William Trotter - A Frozen Hell

These men became, in effect, a ruling triumvirate. President Kallio and the Diet rubber-stamped their decisions, although sometimes with reluctance. On their sagacity and flexibility, and on Mannerheim’s tactical grip, rested nothing less than the fate of their nation.

The entire Finnish strategy was based on a single reality and a single logical assumption. The reality was that, given the size of its army, Finland could not defend every part of its long border with the USSR. The assumption was that, given the nature of the geography, Finland would not have to.

Only on the Isthmus could a large modern army be sustained in prolonged campaigning. North of Lake Ladoga the only place Mannerheim was really concerned about was the part of Ladoga-Karelia on the north shore of the lake. There, in a fifty-to-sixty-mile-wide corridor, were two good roads that led from the border to the interior. One started at Petrozavodsk, inside Russia, and the other ran from the Murmansk railroad along the rocky coast of Lake Ladoga; the two converged near the village of Kitelä. Just a day’s march beyond Kitelä was a crucial section of Finland’s railroad network, along with good roads leading north and south.

This was, in fact, the “back door” to the Isthmus. The road net would support the movement of large formations, including armor, and it seemed logical for the Russians to make an attempt to break through here, wheel south, and take the Mannerheim Line from the rear.

Anticipating such a Soviet thrust, the Finns had held war games there several times during prewar maneuvers and had come up with a sound plan to deal with it. They would let the Russians come in and advance along the converging roads until they reached a strong line of prepared defenses that ran Lake Ladoga–Kitelä–Lake Syskyjärvi. Once the Russians were pinned down, with their supply lines long, thin, and vulnerable and their left flank up against Ladoga, a strong Finnish counterattack would fall on their right flank from the supposedly impassable wilderness below Loimola and Kollaa, cut off the head of their salient, and methodically destroy it.

Mannerheim and his staff had allocated what seemed like an adequate force for this task: two infantry divisions and three battalions of border troops, all of them about as well equipped as any units in the Finnish Army, organized into the Fourth Corps, under command of Major General Juho Heiskanen.

But the Russian Eighth Army, responsible for the entire Ladoga-Karelia front from Tolvajärvi to Lake Ladoga itself, had some unpleasant surprises in store for the Finns. During the fall a new railroad line had been extended from Eighth Army’s main supply base at Petrozavodsk up to the border, just across from the Finnish town of Suojärvi. This strategic preparation nearly doubled the Russians’ supply capability on this front. When the war broke out, they struck here not with three divisions, the maximum number Mannerheim believed they could sustain, but with five, together with a full brigade of armor. And before the war’s end, they would field in this sector all or major portions of another eight divisions.

Most alarming of all was the attack of two entire divisions up at Suojärvi, a sector where Mannerheim had expected nothing stronger than reconnaissance patrols. In the opening days of the war there was virtually nothing to stop these Soviet units from outflanking the entire Fourth Corps line from the northeast, or from rolling through Tolvajärvi in a westerly thrust and running amok in the interior of Finland. It was a crisis situation from the beginning, and before it was stabilized, Mannerheim would be forced to commit one-third of his entire available reserves, seriously depleting the Finns’ ability to reinforce the defenders of the Isthmus.

When Mannerheim studied his situation maps on the night of December 1, these were the threats he saw developing in Ladoga-Karelia:

1. Against the vulnerable road net at Tolvajärvi, the Russians launched their 139th Division: 20,000 men, under General Beljajev, augmented by 45 tanks and about 150 guns. In that whole critical sector, the Finns could muster at the war’s beginning only 4,200 men. None of them were regular army troops, just border guards and Civic Guard reservists. Supporting this attack was the Russian Fifty-sixth Division, which stormed across at Suojärvi then turned southwest and thrust toward Kollaa, seeking to get behind the main Finnish defensive line north of Lake Ladoga.

2. On the north shore of Ladoga itself the Russian 168th Division under General Bondarev struck at Salmi. The plan called for it to advance to a line that ran from Koirinoja to Kitelä and there join forces with the Eighteenth Division under General Kondrashev, which had attacked along the Uomaa road, parallel to and about twenty miles north of the Ladoga coastal road. The plan evolved so that the Eighteenth soon received orders to turn north toward Syskyjärvi, four miles north of the Lemetti road junction, and attack the Kollaa defense line from the rear at the same time it secured the flank of the 168th Division. Strong Finnish defensive positions kept it from ever posing a real threat to the Kollaa line, however.

Another serious drain on Mannerheim’s reserves were the powerful but isolated thrusts into the forested wilderness of central and northern Finland. North of Fourth Corps’s front, the roads were so few and the terrain so utterly hostile during winter that the Finns had expected no large-scale Russian threats between Kitelä and Petsamo, their arctic toehold at the base of the Rybachi Peninsula. Instead the Russians sent eight full divisions into the forests, heavily supported by armor and artillery.

By the end of December 1, Mannerheim’s maps showed the following threats developing from Petsamo south to Tolvajärvi:

1. At Petsamo the Russian 104th Division attacked by sea and by land, supported by naval gunfire and heavy coastal guns sited on the approaches to Murmansk. The Russian plan called for this division to advance down the Finns’ “Arctic Highway” and capture the Lapland capital of Rovaniemi by December 12. That seemed like a reasonable proposition, since the numerical odds on this front favored the Russians by something like forty-two to one. Two regiments of the Russian 104th Division were added to this force after the initial landings and border crossings.

2. At the tiny Lapp town of Salla a two-pronged thrust was begun by the Eighty-eighth and 122d divisions. Their objective was the town of Kemijärvi, where they could pick up some good roads and from there move quickly against Rovaniemi to the southwest, linking up there with the Petsamo invasion force. The Finns did not think the enemy’s Petsamo force could negotiate the 300 miles of benighted, wind-scoured tundra between Petsamo and Rovaniemi, even if there was nobody shooting at them. Therefore the Salla thrust was considered by far the more serious threat to the Lapland capital.

3. The picturesque little village of Suomussalmi was a target simply because it blocked one side of the narrow “waist” of Finland; and it lay astride the shortest route to Oulu, Finland’s most important port on the Gulf of Bothnia. Roads on the Finnish side of the border were fairly well developed in this region. The attack was opened by the 163d Division, 17,000 strong, and weighted down not only with much armor and mechanized equipment but also with such paraphernalia as brass bands, printing presses, truckloads of propaganda leaflets, and sacks of goodwill gifts, presumably for all the disaffected Finnish workers its troops would encounter in the woods. Although the Soviet political assessment was fantastic in its presumptions, it was not made up entirely out of thin air. Communist agents were known to have been active in the Suomussalmi region, and the voting patterns in national elections indicated considerable popular support for left-wing politicians and policies. Stalin obviously believed the area was ripe for “liberation,” and Mannerheim, at least in the beginning, had some worries along those lines himself. In any event, if the Russians took Suomussalmi, they gained good routes to the railroad junction at Hyrynsalmi. From there, Oulu was only 150 miles away, and if Oulu fell, Finland would be cut in half.