Before 1939 passed into history, Western newspaper readers had learned at least two words of Finnish. One, of course, was sisu (guts). The other was motti, a word usually seen in the context of motti tactics.
In Finnish, the word motti denotes a pile of logs or timber, held in place by stakes, destined to be chopped or sawn into convenient lengths of firewood. Motti tactics was the term applied to the way the Finnish Army dealt with the long road-bound Soviet columns that were surrounded and cut to pieces north of Lake Ladoga and up in the vast subarctic wilderness of north-central Finland. The textbook motti operation had three phases:
1. reconnaissance to get a fix on the enemy and encirclement to prevent further movement and to pin the enemy into a narrowly circumscribed area;
2. quick, sharp attacks, using concentration of force to gain local superiority or at least equality, delivered at vulnerable points along the entire length of the enemy column, the object being to split its formation into a half-dozen or more isolated fragments;
3. detailed destruction of each pocket in turn, weakest ones first, while hunger and cold worked on the stronger ones.
So it is that even today, when the Battle of Suomussalmi is taught in the military history course at West Point, the Finnish Army is credited with inventing this tactical doctrine and refining its principles for years before putting them to the test in 1939.
It may all be a myth. Even Finnish historians tend to become a little cagey when writing about the motti battles, and there seems to be no direct evidence that motti tactics by that name were ever taught as part of the Finnish Army’s prewar training doctrine, although that is not to say that individual officers may not have come up with the name spontaneously and quite independently of one another, long before the Western correspondents in Helsinki got wind of it and made it briefly a household term, as they had two months earlier with the word “blitzkrieg.”
Mannerheim and his commanders knew Soviet military doctrine intimately. When the war broke out, he was surprised strategically by the size of the enemy’s effort in the great forests of north-central Finland, but he was not surprised tactically. On a tactical level, the Russians behaved very much as Mannerheim had expected.
The Russian civil war had been too unusual and too political in nature to have offered many military lessons. The Soviet officer corps, like their counterparts in most European states, had been trained to fight a conventional war, moving in columns along roads, with objectives of a conventional nature: cities, railroad junctions, bridges, and the like. The Stalinist purges had gutted the Red Army of three-quarters of its best professional leadership. Mannerheim had nothing but contempt for the kind of officers who had been moved up the promotion ladder to replace those killed or imprisoned during the purges, regarding them as working-class thugs in uniform, no matter what their rank. He knew them to be timid, slow, and unimaginative. If one factored into that the doctrine of blind political obedience to the “Politruks,” the frontline commissars who had to approve every tactical order before it could be given to the troops, then the Red Army looked like a massive but elephantine organism: an army which, when committed to battle under Finnish conditions, was almost guaranteed to stick to the roads because to do otherwise was to risk total loss of control, the breakdown of the disciplinary system, and political malfeasance. Initiative in the Red Army of 1939 was a quality more apt to get an officer shot than promoted.
With the presumptive enemy so well understood and the terrain of Finland so intimately known, it was natural for the Finnish Army to shape its tactical doctrines accordingly. Even if motti tactics were not taught as such before the war, skills were taught that made such tactics the natural outcome of the conditions under which the fighting would take place. Individual and small-unit initiative, expert camouflage, rapid movement on skis, quick concentration and quick dispersal, the technique of large-scale as well as small-unit ambushes—all of these skills were honed to a fine edge in the Finnish Army. When troops so indoctrinated were turned loose against large, road-bound Russian columns, motti tactics were the natural result. Evidence suggests, in fact, that the Finns on some battlefronts did not even call what they were doing motti tactics until they read about it in the newspapers, after which of course the name stuck.
In December, when the Western press began trumpeting the successes of these dazzling new tactics, the Finns naturally did nothing to disabuse all of those sympathetic foreign journalists, making it seem even more as though Mannerheim and his staff had been nurturing these concepts for years, waiting to unleash them and dazzle the world.
