Suomussalmi was the cleanest, most decisive, and most spectacular Finnish victory in the northern half of the country—a paradigm of the qualities that made the Finnish ski soldier a legend. The other battles in the north and central parts of the country were generically similar to Suomussalmi, and a detailed analysis of each campaign would be repetitious, eventually tedious. In most cases a summary is sufficient to give the gist of each engagement, although there are of course certain highlights that deserve closer scrutiny.
By all accounts the Finnish high command was initially stunned that the Russians should choose to deploy half of their available infantry and about one-quarter of their available armor in the far-flung wilderness north of Lake Ladoga. The Russian Eighth Army’s thrusts toward Kitelä made strategic sense, as did the complementary attacks on Tolvajärvi and Kollaa, which served to draw off so many Finnish reserves. What really struck Mannerheim and his staff as illogical were the four offensives mounted farther to the north, at Petsamo, Kuhmo, Lieksa, and Kemijärvi.
Responsible for the defense of the 400-mile region between Kuhmo and Petsamo was Major General E. V. Tuompo, a farmer’s son who had risen by way of the Twenty-seventh Jaegers to become a renowned expert on matters of national defense policy. Tall, slender, an obsessive worker by nature, he was a steady and imaginative officer, an expert linguist, and a respected amateur historian. He would need all of his ability to cope with the unexpectedly massive enemy effort in the northern half of Finland.
As his deputy in command of the Arctic front, from Kemijärvi up to the foggy and storm-lashed coast of the Arctic Ocean, Tuompo had none other than crusty old Kurt Wallenius, the right-wing demagogue who had botched the kidnapping of President Svinhufvud back in the heyday of the Lapuan movement. Wallenius had by now attained the rank of major general. There was, however, no longer any warmth between him and Mannerheim; the Marshal even snubbed Wallenius in his Memoirs, not mentioning him once by name in the chapters dealing with the Winter War. He had fought the Reds in Lapland in 1918, he knew the terrain intimately, and he was a great tactical improviser; opposing more than three fully equipped Soviet divisions with a few battalions of lightly armed ski guerrillas would certainly require improvisation.
11. Petsamo/Kemijärvi Theater
The Arctic front was, paradoxically, easier for foreign journalists to gain access to, thanks to its proximity to Sweden and Norway, than either the Isthmus or the Ladoga front, from which news reporters were barred by Mannerheim’s direct order. For correspondents who had cut their teeth on Ernest Hemingway, Wallenius made great copy; he was profane, feisty, and swaggering. His “trademark” for visiting journalists was bare-chested virility, though more than one reporter privately wondered at the sanity of someone who would walk around with his shirt unbuttoned in temperatures of twenty below zero.
When the war started, the Soviet 104th Division came storming ashore on the Rybachi Peninsula, supported by the guns of the White Sea Fleet and by some powerful shore batteries on the approaches to Murmansk. Opposing them was an outfit called the 104th Independent Covering Company, supported, if that is the word, by a four-gun battery of field pieces cast in 1887, half of whose antique shells refused to go off at all.
Petsamo was Finland’s only arctic port. In terms of climate, amenities, and general unattractiveness to human beings, it was a poor cousin to Murmansk. It was the northern terminus of Finland’s Arctic Highway, one of the young nation’s proudest accomplishments, and it had two economic resources that justified habitation: high-grade nickel ore and fish. Nobody minded giving up the fish, but it was annoying to lose the mineral deposits. Still, the Finnish high command was resigned to it. Given Petsamo’s remoteness from any centers of Finnish strength and its proximity to a major Soviet base, there was no hope of defending the place.
The Russians took Petsamo after a short firefight and immediately landed some engineer and coast artillery units to garrison the port. Most of the shore batteries and fortifications were aimed toward the ocean, however, not toward the Finns. It was from the sea that any Allied expeditionary force would come, and that was a contingency that Stalin dreaded.
