Simultaneously with the epic ground battles, a less publicized but equally one-sided struggle was going on in the air. The first Soviet air attacks had generated considerable shock to the civilian population, but as the raids continued, terror yielded to rage. As would be proven in London and Berlin, the spirits of the bombed do not break as easily as the bombers might wish. Indeed, in terms of overall contribution to the war effort, and considering the fact that by January the Russians were supporting their invasion with about 2,500 aircraft, the Red Air Force had to be judged something of a flop.
The material damage caused by the “strategic” raids of its bombers was relatively slight, with a few notable exceptions, such as Viipuri. Finland, after all, was a most unconcentrated nation; in 1939 nine-tenths of its land consisted of rural wilderness. There were very few modern highways in the interior that offered valuable targets. Much more important was the railway system, and this received a major share of the bombers’ attention. Very often the targets would be small village depots. Battered by day-long saturation raids, these would be reduced to splinters, but in terms of results versus effort expended, it was a classic case of using a shotgun to kill a gnat. The rail tracks themselves were cut thousands of times, all over the nation, but there are few transportation targets as easy to repair as a severed rail line, and the Finns usually had trains running again in a matter of hours. A favorite target for roving flights of Red aircraft was the Helsinki-Viipuri rail line, crowded with civilians fleeing west and military traffic moving east.
In the larger urban centers, strict civil defense measures were enforced from the first hour of the war. These precautions had been well rehearsed during the diplomatic skirmishing and false alarms that led up to November 30, and for that reason civilian casualties in the larger towns were surprisingly low.
Helsinki received its worst plastering on the first day of the war and was the target of significant raids only a few times thereafter. With the harbor locked in ice, Helsinki offered few strategic targets and only minor industrial ones; it is possible that the Russians did not think hitting them was worth the consequences if in the process their bombs killed some foreign journalists or wiped out the embassy of a neutral country. Nationwide, only 5 percent of total man-hour production time was lost due to Soviet bombing, and this loss was more than compensated for by volunteers working overtime.
Even so, although the material effect of the Russian bombings was marginal, the aerial invasion did wreak havoc in the private lives of thousands of civilians. Few of the smaller towns and villages could be given any decent antiaircraft defenses. Every gun was desperately needed on the Isthmus, where Soviet tactical strikes, though unbelievably wasteful in terms of expended ordnance, were massive and increasingly bothersome. In some places the local Civic Guard unit might mount an antique Maxim gun on top of the town hall, but most rural localities were defended by nothing more lethal than a forlorn rifle shot or two. The Russians used incendiaries against the villages, many of which were made entirely of wood and insulated with sawdust in the walls, and which went up like torches. For the working-class neighborhoods and peasant farmers subjected to these vicious raids, the appeal of communism suddenly and literally went up in smoke. Incidents of Red aircraft strafing hospitals and hospital trains were so common that the Finns finally painted over any Red Cross insignia that were visible from the air.
All told, there were 2,075 recorded bombing attacks against civilian targets in 516 localities. About 650 Finnish civilians were killed and 2,000 or so wounded. Approximately 2,000 buildings were destroyed and another 5,000 damaged. The ice-plowed harbor at Turku, where most foreign aid was unloaded, was hit very hard, with 48 out of 63 docking facilities destroyed. The industrial city of Tampere received more than 1,500 bombs, most of them aimed, with indifferent accuracy, in the general direction of the state aircraft factory. Viipuri was almost leveled. Nearly 12,000 bombs rained down on that lovely, late-medieval city, along with perhaps 150,000 rounds of artillery, some of it in the form of colossal freight-train shells fired from the outskirts of Leningrad by ten- and twelve-inch railroad guns.
One interesting ordnance experiment tested by the Red Air Force was a device called the “Molotov Breadbasket”: a six-foot hollow cylinder packed with 100 small magnesium incendiary bomblets. When the parent bomb was released, metal vanes popped out on the sides, imparting a wild wobbling spin to the cylinder as it fell. This motion flung open the sides of the iron casing and caused the minibombs to spray out in a wide arc. Had these overcomplicated weapons been dropped during a summer dry spell, they might have caused the Finns considerable worry, and those that were dropped on the tinderbox villages certainly worked well enough. It is hard to see why thousands of specimens were lugged aloft and dropped into the forests, however, since everything they landed on was covered with deep snow.
Compared to the wholesale aerial pounding of cities that would become common in World War II, the damage sustained by Finland’s civilian population may seem relatively modest. But at the time it was sustained, the world had only seen a handful of comparable aerial blitzes—Nanking, Guernica, Madrid, and Warsaw being the best known—and the world was not yet hardened to these bloody spectacles. The Russians’ wanton though often ineffectual attacks on civilians generated a wave of moral outrage all over the world. Typical was the reaction of former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, who denounced the Russian air attacks as a throwback to “the morals and butchery of Genghis Khan.”
