No aspect of the Winter War so stirred the emotions of the outside world as did the Finnish victories in the great forest battles north of Fourth Corps’s sector, especially that Tannenburg-in-miniature at Suomussalmi. In part it was the landscape in which those battles were fought: vast, dense deciduous forests carved by prehistoric glaciers into a patchwork of 10,000 lakes, often channeled by raw, thin evergreen-clad ridges of reddish gray granite. In part it was the fantastic disparity of numbers between the two armies involved, the whole David-and-Goliath nature of the struggle, combined with the numbing viciousness of the fighting itself, the dash and brilliance of Finnish tactics, and the staggering one-sidedness of their victories. Indeed, the first reports of Suomussalmi were greeted with skepticism, until eyewitness reports began coming back from reliable correspondents, along with photos that haunt the imagination of anyone who has ever seen them.
These victories in the northern wilderness were the most spectacular achievement of Finnish arms. Reading about the obliteration of two whole Soviet divisions by a few battalions of intrepid skiers, the American or English citizen could savor a moment of idealistic rejoicing. For the first time in many years, free men had triumphed. It does not detract from the Finns’ accomplishment, however, to state that the psychological effect of these lopsided victories was not wholly positive, in that they led the outside world to expect a miraculous Finnish victory and may therefore have taken some urgency from the efforts of those who might otherwise have expedited the dispatch of military aid to Finland. The sad fact of the matter was that all of those spectacular victories combined had only the most marginal influence on the really crucial campaign: the struggle for the Karelian Isthmus. Mannerheim and his staff knew that cruel truth, even if most people in Helsinki or London did not.
One of the more curious things about the wilderness battles is that they ever came to be fought at all. The concept of “cutting Finland in two at the waist” may look inviting on paper, but the reality is much different. To be sure, an invader able to debouch from the frontier wilderness into the heavily farmed, more piedmont-like western half of Finland would be in a position to ruin the country’s internal communications, as well as choke off one of its main points of contact with Sweden. The problem lay in getting that far, in successfully crossing the vast tract of virgin forest that protected the developed regions of Finland.
About all that the Soviet attacks had going for them was the fact that they were unexpected. Mannerheim had reasoned that the Russians would never send large conventional forces into such terrain. But once the Finns recovered from their shock and realized that the invaders had done just that, it was imperative that the enemy columns be stopped as quickly as possible. In many respects, the Finns charged with fighting these forest battles saw their tactical situation as being the reverse of that which obtained for their comrades down on the Isthmus. Up there in the wild and trackless forest was a perfect chance to exercise an offensive defense, to put into practice the most imaginative and free-wheeling tactical maneuvers devised during the long prewar years of austere budgets, when Finland’s professional soldiers tried to compensate for their lack of numbers and technology by creating an indigenously “Finnish” style of war making.
One of the main factors that enabled the Finns to destroy forces much larger than their own was surely rooted in the differing psychologies of the men engaged on either side. To the Finnish soldier, the cold, the snow, the forest, the long hours of darkness were all factors that could be turned to his advantage. To say that the Finns were on intimate terms with winter is to voice an understatement. In Finland winter is the fact of life, and all else—the economy, the culture, the national psychology—is colored by, or derived from, that single overriding reality. The relationship between the Finns and winter constitutes something of a contradiction. On the one hand, winter makes life harsh and lonely and sometimes crude. It is this aspect of living with winter, the cumulative effect of endless subarctic nights, the unearthly silences of the winter landscape, the harsh and marginal quality of rural life, that imparts to the Finnish character that dour and brooding quality that is so hard for foreigners to penetrate.
Yet the Finns’ relationship to winter is more symbiotic than antagonistic. Every percentile of economic growth, every pound of grain, every foot of paved highway, every new rural electrification line represented a hard-won victory, a small symbol of progress, wrested from the unyielding flint of the landscape. The Finns, by 1939, were proud of these small but cumulative victories over nature, of the way they had made the snows bloom and brought light to villages where the sun lay hidden from December to March.
When Finns are not brooding about the grimness of nature, they are apt to exult in their mastery of it. Finnish children still barely able to toddle joyfully waddle about on stubby baby-sized skis. Most adults are excellent cross-country skiers. Even the most cosmopolitan city-bred Finn is apt to leave the urban scene at every opportunity and in every season to camp, hike, or practice the recondite sport of orienteering out in the forests and fells.
Finns know how to listen to the stillness in the great forest; for them it is never absolutely silent, and they can read considerable information about their environment from sounds of which outsiders are not even aware. Finns, in short, can adapt to their environment because they feel a part of it. And if this was so in peacetime, it was intensified in time of war.