There was little that Wallenius’s men could do but retreat and fight delaying actions where they could, and the Lapland fells—treeless, wind scoured, and relatively low—offered poor defensive terrain. It was hoped that winter weather would come to the defenders’ aid. As they withdrew, the Finns scourged the region of every man-made or natural thing that might afford the invaders shelter, warmth, or sustinence. Finland had invested heavily in its arctic region, striving to convert this barren land into a habitable and economically viable part of the nation. Every home, every meter of highway, power line, and culvert had been put in place at a great cost of labor, money, and faith. It was not without anguish that the same men who had built these things now blew them up, from the smallest farmhouse to the brand new hydroelectric plant at Salmijärvi, along with several hundred workers’ homes recently built around the site.
As a result, there was no shelter anywhere for the slowly advancing Russians. By mid-December this part of Finland was shrouded beneath a pall of perpetual darkness and almost unimaginable cold, often in the form of gale-force blizzards that roared and screamed for days without letup. Glazed with ice, the Lapland fells turned into a savage lunar landscape.
Only rarely did the Soviet invaders see an opponent; if they did, it was an instant’s hallucination, a flickering blur of motion as a snow-suited guerrilla flashed across the grayed-out horizon. But there were sniping parties that contested every kilometer of their advance, composed of Lapland natives who had tracked bear and wolves over this same ground and who could drill a man through the head at 1,000 meters with their first shot.
The farther the Russians moved down the Arctic Highway the more vulnerable their lengthening supply line became. More and bolder raids were launched by Wallenius’s men. By January the only way the road to Murmansk could be kept open was by constant armored patrols between blockhouse strong points the Russians had erected at five-mile intervals. By the end of January, with temperatures averaging thirty-five below zero, almost all military activity had come to a standstill. The front literally froze solid, with the Russians never able to go one step beyond the tiny village of Nautsi, close to the Norwegian border. Ten thousand Soviet troops were immobilized between there and Petsamo, paralyzed by the efforts of one-fifth as many Finns and by their greatest ally, the arctic winter.
Seventy-five miles south of Suomussalmi the Soviet Ninth Army had mounted a secondary operation intended to siphon off Finnish reserves from the larger offensive of the Forty-fourth and 163d divisions. Ironically, the single division the Russians committed to their Kuhmo attack, the Fifty-fourth, managed to acquit itself far better than the two divisions that were thrown away at Suomussalmi. Its commander, General Gusevski, was no fool. He had trained and equipped his men well, and he would fight the victor of Suomussalmi, soon-to-be-general Siilasvuo, to a standstill.
The Fifty-fourth drove west on two parallel roads, easily knocking aside a succession of weak roadblocks in its path. Hastily assembled Finnish reinforcements mounted a series of sharp and costly counterattacks and succeeded in slowing the Fifty-fourth’s advance by mid-December. By year’s end, however, the forward elements of the Fifty-fourth were less than fifteen kilometers from Kuhmo village.
No sooner had the dead been counted at Suomussalmi than Mannerheim ordered Siilasvuo and his entire Ninth Division to move south and do to Gusevski’s division what it had done to the divisions of Zelentsov and Vinogradov. Siilasvuo got his orders on January 18 and dispatched a two-battalion task force immediately, several days ahead of the rest of his division. The task force hurried by truck to the town of Nurmes, the only settlement of any size close to the front. The telephone exchange at Nurmes, in fact, was the closest communications link that Tuompo and Mannerheim had to the Finns deploying at Rasti, thirty kilometers away.
The three reinforced Finnish battalions now defending Kuhmo were sufficient to check the Fifty-fourth and compel Gusevski to dig in, but they were not strong enough to tear up his formations. By the time Siilasvuo was ready to develop his deadly system of motti tactics against the Fifty-fourth, it had had almost two weeks to fortify its positions. Many of its field pieces and mortars were lodged in bunkers too strong for Siilasvuo’s weapons to destroy. Gusevski also converted a frozen lake within his perimeter into a landing strip usable by light aircraft. Thus right from the start he was better prepared to cope with Siilasvuo’s tactics than either of the divisional commanders had been at Suomussalmi.
To isolate the Fifty-fourth from any relief columns sent from its base at Ryboly, Siilasvuo sent a strong detachment around the mottis to occupy a commanding ridge called Löytävaara. No sooner had the Finns entrenched on that position than intelligence reports reached them that another Soviet division, the Twenty-third, was forming up to try and batter its way through to the relief of the Fifty-fourth. The Löytävaara position was the key to Siilasvuo’s whole effort. As long as it remained in Finnish hands, the Fifty-fourth was trapped. It would so remain, but just barely, and the battle to hold it would absorb hundreds of men and weapons that were urgently needed to wipe out the mottis.