Sir Walter Citrine, a prominent British Labour politician who was invited to Finland in January 1940, as a gesture of solidarity by the Finnish left, was impressed by the high standards of civil defense discipline. Driving east from Turku one night, he recorded, “nowhere could I see the faintest glimmer of light from the hundreds of houses we passed on the road. The blackout was perfect.”1 Citrine was able to see some areas that were off-limits to foreign journalists. The seacoast town of Hanko, for example, where Stalin had demanded to be given a strategic base during the prewar negotiations, had few targets of military value but had been singled out for what must have been vengeance raids. Citrine found this once picturesque town in a depressing state: “A little further down the same street a whole series of wooden shops had been destroyed. Sticking forlornly on an upright post, about six feet from the ground, was the stuffed head of an ox, life-size, gazing out seemingly in sorrow across the sea. How odd and strangely pathetic it seemed. The stillness was uncanny. It was worse than going through a churchyard where all the tombstones had been blown down by the wind. We were told that of the 8,000 population, only 2,000 remained. We saw very few of them.”2
At the start of the war, the small but highly motivated Finnish Air Force possessed 48 fighter planes, most of them obsolete, along with 34 reconnaissance planes and dive-bombers and a mere 18 modern multiengine bombers. By the war’s end shipments of British, French, Italian, Swedish, and American aircraft had raised the total strength of Finland’s air arm to more than 200 planes.
Finnish pilots were a superb, elite group. To dive into huge formations of modern warplanes at the controls of a twenty-year-old biplane capable of half the enemy’s speed required much controlled courage. At the start of the war the Finns’ only modern interceptor was the Dutch Fokker D.XXI—a sturdy, serviceable craft but hampered by an old-fashioned fixed undercarriage and an air-cooled engine that tended to stall at low temperatures and needed constant babying from overworked mechanics. The Fokker mounted four 7.9 mm. machine guns, with 300 rounds per gun, and it could achieve a top dogfighting speed of 286 miles per hour. That made it only 23 miles per hour faster than the SB-2 bombers it was usually sent to intercept and only 36 miles per hour faster than the Ilyushin DB-3.
In late December the Finns received a welcome addition in the form of thirty Morane-Saulnier 406s—sleek French interceptors with superb handling characteristics and a top speed of 302 miles per hour. These were the swiftest planes Finland could send aloft, and they packed the additional punch of a 20 mm. Hispano-Suisa cannon, with sixty rounds, that fired through the propeller hub, in addition to a pair of 7.5 mm. machine guns in the wings. The M.S. 406s did bloody work in March, when they flew sortie after sortie against Russian columns marching over the frozen Gulf of Viipuri. Finnish pilots found them nimble, in particular the men who flew low-level strafing runs, and appreciated the seat armor that had recently been installed in the plane’s latest modification. But the French craft was otherwise quite vulnerable to ground fire and could be taken out of the fight by a single rifle bullet.
Britain dispatched some thirty old Gloster Gladiators, those noble biwinged anachronisms that later flew to their doom, and glory, in the skies over Malta. Once its engine had been adapted to the winter climate, the Gladiator proved to have superior handling characteristics, but its weak quartet of .303 machine guns was useless at long range, and if any were jumped by Russian fighters, they were sitting ducks. In the first ten days they were in action, eighteen of the thirty Gladiators were shot down. The plane was thereafter taken out of action over the Isthmus and Ladoga-Karelia and was relegated to the quieter sectors in the far north. Most of the Gladiators, along with four ancient Hawker Harts, were eventually turned over to some daredevil Swedish volunteer pilots, who tempted suicide by going up in them after Russian formations that outnumbered them five to one. The Swedes acknowledged the situation by painting out the regular Finnish swastikas and covering them with the skull and crossbones. (Finland’s use of the twisted cross as an aircraft insignia had nothing to do with Nazi Germany; the swastika was an old Baltic symbol for good luck and had been painted on the very first Finnish warplanes, back in 1918.) Despite the odds, the Swedes brought down six Russian medium bombers and, amazingly, five or six fighters, losing five more Gladiators in the exchange.
The most common Red aircraft in the skies over Finland was probably the Tupolev SB-2, a fairly advanced design that was roughly comparable to the Heinkel He-111. The SB-2 carried 1,100 pounds of bombs, had a range of 435 miles, and protected itself with four 7.62 mm. machine guns. The SB-2’s Achilles’ heel was its unarmored fuel tanks, located in the wings just behind the nine-cylinder engines. Hit there, the planes usually burst into flames and spiraled out of the sky. Also encountered was the Ilyushin DB-3, which carried 2,200 pounds of bombs at maximum range and more than 5,000 pounds for shorter flights. Missions to Finland permitted the craft to carry even more than that, since the round-trip distance between its forward bases and the Isthmus was so trifling.
