—the “Kollaa River”—and decided that this was the best defensive ground left between Loimola and the rear of Fourth Corps. JR-34 turned and dug in along the southern bank of the Kollaa, spotting its antitank guns on the main road and covering the flanks of the road with wire entanglements buried in deep snowdrifts. Until trenches, mortar pits, and log-roofed dugouts could be constructed, it wasn’t much of a defensive line, but the men of JR-34 were tired of running. Here, at this insignificant subarctic river, the Finns turned to make their stand. Thus was born the “Kollaa Front.” In the weeks to come the phrase “Kollaa still stands!” would inspire Finns everywhere, and the insignificant river would become a symbol of resistance against tremendous odds.
Of course there was little choice in the matter. Kollaa had to be held or else the Russians would smash into the rear of Fourth Corps, break open the “back door” to the Karelian Isthmus, and Mannerheim’s entire scheme of defense would collapse. But holding Kollaa was not a spectacular defensive victory, the way the early victories at Taipale and Summa had been. It was a grinding battle of attrition. There were no dashing maneuvers through the forest, no sensational raids: just two determined armies, one of them growing steadily mightier as the other grew thinner and more haggard.
Fortunately the retreat-weary men of JR-34 were given a few days of respite, thanks to the cautious nature of the enemy’s pursuit. It was not until December 7 that Russian units made their appearance on the north bank of the Kollaa.
“River” is perhaps a misleading word for the Kollaa. At no place was this obscure waterway more than a few meters wide, and no one had ever foreseen that it would become the pivotal position on which the fate of all Fourth Corps depended. In the beginning there were no prepared defenses for the men who dug in there, other than a few foxholes athwart the road itself and a screen of antitank rocks that had been emplaced on the shoulders of the road and of the railroad embankment. Beyond that, there were only the dugouts and bunkers that Teittinen and his men had to dig out of the granite-hard soil during whatever spare time they had between Soviet attacks.
At the start of the battle Teittinen could call on the support of a half dozen nondescript batteries of guns, of various calibers, ages, and states of mechanical reliability, along with the ever-faithful armored train, whose crashings and belchings always raised the defenders’ spirits, regardless of what damage it might do to the enemy. Teittinen sent repeated pleas to Fourth Corps and to Mannerheim for more artillery support, and finally, a week or so into the battle, he got it: two French 3.5-inch field pieces whose barrels bore a casting date of 1871. These antiques could no longer be aimed with any accuracy; they were just pointed in the general direction of the Russians and kicked off. Their age-pitted ammunition was not very lethal, but the old black-powder shells made a very satisfying “Bang!” when they detonated.
The pattern of fighting on the Kollaa front was defined by the very first Russian attacks and in weeks to come would change little. The first Red thrust came barreling straight down the highway, a column of tanks firing on the move, with infantry formations dimly in view straggling behind them. The tanks clattered right into the cross hairs of waiting Finnish gunners, and the leading three vehicles were hit within seconds of each other. The remaining tanks retreated, and the unsupported infantry could make no progress on its own.
The struggle for Kollaa began, then, with those three burned-out tanks on the Loimola highway. As the Russians’ strength grew, and the urgency of their attempts to break the Kollaa line increased, the battle spread day by day in a wider and wider arc on either side of the highway, the attackers massing at more and more points, and the defenders stretching their resources, day by day, to meet each new threat. The Russians moved, the Finns countered. It was set-piece conventional battle, except for the odds, which were not conventional at all. No matter how many men the Finns scraped up and fed into the line at Kollaa, the Russians came against them with triple or quadruple their strength. At the start, a single regiment of Finns faced a division of Russians. Then, two divisions. The Finns’ strength grew to two regiments; the Russians deployed four heavily supported divisions. There were never enough Finns to meet every threat, never enough guns firing in support. Always the dreaded “big breakthrough” seemed just minutes away from happening. The image suggested by the defense was that of a rubber band being stretched tauter and thinner every day, until the breaking point must surely come at any hour.
