Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

By Christmas the Soviets paused to regroup, still not home. They had thrown more than seven divisions against the Line, and the Finns sisu ed them all back, destroying about 60 percent of their armored vehicles. The Mannerheim Line was undented. Now, when you have purged most of the officers in the army, staged mock trials to eliminate your po­litical friends and rivals, and airbrushed out any historical inconveniences, you have not established a system for ob­taining strong feedback from your underlings. But the chief of the Soviet armed forces, Kliment Voroshilov, foolishly lay the failure at Stalin’s feet for his army purges and backed up his point by smashing a suckling pig on the table in front of the Russian Rex. Instead of killing Voroshilov, the evil genius in Stalin extracted revenge by making Voroshilov his whip­ping boy for years to come, always keeping the specter of the firing squad on hand. Most attackers would have either changed strategy or simply given up. Stalin had a different system. He brought up fresh divisions from the virtually limitless supply of un­happy manpower and readied to repeat the whole affair. Soldiers who declined to volunteer for suicide attacks faced the firing squad. It was mass murder under the guise of de­termination.

Incredibly, farther north the Soviets suffered even worse defeats. Roads were fewer and not much bigger than paths. Soviets tank columns quickly bogged down, and a division might stretch out over more than twenty miles. A key battle took place for weeks at the Kollaa River, where the Finns dug in along its north bank. At first the Soviets threw a divi­sion of troops against a few thousand Finns. Then the Soviets added a second, then a third, and finally a fourth division. Still the Finns held firm. In late January the Soviets launched an all-out offensive, but they simply totted up about a thou­sand dead a day to the growing casualty list. In one instance, four thousand Russians attacked thirty-two Finns. There the Line cracked. Finally, the Soviets had found their winning ratio.

To fight the overwhelming odds, the Finns adopted the tactic called motti : cut the long Soviet column into tiny pieces and slowly destroy each fragment. Mannerheim knew the tactics would work as he anticipated the response by the pet­rified and doltish Russian officers. The Soviets would fight hard but would never venture into the dense woods, and if a column got cut in half, they would simply sit tight and wait. For what, no one is sure, but that was the closest thing to a plan in the Soviet playbook.

The first use of motti took place against a Soviet division on the shores of Lake Ladoga. Here the Finns minced a well-stocked Soviet division into little pieces and slowly strangled it. The Soviets formed defensive pockets but slowly succumbed to the cold and hunger, fighting with dwindling sup­plies of ammunition.

But the real Soviet disaster occurred in the far north woods. There the Finns perfected motti against the 163rd Division. About 10 percent of the division died from the cold before the first shot was even fired. On December 12 the Finns sliced through the Soviet division in short, sharp, and well-planned operations, cutting the division in two. The Finns launched two or three of these raids a day, slowly chopping the division into smaller and smaller sections.

To rescue the division the Soviets sent in the Forty-fourth Division. A series of quick raids on December 23 stalled its advance. It simply stopped, its commander suffering from an outsized case of brain freeze. After a month of warfare the Soviets still had no idea how to gain the initiative or counter­attack effectively. The Finns turned up the tempo on the 163rd, and it collapsed on December 28. A few breakout at­tempts by survivors failed, and in a typical Winter War battle, about three hundred Soviets got machined-gunned in the open with not one Finnish casualty. Meanwhile the rela­tively fresh Forty-fourth Division simply stood idle.

The Finns next turned on the hapless Forty-fourth. By January 1, the motti had begun. The petrified Soviets began to crumble. They would fire wildly into the woods, burning up their ammunition. Slowly the Finns closed the ring. The Soviets planned a breakout, then called it off. The command­ers seemed to be paralyzed as their troops slowly died from cold and hunger. Meanwhile, the Finnish troops rotated be­tween the front lines and their warm bunkers with hot food and a sauna every few days. The Finns picked their targets carefully, focusing on the large Soviet field kitchens, assisting the Soviets in their agony. On January 6 the Soviet com­mander declared every man for himself, and all organized resistance collapsed. The second Soviet division perished. Overall, the Finns killed more than 27,000 Soviet invaders, destroyed about 300 armored vehicles but lost 900 of their own, an outsized 30:1 ratio. The commander of the 163rd made his way back to the Soviet Union where he was court-martialed and executed. There has never been an explanation for his failure to move. He simply sat and waited for two di­visions to die.

The Finnish victories stunned the world. Leaders hailed the Finns for fighting the dreaded Soviets, but that was es­sentially all they got. Sweden provided some aid, and Italy donated seventeen bombers, while its citizens provided a good stoning of the Russian embassy in Rome.

Manly, mustachioed hubris had started the war but finally it took two women to bring about its end. Hella Wuolijoki, a Finnish playwright, started talks with her friend Alexandra Kollontay, the Soviet ambassador to Sweden. Through these talks the Soviets on January 31 severed their relationship with Kuusinen’s bogus government, paving the way for direct negotiations with the Finns. Stalin wanted out — if he could make the deal he liked. He had had enough of this sideshow. His mighty army was humbled before the world, and he feared becoming bogged down in Finland as the spring and summer marching season in the plains of Europe approached. He also feared the British and French would intervene and attack the Soviets either in Finland or in the Soviet Union itself.

Unknown to Stalin, the British and French had different ideas for Finland. They wanted to use the war as a pretext for sending thousands of troops into Sweden and Norway to fight the Germans. Northern Sweden’s iron ore fields sup­plied almost half of Germany’s growing need for steel. To deny them to the Germans would boost the Allied war ef­forts. Plus, the wily French thought if they could get the war against Germany started in Scandinavia, it would not take place in France. Basically, they wanted to export the battle­fields. So they cooked up lavish plans to help the Finns, not bothering to tell them that the bulk of the troops would stay in Sweden.

But the Swedes had no intention of helping the British and French. They wanted the war to quietly end with a surviving Finnish state acting as a buffer between it and Russia. The Swedes, however, sniffed out the French strategy of dumping the Germans onto them by remaining neutral, except for the face-saving trickle of aid. The Germans wanted the war to end to keep relations peaceful with the Russians so they could focus on destroying Britain and France, still higher up on Adolf’s target list than Russia.

But the French were doing their damnedest to keep this war alive. As the Finns and Soviets neared final terms on a cease-fire, the French, in a fit of Gallic exaggeration, prom­ised fifty thousand troops and one hundred bombers, as long as the Finns kept fighting. The offer stunned the Finns. They reconsidered the deal with Stalin. All their hopes and dreams might actually come true. Perhaps the French would really come to someone’s rescue, they thought.

For a moment the lineup for the Big War stood suspended with the Finns holding the key. Had the Finns publicly asked for the Allied aid, the British and French would have come over. And that would have probably meant teaming up against the Russians. In turn, Germany would have invaded Finland to fight their British and French enemies. This would have pitted the Germans and Russians against the British and French. It was potentially a history-altering moment.