All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  US president Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his London ambassador Joseph Kennedy on 30 October 1939: ‘While the [First] World War did not bring forth strong leadership in Great Britain, this war may do so, because I am inclined to think the British public has more humility than before and is slowly but surely getting rid of the “muddle through” attitude of the past.’ FDR’s optimism would ultimately prove justified, but only after many more months of ‘muddle through’.

  The next act of the struggle increased the world’s bewilderment and confusion of loyalties, for it was undertaken not by Hitler, but by Stalin. Like all Europe’s tyrants, Russia’s leader assessed the evolving conflict in terms of the opportunities it offered him for aggrandisement. In the autumn of 1939, having secured eastern Poland, he sought further to enhance the Soviet Union’s strategic position by advancing into Finland. The country, a vast, sparsely inhabited wilderness of lakes and forests, was one among many whose frontier, indeed very existence, was of short duration, and thus vulnerable to challenge. Part of Sweden until the Napoleonic Wars, thereafter it was ruled by Russia until 1918, when Finnish anti-Bolsheviks triumphed in a civil war.

  In October 1939, Stalin determined to strengthen the security of Leningrad, only thirty miles inside Soviet territory, by pushing back the nearby Finnish frontier across the Karelian isthmus, and occupying Finnish-held islands in the Baltic; he also coveted nickel mines on Finland’s north coast. A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly. Arvo Tuominen, a prominent Finnish communist, declined Stalin’s invitation to form a shadow puppet government, and went into hiding. Tuominen said: ‘It would be wrong, it would be criminal, it was not a picture of the free rule of the people.’

  At 0920 on 30 November, Russian aircraft launched the first of many bomber attacks on Helsinki, causing little damage save to the Soviet Legation and the nerves of the British ambassador, who asked to be relieved of his post. Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: ‘They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?’ The nation’s defence was entrusted to seventy-two-year-old Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, hero of many conflicts, most recently Finland’s civil war. As a Tsarist officer posted to Lhasa, Mannerheim had once taught the Dalai Lama pistol-shooting; he spoke seven languages, Finnish least fluently. His hauteur was comparable to that of Charles de Gaulle; his ruthlessness had been manifested in the 1919–20 purges of the defeated Finnish communists.

  During the 1930s Mannerheim had constructed a fortified line across the Karelian isthmus, to which his name was given. He suffered no delusions about his country’s strategic weakness, and had urged conciliation of Stalin. But when his countrymen opted to fight, he set about managing the defence with cool professionalism. Before the Russians attacked, the Finns adopted a scorched-earth policy, evacuating from the forward areas 100,000 civilians, some of whom adopted an impressively stoical attitude to their sacrifice: border guards who warned an old woman to quit her home were amazed, on returning to burn it, to find that she had swept and cleaned the interior before leaving. On the table lay matches, kindling wood, and a note: ‘When one gives a gift to Finland, one desires that it should be like new.’ But it was a distressing business to destroy housing and installations around the Petsamo nickel-mining centre, which had been constructed with infinite labour and difficulty inside the Arctic Circle. The frontier zone was heavily booby-trapped: mines triggered by pull-ropes were laid, to smash the ice in front of invaders attacking across frozen lakes.

  Stalin committed twelve divisions to assaults in a dozen sectors. Most of his soldiers were told that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union, but some were disbelieving and bewildered. Captain Ismael Akhmedov heard a Ukrainian peasant say, ‘Comrade Commander. Tell me, why do we fight this war? Did not Comrade Voroshilov declare at the Party Congress that we don’t want an inch of other people’s land and we will not surrender an inch of ours? Now we are going to fight? For what?’ An officer sought to explain the perils of acquiescing in a frontier so close to Leningrad, but Moscow’s strategic ambitions roused scant enthusiasm among those ordered to fulfil them, most of whom were hastily mobilised local reservists.

  Stalin was untroubled. Confident that his attacking force of 120,000 men, six hundred tanks and a thousand guns could overwhelm the Mannerheim Line, he ignored his generals’ warnings about the restricted approaches to Finland. Tanks and vehicles were obliged to advance on narrow axes between lakes, forests and swamps. Though the Finns had little artillery and few anti-tank weapons, so inept were the Soviet assaults that the defenders wreaked havoc on their columns with rifle and machine-gun fire. The snowy wastelands of eastern Finland were soon deeply stained with blood; some defenders succumbed to nervous exhaustion after mowing down advancing Russians at close range hour after hour. Soviet armour suffered 60 per cent losses, chiefly because tanks advanced without infantry support. Most fell victim to primitive weapons, notably bottles filled with petrol and capped with a flaming wick, which caused them to explode into liquid fire when smashed against a vehicle. Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet ‘Molotov bread-basket’, then ‘Molotov cocktail’, first entered the military lexicon.

