By December 27, the Karelian Isthmus had grown relatively quiet. Finnish reconnaissance flights revealed that the Russians were erecting bunkers, a sure sign that, for the moment at least, their thinking was defensive in nature.
Mannerheim did some reorganizing of his own during the January lull: between January 2 and January 5 the burned-out Fifth Division went into reserve, replaced by the Sixth Division, which Mannerheim renamed the Third Division in order to confuse enemy intelligence. As much as the Fifth, the Tenth Division at Taipale also needed relief, but there was no other reserve division to plug in. All Mannerheim could do was rename it, as well, calling it the Seventh Division, so that the Russians might think they were confronting rested troops. It is impossible to say how well or how long these ruses worked; probably not for long. As commander-in-chief’s reserve, Mannerheim placed the newly created and wretchedly equipped Twenty-first Division behind the Seventh, in the Pyhäjärvi area.
As round two of the Isthmus fighting began, Finnish dispositions were as follows (southwest to northeast):
Second Corps (General Öhquist)
• Fourth Division: the right flank of the Mannerheim Line, to the gulf coast
• Third Division: on its left, covering the Viipuri Gateway (Summa and Lähde sectors)
• First Division: on the Third’s left, as far as Lake Muolaa
• Second Division (formerly the Eleventh): from Lake Muolaa to the Vuoksi Waterway
Third Corps (General Heinrichs)
• Seventh and Eighth divisions, manning the rest of the Isthmus, from the Vuoksi’s northern end, along the Suvanto Waterway, and Taipale—the extreme left flank of the Mannerheim Line
Reserves
• Fifth, Twenty-first, and Twenty-third divisions, employed strengthening the “Intermediate” and “Rear” lines—the last named, the Finns’ final line of prepared defenses on the Karelian Isthmus, was anchored on the city of Viipuri
Timoshenko’s plan called for gradually increasing the bombardment, wearing down the defenders, and softening up their fortifications, then suddenly escalating the artillery and air punishment on February 1, following it with strong local ground attacks. After ten days of round-the-clock pounding, the Red Army would go all out on February 11 and try to score the big breakthrough that had eluded its generals so far.
Factored into Timoshenko’s equation was a savage but simple truth. Russian units could be rotated when casualties, exhaustion, or depleted supplies lessened their performance. Finnish units could not. The cumulative strain on the defenders was designed to grind them down not only physically but psychologically, by depriving them of sleep, warmth, hope itself. Eventually, as they shuffled the same increasingly burned-out units to meet threat after threat, even Finns would reach their breaking point.
When in late January the Finns began to have some conception of what was in store for them, there was frustratingly little they could do to disrupt the enemy’s concentrations. The air force bombed and strafed troop columns and gigantic supply depots, but the clouds of Soviet flak and swarms of Polikarpov interceptors made these raids hazardous and restricted them to the hours of dawn and dusk. Finnish artillery found its maps literally covered with potential targets, against which it could do nothing. Every Finnish battery was under the strictest orders to fire only against directly threatening ground attacks, so desperate was the shortage of ammunition. And so contemptuous were the Russians of the Finns’ ability to hinder them that they drove miles-long convoys of supply trucks toward the front with headlights blazing.
On the morning of February 1 a Finnish reconnaissance plane threaded its way through some forty Russian fighters and made a hasty photo run over Russian lines in front of the Summa positions. The film brought back was quickly processed and enlarged. When the Finnish intelligence team gathered to examine the still-damp enlargements, there was a spontaneous gasp from each man’s lips. Overnight, the number of enemy cannon emplaced before Summa had multiplied astoundingly. Counting only the visible guns, brazenly mounted in open, uncamouflaged emplacements, there were no less than 200 pieces of artillery massed to fire against the Summa sector alone. It was nearly as bad everywhere else.
The sound of that first big salvo, on February 1, produced a terrifying convulsion of the earth. An iron wall of sound and vibration crashed into the defenders’ nervous systems like the last thunderclap of Armageddon. Overhead appeared the first waves of a correspondingly vast aerial offensive; 500 planes over Summa alone. To the fury of the cannonade was added the impact of concentrated carpet bombing, the heaviest and most sustained aerial attacks in the history of warfare to date.