Gusevski’s men did not panic. Under heavy covering fire, he sent strong patrols beyond his perimeter to cut down the trees, creating a 100-meterwide “dead zone” around the mottis and making it hard for the Finns to get close. The timber from these cutting operations was hauled back into the mottis and used to reinforce the Russians’ bunkers. Siilasvuo kept up the pressure as best he could, even hurrying forward a number of Soviet cannon that had been salvaged at Suomussalmi. But Gusevski’s blockhouses were strong. The captured 76.2 mm. field guns were too light to destroy them without a long and wasteful battering. And shells for the captured antitank guns, of course, were quite unsuited for such targets, although Siilasvuo’s men did use them in the absence of anything more potent.
As Finnish pressure increased, so did Russian pressure on the Löytävaara roadblock. An armored attack was launched against that position in early February, but several vehicles were disabled by mines, and two others received direct hits from a concealed captured antitank gun. Those two vehicles blew up violently, crashing into the rear of the mine-damaged vehicles and creating a flaming knot of twisted metal. Within minutes, the attack evaporated.
Siilasvuo had counted heavily on being able to starve the Russians into surrender, but the Red Air Force flew heavily escorted missions several times daily, and the Fifty-fourth, though hardly comfortable, never experienced the same extremes of hunger that other besieged Soviet units had to endure. For a time, thanks to their superior radio intelligence and the enemy’s poor communications’ discipline, the Finns were able to imitate Russian signals and have the supplies dropped into their own positions. It did not take the Russians too long to figure out what was happening, however, and one day, instead of supply planes the Finns lured a wedge of SB-2 bombers, which dropped their “cargo” right on target and killed a number of Finnish soldiers. Siilasvuo urgently requested antiaircraft weapons, and Tuompo was able to send him a few of the precious 40 mm. Bofors guns. Siilasvuo also massed everything from captured four-barrel Russian flak-mount machine guns to volleyed rifle fire along the Russians’ flight path. This gauntlet of fire brought down five or six Soviet transports and forced the cancellation of daytime resupply missions, but there was nothing Siilasvuo could do about the night flights, and enough supplies got through by means of those to keep the Fifty-fourth Division from starving.
Not only was the Fifty-fourth honored by one of the most successful Red Air Force supply shuttles, it was also the object of a major relief attempt that saw the first massed deployment of Soviet ski troops in the Winter War. Hastily formed from three independent ski battalions, the new unit was dubbed the Siberian Ski Brigade, even though only a portion of its men actually came from that part of the USSR. Totaling 2,000 men, the brigade was comprised of skilled troops, well equipped and blessed at the start with high morale.
The Siberian brigade went across the border on the northern road to the defensive enclave at Kiekenkoski; from there it was to move south, through the heavily forested, lake-spattered wilderness between the two roads, and strike the besieging Finns from behind.
It was a sound plan, and the troops were confident. They were undone, however, by a problem that has been the bane of commanders since the days of Sparta: bad maps. The highly detailed maps of the Kuhmo sector that had been issued to the Siberians bore little resemblance to the real terrain and were filled with misshapen, out of place, or simply nonexistent lakes and ridges. It did not take long for the Siberians to become confused.
Matters were made worse when their commander was killed in their very first encounter with a Finnish patrol. At the same time, the Siberians discovered that their automatic weapons refused to fire. No one had told them that it was necessary to clean the conventional lubricants from their weapons before subjecting them to such intense cold; virtually all of their machine guns and automatic rifles were jammed by gobbets of frozen oil. The skiers fought with a courage and tenacity that elicited grudging admiration from the Finns. Many of them threw down their submachine guns and Degtyarevs in disgust and waded into the Finns with pistols, grenades, and bayonets. Darkness ended the first engagement before either side could claim a victory, but the sudden death of their commander and the sudden loss of confidence in both maps and weapons seem to have generated considerable panic among the Soviet skiers. The unit lost cohesion and split into several fragments, all of them hopelessly lost.
