What was it like for the Finnish GIs in the trenches to fight in these apocalyptic struggles for the Mannerheim Line? It is not possible to reconstruct every battle in the Summa sector in detail. They raged under conditions of total chaos, and few coherent narratives of them exist that were written from the soldiers’ point of view. Finns who survived and wrote accounts of these battles after the war usually admit to breaks in their memories, vortices in which events lose focus and become a blur of violence and exhaustion.
Nowhere on the Mannerheim Line was there any place, after February 11, that could accurately be described as a “quiet sector.” Enemy pressure was severe along the entire front. Soviet artillery fire was vicious and heavy against all the defenders’ positions. In the Summa sector the scale and intensity of the onslaught passed beyond the power of words to describe adequately, even as it finally passed beyond the Finns’ capacity to endure. To gain a clearer understanding of what the February fighting was like, it might be more profitable to “zoom in” on a sector where events were recorded in some detail, where the ebb and flow of battle can be brought into sharp focus.1
In the sector that fronted the Muolaa church—a rural landmark about halfway between Lake Muolaa and the Vuoksi Waterway—the Soviet bombardment was not quite as cataclysmic as the 400-gun flail that pulverized Summa, but it was bad enough. What happened there was a paradigm of what took place all along the line, north and south of the main point of contact at Summa.
The most advanced Finnish position was a country churchyard on the swampy banks of Lake Kirkkojärvi, where troops entering or leaving the command bunker, located near the protective stone walls of the church cemetery, had the macabre experience of crawling over a partly exposed coffin.
13. Muolaa Church Battle
Russian pressure against the Muolaa church sector grew severe on the morning of February 11, when sappers detonated an enormous chain explosion and blew gaps in the belt of antitank rocks fronting Finnish lines. This overture was followed by a four-hour bombardment that blasted the churchyard into a smoldering ruin and left its cratered surface littered with old bones.
Moments after the shelling stopped, the Russians attacked with twenty-eight tanks. There was not a single Finnish antitank gun left in this sector because all available weapons had been pulled out and sent south to the Summa front. The men defending the Muolaa position had nothing but satchel charges, grenade clusters, and Molotov Cocktails. Their orders were firm: stand fast, ignore the tanks if possible, but repel the infantry at all costs; once the Red infantry withdrew, the tanks would pull back as well—at least that was how it had worked in December.
Although the Red tanks got to within twenty meters of the stone wall surrounding the churchyard, they went no further, apparently fearing a Finnish ambush. Moreover, they did not support their following infantry very aggressively, and the Russian soldiers took heavy casualties every time they tried to advance on their own. Finally, the attacking formations went to ground out near the antitank rocks, about 200 meters behind their own armor. At dusk they withdrew, leaving hundreds of dead.
The Red armor formed a wagon-train circle for the night, each tank parking so it could cover its neighbor with machine-gun fire. With the coming of darkness, the Finns struck back. Taking advantage of their knowledge of the ground, they crept close—while snipers shot out the tanks’ headlights—and destroyed seven vehicles with hand-thrown missiles.
Strong attacks were again repulsed on February 12, but the churchyard had to be abandoned on the thirteenth; it was too exposed, and Russian shells had battered down all the cover. The churchyard was immediately occupied and fortified, giving the attackers a good position from which to enfilade the Finns’ left flank.
New orders came through from Isthmus Command: the Muolaa position—now held by only a single company—must remain in Finnish hands at all costs, until after the crisis at Summa had been dealt with. No reinforcements or artillery support could be expected. By now, the defenses in this sector were in a very dilapidated condition. There was only one concrete bunker; all the rest were earth and timber fortifications, built by prewar volunteer labor and never intended to withstand this kind of punishment. The trenchlines connecting each strong point were starting to collapse—the soil in this part of the Isthmus was loose and gritty, like coarse sand. The defenders had a mortar or two, but no shells left for them, and they had an artillery observer, but since he had no guns to observe for, he fought as an infantryman.