Day by day the weight and fury of this fire would increase. Finnish dugouts caved in and their occupants were buried alive. The deepest-buried telephone cables were eventually unearthed and ripped to pieces. It became impossible even to heat the Finnish blockhouses; the slightest trace of smoke was enough to summon a punishing bombardment. All resupply had to be done at night. Even the field kitchens could only function after dark. Deprived now of warmth and warm food, the Finns began to show increasing signs of fatigue.
Despite their improved tactics and morale, one aspect of the new Russian attacks remained the same as it had been in December: they were still willing to accept staggering losses in order to reach their objectives. Some attacks, it is true, were screened by smoke, and almost all were heavily supported by artillery and armor, but the infantry assembled, approached, and charged in the open. Whole battalions advanced in dense, cheering columns into which Finnish machine gunners poured streams of bullets, with sickening effect.
These attacks followed a methodical pattern: strong artillery and air bombardment, followed by strong tank/infantry assaults. No matter how many men and vehicles were lost, the attacks would be repeated, in each division’s assigned sector, three, four, five times each day, with fresh Soviet units committed each time. Finnish shell fire smashed formations time and time again, but it seemed to make no difference. Armored spearheads of 100 or more tanks were commonly employed. With Bofors guns rationed out at an average of two per regiment, there was no way the defenders could handle such odds; and the Russians’ new emphasis on close cooperation between infantry and armor made it suicidal to send out antitank squads armed with hand-thrown missiles.
From the moment of the opening salvos to the fall of total darkness, February 1 was a day of nonstop combat. Yet as heavy as these attacks were, they were still essentially just big probing actions, designed to take out a bunker here and there, feel for the weak spots, and wear down the defenders, setting them up for the all-out blow that would fall on the eleventh.
Each time a Finnish bunker was taken, the men who had defended it were forced to dig holes in the open, or compelled to crowd into the sagging, battered trenches that connected each concrete strong point. Gradually more and more Finns began to feel the effects of prolonged exposure, the mental and physical toll of sleeplessness, and the general deterioration of faculties that comes with prolonged exposure to concussion.
Even at dusk, when the attacks were broken off, the defenders were unable to snatch more than odd moments of sleep. Every man was needed to retake lost positions, repair damaged fortifications, haul forward new supplies of food and ammo, and help bear the shivering wounded to the rear. As the “softening up” entered its third and fourth days and the troops’ condition worsened, the frontline troops and the local reserves, stationed a few thousand meters to the rear in the “support line,” had to be rotated at shorter and shorter intervals. Even in reserve there was little rest: men in the support line were working frantically to reinforce and repair its defenses and had to be prepared at any time to rush forward and contain Soviet breakthroughs. By the end of the first week of this routine, the units on the line were reaching a state of exhaustion.
In their attacks on February 2 and 3 the Russians repeated the pattern established on the first day, only now the assaults came in greater strength, against a wider frontage of the line. Again fighting was fiercest at Summa, where several concrete blockhouses changed hands five and six times in a single day. One regiment lost its commander three times on February 5. By the end of February 3, it was possible to count more than 1,000 dead Russians on the ground in front of Summa village. By February 7, despite the shortage of antitank weapons, the Finns in General Öhquist’s Second Corps had destroyed about ninety Soviet tanks.
And still the bombardment increased. In the Summa sector alone, 400 shells per minute rained on the line. The frozen, granite-veined Karelian soil acquired the consistency of warm paste. Somehow the defenders hung on in their disintegrating positions: deafened, sleepless, half crazy from shock and noise, still they fought back, responding time and time again while the enemy pressed home its relentless assaults, sometimes over mounds of corpses. The layers of snow and soil and sheeting that had hidden the Finnish field emplacements were blown away. Layers of logs and sandbags five feet thick were blown to dust. The outer faces of concrete pillboxes were raked to powder by thousands of near misses, and the steel-reinforced walls of the most massive blockhouses were beginning to crack. So enormous and unrelenting was the concussion from the bombardment that a number of multiton concrete emplacements were finally lifted up and tilted to bizarre angles, ruining their fields of fire.