Although the ski brigade never achieved any major successes, its mere presence forced the diversion of large numbers of Siilasvuo’s men away from the besieged mottis. After the unit fragmented, there were several days of confused skirmishes, as isolated Russian detachments attacked Finnish outposts and support units. After two days of scattered fighting, Siilasvuo’s men cornered about seventy-five of the Siberians inside a cluster of wooden farm buildings. After the trapped Russians had rejected several demands for surrender, the Finns set fire to the buildings with Molotov Cocktails and shot down the occupants as they ran screaming into the snow. Not one of the trapped skiers survived.
Eventually about a fourth of the Siberian Ski Brigade managed to find its way back to Soviet lines on the northern road. The others, lost and increasingly desperate, wandered around the area for days, causing various kinds of mischief. One formation of about 100 skiers attacked a Finnish command post near the Rasti motti and lost half their number fighting it out with a hastily mustered force of headquarters’ clerks, staff officer, medics, and some veterinary specialists who were manning a stable of supply horses.
One intrepid Soviet loner managed to abscond with a sled containing a month’s back pay for an entire Finnish battalion. Most of the money was later recovered from the woods. By the time all the alarms and skirmishes died down, 1,400 of the Siberians had been killed, and the rest had either been taken prisoner or had managed to regain friendly lines.
As February gave way to March, the Russians put tremendous pressure on the roadblock at Löytävaara, where a single Finnish battalion had dug into the low, narrow ridge. Theirs was not a very strong position, about two kilometers long and half a kilometer wide. Against this unprepossessing bulwark, the Russians hurled a reinforced division, supported by forty pieces of artillery, which hurled up to 200 shells per minute on the defenders. The Finns could not make any reply to this shelling; they could only endure it and repel the infantry attacks that always followed. By the end of the war, all tree cover had been blasted from Löytävaara, and the front slopes of the ridge had been turned into a barren expanse of overlapping craters. No snow remained visible, only a churned black muck dotted here and there with the remains of what had once been Finnish bunkers.
When the cease-fire went into effect on March 13, Siilasvuo and his men felt cheated of a victory. On one hand, they had neutralized the Fifty-fourth Division, but on the other hand, the Fifty-fourth had also neutralized them, at a time when Mannerheim desperately needed the Ninth Division on the Isthmus. When the firing stopped and the emaciated but unbeaten survivors of the Fifty-fourth marched back to Russia, Siilasvuo’s men finally occupied the vacant mottis. They found grim evidence of how desperate the situation really had been inside the pockets: vast piles of clothing, parcels, crates, carts, bicycles, musical instruments, letters, maps, amputated limbs, frozen heaps of human and animal waste, piles of horses’ heads near the field kitchen, and of course the dead in their frozen hundreds.
Two rather minor Russian attacks were launched in the area of Lieksa, about forty miles southeast of Kuhmo. Neither attack was pressed very urgently and both were thrown back, without undue difficulty, by relatively modest Finnish forces. By the end of December that sector was quiet, and the Finns transferred their men to more active fronts, except for one ski-guerrilla battalion whose exploits are often spoken about in Finland but whose operations remain “classified” to this day. It remained encamped in the Lieksa area and from that location undertook a number of deep penetration raids into Soviet territory. These included strikes against supply depots, at least one air field, and, according to persistent “unofficial” stories, a number of raids against the Murmansk Railroad itself.
It was on the banks of the Kemi River, close to the little industrial city of Kemijärvi, that the Russians were checked in their most serious incursion into Lapland. They had sent an entire division, the 122d, stabbing westward from its base at Kandalaksha at the tip of the White Sea. The ultimate objective of this attack was Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, where the 122d was expected to link up with elements of the 104th, driving down from Petsamo on the Arctic Highway. As already recounted, however, the 104th never covered half that distance, but for a time the 122d looked as though it would do the job all by itself.
A fairly strong packet of armor had been attached to this division, and the Russians used it rather more aggressively on this front than they did at either Kuhmo or Suomussalmi. The forests in this sector thinned out considerably just beyond the frontier zone and offered considerably more room for tank deployment. The Finnish high command had expected nothing more than raiding parties and reconnaissance patrols in this region and so were again forced to scramble for odds and ends of reinforcements to counter this unexpected threat.