Of the many types of Soviet fighters that escorted the bombers, none really gave the Finnish Fokkers as hard a time as the thick, stubby Polikarpov I-16/model 18, an advanced version of the plane Andre Malraux had flown for the Republicans over Madrid, which carried two 7.62 mm. machine guns behind the propeller and two 20 mm. cannon in its stubby wings. An unforgiving plane for novice pilots, the I-16 could attain a top speed of 326 miles per hour above 14,000 feet; its lines had been suggested by several trophy-winning sports aircraft from the early 1930s. At the lower altitudes where most of its dogfighting took place, however, it was only marginally faster than the Fokker D.XXI and somewhat slower than the M.S. 406.
Finnish fighter pilots performed prodigies of valor with their motley collection of planes, diving time and time again into Red formations that outnumbered them ten, fifteen, even twenty to one. Some kind of record was set on January 6, when the leading Finnish ace, a lieutenant named Sarvanto, single-handedly took on a formation of SB-2s and shot down six of them in four minutes. All told, Finnish fighter pilots shot down 240 confirmed Red aircraft, against the loss of 26 of their own planes. It was standard practice to send at least one interceptor up to meet every Russian bomber sortie within range. Not infrequently the appearance of a single Fokker caused an entire squadron of SB-2s to jettison its bombs into the snow and turn tail.
Equal in their dedication were the ground crews who kept the interceptors in the air, even when the planes had been shot to sieves. Most of their work was performed out of doors under camouflaged hangar tents, in temperatures colder than those of a deep freeze. A forward “air base” might consist of a frozen lake, a wind sock, a telephone set, some tents, and perhaps, if they were extremely lucky, an abandoned farmhouse. Hot food was a luxury, as were real beds, sleep, and warmth.
Honor was due, as well, to the women’s auxiliary, the Lotta Svard organization. Lotta herself was a folk hero from the days of the Napoleonic Wars, a kind of Nordic Molly Pitcher. Approximately 100,000 women and girls served in the Lottas, and they did much to compensate for Finland’s chronic shortage of manpower. They manned air-raid warning posts in high spotting towers, exposed to Russian strafing attacks, bitter cold, and falling shrapnel from Finnish flak bursts. Less glamorous but equally important was their work as nurses, communications specialists, clerks, cooks, laundresses, etc. The “Little Lottas,” girls from eight to seventeen, wrote letters to the boys at the front, forwarded gift parcels, and helped out in a hundred other capacities.
Written into the Lottas’ creed was the following admonition: “Be not ostentatious in either habit or dress; humility is a priceless virtue.” As historian Allen Chew commented: “Their uniform, apparently designed to insure chastity, reflected those Puritan virtues: heavy black stockings, very long, shapeless, somber-gray dresses and floppy garrison hats. By contrast, the modest uniform of the WAACs was daringly provocative.”3
Finnish antiaircraft was quite deadly. Estimates of Red planes brought down by ground fire range from 314 to 444, and these include only the confirmed kills, planes whose wreckage fell behind or within sight of Finnish lines. Taking the lowest number as a benchmark, that works out to one kill for every 54 rounds of cannon fire and one low-altitude kill for every 300 rounds of automatic fire, which was remarkable shooting. If the unconfirmed kills are added—planes that were last seen trailing fire and losing altitude—the total number of Russian aircraft lost in the whole 105-day conflict approaches 800.
Finnish bombers, mostly Bristol Blenheims but with a few Italian Fiats added late in the war, carried the war to the enemy as best they could. The Blenheims, nicknamed “Tin Henrys” by their Finnish pilots, had an unpleasant tendency to burst into flame from what should have been minor damage. They could haul a half ton bomb load for a distance of 1,200 miles at 220 miles per hour. Finland started the war with sixteen Blenheims, then obtained ten more in January and a final dozen in February. There were a handful of daring raids against the Soviets’ strategic bases in Estonia, but with so many urgent tactical targets closer to home it seems unlikely that such risky, long-range operations were mounted more than a few times, perhaps as morale boosters or just to show the enemy that it could be done. Most Finnish bomber missions had perforce to be tactical in nature—strikes against gun emplacements and enemy columns—and due to the swarms of Red fighters that protected such targets, all but emergency missions had to be flown at dawn and dusk. This increased the Finnish pilots’ chances of getting back alive, but given the primitive state of bombsight technology at that time, it also considerably lessened their chances of hitting anything.
All told, the Red Air Force flew approximately 44,000 sorties during the war, according to Soviet statistics. In the air as on the ground, the Russians learned from their early mistakes, and by late February they were even showing some imagination in their tactics. On February 28, for example, thirty-six Red fighters bushwhacked a squadron of fifteen Finnish planes just as they were taxiing for takeoff, and blew six of them out of the sky with one massive pass.
1Citrine, Sir Walter, My Finnish Diary (London: Penguin Books, 1940), 47.
2Ibid., 56.
3Chew, 27.