The strength of the Intermediate Line varied widely from sector to sector. In the “Gateway” section, from Lake Muolaanjärvi to the Vuoksi Waterway, it was as strong as the Mannerheim Line itself had been. Indeed, in one prewar configuration, it had been part of the Mannerheim Line. Elsewhere the secondary line was not impressive; one Finnish general called it nothing more than “a colored line on a map.” Made up of scratched-out trenches, a few bunkers, and barbed wire entanglements, the Intermediate Line was thin, brittle, and poorly reinforced with concrete, and the troops who were digging in along its forward edge were already exhausted.
By late afternoon of the sixteenth the Russian Seventh Army had wrested Kämärä Station from its stubborn but undergunned defenders after a three-hour battle that cost both sides heavily. Otherwise it was not until the seventeenth that contact became general along the Intermediate Line, offering a few priceless hours for the Finns to catch their breath, throw up some sandbags, plant a few mines, and sight their Bofors guns up the relatively open roads to the east.
By the afternoon of the eighteenth most of the enemy’s armored strength had reached the Intermediate Line, and massive attacks were launched at several points. By now, however, the Finnish gunners had redeployed their batteries and registered the ground, and a taste of victory had made some of the Russian tank commanders reckless. Reverting to the tactics of December, they charged ahead of their infantry support and were hit hard in the open terrain, losing more than fifty vehicles between February 19 and 21.
Over in Third Corps’s sector on the left flank of the Isthmus, there had been no retirement. The original Mannerheim Line positions still held. Looking at their maps the Russian commanders could see their own left growing longer and longer, and the Taipale sector looming more and more as a salient deep behind their right. If Finland had been hoarding a division or two, here was the perfect place to use them. To prevent this from happening, and if possible to eliminate the Taipale salient altogether, the Russians redoubled their efforts to smash the stubborn defenders there.
February 18 came to be known as the “Black Day at Taipale.” An entire Soviet division, supported by the usual stupendous artillery and aerial bombardment, smashed into a green replacement regiment and drove it from the field in panic. A dangerous dent was hammered into the front lines, and several important strong points fell, but the support line, manned by the battered but battle-wise veterans of the sector, held out. The Taipale line remained unbroken, though only barely so.
The following day there was a dramatic shakeup in command. General Östermann had clearly fallen from Mannerheim’s favor, and his own confidence was further shaken by the news that his wife had been seriously wounded in an air raid. On February 19, Östermann resigned his command, citing reasons of health. Mannerheim accepted the resignation, then added to the command-level friction by ignoring the next man in line for the job of Isthmus Commander, General Öhquist, and appointing in his stead General Heinrichs, of Third Corps. To replace Heinrichs, Mannerheim imported the victor of Tolvajärvi, General Talvela.
A general reorganization followed these changes in command. First and Second divisions were grouped into a new corps, the First, between Second and Third corps. The purpose of this regrouping was to allow General Öhquist and his now-streamlined Second Corps to concentrate all their attentions on the defense of Viipuri and the Gulf of Viipuri.
By February 22 it was obvious that Koivisto Island could not be held any longer without its garrison being cut off. The island’s shore batteries had all but paralyzed daytime traffic along the coastal roads, destroying tanks, artillery batteries, and supply columns. But a massive enemy buildup across the straits from Koivisto gave promise of an all-out assault on the island, and its garrison was urgently needed for the defense of the gulf. Therefore on February 23 the coast artillerymen began evacuating their positions, blowing up what they had to leave behind only after firing off nearly every shell in their magazines, subjecting the assembled Russians across the straits to one of the most devastating concentrations of Finnish shell fire encountered by any Soviet units in the war.
With the galling obstacle of the offshore batteries removed, the pace of the enemy drive quickened along the gulf coast. Spearheaded by fresh units of elite shock troops, several Soviet divisions drove past Koivisto and battered against the portion of the Intermediate Line held by the Finnish Fourth Division. Pulliniemi, the long, thin peninsula leading from Koivisto city out into the wide neck of the Gulf of Viipuri, was hardest hit, and by the end of February 23 all but the tip of that promontory had fallen. Crossing the ice from Pulliniemi, the Russians captured a nearby islet. Ominously, this was the first position in the actual gulf to fall into enemy hands.
