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

by Ed Strosser

  As they slowly were pushed back up the Isthmus, the Finns booby-trapped everything. They planted mines, wired barns with bombs, and even turned frozen livestock into deadly traps. The Russian steamroller slowed to a crawl.

  Mannerheim’s plan was to deny the interior rail system to the invaders. By keeping the Soviets on the back roads, he knew they would bog down and become easy prey for his mobile guerrillas. It might not spell victory but would at least buy time.

  The first problem the Finns encountered was fighting the Soviet tanks. Mannerheim’s men had virtually no antitank guns and where they did exist, ammunition was in short supply. To throw off the tanks they relied on sisu and ingenu­ity. The most common weapon was the “Molotov cocktail,” which they perfected and named. It consisted of jars filled with gasoline, kerosene, and other flammable liquids, thrown at the tanks from close range. The technique was simple; someone jammed a log into the tracks of the tank to stop it, and then the tank was attacked with flaming bottles of gaso­line. The Finns also used bags of explosives and hand gre­nades against the Soviet armor. That also took loads of sisu. About eighty tanks were knocked out in the first few days but with sharp losses for the brave tank-attackers.

  Despite the stout resistance, by December 6 the Soviets reached the Mannerheim Line, which consisted of an eighty-mile-long series of concrete blockhouses, smaller pillboxes, and firing trenches. Manned by determined fighters, it was a formidable barrier. But it was short of antitank guns, artil­lery, and antiaircraft weapons. The Finns dug in. The Soviets pushed ahead, ready to stomp their enemy. “Tactics,” they sneered, “we don’t need no stinking tactics.”

  The Soviets launched their siege on the defenses but quickly fell into a predictable rhythm. They would move out just after first light, slowly approach the defenders, make furious assault after assault in tight formations, causing few Finnish casualties but resulting in piles of Soviet dead, some­times numbering a thousand an hour. The Russians would retreat at dark and form defensive circles around huge campfires. Then the Finns would reoccupy any lost ground and snipe at the nervous Soviets all night. Some attacks broke up under well-aimed artillery; others evaporated from intense machine-gun fire. Throughout December the Soviets pushed against various sectors of the Finnish line only to suffer the same results everywhere. Finnish gunners mowed down row after row of attackers who slowly moved for­ward in virtual suicide attacks, unprotected by any trees or tanks. The Soviet dead were so numerous that some Finnish soldiers broke down emotionally from the stress of killing so many of the enemy. True to form, the Soviets never wa­vered in their tactics.

  Finns live for winter — they know how to dress, ski through the dense woods, quickly remove the skis for fighting, and keep warm. The Soviet army, despite living in an equally cold country, inexplicably knew none of this. Many didn’t even know where they were. So while the Soviet troops suffered miserably from the cold in their dark uniforms that stood out against the white world in which they had plunged, the Finns donned camouflaging white sheets, slept in well-stocked and -heated dugouts, and even enjoyed the occasional sauna. The Soviets built huge campfires every night and the men huddled around, easy targets for snipers. For the invaders, simply sur­viving another day became an achievement. It was almost an unfair fight, except the Soviets had ten times the strength. Ac­tually, it still was an unfair fight.

  As the battles raged at the Mannerheim Line, the Soviets threw divisions against the overmatched Finns on the north side of Lake Ladoga. Here the Soviets pushed relentlessly forward as the Finns engaged in a fighting retreat. As the So­viets approached key crossroads that would allow them greater movement, Mannerheim committed his reserves in early December. Even with his forces boosted, the Finns were still greatly outnumbered. Mannerheim knew he needed a victory to revive the spirits of his men. On the moonless night of December 9, two companies of Finns crossed a frozen lake to attack the camped-out Soviets. One company got lost. The other, led by Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, snuck up on an entire regiment of Soviets, took careful positions, and opened fire. In a few minutes it was all over and the entire regiment lay dead, over a thousand men wiped out. The raid unnerved the Soviets, who remained immobile for two days, while the Finns found a new bounce in their step knowing the Reds could be beaten.

  The Finns kept pushing. One Soviet probe of about 350 men got ambushed by a Finnish task force, killing every Rus­sian. Another Russian night attack into the Finnish rear was halted when the attackers stopped to eat sausage soup from an abandoned Finnish kitchen. As the Russians dined al fresco, the Finns regrouped and wiped out the sausage eaters. The Finns spotted another Russian night advance on a lake and opened fire, not stopping until all two hundred Soviet attackers lay dead on the ice.