The inherent weaknesses of the Mannerheim Line forts was becoming grimly apparent: weaknesses that should never have been built into them, regardless of the fact that no one ever expected them to withstand so titanic a battering. The concrete foundations anchoring the newer positions had not been sunk into the ground deeply enough. The concrete walls were not thick enough, nor laced with sufficient steel. Far too many bunkers had been built to command isolated bits of ground, and too few of them could offer support to neighboring strong points when waves of Red infantry swarmed on the tops and sides. Most of the strong points housed no armament larger than the reliable but slow-firing Maxim guns. These wrought mass destruction on attacking infantry but too often could be neutralized by a single determined enemy tank simply parking itself in front of the embrasures, a situation that would never have arisen if the Finns had obtained adequate numbers of antitank guns.
One by one, the Finnish strong points went under, submerged beneath waves of fanatically brave Soviet infantrymen who pressed forward ruthlessly. Time after time Finnish fire would mow down hundreds of men in the first waves of these attacks so that those pressing forward from behind were forced to climb over windrows of dead and dying comrades. As each successive attack dashed itself to pieces, the rows of dead were closer and closer to Finnish lines, until ultimately the assault swept into the trenches and the horror of hand-to-hand combat would erupt. Eventually, no matter how many Russians died in such costly assaults, every Finnish strong point subjected to these attacks was overwhelmed.
In some sectors the Russians captured pillboxes that appeared to have sustained only moderate structural damage, only to find the entire Finnish garrison stone dead inside, without visible wounds of any kind except for rivulets of frozen blood from their nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. These men had died from the cumulative effects of sheer concussion.
Yet somehow, as the offensive moved into its second week, the Mannerheim Line continued to hold. There is no rational explanation for the defenders’ endurance. They drew their strength from sources not normally tapped, from the deepest human reservoirs of determination and primitive courage. By the start of the second week, they responded to each new Soviet attack almost as though they were automatons. As soon as the bombardments let up and the attacking formations were visible beyond the shattered wire entanglements, officers would stagger through the trenches, blowing whistles, cursing and yelling, kicking and slapping and threatening each soldier in turn until all of them somehow were on their feet and stumbling to their assigned firing posts. They continued to fight back, and for ten unspeakable days, they held out. The battle for the Mannerheim Line had become, in the word’s of contemporary journalist John Langdon-Davies, “the sort of nightmare that might trouble the sleep of an athlete, who finds himself entangled in an unending series of last-laps toward a [goalpost] constantly retreating before him.”1
On February 6 the defenses along the Johannes Highway southwest of Summa were assailed by an entire fresh Soviet division. Met by a blistering Finnish barrage, the attack collapsed, and the decimated Russian battalions fled in panic, not even slowing down when their political officers fired into the mob with their pistols.
On February 8 General Öhquist noted in his personal diary: “the men of the Third Division are deadly tired and absolutely must be relieved.” That was the opinion as well of the division’s commander, who begged Mannerheim to replace his men with the now-rested Fifth Division. The men of the Third were collapsing in their tracks, he insisted, and he was down to a single worn-out battalion of reserves with which he was attempting to counter penetrations made by entire regiments. Mannerheim refused.
Meanwhile, in their rear-area headquarters on the Intermediate Line, the staff of Fifth Division was getting nervous. They knew they were needed in the line, and they were afraid that Mannerheim might eventually order their men up in battalion-sized packets, at the height of some crisis, and thus fritter away the effectiveness of the division as a whole. But that was exactly what Mannerheim was trying to avoid. The Fifth was the only veteran division within easy reach of the “Viipuri Gateway,” and it required icy nerve on the old man’s part to maintain a firm grip on it when hysterical reports of imminent disaster were flooding the telephone lines to his headquarters. Mannerheim was convinced that these were the pleas of panic-stricken and exhausted men and that there was not yet a breach so dangerous as to require the commitment of the Fifth Division.