General Öhquist asked Mannerheim for permission to draw up plans for a general retirement to the Rear Line, should the need for such a withdrawal suddenly arise. But Mannerheim refused to permit any further open discussion of retreats. To Öhquist and other subordinate officers the Marshal’s attitude appeared stubborn and unrealistic, but as before, Mannerheim had his reasons. He knew that every foot of Finnish soil remaining under his army’s control gave Finland that much more leverage at the peace negotiations. Besides, the last-ditch defense line, running through Viipuri itself, was far from ready for occupancy, and every hour that was bought by the Intermediate Line gave the overworked engineers time to strengthen those defenses. There was, as well, the principle of the thing. In Mannerheim’s view an army whose generals started talking about defeat was already halfway there.
By February 24 the Intermediate Line was bending in several places. The situation was especially grim at Honkaniemi Station, where the defending companies had been reduced to forty or fifty men. It was here, at 6:30 A.M. on February 26, that the Finnish Army launched its one and only armored attack of the Winter War. Employed was a single company of Vickers tanks purchased just before the outbreak of hostilities, but only now outfitted with their armament of 37 mm. guns. The very appearance of these vehicles caused a panic among troops who had never laid eyes on a Finnish tank before. Initially the attack enjoyed some success, probably due to Russian astonishment at the appearance of Finnish armor, but several of the tanks broke down just inside Russian lines, and the others soon ran into some enemy tanks whose turret armor deflected their 37 mm. shot harmlessly, but whose 76 mm. guns devastated them in return. The whole operation had a ring of desperation to it and shows the negative side of the usually successful Finnish doctrine of aggressive counterattacks. A great deal more service could have been gotten from those tanks by using them as mobile antitank guns instead of wasting them in a charge.
Timoshenko planned an all-out offensive against the whole Intermediate Line on February 28, but by that time Mannerheim had given permission to start the withdrawal to the Rear Line. The signs were not good. The Mannerheim Line had held out in most places for seventy-eight days. The Intermediate Line had held out for twelve. How long could the third line be held? And what would happen when it, too, was shattered? There was no fourth line.
The massive assault launched on February 28 largely fell on empty trenches. Here and there, however, the Finns manned delaying positions that cost Timoshenko dearly. In front of one such position, the massive artillery bombardment was not followed up by the expected infantry attack. Instead, all during the afternoon the Finns heard a single Russian voice, out in noman’s-land, screaming over and over again, “Stalin! Stalin!” It was a lone wounded man, hopelessly caught in barbed wire. The Finns decided that if the enemy sent a patrol out for him, they would not fire. But the hours crawled by and there was an eerie lack of movement in front of the delaying position. At regular intervals the man on the wire continued to throw his head back and scream at the gray heavy sky: “Stalin! … Stalin!” Finally, the Finns put him out of his misery with a burst of Maxim fire.
Before withdrawing, the delaying force sent out a patrol to see what the strange lack of enemy movement signified. The patrol soon came upon the assembly area for the ground attack that had never been launched. Inside a two-acre killing ground, they counted 400 corpses, stacked on top of one another. The Russian bombardment had fallen one kilometer short. The heaviest weapons in the Red arsenal had been used, including the twelve-inch railroad pieces firing from just over the border and several of the monstrous sixteen-inch shore batteries in the outer belt of Kronstadt defenses, and it had all landed here. The Finnish patrol eventually came upon the enemy’s forward artillery observer—dead, in a sitting position, a map across his knees and the telephone receiver, whose wire ended in midair, still clutched in his fist. He had been trying to report the shortfall of rounds at the moment of his death. The entire battalion, it was learned from documents, had just been graduated from the Leningrad noncommissioned officers’ academy; they had died clean shaven, wearing neat new uniforms and brand new flannel underwear.1
1Engle and Paananen, 128–29.