Arctic conditions rewrote the procedures for waging combat. Hands and feet were especially vulnerable. A man whose feet or fingers had blackened from frostbite was as effectively hors de combat as a man with a bullet in his leg. Diet and nutritional requirements change in arctic conditions. Troops need hot, heavy, plentiful food to fuel their body chemistry. The standard Red Army fare of black bread and unsweetened tea were simply not enough to keep men going. If a man rested his ungloved hands, even for a second, against bare gunmetal, he left blood and skin behind when he tried to pull away. If tanks and trucks were not run for fifteen minutes out of every two hours, their batteries died and could not be recharged. The Finns cleaned their rifles with a mixture of gasoline and gun oil, their automatics and artillery pieces with a mixture of alcohol and glycerine. The invaders used conventional petroleum lubricants, which not only did not lubricate at subzero temperatures but sometimes actually prevented the weapons from firing at all. There were special problems involved in tending the wounded, too, for the same cold that immobilized a man with low blood pressure also tended to freeze drugs solid. Finnish medics went into battle with ampoules of morphine tucked inside their mouths or taped to their armpits. The cold did help stanch the blood flow from many types of wounds, but it also promoted the onset of gangrene. Wounds had to be disinfected very quickly.
The winter of 1939 was one of the most brutal the northland had ever known since meteorological records started being kept in 1828. Temperatures of –30°F were not uncommon. At Sodankylä in February the thermometer dropped to a savage 42.7 degrees below zero.
Finnish soldiers knew how to dress for arctic warfare: in layers, which could be added to or peeled off as required. In addition to his regulation uniform, the ski trooper was likely to be wearing heavy woolen underwear, sweaters, several pairs of socks, boots lined with reindeer fur, and a lightweight snow cape of about the same texture and heft as a bedsheet, complete with cowl and drawstring. Snow-camouflage discipline among the ski soldiers was superb. A good man could wrap his snowsuit around him and hunker down in such a way as to be invisible to a Russian patrol passing ten meters away. Incredibly, none of the Russian columns that entered the forests had any snow camouflage at all. The tanks were painted olive drab and the men wore regular khaki uniforms, overcoats, and helmets. Not until late January did the Red Army get around to painting its equipment white and issuing snowsuits to its infantry.
Finnish soldiers accepted the forest on its own terms, whereas the invaders never lost their fear of the wilderness. When the Russians did venture into the trees, they usually went in large, clumsy formations. Mostly they preferred to huddle in the deceptive and dangerous psychological warmth of their road-bound formations.
In the forest the Russian soldiers had to face what they called Belaya Smert: the White Death. It came silently, when men became so numb with cold and fatigue that they just lay down in the snow and went to sleep, or it came violently, in the form of a sniper round fired from an invisible Finn hundreds of meters away. In the diary of a Russian captain named Shevenok was found the following typical response to forest conditions:
No, the Finnish woods are altogether unlike our Ukraine. Tall pines stand all together in the snow, like paintings. Above are branches and down below it is bare, as if you were standing not in groves but in some sort of grotto with pillars. The stars wink—frigid, still. The snow falls silently, straight in the eye. The firing of the guns sounds like a long drawn-out echo from afar, as if from a tube.1
The Russians’ style of bivouac was hopeless. They lugged with them huge, cumbersome field kitchens, instead of the small multi-purpose stoves the Finns used for frontline units. These highly visible Russian devices were the invaders’ only source of hot food, and in arctic conditions, a hot meal could literally mean the difference between life and death. The high-hat stovepipe chimneys of these kitchens were hard to disguise. They gave off telltale plumes of smoke and were high-priority targets for Finnish snipers and mortar crews.
Aside from the field kitchens, the invaders’ only source of warmth was campfires. The Russians were addicted to great roaring tree-trunk blazes around which they habitually gathered, even though the soaring flames outlined them like rifle-range targets and never failed to attract the attention of every Finnish sniper within range.
No Finnish unit, however small, went into battle without sufficient artificial warmth for every man. Frontline dugouts were equipped with small, efficient stoves that burned with a hot, steady flame and gave off the merest whisper of smoke. Just behind the front lines the Finns lived and worked in shellproof dugouts roofed over with layers of logs and earth and completely camouflaged. Inside these dugouts the walls were lined with furs and skins. Men could rest in snug comfort when they returned from patrol duty or a period of combat. When a Finnish soldier was wounded, he was usually back in the comfort of a warm aid-station bunker within the hour, while his wounded Russian counterpart knew only an intensification of misery, cold, and pain.