Salla was the Russians’ initial objective, a tiny picturesque rural village. The road forked at Salla. The northern branch went through Pelkosenniemi and then to Sodankylä, where it connected with the Arctic Highway. If the Russians could reach Sodankylä, Wallenius’s troops on the Petsamo front would be cut off from their supplies. Alternatively, from Pelkosenniemi the Russians could turn south and take Kemijärvi, cutting off all Finnish forces fighting between the Kemi River and the border. At Salla, the Russians divided their forces, sending an infantry regiment, a reconnaissance battalion, and a company of medium tanks toward Pelkosenniemi while the rest of the division pushed on toward Kemijärvi.
General Wallenius arrived to take personal command of the defensive battle on December 17; by that date, the enemy was less than twenty miles from Kemijärvi. Mannerheim had augmented the forces at Wallenius’s disposal to the extent that he had seven battalions to work with, four of them equipped with little more than their rifles.
Wallenius struck back first against the northern enemy thrust. On the night of December 17, he outflanked them with a battalion that was able to get within 100 meters of Russian lines without being detected. The entire battalion came surging out of the darkness under the arctic pines, firing as they charged, and routed their opponents with surprising ease. Leaving much of its heavy equipment and several vehicles behind, the northern wing of the 122d hastily retreated and did not stop until it had pulled back a total of fifty-five miles, effectively removing it from the action.
This success enabled Wallenius to shuttle reinforcements down to the Finnish defensive line in front of Kemijärvi. The defenders there had already taken out one Russian battalion, killing 600 men in a fierce twelve-hour battle. For the next week, the Russians hammered at Wallenius’s line, sending in battalion-sized attacks at the rate of two or three a day. The defenders’ positions were superbly camouflaged, and each time they held fire until the attacking infantry was within 150 meters. One Soviet company participated in two such attacks in a single day and was reduced to thirty-eight men by the end of the second assault. Elements of a fresh Russian division, the Eighty-eighth, arrived on the scene, and its battalions were thrown in as they came on line, with no better results.
By the end of December both enemy divisions had shot their bolt. It was all they could do to hold on to the ground they had already won; they were unable to advance a single meter farther to the west. Wallenius was now ready to go over to counterattacks. Beginning on January 2, he struck the Russians with a series of short, hard assaults, keeping them off balance and withdrawing when resistance stiffened, then striking again elsewhere within hours. Gradually the Russians were pushed back. When they reached a series of high ridges, about two miles west of Märkäjärvi, they created a strong defensive line and went to ground behind it. There they stayed for the remainder of the war. Except for routine patrol activity, this sector remained fairly quiet until the end of hostilities in March.
The Kemi/Salla front, as the Finns designated it in their official bulletins, was comparatively easy to reach from neutral Sweden, via the railhead at Rovaniemi. Scandinavian, British, European, and American journalists made the trek, all hoping to get a firsthand look at this strange arctic war.
Among them was Carl Mydans, Time-Life Incorporated’s crack photo-journalist, a pioneering camera artist whose war pictures had the same kind of force and poetry as those of his close friend, Robert Capra. Fortunately Mydans was as good a writer as he was a cameraman, and he left some of the most vivid and haunting descriptions of the forest battles ever to come from a Western journalist.
The first thing Mydans noticed as he approached the Kemi battlefield was the surreal quality of the light. In these latitudes, in winter, daylight lasted about two hours—the sun did not get above the horizon until 11:00 A.M., and then it hung low and smoldering in a haze-filmed sky, drenching the primal landscape with ruddy light.
Even in Lapland, the words “Life magazine” carried considerable weight. Mydans was given a ride to the front by no less a personage than General Wallenius himself. Mydans found him fascinating: an old-fashioned, strong-man type with a flare for the theatrical, and tough as reindeer hide. A few kilometers from the battlefield the general’s whitewashed staff car was halted by a couple of zealous sentries who suddenly appeared in the road, Suomis on their hips, and flagged the car down. The guards loudly demanded that no one in the car move until all papers had been examined; there were still Russian stragglers roaming in this area. With grandiloquent vigor, Wallenius threw open the car door, fairly leaped out into the sentry’s flashlight beam, then flung open his overcoat to reveal a bare, hirsute chest that bulged with muscle. Both sentries instantly snapped to attention and began babbling apologies. Wallenius gruffly congratulated them on their zeal, cracked a parade-ground salute, hopped back in the car, and sped away, obviously very pleased with himself.