The reality was that, although motti tactics were a dramatic tactical success, they were more often than not a strategic failure. The Finns’ objective was to shatter the invading columns and either route them back over the border in disorder or annihilate them as quickly as possible. When the Russian columns broke into strong defensive mottis, it was in fact a setback for Finnish strategic goals, given the Russian soldiers’ proclivity for defensive fighting. None of the mottis, including the so-called Great Motti at Kitelä, which contained an entire Soviet division, would have been too hard to reduce if the Finns had been decently equipped with artillery, armor, or tactical air power; but those were the very things the Finns lacked, and without them, each motti had to be starved, frozen, and finally hacked into pieces. To do that required two more vital commodities that were in short supply in Mannerheim’s inventory: manpower and time. Mannerheim had hoped, in fact, to avoid the creation of strongly fortified pockets such as the bigger mottis. He knew how tenacious the Russian soldier could be in defense—he had commanded enough of them in his time—and he also knew that Red Army doctrine, reinforced by the severe example of the purges, dictated that any piece of terrain taken from an enemy became “Russian” soil and so must be defended to the last man and bullet.
General Hägglund, in his postwar writings, stated flatly that of the eleven mottis that resulted from his long-cherished counteroffensive, only the Great Motti at Kitelä was planned. The others “just happened.” Hägglund likened them to “wood chips” that fell this way and that and declared that the dispersal of Finnish forces required to subdue or contain all those pockets made it impossible for his strategy to yield the sort of victory he had envisioned.
The original plan had called for halting the Russians along a strong line of both natural and prepared defenses anchored on Lake Ladoga and running through Ruokojärvi and Syskyjärvi. While they were engaged along that line, the Finns would fall upon their vulnerable right flank. Hägglund was prevented from carrying out this plan by the unexpectedly strong enemy thrusts at Tolvajärvi and down the Loimola road.
When the Russians crossed the border on the north coast of Lake Ladoga, the Finns engaged them with delaying actions, as planned, slowing them down so that the main Russian force did not reach Kitelä, just east of the main Finnish defenses, until December 10. Several heavy Russian assaults were launched against the fortified line, but all were repulsed with considerable loss. Especially valuable to the defenders were the six- and ten-inch coast artillery batteries on Mantsinsaari Island, which interdicted the main Russian supply line to the east and greatly hampered resupply and reinforcement of the spearhead up at Kitelä.
As the situations at Tolvajärvi and Ilomantsi stabilized and as the defenses at Kollaa continued against all odds to hold, General Hägglund decided to proceed with the original plan, even though it was now somewhat diluted because so many reserves had been drawn off to meet those threats to the north of Fourth Corps.
There were two Soviet divisions in the Kitelä salient: the 168th, concentrated along the coastal road (“Pitkäranta road”), and the Eighteenth, concentrated on the right flank of the salient from Syskyjärvi back along the only other decent road in this sector, the Uomaa road. Attached to the Eighteenth Division was the Thirty-fourth Tank Brigade, although the 168th, too, had attached armor formations. Both divisions were well supplied with artillery. Leading into the Russians’ right flank, at a point some twelve kilometers or so behind the front, was a secondary north-south artery called the Siira road. This avenue afforded the Finns an excellent approach to the sensitive Uomaa road, the northern of the Russians’ two supply lines on the Ladoga front.
Hägglund seems to have been thrown off balance by the crises up at Kollaa and Tolvajärvi. His first two moves were abortive false starts that should have alerted the Russians to what was up but do not seem to have had that effect. The first warm-up attack was launched on December 12. Hägglund was probably motivated by the good news from Tolvajärvi, where Talvela had successfully eliminated one of Fourth Corps’s worst threats. Eight Finnish battalions assembled far out on the Finnish left near Kotajärvi and moved out through the woods to try and stage a surprise attack on the Siira-Uomaa road junction.
The approach march went badly. The terrain was far worse than even the Finns were used to dealing with. The infantry grew tired long before they reached enemy lines, and inevitably a quantity of extra ammunition, heavy machine guns, mortar parts, and radios were set down and marked for the reserves to pick up and bring forward later. Exhausted and disorganized by the march, the Finns attacked the road junction, but only three of the eight battalions made any headway. Russian shell fire was heavy and tank/infantry counterattacks were soon hitting the Finns from both east and west as the enemy got its reserves into motion. By the evening of December 13 Hägglund’s worn-out battalions broke contact and retired back up the Siira road, unable even to hold their minimal gains. It was fortunate for Hägglund that the Russians did not pursue beyond the range of their own artillery.
Hägglund made his second effort on December 17, with a conventional frontal assault on the main Russian line between Ruokojärvi and Syskyjärvi. The attackers made little headway against the Russians’ superior firepower, and when his casualties started rising, Hägglund called off the operation. This endeavor was marginally successful as a feint, however, for it did draw the enemy’s attention and some of its reserves away from the sensitive right flank, where Hägglund still planned to launch his maximum effort.
