Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

In due course, the soldiers would indeed find their voice. On November 26, 1939, a Soviet border post near the village of Mainila in Karelia came under artillery fire, killing four Red Army men and wounding nine. Molotov hurried to blame the Finns for the “deplorable act of aggression,” despite the fact that the post was beyond the range of Finnish gunners, who had been withdrawn from the frontier as a precaution. Summoning Helsinki’s representatives to Moscow once again, he declared that his government was henceforth freed from the obligations of the existing Soviet-Finnish nonaggression pact and that normal relations could no longer be maintained. Just as Hitler had manufactured the Gleiwitz incident three months earlier, a false-flag operation to provide him with a casus belli against Poland, Stalin had done the same at Mainila, giving communists worldwide the spurious argument they needed to justify Soviet aggression. Within four days the Red Army was on the march.

At first glance, it is difficult to imagine more of a military mismatch. The twenty-six divisions and 500,000 soldiers deployed by the Soviets should have been sufficient to easily sweep aside the 130,000 soldiers fielded by the Finns. In every sphere, the Red Army had an overwhelming advantage, with three times as many soldiers and thirty times as many aircraft. On the Karelian Isthmus, for example, where the main Soviet attack was expected, the Finns could field only 21,000 men with 71 artillery pieces and 29 antitank guns against a Red Army force comprising 120,000 men, 1,400 tanks, and over 900 field guns. In addition to its numerical advantage, Moscow was convinced that the Finnish working class would rise up in support of their communist “liberators” and serve as a “fifth column” behind enemy lines, disrupting logistics and undermining morale. Soviet confidence was naturally high, therefore, with senior military personnel allocating only twelve days to the operation and anticipating such a swift advance that Red Army commanders were even warned not to cross the border into neutral Sweden—three hundred kilometers distant—by mistake.

The reality was to be rather different. Material and numerical advantages would count for little in the extreme conditions of a Finnish winter, when temperatures plummeted as low as –40°C. In addition, much of the terrain through which Soviet soldiers would have to trudge was a trackless, snowbound wasteland of deep pine forests, punctuated by frozen rivers, lakes, and swamps—all but impassable to a modern mechanized army. Making the situation harder still, the Karelian Isthmus, north of Leningrad, had been fortified in the interwar period and now boasted an extensive (though incomplete) network of bunkers, trenches, natural obstacles, and earthworks, known as the Mannerheim Line, after Finland’s military commander in chief. The Red Army would clearly not be having things all its own way.

The Soviets’ numerical superiority was also lessened by the differing quality of the opposing troops. For its part, the Red Army was mired in crisis. Still reeling from the purges that had cut a murderous swathe through its ranks in the mid-1930s and accounted for over 85 percent of senior officers, it was hamstrung by poor leadership, defective training regimes, and low morale. And though well armed in comparison with the Finns, its ranks lacked winter clothing, skis, and camouflage, with both the infantry and their tanks going into battle that November sporting their traditional olive green color scheme, making them an easy target for their opponents. Tactically, too, the Red Army was lacking, with invention and initiative among the officer class proving a secondary casualty of the purges. What passed for military doctrine, then, was often simply a massed, frontal assault, with shortcomings exacerbated by an insufficient coordination between the various branches of the armed forces.

The Finns, meanwhile, were highly motivated. And far from welcoming the Soviets as Moscow had predicted, they were imbued with a staunch patriotism, which ensured that what their soldiers might have lacked in materiel, they made up for in morale. They were also able to draw on a large pool of trained reservists to bolster their standing forces, and many of them brought vital local knowledge with them, as well as excellent fieldcraft and survival skills. One quip that did the rounds that winter summed up their optimism in the face of such an apparently powerful foe: “They are so many and our country is so small,” they would say. “Where will we find room to bury them all?”

Typically, the Soviet assault on Finland was both political and military. So, as Soviet bombers hit Helsinki and Viipuri and tanks and infantry made their first sallies against the Mannerheim Line, a pro-communist puppet government was established at Terijoki, the first small town across the old Soviet-Finnish border. The Finnish Democratic Republic was led by veteran communist Otto Kuusinen, whose main claim to fame was that he had survived the Soviet purges. Yet, despite assiduously courting the trade unions and the moderate Left, Kuusinen found himself ignored, recognized solely by his Moscow masters, with his writ running only in those areas “liberated” by the Red Army.

Such political misjudgments were allied to serious strategic failings. For all its material superiority, the Red Army could be remarkably inflexible—the archetypal “colossus with feet of clay.” Its tactical naivety, it seems, was often matched by a very cautious approach, in which the slightest Finnish resistance could hold up an advance for hours. In the conditions—with only a few roads and tracks providing a passage through largely impenetrable forests—this naturally played into the defenders’ hands, and Soviet assaults quickly deteriorated into enormous armored traffic jams.

As the Red Army advance stalled, the Finns moved to counterattack, showing all the guile and ingenuity that their opponents lacked. Small units of mobile ski troops would outflank the invaders and separate them from their supply columns, using the long nights of the Scandinavian winter to harry and ambush their foes under cover of darkness. Infantry, meanwhile, employed improvised explosives, such as satchel charges, or the famed “Molotov cocktail,” a petrol bomb containing kerosene and tar, which could be remarkably effective when aimed at the air intakes of Soviet tanks. The weapon got its nickname after Molotov claimed in public that Soviet bombing missions were in fact dropping food packages over Finland. Soviet cluster bombs were then ironically dubbed by the Finns as “Molotov breadbaskets,” and the humble petrol bomb was named as “a drink to go with the food.” For all the mocking humor, the Molotov cocktail—mass-produced in a Finnish distillery—would prove a formidable weapon.

In time, Finnish tactics, which had hitherto been largely ad hoc, evolved into a recognized method. After isolating and containing each Soviet advance, the Finns would systematically reduce the enemy columns, with relentless probing attacks and the harsh winter weather combining to sap Soviet resistance. This tactic became known as the motti , from the Finnish word for timber stacked prior to being chopped. The sinister implication was that Soviet forces, thus encircled, were merely waiting to be dealt with, either by Finnish soldiers or by the elements.

The harsh Nordic winter could be a fearsome foe. While the Finns were used to the freezing conditions and tended to dress appropriately, the Red Army soldiers had little protection against the cold. All too often, the weather wrought as great a death toll as military action, and Finnish troops grew grimly accustomed to finding their enemies frozen solid where they crouched or lay, supposedly poised for action. In some cases, the survivors made for an even more gruesome spectacle. On one occasion, a Finnish officer took delivery of two Red Army prisoners brought in with snow blindness and severe frostbite to their hands and feet. “After a while” an eyewitness reported, “the Russians became aware of the heat from the stove and stumbled towards it. Then they both put their hands on the red-hot iron. They kept them there. They couldn’t feel a thing. And there they stayed with their hands sizzling like rashers of bacon.”