  Mannerheim observed dryly that the attackers came on ‘with a fatalism incomprehensible to a European’. A hysterical Soviet battalion commander told his officers: ‘Comrades, our attack was unsuccessful; the division commander has just given me the order personally – in seven minutes, we attack again.’ The Soviet columns lumbered forward once more – and were slaughtered. Some Finnish units adopted large-scale guerrilla tactics, striking at Soviet units from the forests, then withdrawing. They sought to break up the attackers’ formations then destroy them piecemeal, calling such encounters ‘motti’ – ‘firewood’ battles – chopping up the enemy. Among the heroes of the campaign was Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, who collapsed with a heart condition in the midst of one action, but somehow kept going. Like most of his fighting countrymen, Pajari was an amateur soldier, but he achieved a notable little victory against much superior forces at Tolvajärvi. During weeks of fighting at Kollaa, the Finns deployed two French 3.5? guns cast in 1871, which fired black powder charges. In the northern sector, the defence was supported by a 1918-vintage armoured train, bustling to and fro between threatened points.

  The Red Army was grotesquely ill-equipped for winter war: its 44th Division, for instance, issued men with a manual on ski tactics, but no skis; in the first weeks, Russian tanks were not even painted white. The Finns, by contrast, dispatched ski patrols to cut roads behind the front and attack supply columns, often at night. One Finnish Jaeger regiment was led by Col. Hjalmar Siialsvuo. A peacetime lawyer, short, blond and tough, he galvanised the protracted defence of Suomussalmi village, and eventually found himself commanding a division. The Russians were impressed by the proficiency of Finnish snipers, whom they called ‘cuckoos’. The chief of staff of Gen. Vasily Chuikov’s Ninth Army produced an analysis of Soviet failures which concluded that the offensive had been too road-bound: ‘Our units, saturated by technology (especially artillery and transport vehicles), are incapable of manoeuvre and combat in this theatre.’ Soldiers, he said, are ‘frightened by the forest and cannot ski’.

  The Finns deplored everything about the manner in which their enemies made war. One desperate Russian general sought to clear a minefield by driving a herd of horses through it, and the animal-loving defenders were appalled by the resultant carnage. A man gazing on heaped Russian corpses in the northern sector said: ‘The wolves will eat well this year.’ Carl Mydans, a photographer for America’s Life magazine, described the scene on one frozen battlefield: ‘The fighting was almost over as we walked up the snow-banked path that
led from the road to the river … The Russian dead spotted the ice crust. They lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters, with sausage and bread and shoes. Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow under the tall black pines.’

  The Finnish Campaign

  Around the world, the Soviet assault inspired bewilderment, increased by the fact that the swastika was a Finnish good-luck symbol. Popular sentiment ran strongly in favour of the victims: in fascist Italy, there were pro-Finnish demonstrations. The British and French saw Stalin’s action as further evidence of the Russo-German vulture collaboration manifested in Poland, though in reality Berlin was no party to it. There was a surge of Allied enthusiasm for dispatching military aid to Finland. French general Maxime Weygand wrote to Gamelin urging this course, which in French eyes had the supreme virtue of moving the war away from France: ‘I regard it as essential to break the back of the Soviet Union in Finland … and elsewhere.’ But, while there was intense discussion of possible Anglo-French expeditions to Finland during the months that followed, the practical difficulties seemed overwhelming. If Winston Churchill had then been British prime minister, it is likely that he would have launched operations against the Russians. But the Chamberlain government, in which as First Sea Lord Churchill represented a minority voice for activism, had no stomach for a gratuitous declaration of war on the Soviet Union when the German menace was still unaddressed.

  Marshal Mannerheim conducted his campaign to a meticulous personal routine: he was woken at 0700 in his quarters at the Seuranhoe Hotel in Mikkeli, some forty miles behind the front, appeared immaculately dressed for breakfast an hour later, then drove to his headquarters in an abandoned schoolhouse a few hundred yards distant. In the tiny, intimate society of Finland, he insisted upon having casualty lists read aloud to him, name by name. During the first weeks of war, knowing the limitations of his army, he resolutely resisted subordinates’ pleas to advance and exploit their successes, but on 23 December a Finnish counter-attack was indeed launched across the Karelian isthmus. Infantry charged forward crying ‘Hakkaa paale!’ – ‘Cut them down!’; lacking artillery and air support, they were repulsed with heavy losses.

  The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice. Stalin’s response to the setbacks, indeed humiliations, of the December offensive was to replace failed senior officers – one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag – and to commit massive reinforcements. Ice roads capable of bearing tanks were built by laying logs on trampled snow, then spraying them with water which was allowed to freeze. The Finns had started the war with three weeks’ supply of artillery ammunition, and fuel and small-arms ammunition for sixty days; by January, these stocks were almost exhausted.

  The world greeted Finland’s initial successes with awe: Mannerheim became a popular hero in western Europe, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier promised the Finns reinforcements of a hundred aircraft and 50,000 men before the end of February, but never lifted a finger to make good on his pledge. The writer Arthur Koestler, in Paris, wrote contemptuously that French excitement about Finnish victories recalled ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’. In Britain the left, represented by its weekly organ Tribune, at first offered reflexive support to Moscow’s cause, then abruptly switched allegiance to back the Finns.