In Mannerheim’s opinion it was taking the general too long to work up to making that effort. He sent a personal envoy from supreme headquarters with orders to get Hägglund moving, and events thereafter unfolded with more dispatch. With the Finns victorious at Tolvajärvi and with Kollaa holding, there was no reason to delay; even the weather had turned in the Finns’ favor, as massive snowdrifts piled up along the rocky shores of Ladoga, making it difficult for the Russians to keep their two supply lines open and forcing them more than ever to stay close to the roads and the villages.
Hägglund’s plan was this: First, an attack would be launched against Uomaa village, to cut the northern supply line and establish a roadblock facing east and to check any Russian reaction from over the border. Next, the main attack would be carried out by two task forces designated according to the first initial of their commanders’ last names, Task Force A (for Autti) and Task Force H (for Hannukselka). These concentrations would strike the Russian line along a fifteen-kilometer stretch of the Uomaa road, breaking through at multiple points and driving south to the coast of Ladoga, thereby cutting off the “head” of the Russian salient, the 168th Division, headquartered at Kitelä. From their main line of resistance between Ruokojärvi and Syskyjärvi the Finns would launch diversionary attacks to pin down the sizable Russian forces dug in there and keep them from taking any action against the flanking movement. If the plan succeeded, all military logic dictated that the Russians would respond in only two ways: by launching hasty local counterattacks, which Hägglund was confident his men could handle, or by making a complete withdrawal from the Ladoga coast, which would free at least a whole division of Finnish troops to reinforce the Isthmus front.
Offensive action began on the day after Christmas, when a feint attack was launched against Ruhtinaanmäki, a hill near Syskyjärvi, successfully pinning down a sizable Russian force in that vicinity. The Finns made sure this effort did not look like a feint. They pressed the assault hard, took heavy losses, and dug in under galling shell fire. On December 27 a raid in force swept out of the forest and attacked Uomaa village. The enemy garrison resisted stoutly, however, and fell back to fortified buildings in the center of the village, where they mounted a tenacious defense. The Finns detailed a screen of troops to keep the village surrounded and pressed on to the east, establishing their roadblock about five kilometers from Uomaa.
8. Development of Counterattack, Showing Formation of Mottis
Having learned something from his study of the miscarried attack on December 12, Colonel Autti did not attempt to hide his force by marching through the snow-choked wilderness. He formed up his men just beyond sight of Russian lines across the Siira road and at the prearranged moment launched them behind an artillery barrage in a flat-out charge straight down the road. The attackers crashed into the Russian line, firing on the run, and broke through. By twilight they could bring the Uomaa road under small-arms fire. The road junction itself was seized the next morning, and by January 3 organized Soviet resistance had been compressed into a small figure-eight-shaped motti just to the west of the road junction.
Colonel Hannukselka’s task force had similar success when it came storming out of the forest between Syskyjärvi and Pyhäjärvi. By the end of the first week of January the entire Russian Ladoga front had broken into pieces. Everything was going according to Hägglund’s original plan, with the exception of one increasingly troublesome turn of events. Instead of being panicked into hasty counterattacks, or doing the more logical thing and staging a fighting withdrawal back to the Soviet border, the broken enemy formations were simply going to ground. When a Russian battalion was threatened with encirclement, it made no effort to break free. It simply deployed for perimeter defense and starting digging in. For the moment the Finns could only register uneasy puzzlement over this phenomenon, leave token forces to guard the bypassed pockets, and press on with the main attack elsewhere.
By January 11 Colonel Autti’s force reached the village of Koirinoja and severed the supply line of the 168th Division. Task Force H was still bogged down in a series of sharp little firefights with pockets of the Eighteenth Division and Thirty-fourth Tank Brigade. Again, although these units were shattered, the fragments did not retreat or lash out wildly at their assailants; they simply dug in and refused to budge.