Mydans arrived only a short time after the Russians had begun their withdrawal. He could plainly hear the rumble and crack of the ebbing battle in the distance. Free to roam the battlefield by himself, he began by wandering through the recently vacated Finnish positions. He found little that reminded him of the formal “battle lines” he had seen in Spain and China. Deep trenches and elaborate earthworks were few; the soil, he quickly discovered, was as hard as marble. Mostly he found log-roofed huts and bunkers, or snow-colored tents staked out over shallow foxholes. The larger structures were floored and lined with moss, furs, or some similar form of insulation. The more elaborate bunkers where Finnish ski patrols had rested between actions were filled with handmade blankets, straw, animal hides, lanterns, and small, smokeless stoves. The interiors were a bit funky from occupancy, but they were warm and, given the environment, remarkably cozy.
Mydans had learned, in the course of covering several wars, to “read” the dead. One could tell a lot about an army, he averred, from the condition of its fallen. A helpful Finnish officer answered his first question. No, neither side bothered with steel helmets in the forest fighting; all that inert, frozen metal on top of one’s head was more of an annoyance than a protection. Otherwise, he observed that the Russian dead wore heelless, soleless, hard felt boots that looked to be of little value in such a climate. Their padded-cotton uniforms reminded Mydans of the ones he had seen worn by the Japanese in China. While he was poking around, a formation of Soviet aircraft flew overhead. Several nearby Finns, inspecting the enemy dead for documents that might be of value to the intelligence experts, paused long enough to glare up at the sky, make some universally obscene gestures with their fists, and growl something in Finnish that Mydans later figured out was “Fuck you, Molotov!”
It was almost impossible to take pictures of the battlefield. Mydans’s cameras froze if he exposed them to the open air for longer than a half minute. He had to carry them inside his clothing, next to his skin. Every time he whipped one out, quickly estimating his focal and light data, he had first to remove his thick gloves, get a secure grip on the camera before tugging it free of his clothing, then set up and grab his shot in a split second. If he left the gloves off of his hands for as long as a minute, his fingers began to throb wickedly from the cold.
He visited a field hospital just behind Finnish lines. There he saw four seriously wounded Russians being given treatment ahead of a group of less-injured Finns. This appeared to be standard practice. The badly wounded were given attention first, regardless of their nationality. A tour of the hospital left Mydans with a feeling that the Finnish medical service was unusually efficient and as well equipped as that of any army he had ever covered. An examination of both the hospital’s records and the wounded men still being held revealed what Mydans considered a remarkably high percentage of facial injuries, perhaps accounted for by the close-range nature of the recent fighting.
Mydans then ran into another foreign correspondent, a colleague of long standing. This man had been shown the scene of the bitterest fighting, and he thought Mydans might like to see it too. Mydans returned to the battlefield and later recorded what he saw there:
The fighting was almost over as we walked up the snow-banked path that led from the road to the river. In the sickly half-light we followed its stained track on to the ice. Here the Russian dead spotted the ice crust. They lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters, with sausage and bread and shoes. Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow under the tall black pines. Here in the winter of nights with no days, on an obscure river north of the Arctic Circle, in snow that engulfed a man on foot up to his bayonet belt and made him stagger like a dying insect, in temperatures that solidified the lost and wounded into frigid death, here the Finns met the Russians, and stopped them.1
On the road itself the scene was even more horrific:
Russian Ford trucks with windshields, radiators and bodies bullet shattered. Bloodstained seats told what had happened to the drivers. But back on the narrow icy road and in the woods [alongside it] was a sight that even the most hardened war reporters have called the most horrible they have ever seen. Trucks and supply sleds stood jamming the road. All faced Finland. Here and there they had gone into the ditch on either side, thrown or driven there by necessity. Dead Russians lay about like fallen leaves. With them were their horses, and a shattered truck filled with black bread, a big pile of old leather shoes, heaps of bologna tied with string and hauled like ropes, helmets, gas masks, packages of rice, of red powder for making soup, cases of canned fish, cotton sacks of tobacco, machine gun clips, shells, ammunition, sleighs, harnesses, arms and legs, pink blood in the snow.2
As Mydans was leaving the battlefield, he passed some Finnish officers making a body count of the enemy dead. One of them remarked, in a flat weary voice, “The wolves will eat well this year.”