Mannerheim’s logic was solid, but unfortunately it created a state of mind at supreme headquarters that led to each report of a Russian breakthrough being examined and double-checked with such thoroughness that when a truly lethal penetration did occur, it went unnoticed and uncountered until it was too late. Thus the entire Summa sector was shattered by a breakthrough whose initial penetration was not of itself inherently critical.
By February 8 ammunition for all types of Finnish artillery was so low that Öhquist was forced to order new restrictions imposed on all of Second Corps’s guns: not a shell was to be fired unless it was to directly repel an attack that could not, in the opinion of the senior officer on the scene, be handled with small-arms fire alone. Öhquist later wrote that this was the bitterest of the many unpalatable orders he had to issue during those grim days. The enemy was forming up for mass attacks out in the open, presenting targets that were the stuff of an artillerist’s dream: “the fattest, most impudent kinds of targets one could imagine.”2
On the tenth and eleventh the Soviet offensive widened, as attacks thundered against every sector of the line from Taipale to the Gulf of Finland. During the fighting in that area, the Russians tried for the first time to outflank the line by sending powerful infantry columns on a long, curving march across the thick ice. Before these forces could come ashore behind Finnish lines, however, they were spotted and taken under fire by the coastal batteries in the Koivisto sector, particularly the six-, eight-, and ten-inch weapons emplaced near Saarenpää, on Koivisto Island, and at Humaljoki on the mainland. On this occasion at least, the attackers were given a dose of the same kind of punishment the Finns were enduring at the mercy of the Russian artillery. The six- and eight-inch weapons were supplied with shrapnel shells that were fused to detonate in airbursts over the heads of the Russian columns like gigantic shotgun blasts. The heavy coastal battery, armed only with shells designed to pierce a battleship’s armored deck, could not cause that kind of damage with their elephantine projectiles, but the enormous weight and velocity with which they struck tore great holes in the surface ice, so that each successive strike enlarged the fractures until they turned into chasms. Hundreds of men drowned in the cold black waters, sucked down by the weight of their gear, or froze to death in a matter of seconds as they tried to swim to solid ice.
On the twelfth, the enemy launched a major attack whose goal was to silence those shore batteries. The biggest push came against Saarenpää, one of the most heavily fortified points in the whole Koivisto region. Screened by a thick ground fog, two companies of Red infantry managed to sneak across the ice and get to within fifty meters of the coastline before being spotted by a small security patrol. These opened fire with small arms and pinned down the attackers until an observer with a field telephone could arrive on the scene and direct the gun laying of a six-inch battery of naval rifles, the only weapons that could depress low enough to hit such a close target. By the time the ground fog had burned off, the coastal battery was trained down the Russians’ throats at point-blank range. The attacking force was torn to pieces by its bombardment; not a man set foot on the Finnish shore.
Later that same day the Russians sent 76.2 mm. field guns out onto the ice to lay down a barrage, along with twenty-five medium tanks to overrun the defenders while they were still pinned down. Disregarding the shells bursting all around their emplacements, the Saarenpää gunners coolly waited for the armored formation to fill their sights, then opened up a blistering barrage, keeping at least three shells in the air simultaneously until there were simply no more targets to engage. All twenty-five tanks were ablaze or had sunk through holes the explosions had torn in the ice.
Up on the line’s extreme left flank at Taipale the Russians charged across the same wide-open, bloody approaches they had used in December, and large formations moved out to turn the Taipale flank by marching across the ice of Lake Ladoga. There, just like the men who tried to storm Saarenpää, they were slaughtered by the shore batteries. The fighting rose in intensity and reached a grim climax on February 14, when in the space of less than four hours, 2,500 Russian infantry were cut down on the ice around Taipale. Thereafter, the scope, if not the intensity, of Russian attacks on Taipale seemed to diminish, as their gains enlarged elsewhere. But there was never a day of real rest for the defenders of Taipale. At no time between early February and the end of the war in mid-March could they count less than 100 Soviet aircraft bombing their positions during any hour of the day.
1Langdon-Davies, 108.
2Halsti, Wolf, Talvisota (Helsinki: Werner Soderstrom Oy, 1955), 318.