On the map the surrounded Russians’ position now looked hopeless. But the fanatical resistance of the troops inside each of the eleven mottis upset every Finnish timetable. The tenacity with which the Russians defended themselves soon earned the grudging admiration of the Finns. Here was an enemy who was displaying plenty of sisu of its own variety. One Russian company inside the Uomaa motti refused an invitation to surrender even though 83 of its 85 men were dead or wounded. Most of the mottis’ inhabitants remained peaceful unless disturbed. They were not concerned with launching sallies against the Finns, but they would fight back savagely when attacked. And the mottis’ power of resistance was formidable. There were more than 200 tanks and armored cars inside the pockets, 100 of them in the two Lemetti pockets alone, where the Thirty-fourth Tank Brigade had been concentrated. Inside the circles of armor were hundreds of field guns and mortars that could concentrate their fire quickly on any threatened part of the defensive perimeter. Even though the tanks soon became immobilized from lack of fuel, their turrets still rotated and their guns still fired. Each motti remained ringed by steel and bristling with firepower. On the Ladoga front, starvation was not a major weapon in the Finns’ arsenal, for there was an abundance of horse meat trapped inside the mottis, and the Soviet Air Force’s resupply efforts, despite considerable interference from Finnish antiaircraft fire, were both determined and successful.
Not that living conditions were comfortable or that hunger was ever very far away. A diary found inside the Kitelä motti recorded that when an aerial food drop landed within the perimeter, the men nearby would “run like maniacs; they tear at the packages, eat, and die. Food is all in all to them. … a hungry human is an animal.”
Inside the Great Motti at Kitelä was General Bondarev’s 168th Division, dug in defending an area of more than twenty square miles. The Russians seem to have made it a point of pride not to let the Great Motti fall. In January a tenuous overland supply route was opened between the new Soviet front east of Pitkäranta and the sector of the Great Motti’s perimeter near Koirinoja. By this time, the surface ice of Lake Ladoga was frozen hard enough to bear the weight of supply sledges, even light artillery. The Russians dispatched well-armed columns out onto the ice around Finnish lines on the coast and succeeded in reopening a direct link with the trapped division.
Hägglund’s men were strained to the limit just maintaining the siege of this enormous pocket. All they could spare to deal with this new threat was a handful of small guerrilla detachments. Starting about January 20, these units marched out onto the bleak, otherworldly landscape of Ladoga, where winter storms whipped waves of snow across a vast, flat, gray-black horizon. The Finns dug in on some small, bare, rocky islets that dotted the surface of the lake, close to where the resupply columns would have to pass in order to reach the Great Motti.
The enemy columns moved out from below Pitkäranta with the coming of night. There were long lines of horse-drawn wagons, trucks mounting machine guns, an escort of light tanks and armored cars, screening detachments of well-armed infantry on the flanks. The Finns’ only real asset was their skill at winter camouflage and their ski mobility. Sometimes the Red columns would be smashed by fire from the Mantsinsaari shore batteries, but those positions were under increasingly heavy counterbattery and aerial bombardment and could risk exposing their positions only to fire at critical targets on the mainland. Seldom did they dare to fire at ghostly columns of horse-drawn carts out on the ice. Therefore the columns had to be stopped by ski guerrillas using for cover the rocky outcroppings on the ice desert that was Ladoga’s surface.
Night after night the ski troops went out to ambush the supply columns. Eerie nocturnal firefights swirled and flickered through the murk, with men’s perceptions distorted by the mirage-producing refractions of the Ladoga landscape. Sometimes the skiers would hit the same column a dozen times in one night, dashing in to open fire, hurl their bundles of stick grenades, and slide satchel charges under tank treads. Observers on the shoreline heard the hollow thud of cannon fire and saw the flash of small arms like swarms of fireflies. The strangely mirrored columns of illumination from Russian searchlights, bending and shimmering, were reflected back by the ice in weird permutations of normal light. In the morning the track of the columns would be marked by hundreds of frozen dead, who had stiffened in whatever position they were in when the bullet found them, and charred wagons, gutted horses, and occasionally a scorched and blackened armored vehicle.
About a week before the end of the war, a time when the effort was all but superfluous, the Soviets mounted an all-out offensive against Mantsinsaari and the other, much smaller clumps of stone the Finns had fortified. Overwhelming aerial and artillery bombardments literally pulverized the smaller islets, and wave after wave of Red infantry flooded the ice to finish off the surviving Finns. Only a handful of men from the Finnish garrisons survived. Hundreds perished, fighting until they were overwhelmed by waves of Soviet infantry.