After he returned to the rear, Mydans came upon a group of Finnish soldiers having some sport with a captured Russian. Circling around the man, snarling menacingly, they jeered at him and threatened him with their big knives. They feinted kicks at him with their boots, and clicked the mechanisms of their weapons at him. The prisoner was on the edge of hysteria. Only moments after Mydans arrived, a Finnish officer came for the prisoner and led him from his tormentors into the local command post, an abandoned schoolhouse, for interrogation. Mydans followed, his reporter’s instincts in overdrive.
Once the prisoner was seated, he told the Finnish interrogators that he was a dairy worker from Leningrad and that he had left behind a wife and four children. His officers had told the men in his company that they were attacking toward Helsinki. At that point, the “audience” of Finnish soldiers who had crowded into the room began hooting and jeering at the Russian once more. One of the Finns slipped up behind the man and suddenly yanked the blanket from his shoulders. The prisoner gave a tiny yelp of fright and began to shake. Frowning, the major who was conducting the interrogation barked an order, and the onlookers moved back.
Then, his face once more impassive, he paused before starting his questions again. When he did, his voice was very gentle, almost soothing, and the interrogation was soon ended.
Reaching forward, he offered the prisoner a cigarette. The Russian stared at him and his outstretched hand. His tongue, large and white, licked his cracked lips and he slowly raised two blackened and bloodstained hands toward the cigarette. He hesitated, then looked full into the eyes of the Finn. Suddenly tears welled down his dirt-caked face and rolled off his encrusted padded uniform. The room went silent. Gently, the major placed the cigarette on the corner of the table and turned away as if to study the papers before him. For a long moment he sat withdrawn in silence while the Russian continued to tremble, his face now smeared where he had rubbed the tears with his padded cuff.
Mydans thought he had a powerful photograph just waiting to be taken. He reached into his musette bag for his camera and flash gun. “You want to take his picture?” the Finnish major asked. He beckoned for Mydans to come closer. Mydans stepped forward and turned the prisoner around so that he would be facing the camera.
He was rigid and shied from my touch like a mare.… I waved several soldiers out of the background and the prisoner watched me frantically. As he looked and saw himself standing alone, his knees sagged further and knocked audibly in the silent room.
“It’s all right,” I said reassuringly, “I’m only going to take your picture.” But the major did not offer to translate. I held my camera aloft to show him, but he only cringed away from me. Through the finder I saw his hands move up slightly in front of him and then drop. I flashed.
The Russian wheeled around screaming. He sagged to his knees and grasped the table leg. There he remained, pounding his head on the table, weeping, stuttering in Russian.
For a moment no one moved. Then, in shame, some of the officers and men slipped out of the room. The major jumped up and gently raised the sobbing prisoner. “You’re not hurt,” he repeated soothingly, “You’re not hurt—we’re only taking your picture, we’re not shooting you.” He reached for my camera and held it to the Russian’s wet face. “Look through the window,” he spoke as one would speak to a child.…
The [Russian’s] furtive eyes flickered about the room. One eye caught the finder and two black hands reached up slowly and took hold of my camera. For a minute he peered through it at me and into the little group of Finns who waited, quiet and embarrassed. Suddenly there was a flicker of a smile, then a laugh, then as the major held him he shook with screams of laughter.
Now the whole room was laughing, and half a dozen hands were poking cigarettes at him. Someone put the blankets back over his head and we followed him out through the blackout curtains. The major turned him over to some guards.…
… As the major passed me on the way back to the schoolhouse, he stopped, hesitated before me, started on again. Over his shoulder, he said harshly in English: “The Russians are pigs!”3
1Mydans, Carl, More than Meets the Eye (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 19.
2Mydans, dispatch in Life, January 29, 1940.
3Mydans, More than Meets the Eye, 223.