Just before their departure for the Suomussalmi campaign, the soldiers of the Soviet Forty-fourth Division were issued thousands of brand new manuals on the subject of ski warfare. What good this was supposed to do is unfathomable, since the Forty-fourth Division had not been given any skis. Nor would the manuals have done the Russians much good if they had been so equipped. The diagrams in the manuals showed skis attached to the cartoon soldiers’ feet by means of conventional civilian bindings, with tight, secure heel straps. The Finns, however, knew that the cardinal rule of ski fighting is never to fight on skis if you can possibly avoid it. Finnish ski boots, pieksu, had turned-up toes and no heel straps so that a man could hop out of his skis, or back into them, in a matter of seconds.
Other worse-than-useless schematics in the Soviet ski combat manual showed men attempting to throw hand grenades in the conventional overhanded manner while still strapped in their skis. The Finns had perfected a method of dropping down into a tight crouch and hurling their grenades with a side-arm pitch. Anyone following the diagram in the Russian manual could expect his grenade to land anywhere except the intended target.
Quite the silliest series of drawings in the Russian booklet depicted the “proper” technique for bayonet fighting on skis. In order to bayonet an opponent, a soldier must work up a high coefficient of friction between his feet and the ground beneath them. Since skis are designed for the express purpose of eliminating such friction, the very idea of bayonet fighting on skis quickly reduces itself to an absurdity.
When the Russians attacked through the great central forests, they did so in spearhead formations. Most of their units had marched from their rail debarkation points on the Murmansk line, in some cases a distance of 200 miles, and had already lost up to 10 percent of their manpower from frostbite even before they crossed the Finnish border. Snow drifts up to twenty feet high had to be dug through and tramped down along the route of march. With every mile they crawled westward, the columns became more strung out, until a single division might be straggling over twenty to twenty-five miles of road. First came the advance guard, reconnaissance troops, and a packet of armored cars, then the forward elements of infantry, then a packet of armor, then some support troops—sappers and medics and quartermaster troops—and finally the main body of armor, infantry, and cannon, all followed up by a rear-guard detachment. There were no flanking roads. Flanking screens of infantry, if the terrain permitted them to be used at all, wallowed through the woods a few hundred meters from the sides of the column. As Finnish guerrilla raids intensified, this distance decreased, casualties mounted, and the pace of the invader’s march slowed to a crawl and finally stopped altogether.
So one-sided were the Finnish victories, and so uniformly wretched was the human material of whole Soviet divisions, that a myth arose after the war that many of these units were made up of various political “undesirables,” recalcitrant peasants from the Ukraine or minorities from the troublesome Asian republics, for example, whom Stalin had dispatched into the wilderness for the express purpose of “liquidating” them cheaply while simultaneously causing trouble to the Finns in the bargain.
Stalin was certainly capable of such bloody-minded calculations, but a close examination of the historical facts suggests a less satanic thought process. Stalin’s military advisers began the war confident that they could knock Finnish resistance aside by simply hurling across the border whatever troops were on hand, whether they were any good or not. Some Russian soldiers were, of course, accustomed to harsh winters; others were not. One division was comprised mainly of Uzbeks, Tartars, Tadzhiks, and other tribal minorities from Turkestan. A large number of its men simply keeled over in the cold or just sat apathetically in their foxholes until they froze to death.
Most of the Russians, however, no matter what their province of origin, went into battle believing that Finland (or at least Finland’s bourgeois government) had started the war and that the Finnish masses would welcome them as liberators. That illusion was one of the first things to die; the Finnish masses were never glimpsed, and some of the most ruthless ski guerrillas were loggers and pulp-factory workmen who had voted Communist in the last elections.
It is not uncommon to read accounts of the forest battles in which Finnish veterans voice their pity and compassion for the poorly led, ill-clad Russian conscripts they were called upon to slaughter in these campaigns. It is also common to read of instances where these same pathetic, third-rate Soviet units, half-starved and frozen to the bone, fought back with rabid ferocity even in the last extremity of their wretchedness.
For many of the encircled Soviet troops, just staying alive, for one more hour or one more day, was an ordeal comparable to combat. Freezing, hungry, crusted with their own filth (while the besieging Finns, a thousand meters away, might be enjoying a sauna-bath), for them the central forest was truly a snow-white hell. They fought because they had no choice—if they did not fight, the Politruks would shoot them; if they tried to sneak home through the forest, they would freeze to death. Surrender to the Finns was a last, desperate resort; they had been told, in lurid detail, about how the Finns tortured prisoners to death. Most of them had only the vaguest notion of where they were; many of the men who died at Suomussalmi and the Kemi River actually thought they had been advancing on Helsinki, hundreds of miles to the south. Their despair was recorded in the thousands of never-mailed letters to home they had scrawled before dying, letters they had sealed, for lack of anything better, with bits of black bread that had been chewed to a paste and dabbed onto the paper like blobs of rubber cement.
1Chew, 28.