At 6:00 A.M., February 14, the next Russian assault began, prefaced by a devastating bombardment made even worse by a battery of 76.2 mm. field guns that had been emplaced in the old churchyard. This time, twenty-five tanks advanced, led by a quartet of flame-throwing machines that could shoot a fire stream forty feet long from their turrets. The Finns soon learned that it was possible for a man to run through the fire, provided he covered the exposed parts of his face, without suffering more than a scorched snowsuit. They used this hair-raising tactic to work in close, where the tanks’ machine guns could not depress sufficiently to hit them, and disabled several vehicles with mines, grenades, and in one case by the crude but effective method of prying the treads off their wheels with a crowbar.
Again, the attacking infantry hung back, many of them inching forward behind individual armored shields mounted on ski runners. The shields seemed to make the attackers timid, and individual Finns took advantage of their passivity to strike back. One sniper, a platoon commander named Kuusala, went out into no-man’s-land with a telescopic rifle and shot fifteen Russians through the legs and buttocks while they crouched behind their shields. On the way back to Finnish lines for more ammunition, Kuusala was spotted by several tanks, which attempted to run over him. He took cover in a shell crater while the vehicles drove back and forth over it, and when he reached friendly lines, his entire back was one vast purple welt from the pressure of the treads.
Once again the Russians withdrew, and the enterprising Kuusala led a squad into no-man’s-land and collected thirty abandoned armored shields. These proved extremely useful in shoring up the Finns’ crumbling earthworks. There was a lull on the fifteenth, while the Russians replenished their artillery ammunition, and the defenders used it to send out ambush patrols. One Finnish sniper obtained thirty verified kills on that day alone.
On February 16, once again lavishly supplied with shells, the Russians moved to obliterate this stubborn pocket of resistance once and for all. Against the single half-strength company hanging on at Muolaa, they sent a great wedge of fifty tanks, preceded by heavy rolling barrages and accompanied by artillery observers in radio-equipped vehicles.
By eleven o’clock that morning, when the Finnish company commander looked out of his bunker, he could see no movement in what was left of his position—only a churned and smoking landscape. Yet when the enemy attacked again, a few minutes later, using squad-sized armored sleds towed behind huge K.V. tanks, the defenders’ trenchline blazed defiantly. Two of the K.V. monsters hit mines that had been planted the night before, and the drivers of the other two vehicles panicked. They turned their tanks around and exposed their infantry passengers to a deadly cone of fire from the Finns.
Finnish discipline almost cracked at midafternoon. The last Finnish machine gun went out of order, jammed by the constant rain of grit on its mechanism, and pairs of Soviet tanks teamed up and started driving back and forth on opposite sides of the defenders’ trenches, collapsing their walls and burying some men alive. But eventually the Russians stopped shelling the Muolaa position—their observers could report no visible targets left to shoot at. The handful of Finns still alive at the bottom of their crumbling entrenchments rifled the pockets of the dead and stripped bullets from the belts of their now-useless machine guns. Somehow, they managed to throw back one more battalion-sized attack before darkness fell, and the long-awaited order came permitting them to withdraw.
Out of the company that had defended the Muolaa church sector, less than one platoon walked out that night. Behind them, they left approximately 1,000 dead Russian infantry and the blackened shells of at least sixteen tanks. By that time, no one was counting.
By nightfall on February 11, the nightmare of a decisive Russian breakthrough had become a reality. But instead of the sudden, dramatic hammer blow that everyone had been expecting, consciously or not, the penetration that caused the abandonment of the Mannerheim Line was first reported almost incidentally, and without much urgency, to Isthmus Command. It was nestled within a host of battle reports that sounded far more disaster fraught than the modest whisper with which the real crisis introduced itself. Instead of high drama, there was only confusion. The Lähde road breakthrough, which accomplished what hundreds of other enemy assaults had failed to do, was not recognized as a significant threat until the Russian forces within the salient had grown too powerful for the Finns to destroy or eject them. Every action they took to counter the emergency was hours too late, and too weak by hundreds of men.
Manning the defenses in the Lähde road sector northeast of Summa on February 11 were the men of the Second Battalion, JR-9. The Russians had timed their offensive better than they knew: only a few hours before dawn, 2/JR-9 had finished relieving the battered battalion that had held this sector since late January. That battalion was no longer capable of effective resistance; its men had endured everything the enemy could throw at them, had repulsed dozens of attacks, had been overrun by tanks more times than anyone could keep track of, yet they had never broken, never fled the field.