  Churchill regarded Soviet action as direct kin to Nazi aggression. Britain’s First Sea Lord exulted in Stalin’s failure, declaring in a broadcast on 20 January: ‘Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a Nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.’

  The Finns were heartened by such rhetoric. British Tory MP Harold Macmillan, who visited Finland, reported a Helsinki woman ticket-collector saying to him: ‘The women of Finland will fight on, because they believe that you are coming to help them.’ Eight thousand Swedes, eight hundred Norwegians and Danes, together with a few American and British civilians, volunteered to take up arms; some reached the war zone, but none served to any effect. Britain had few enough weapons for its own armed forces, and had nothing significant to spare for a nation which might be struggling gallantly, but was not fighting the power against which it was itself making war. Thirty Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters were dispatched, of which eighteen were lost in action within ten days; the Finns were obliged to pay cash for the aircraft, a foretaste of neutral American policy towards Britain.

  There was no doubt of the strength of British popular sentiment in Finland’s favour, but next to nothing was done to translate this into action, save to prepare an expedition to Narvik, neutral Norway’s northern ice-free port. The Allies were attracted by the notion of exploiting the pretext of aiding the Finns to land in Norway and sever Germany’s winter link to Sweden’s iron-ore mines. The cynicism that had characterised Allied policy during the Polish campaign thus reasserted itself. In the early months of 1940 London and Paris urged the Finns to keep fighting, because if they quit there would be no excuse for intervention in Norway. A wild French proposal to land an expeditionary force at Petsamo on the north coast was vetoed by the British, who still declined to clash headlong with the Russians.

  In mid-January, a new wave of assaults on Finland began. In one position 4,000 Russians attacked thirty-two Finns; they lost four hundred men, but only four defenders survived. On 1 February, the invaders launched a massive bombardment of the Mannerheim Line, followed by infantry and armoured drives in overwhelming strength. The Finnish artillery, such as it was, had almost exhausted its ammunition, but for two weeks the defenders held their positions. An officer, Wolf Haslsti, wrote on 15 February: ‘In the early afternoon, there appeared in front of our tent a reserve ensign, really nothing more than a child, asking if we could spare some food for himself and his men … he was in charge of a platoon of “men” scarcely old enough to shave. They were cold and scared and hungry and on their way to join the troops at the roadblock in front of Lahde.’ Next day Haslsti added: ‘Same reserve ensign back again, blood on his clothes, asking for more food … he lost both guns and half his men when the Russians broke through.’ Finnish sufferings were matched by those of their foes, especially those trapped for weeks in encircled positions. A Russian soldier wrote on 2 February: ‘It’s particularly cold this morning, nearly minus 35C. I was unable to sleep due to the cold. Our artillery has been firing through the night. After I woke I went for a shit, but at that moment the Finns opened fire, one bullet hitting the ground between my legs. I hadn’t had a shit since January 25th.’

  The one-sided struggle could not continue indefinitely. The Finnish government made a last vain plea for Swedish help. The British and French offered token contingents of troops, which embarked on transports but had not yet sailed when on 12 March a Finnish delegation signed an armistice in Moscow. Minutes before this took effect, the Soviets launched a last vengeful bombardment of their vanquished victim’s positions. A Finnish officer wrote to his family: ‘One thing is clear: we have not fled. We were prepared to fight to the last man. We carry our heads high because we have fought with all our might for three and a half months.’

  Carl Mydans found hims
elf on a train to Sweden with three Finnish officers, one of whom opened a conversation with the American: ‘At least you will tell them that we fought bravely.’ Mydans muttered that he would. Then the colonel’s temper snapped: ‘Your country was going to help … You promised, and we believed you.’ He seized Mydans and shook him, screaming: ‘A half-dozen goddamned Brewster fighters with no spare parts! And the British sent us guns from the last war that wouldn’t even work!’ The Finn lapsed into sobs.

  The peace Stalin imposed bemused the world by its moderation. He enforced his territorial demands, amounting to 10 per cent of Finland’s territory, but refrained from occupying the entire country, as he probably could have done. He appears to have been uneasy about provoking international anger at a moment when much larger issues were at stake. His confidence had been shaken by his losses – at least 127,000, perhaps as many as a quarter of a million, dead, against Finland’s 48,243 killed and 420,000 homeless. Soviet prisoners released by the Finns were dispatched by Stalin to the gulag to contemplate their treachery in having accepted captivity.

  The Finnish campaign was irrelevant to the confrontation between Germany and the Allies, but it importantly influenced the strategy of both. They alike concluded that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger; that Stalin’s armies were weak, his commanders bunglers. After the armistice Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in re-arming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide. The Russians learned critical lessons from the Finnish war, and set about equipping the Red Army with winter clothing, snow camouflage and lubricants for sub-zero temperatures, all of which would play a vital role in future campaigns. The world, however, saw only that Russian prestige had been debased by one of Europe’s smallest nations.