In the end, thanks to airdrops, the Ladoga relief columns, and an abundant supply of horseflesh, the 168th Division survived. Its defensive position was very strong as well as large. The Ladoga coastline was a veritable rampart of granite headlands and outcroppings. Storming the motti from that direction would be like attacking a castle, and the inland perimeter was ringed by high wooded ridges into which the division’s tanks had been buried so that only their turrets remained above ground as revolving pillboxes. The divisional artillery had been massed in the center of the motti, where it could bring devastating fire on any point in a 360-degree radius.
To storm such a position would require the kind of firepower the Finnish Army had learned to do without. Mortars and grenades would not do the job, and there was not enough heavy artillery to go around. What reserve guns the Finns did have were being husbanded for the Isthmus battles. Sometimes the Finnish troops were able to even the odds a little bit by using captured enemy weapons, but most of the guns that had fallen into Finnish hands were too light to make a dent in the fortified mottis. Occasionally, however, the Finnish soldier’s talent for improvisation came into play, as happened when the Finns surrounding the “West Lemetti Motti” sneaked out under cover of darkness and penetrated the Russian lines. They then located the site of two 120 mm. mortars, tied ropes to the barrels, lashed a few dozen shells to the base plates, cut the gun crews’ throats, and proceeded to drag the two weapons back to Finnish lines without being challenged. In the morning the Finns opened fire on a number of bothersome bunkers that had proven impervious to grenade and machine-gun fire and blew all of them to matchsticks.
Sometimes, either in response to Finnish pressure or to orders from higher up, the motti garrisons did attempt to break out. Usually this happened without much, if any, warning. The garrison of the “East Lemetti Motti” made their move against the greatly outnumbered Fourth Jaeger Battalion, which had been surrounding them and keeping up the pressure for several weeks. The Jaegers’ commanding officer, a colonel named Aarnio, had just that morning received an intelligence update that confirmed a state of total quiescence within the motti. No enemy movement had been discerned in the last twenty-four hours. Aarnio’s men were strung out in a thin ring around the motti, and his guard was down. Then, about 100 meters away, a mass of Soviet infantry, personally led by a general and his headquarters staff, was just suddenly there. Aarnio rounded up a scratch defense line of clerks, cooks, drivers, and supply and medical personnel and radioed for help. The sudden outburst of firing alerted the rest of the battalion to the fact that a breakout was being launched, and small groups of skiers were already hurrying to the sound of the guns.
For more than an hour, a confused, point-blank firefight crackled through the woods, with the heaviest action along the Uomaa road. When the firing subsided, Aarnio’s patrols counted more than 400 dead Russians in the first 250 yards between his headquarters’ dugout and the motti’s outer defenses. Among them was General Stepan Ivanovich Kodratjev, commander of the Thirty-fourth Tank Brigade, who had bravely led the assault. All of his staff lay sprawled around him, including four female typists carrying rifles. A body count revealed that more than 3,000 Russians died in the breakout attempt, including 310 officers.
These were not the low-caliber officers the Finns would kill by the hundred in the great forest battles, but well-fed, smartly dressed professionals who died wearing clean white shirts, members of the Leningrad and Moscow elite. About 600 Russians survived the breakout attempt only to find themselves trapped in another motti identical to the one from which they had fought clear. The booty captured inside the now-deserted East Lemetti position was substantial: 105 tanks, 12 armored cars, 237 trucks, 31 civilian-pattern automobiles, 10 tractors and prime movers, 30 field kitchens, 6 usable pieces of artillery, and enough ammunition to fill 200 truckloads.
Eventually all the mottis except three were wiped out: the Great Motti centered at Kitelä, the Uomaa village motti, and the hourglass-shaped motti near the Siira road junction. Hägglund’s counterstroke had been well planned, bravely executed, and nearly pointless in the sense that his whole purpose was to eliminate the threat in the Ladoga sector in time to send a division or more to reinforce the Isthmus. Instead, Mannerheim finally had to reinforce Hägglund at the end of January with a half dozen miscellaneous reserve battalions and a full regiment from the newly formed Twenty-third Division. It was a curious situation, this standoff between Fourth Corps and the mottis, and a major disappointment to the Finns. Still, despite the failure to eliminate the Ladoga salient altogether, Hägglund’s men had performed remarkably. At the crux of the campaign, just before Mannerheim decided to send him additional troops, his two divisions were containing numerically superior forces at Kollaa, along the Pitkäranta line facing east, and along the original fortified line west of the Great Motti, and simultaneously besieging ten heavily fortified pockets. Like every other successful Finnish commander, Hägglund got the maximum performance from his men.