The replacement battalion was dreadfully understrength. To man its mile-and-a-half-wide section of the line, it mustered 40 percent of its peacetime complement, or about 400 men. To compound its problems, this was a battalion of Swedish-speaking Finns attached to a Finnish-speaking regiment. Under normal civilized conditions, so many Finns are bilingual that this would not have been a problem; in the tension and chaos of battle it was one more strain on an already overburdened communications system. Its commander, a major named Lindman, was wound too tight before the fighting even started. When he saw the wave of men and steel inundate his positions, he caved in and remained stunned to inactivity during the most crucial moments. The Second Battalion would fight a leaderless battle, a battle of company commanders and noncoms doing what they could with what they had.
As luck would have it, the Lähde road sector was the very place that had made General Öhquist apprehensive during the prewar debates about the Mannerheim Line’s final configuration. The sector was very close to that critical “elbow bend” at Summa, and its worthiness as a defensive line rested solely on the two modern fortresses that dominated its approaches, the Million-Dollar Bunker and the Poppius bunker. Otherwise the fortifications were not impressive: three more concrete pillboxes designed and poured almost twenty years earlier and all three badly damaged by shell fire, plus numerous trenches, log bunkers, and dugouts, all badly mauled by February 11. Moreover, except for the left flank, where the Munasuo Swamp remained boggy and treacherous beneath its crust of winter ice, the terrain leading to the defenses was open, lightly wooded, and gentle in slope: good tank ground. There had been extensive mine fields, antitank rocks, and wire entanglements, but the ten-day bombardment had reduced the rocks to broken stumps, blown up most of the mines, and cut the barbed wire into useless little curlicues standing in clumps, with big cleared avenues in between.
14. Russian Breakthrough of February 12, 1940
It was pitch black when the battalion took over this sector. Its men had no chance to become familiar with the terrain or to establish any psychological or visual contact with whomever was on their flanks. While in reserve, the men had of course heard numerous horror stories about the new kind of war Ivan was waging.
February 11 was a Sunday, cold (–7°F) and foggy. During the night Timoshenko moved up eighteen fresh divisions and five tank brigades across the entire width of the Karelian Isthmus. At Lähde the Russians wheeled up additional artillery batteries by hand, so as not to alert the Finns, and unmasked their hitherto-hidden sharpshooting pieces, the guns that had been sighted to pour flat-trajectory fire against the embrasures of Finnish strong points.
In front of the Lähde sector the Soviet 123d Division made ready for the attack it had rehearsed so carefully. It was an anxious night for the division’s soldiers and their officers. Their primary task was to take out both Poppius and Millions, and they were certain the eyes of the Kremlin would be on them.
There was now even more importance attached to this sector than before. The Summa defenses had proven so tough that Meretskov had decided to make the Lähde sector the focus of his main thrust. If he scored a breakthrough here, Summa would have to be abandoned. About 1,000 meters behind the main fortifications was a support line. Once the 123d had punched through that, it was within easy striking distance of road junctions whose very sensitivity would force the Finns either to abandon the whole Summa sector or bleed themselves white in counterattacks.
At first light a vodka ration was issued to the troops. By eight o’clock the 123d Division and its attached armor, the Thirty-fifth Light Tank Brigade, were in position. The curtain went up in the form of a two-and-a-half-hour bombardment of unprecedented weight and fury. The hitherto-masked sharpshooter weapons opened up on the Poppius and Millions bunkers, tearing great chunks out of their concrete and buckling their armored embrasure shields.
All three companies of JR-9 were in line between Lake Summajärvi and the Munasuo Swamp. On the right, covering the Millions bunker, was Lieutenant Ericsson’s company; in the center, covering Poppius and the Lähde road itself, was Lieutenant Malm’s company; on the left, dug in behind Munasuo Swamp, was Lieutenant Hannu’s company.