  On December 12 the Finnish commander Mannerheim moved his troops forward. They pressed the attack, despite fierce Soviet resistance. When the Soviet troops were too beaten up, they would just call up fresh ones. The Finns lacked this luxury, but they kept fighting with their dwin­dling numbers. By the time the attack petered out on Decem­ber 23, the Finns had pushed the Russians far enough from the main roads to feel secure. The cost was about 630 Finn­ish deaths and over 5,000 Soviet dead and another 5,000 wounded. While a stunning victory for Mannerheim, it also showed that even with a 10:1 kill ratio, the Finns would run out of troops well before the Soviets.

  By Christmas the Soviets paused to regroup, still not home. They had thrown more than seven divisions against the Line, and the Finns sisued 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.

  But the French military soufflé soon deflated under the weight of British reality when they said only twelve thousand French troops would actually arrive and then only in mid-April. The Finns fell back to earth. They never called for the aid. In January, as both sides paused on the ground, the Soviets picked up the pace in the air war. Despite an overwhelming numerical advantage, the Soviets achieved little from their air forces and — this is getting monotonous — got mauled by the Finns. When the war started, the Finns had only forty-eight fighter planes, few of them modern. But they tore through the Soviets and attacked using their tactic of two pairs of two planes called “finger four,” which outmaneuvered the Soviet planes flying in a single formation of three. By the war’s end they had shot down 240 Soviet aircraft with a Finnish loss of only 26. Overall, including ground fire, the Soviets lost eight hundred planes in the war, about eight per day. For these losses, the Soviets actually succeeded in blow­ing up lots of snow and killing thousands of trees. They also managed on rare occasions to actually hit Finnish people and buildings.

  Meanwhile, back on the ground, the Soviet divisions fat­tened up for the kill again, but the Finns were now running low on shells. While Stalin altered his tactics somewhat, he refused to give up one key negotiating point: if the truce talks failed, he would endure endless casualties to achieve victory. On February 1 the Soviets opened with massive artillery and aerial bombardments, the largest yet in military history. The bombing stunned even the stoic Finns. As usual, the Soviets surged forward in tight waves. Then they died in tight waves. The Finns continued to fight furiously, despite being bombed out of their bunkers. The Soviets simply ground down the Finns and forced them to expend their ammunition into the chests of the hapless Russians. Thousands fell in each assault with second and third waves climbing over their frozen com­rades. At one point twenty-five hundred Russians died in less than four hours.

  Then on February 11, the Soviets moved up eighteen fresh divisions. But the Finns held firm. Back and forth the fighting swirled, the exhausted Finns never breaking. Finally, on Feb­ruary 15, after the Soviets punched a hole in the resistance, Mannerheim ordered part of his line to retreat to their second layer of defenses. The Soviets pushed on. On February 28, Mannerheim withdrew to the final line of defense. As the dip­lomats dickered and the French made their empty promises, the Russians hammered the rear line with a total of thirty di­visions. By March 10 the Finnish army was down to half its prewar strength. The rear line consisted of sporadic pockets of Finns taking on huge numbers of Russian tanks and troops. They were fighting on fumes, but still fighting.

  MOLOTOV COCKTAIL

  The Molotov cocktail has been the weapon of choice for revolution­aries and angry youth throughout the world. While the gasoline-filled bottle with the flaming rag has held a key place in many a soldier’s arsenal, few armies got better use from it as the Finns against the Soviets. Although it was invented by troops under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the Finn
s perfected it and honored Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov by naming it after him. During the Winter War, the Finns found the homemade weapons so effective they created a factory to mass-produce them. More than half a million were eventually turned out with an improved design that no longer required a flam­ing rag. Instead, a capsule of sulfuric acid was used to ignite the flammable liquid in the bottle as it shattered against another Soviet tank.

  On March 8 the Finns met the Soviets in Moscow, ready to sign away their battlefield victories. It was a typical brutal Soviet negotiation: sign or keep fighting. The Finns pushed their points. But the Soviets sat in stony silence: sign or keep fighting. The Finns got Stalined. Soviet foreign minister Molotov presented the Finns with the agreement, which had harsher terms than they had previously discussed. Stalined again. Facing a total breakdown of their army, the Finns had no choice but to sign the agreement, handing Stalin his terri­tory. Just before the Finns signed the surrender, the French and British both announced they would help Finland if they kept fighting. The Finns could only shake their heads at the pathetic little men in London and Paris.

  In an act of revenge, fifteen minutes before the cease-fire was to begin on March 13, the Soviets opened up with a massive artillery bombardment. Stalined a third time.

  The Soviets got their land, so in a limited sense they won the war. But enough victories like this can destroy a country. The Russians suffered about 250,000 dead and a similar number of wounded. The Finns had about 25,000 dead, a ratio of ten Russians per Finn. The Finnish wounded amounted to about 43,000. In a one-hundred-day war, that was solely a sideshow as 2,500 Russians died each day. They suffered so many casualties that after the war a Russian gen­eral grimly joked that they had won “just enough land to bury our dead.”