Every day following their first probe on December 7 the Russians broadened the frontage of their attacks, called in more air strikes, and wheeled up more batteries of artillery, more tanks, and more men. And every day the importance of Kollaa grew. To the south, on the shores of Lake Ladoga, General Hägglund was risking everything on the long-planned counterstroke against the big Russian salient pinned, its left flank against the lake, at Kitelä. If the Kollaa front was ruptured while that attack was developing, Fourth Corps would surely collapse, for it would be impossible for Hägglund to disengage and wheel any significant forces to face a new threat from his rear.
In late December the Russians tried some new tactics. One day they would send their troops forward in tight clusters, bunched behind lines of firing tanks. The next day they would try to infiltrate small bodies of men equipped with individual shields of armor plate, each with an observation slit cut into it, an expedient that was curiously medieval in appearance and not very practical. Once a man was hunkered down behind that armored shield, he was not likely to come out from behind it and charge. It was very difficult to aim and fire through the small observation slit and the smaller rifle hole cut below it. Finnish snipers positioned themselves in front of the defenders’ main line and shot dozens of these shield-bearing warriors in the legs and buttocks. But the Russians at Kollaa learned from their mistakes and even became good at adapting the forest to their needs. They learned, for instance, how to make “ice roads” by employing hundreds of men to trample the snow flat, then corduroying the resulting lane with sawed-down tree trunks. After the logs were in place, water was hosed over them. In a matter of hours it froze solid, and the road surface thus created would be serviceable for light tanks and field artillery.
In mid-January the Russians reinforced their artillery at Kollaa so that when they opened an all-out offensive during the week of January 21–28, they would deploy fifty batteries, almost 200 weapons, against the Finns’ total of twenty guns. The January assaults were not fancy, consisting of human wave attacks all along the line—constantly, without pause—while thousands of shells rained on the defenders. Russian casualties rose to more than 1,000 men a day. Against one strong point, known to the Finns as “Killer Hill,” the Russians threw a 4,000-man regiment against a defending force of 32 Finns. More than 400 Russians died; 4 of the Finns survived.
Under this kind of strain men snapped suddenly and without warning. During these January attacks one coolly professional platoon leader, who had endured two weeks of nonstop shelling and whose unit had repelled so many Russian attacks that they had lost count, suddenly went through that invisible window that marks the border of reason. He stumbled into his company commander’s dugout, tears streaming from his swollen, bloodshot eyes. “My wife is coming here with more machine guns!” he babbled. “My wife is coming and bringing us more weapons, so we can kill all of the bastards, every last one of them!” With that, still gesturing and yelling incoherently, he turned and ran outside into the Russian bombardment, where he was at once killed by shrapnel.1
In late February and early March, by which time the importance of the Kollaa front had become secondary, the Russians’ attacks became almost vindictive in their savagery. There were so many planes in the air over Kollaa that groups of two or three aircraft would gang up on individual Finnish soldiers caught in the open and waste thousands of rounds in strafing attacks on one man. By then, the Russians had deployed eighty batteries of artillery. The landscape around Kollaa had been pulverized. The once-dense forests had been stripped of all foliage, turned into a bleak moonscape of overlapping craters, the lacerated earth prickly with the torn, skinned stumps and trunks of blasted evergreens.
A final wave of Soviet attacks began on March 2. The defense was broken and penetrated dozens of times, but each time, the Finns somehow contained the enemy, repaired the damage, retook the lost ground, held out. So thinly stretched were the defenders during those last days of the struggle that company-sized Russian salients were counterattacked by as few as five or six Finns.
Nevertheless, Kollaa held out until the end. When the cease-fire took effect, on March 13, the defenders slowly emerged from their holes and wandered aimlessly over the devastated landscape. The silence was deafening.
1Engle and Paananen, 140.