At noon Leningrad time, two regiments of the 123d Division launched their attacks. One entire regiment came against Ericsson’s men and the Million-Dollar Bunker, while a battalion supported by two companies of tanks went for Poppius. Poppius resisted furiously. Lieutenant Malm’s men defended the bunker so successfully that the first Russian attack faltered and broke after only twenty minutes. Then a second, fresh battalion was added to the Poppius attack, and this time the Red tanks, despite losing four of their number to shell fire, drove right up and parked in front of the bunker’s firing ports, ignoring the machine-gun fire that sparkled and whanged off their turrets.
This was not a new tactic; when it had been tried before, the bunker’s garrison had called for fire from the Bofors guns or had sneaked out the rear entrance and plastered the vehicles with cocktails and grenade bundles. It was not possible to do that now. The Russians had improved their tankinfantry tactics to the point where each vehicle was adequately covered by men with automatic weapons, and every single Bofors gun in the Lähde sector was out of action, not from direct hits but from concussion.
Now the Poppius garrison had no choice but to spill out of the strong point and take up the fight from what was left of the earthworks around it. As they closed on the position, the Red infantry encountered savage resistance, leaving about 200 dead sprawled within a 100-meter radius of the bunker. Even so, at approximately 12:30 P.M., officers watching from the 123d’s start line were delighted to observe a red banner going up on top of Poppius. There were cheers, the first cheers some of these men had heard since the war started.
Over on the Finnish left, Lieutenant Hannu’s men at first faced only infantry, since the swamp would not support the weight of armor. Attacking across the shallow weed-fringed expanse of the bog, the Russians lost so many men that the survivors referred to that place as “The Valley of Death.” But Hannu eventually had to order a withdrawal when he spotted a score or more of T-28s moving in behind him from the direction of the Lähde road.
Only on the right flank, where the Million-Dollar Bunker stood, were the defenders able to maintain their original line. Ericsson’s men fought on all day. Several times the strong point was submerged beneath waves of Red infantry, and each time it was cleared off with grenades and Suomi fire. Individual Russians tried to wriggle in through the firing ports, and there were a number of hand-to-hand encounters. Resistance continued all night at the bunker, even after the fortress was completely surrounded. The Russians twice called out for the platoon inside to surrender and were answered with obscenities. Then at 5:00 A.M. on the morning of February 12, enemy sappers placed a 500-pound block of TNT on top of a shell-fire crack on the roof of the main chamber. The resulting blast killed every man inside and left a thirty-foot hole in the roof of the fortress. Even then, their number reduced to less than fifty, Lieutenant Ericsson’s men continued to resist. His ordnance people even got one of the Bofors guns working again and knocked out three or four passing tanks with it before it jammed for good. Finally, at noon on the twelfth, the survivors withdrew, still in good order, to the support line behind Lake Summajärvi.
By nightfall the 123d Division and its tanks had secured a lozenge-shaped salient down the Lähde road as far as the Finnish support line. No attempt was made to rush those defenses, not with the light fading and the possibility of imminent Finnish counterattacks. The Russians secured the ground they had seized, formed a strong defensive perimeter, and broke out some more vodka.
They deserved it; nowhere else along the entire line had the big push of February 11 made much of a dent. Fierce attacks on Summa had been repulsed, and everywhere else on the fronts of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth divisions, all Russian lodgments were eliminated by counterattacks during the night.
A counterattack was in order against the Lähde road penetration, too, and if the Fifth Division had been closer and the danger had been realized earlier, it might have succeeded. As it was, Mannerheim did not release the Fifth Division’s three regiments, JR-13, -14, and -15, until the morning of the twelfth. The plan was to throw all three regiments against the Lähde salient in a division-sized blow, but events were outstripping the Finns’ ability to cope. General Öhquist was forced to commit one regiment, JR-13, to bolster the support line at the head of the salient, and to parcel out another, JR-15, to a danger spot near the boundary between Third and Fourth divisions. That left only JR-14 immediately available for the counterattack.
