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

Aided by the weather and their own ingenuity, the Finns scored some remarkable successes. By Christmas Eve 1939, both the Soviet 139th and 75th Rifle Divisions had been effectively wiped out at the Battle of Tolvajärvi, north of Lake Ladoga, while the 44th and 163rd Divisions were annihilated further to the north at Suomussalmi in early January. The latter battle was perhaps the most exemplary of Finnish methods. After the Red Army’s 163rd Division encountered stiff resistance, the elite 44th Division was sent in support, but both suffered a similar fate. Strung out along the narrow roads, hemmed in by lakes and forests with their forward progress prevented by a fortified Finnish roadblock, the two divisions were harassed by fast-moving ski troops and ambushes and gradually broken up into smaller and smaller sections, exposing the enemy soldiers to the ravages of cold and hunger as well as combat. Each dwindling pocket was then wiped out, one by one. When the two divisions were finally eliminated, the Finns discovered over 27,000 frozen corpses littered along the forest road, amid the scattered remains of their equipment. It was a horrific scene. As a reporter discovered, the dead were everywhere: “On the sides of the road; under the trees; in the temporary shelters and dugouts where they had tried to escape the relentless fury of the Finnish ski-patrols. And all along both sides of the road, for all these four miles, are lorries, field-kitchens, staff-cars, ammunition carts, limbers and every other kind of vehicle you can imagine.”

In the face of such morale-sapping setbacks, Red Army justice was swift and harsh. The commander of the 44th Division, General Aleksei Vinogradov, who had escaped the slaughter and returned to Soviet lines, was court-martialed a few days later and executed in front of his few surviving soldiers. NKVD reports suggested that the rank and file approved of the punishment.

In the motti battles, the Finns used snipers to devastating effect. Their deployment had an important psychological aspect, as they were able not only to spread fear but also to maximize the mental anguish suffered by their opponents, by targeting commanding officers, for instance, or concentrating their fire on field kitchens or on men huddled around a campfire. A few snipers even targeted soldiers while they were relieving themselves, reinforcing the impression among survivors that nowhere was safe. Using their exceptional camouflage and fieldcraft skills, the Finnish marksmen were expert at concealing their positions and took a heavy toll on the Soviet troops. As one Red Army colonel later complained, “We couldn’t see [the Finns] anywhere, yet they were all over the place.[I]nvisible death was lurking from every direction.”

Most famous among the snipers was Simo Häyhä, a slight, unassuming thirty-four-year-old corporal serving with the 34th Jäger Regiment in the snowy wastes north of Lake Ladoga. Although working with only an aged variant of the Russian Moisin-Nagant bolt-action rifle, equipped with standard iron sights, he was able to “score” over five hundred confirmed kills in barely one hundred days in the front line: the highest figure of any sniper in World War II. Targeted with artillery strikes and countersniping, Häyhä survived the war, despite being shot through the face. He was known to the Soviets as “Belaya Smert” (White Death).

As the Red Army’s forces ground to a halt in early January 1940, stalemate ensued. Bolstered by their successes, the Finns were also buoyed by expressions of international support. Right from the outset, Helsinki had benefitted from an outpouring of sympathy, most tellingly perhaps when the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for its attack and the League Council called for its members to assist the Finns. For many in the West, Finland became a cause célèbre, a moral test case, and a fillip for all those still dismayed by their impotence over Poland. In this spirit, perhaps mindful of Poland’s fate, Neville Chamberlain declared in January 1940 that “Finland must not be allowed to disappear from the map.” First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill echoed that sentiment in his own inimitable style: “Only Finland,” he said in a radio address, “superb, nay sublime, in the jaws of peril, shows what free men can do.”

The case of Finland, it seemed, suggested a juxtaposition of Stalin’s aggression with that of his political partner Hitler, as the British Daily Sketch newspaper argued in an editorial: “Our task in this war is to defeat Hitlerism, but it is still Hitlerism if the aggressor is called Stalin.” As a result of such sentiments, a huge relief effort was launched, with Sweden, Britain, and France in the vanguard, collecting military hardware to be sent to Helsinki: 500,000 hand grenades, 500 antiaircraft guns, and nearly 200,000 rifles. Meanwhile, some 11,000 volunteers—mainly Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians—registered their willingness to fight for Finland’s cause, with the American president’s cousin Kermit Roosevelt among them. Some citizens of Finland’s Baltic neighbors joined up too, in many cases eager for the fight that their own governments had not dared to invoke. In the former Lithuanian capital of Kaunas, for instance, over two hundred volunteers crowded into the Finnish consulate to enlist.

Altruism is a rare quality in politics, of course, and it should be noted that there was precious little of it in Allied planning to aid the Finns. Although high principles and ideals may well have motivated individuals, the politicians had other concerns, not least using any putative campaign to help Finland as an opportunity to hinder Hitler. Consequently, when drawing up tentative plans to assist the Finns, the Allies rather ambitiously foresaw that any landing force would travel via Narvik in northern Norway and Luleå in northern Sweden, both of which lay on the route used by the Germans for the extraction of the Swedish iron ore so vital to the German war effort. In this way, the Western Allies neatly subsumed Finland’s cause into the wider one of fighting Hitler. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given its grand geostrategic ambition, the plan came to naught.

Stalin, meanwhile, was furious: a campaign that should have lasted only two weeks had lasted three times that, with no success in sight. The Red Army was being humiliated before the eyes of an outside world that was growing restive, and—as Khrushchev believed—the Germans were watching events with “undisguised glee.” Certainly, the Red Army’s difficulties in the Winter War had been noted with interest in Nazi military and political circles, with many doubtless seeing the apparent weaknesses of the Soviets as an important revelation. Joseph Goebbels, for instance, clearly noted the Red Army’s failings: “Russia, as expected, is not making especially swift progress,” he wrote in his diary on December 4, adding, “Her army is not much good.” Elsewhere, the appropriate conclusions were being drawn. As the German ambassador in Finland wrote to Berlin in January 1940, “In view of this experience the ideas on Bolshevist Russia must be thoroughly revised.” The Red Army’s inability to “dispose” of such a small country as Finland, he argued, suggested that a change of approach toward Moscow might be advisable. “In these circumstances,” he wrote, “it might now be possible to adopt an entirely different tone toward the gentlemen in the Kremlin from that of August and September.”

Yet, for all that, Nazi Germany’s attitude toward the conflict was more nuanced than Khrushchev would have imagined. Public opinion, for instance, broadly sympathized with the Finns and was perturbed to see a Nordic nation and a traditional ally of Germany apparently being sacrificed to communist expansion. At the same time, concerns were expressed about the wisdom of Helsinki’s decision to stand firm against the might of Moscow. Some were more forthright in their opinions. The conservative diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, for instance, decried Germany’s collusion with the Soviet Union, stating, “In such company, in the eyes of the world, we now appear to be a big gang of robbers.” The Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, would have concurred. He noted in early December 1939 a growing anti-German sentiment in Italy and claimed that the fate of the Finns would be of much less concern to the Italian people were it not for the fact that the Soviets were the allies of Germany: “In all Italian cities,” he wrote, “there are sporadic demonstrations by students in favour of Finland and against Russia. But we must not forget that the people say ‘Death to Russia’ and really mean ‘Death to Germany.’”