Action was also heavy elsewhere on February 12. Summa received five separate attacks on that day. All were thrown back. Second Division’s front was penetrated in three places, all retaken by vigorous counterattacks. By the end of the day the Mannerheim Line was still intact except for the Lähde salient, and the Russians had again suffered terrible losses. But Timoshenko’s long-range strategy was to grind down the Finns by forcing them to mount continuous counterattacks against localized threats, stretching their dwindling resources to the breaking point. On the twelfth alone, Isthmus Army suffered 1,200 casualties. Timoshenko could lose ten times as many men in one day. Mannerheim was now defending regiment-sized fronts with scarecrow battalions, and there was no way it would get better.
The counterattack against the Lähde bulge went in on the morning of February 13. The plan called for two battalions of JR-14 to hit the salient from the Majajoki River valley while two other battalions launched secondary attacks, one from the support line against the head of the salient and one against its right from the boggy ground at the head of Munasuo Swamp. As it happened, intense bombing, shelling, and armored probes kept the former battalion pinned down, and the latter battalion had to check its advance to meet a new Soviet thrust to the northeast of Munasuo. That left the two battalions of JR-14 to carry out the whole operation. Up until about midday they made a brave show of it, driving the enemy off of a hill north of Summajärvi and getting some companies across the Majajoki, but by that time forward observers in the Russian salient were calling down enormous concentrations of artillery upon the attackers. After suffering heavy casualties, including the regimental commanding officer and four successive battalion commanders, and with their left flank in danger of being turned by tanks, the two battalions withdrew to the support line.
Finnish historian Wolf Halsti, serving in the quartermaster arm of the Fifth Division, was an eyewitness to these events. After the collapse of the counterattack, he noted in his diary:
The tactical situation in and of itself is not hopeless! Only the means to deal with it are lacking! If only we had some heavy weapons! Those poor bastards from Turku! [The battalions attacking that morning were made up of men from the Turku district.] I wonder if they know whose fault this mess really is? What a pleasure it would be to form a battalion out of politicians and bureaucrats and then order them to make such an attack, without the tanks and artillery their stupidity has deprived us of today!!2
Up at the head of the salient, in midafternoon, the Russians mounted a ferocious armored attack. There was a desperate close-range melee at the point of heaviest contact, an antitank ditch walled on its western side by a log palisade. One Finnish company lost eighty-six men that afternoon. Massed fire from the tanks’ cannon blew down the log wall, and Russian infantry filled the ditch with bundles of brush, logs, and in some places their own bodies. After two-and-a-half hours of bitter combat, a wedge of fifty Soviet tanks crashed through and barreled west, into the Finnish rear. Frenzied efforts were made to counterattack them by tank-killer squads armed with explosives and bottle bombs, but with the Russian infantry vigorously following the tanks, it was suicidal. The first position the tanks overran was a battery of ammunitionless howitzers that had first seen action in 1905 against the Japanese in Manchuria. More serious was the loss of ten 150 mm. guns still farther back, which were overrun so quickly that there was no time to spike them, much less pull them to safety.
Then, only one mile from the Lähde road junction and with a clear run on good tank ground all the way into Viipuri, the armored spearhead halted, regrouped, and waited for additional units to catch up. Historians can only guess why, with total victory in their grasp, the Russians held up their best punch of the war. The most likely explanation is that they could not believe that the road to Viipuri lay open before them, or that the Finns’ defenses had been as badly shattered as they really were, and so reverted to old habits and the tactics of caution. By the time they got moving again, the Finns had shored up their sagging defenses, and the Russians’ opportunity was gone.
Elsewhere on the thirteenth the situation reports read like paraphrases of those from the previous two days. Taipale was pummeled by 50,000 shells and attacked by five regiments, but the defense did not break. Second Division, including the battered men defending the Muolaa churchyard, bent under severe pressure but did not break either. A further counterattack against the Lähde salient was contemplated early on the night of February 13–14, but the continued lack of artillery support and the relative lack of cover made it look hopeless, and the operation was canceled before it was fully planned.
There was a tense meeting at Second Corps headquarters on the morning of February 14. Present were the exhausted General Öhquist, General Östermann, overall commander of the Isthmus Army, and Marshal Mannerheim. All three generals agreed on one thing: since the Lähde road bulge could not be eliminated, it would be necessary to make a major adjustment in the whole of Second Corps’s front. Beyond that point there was disagreement. Predictably all three generals gave differing accounts in their memoirs. Östermann favored pulling all the way back to the Rear Line, anchored on Viipuri, and using the half-finished Intermediate Line only as a delaying position. Öhquist, prodded by Mannerheim, came out in favor of making a determined stand along the Intermediate Line. In the latter stages of the conference, Mannerheim pointedly snubbed Östermann and talked tactics directly with Öhquist, who was, after all, Östermann’s subordinate. This violation of the chain of command was only the latest symptom of the friction that had been growing between Mannerheim and his Isthmus commander for some weeks.
Although Mannerheim had made his basic feelings clear, he left to return to Otava without having issued any firm orders. As usual the Baron offered no explanation for his actions, but it is likely that he wanted to check on diplomatic developments before passing such a crucial order. Alone of the three men in the room that day, Mannerheim knew that peace talks were at a delicate stage and that Finland retained some power to influence diplomatic events only as long as its army appeared to the outside world to be unbeaten. It was this political consideration, and not bloody-minded stubbornness, that made Mannerheim insist on holding every inch of Finnish soil until the last possible moment.
February 14: repeated attacks were launched over the ice against the gulf flank of the line. All were thrown back with heavy loss. In the Lähde sector the Russians widened their salient and rolled up portions of the support line, losing a battalion’s worth of men but exerting such pressure on the rear of the Summa sector that it became necessary to start withdrawing the defenders. It was a bitter moment for them: Summa had held out for seventy days against the heaviest blows the Red Army could throw. The withdrawal was accomplished without the Russians finding out, and the next day, February 15, they launched a tremendous attack with two divisions and more than 100 tanks, only to find their opponents had vanished. When the Kremlin received word that Summa had “fallen,” Stalin at first did not believe it and had to be reassured by a high-ranking eyewitness who had actually seen the red flag hoisted over the gutted pillboxes.
In the interior of Finland, the “bottom of the barrel” was being scraped for replacements. Sixteen-year-old boys, reservists in their mid-fifties, and convicts with light sentences were being issued rifles and uniforms and rushed through basic training or refresher courses. Odds and ends from less-threatened areas in the north and central wilderness, a company here, and a company there, were being shuttled south as rapidly as possible, while the Red Air Force redoubled its efforts to chop the rail net into pieces, causing constant delays.
To block the Russians’ next move from the Lähde salient, the worn-out remnants of JR-14 and some teenaged Civic Guard recruits from the Viipuri area were hurriedly deployed in a thin defense line anchored on the open, barren terrain of Kämärä Ridge. There was little tree cover and no time to dig foxholes. The Finns just burrowed into the snow and pointed their rifles east.
Historian Wolf Halsti was present with the supply echelon of the withdrawing Fifth Division when the boy soldiers went into battle:
2/15/40: In the early afternoon, there appeared in front of our tent a reserve ensign, really nothing more than a child, asking if we could spare some food for himself and his men.… he was in charge of a platoon of “men” scarcely old enough to shave. They had come straight from training school with two new antitank guns. They were cold and scared and hungry and were on their way to join the troops at the roadblock in front of Lähde.…
2/16/40 (afternoon): Same reserve ensign back again, blood on his clothes, asking for more food.… he lost both guns and half of his men when the Russians broke through.… his men were scattered, the tanks drove right over his guns and crushed them.… I asked why he had not nailed the tanks before they got that close. The wretched fellow explained that his men had received the guns, still covered with canvas, straight from their freight cars, in pitch darkness; since they had to move forward right away, they left the covers on the weapons as they went to the front. It was not until the guns were emplaced in the forward positions that they had a chance to remove the wrappings and then they were sickened to learn that these were not the same type of weapon they had trained with. They did everything they could to figure out how to load and fire the guns, but there was not enough time to get ready before the Red tanks attacked and drove straight over them.…”3
At four o’clock on the afternoon of February 15, Mannerheim authorized a general retirement of Second Corps to the Intermediate Line.
1The Muolaa church battles are chronicled in great detail in Kansa Taisteli magazine, January-March 1962.
2Halsti, 318.
3Ibid., 301.
