The Winter War: Soviet Divisions Swallowed by the Snow

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An army marched into a country fifty times smaller than itself, and the snow swallowed it. White shadows gliding through the forest on skis cut columns of tanks kilometres long into pieces and froze them where they stood. Finland lost that war — but in Berlin the wrong lesson was drawn, and that lesson cost millions of lives.

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The published text of the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 was an ordinary diplomatic document stating that the two countries would not attack one another. What actually mattered was the secret additional protocol attached beneath the signatures, a document whose existence would be denied for decades. That protocol divided a belt of land running from the Baltic to the Carpathians in two, as though drawn with a ruler. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. Nobody in Helsinki had read those lines, but over the course of the autumn they would come to understand, step by step, what had happened.

The Soviet Union's concern, at least in the form it was described in official language, was geography. Leningrad, the country's second capital, its industrial heart and the base of the Baltic Fleet, lay only 32 kilometres from the Finnish border. A long-range artillery battery placed on the Karelian Isthmus could pound the centre of the city. In Moscow's eyes this, combined with the possibility that a hostile great power might use Finnish soil as a base, was an intolerable exposure. In Helsinki's eyes the same map said something entirely different: a country of 3.7 million was being asked to hand over its own defensive line in order to satisfy the security anxieties of a neighbour of 170 million.

On 5 October 1939 the Finnish government was summoned to Moscow. The man sent to the talks was one of the country's most experienced diplomats, Juho Kusti Paasikivi; in later rounds the Finance Minister, Väinö Tanner, joined the delegation. The demands laid on the table were clear. The border on the Karelian Isthmus would be pulled several dozen kilometres westward, a series of islands in the Gulf of Finland would be handed over, the western tip of the Rybachy Peninsula in the north would be surrendered, and, heaviest of all, the Hanko Peninsula, which controls the approach to Helsinki, would be leased to the Soviet navy as a base for thirty years. In return the Soviet Union offered an area in East Karelia twice the size of what it was demanding. But the territory on offer was empty forest, while what was being asked for was Finland's most densely populated, most fertile, most industrialised region, and it sat directly on top of the defensive line.

Three rounds of talks were held. The Finnish delegation showed flexibility on the islands and on pulling the border back to some degree, but held firm on Hanko. Placing a naval base at the door of the capital meant, in their view, the end of neutrality. On 13 November the negotiations broke off and the delegation returned to Helsinki by train. Each side believed the other was bluffing.

On the afternoon of 26 November, seven artillery shells exploded near the village of Mainila on the Soviet side of the border. Within hours Moscow radio announced that Finnish artillery had opened fire on Soviet units, that 4 soldiers had been killed and 9 wounded. Helsinki's response was calm and technical: Finnish artillery had been withdrawn out of range of the border weeks earlier precisely to prevent the risk of such a provocation, and they proposed that the incident be examined by a joint commission. The proposal was rejected. On 28 November the Soviet Union renounced the 1932 non-aggression pact between the two countries, and on 29 November it severed diplomatic relations.

On the morning of 30 November 1939, artillery fire began along the full 1,300 kilometres of the border. That same day Soviet bombers were over Helsinki; the bombs that fell on the city killed 91 people. On the first day of the war, the lenses of the world's press saw a European capital burning.

The numbers were merciless. Through mobilisation Finland had been able to put roughly 300 thousand people under arms; the army had 32 tanks and 114 combat aircraft, and some of those were in unusable condition. The number of anti-tank guns was, given the width of front to be defended, absurdly small. On the other side there were 425 thousand soldiers in the first wave, thousands of armoured vehicles and more than three thousand aircraft. Soviet planners had calculated that the operation would take two weeks; the troops had been told not to frighten Finnish workers, and to take care not to stray onto Swedish territory as they crossed the border.

On 1 December Moscow proclaimed a government in the border town of Terijoki. At its head was Otto Wille Kuusinen, a Finnish communist who had lived in the Soviet Union for years, and this cabinet called itself the Finnish Democratic Republic. This was Moscow's official thesis: the Soviet Union was not at war with Finland, it was helping a fraternal people at the invitation of the legitimate Finnish government. The fiction did not work diplomatically either. On 14 December the League of Nations made one of the sharpest moves it had made since its foundation and expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation.

In Finland, supreme command was given to the 72-year-old Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. A man who had served for years as an officer in the Russian army, crossed Central Asia on horseback and commanded the white side in the civil war of 1918, he had for years been objecting to his own country's defence budget. Now he had to defend a line that bore his name but fell far short of its legend.

The most ambitious part of the Soviet plan was not in the south, on the Karelian Isthmus. The truly audacious idea sat in the middle of the map. At that latitude Finland was at its narrowest: from the eastern border to the city of Oulu on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia was about 250 kilometres as the crow flies. If a Soviet division could cross that corridor and reach the sea, the country would be cut in two and the only rail link between north and south would be severed.

This task was given to the 163rd Rifle Division. They crossed the border at the beginning of December and entered the town of Suomussalmi on 7 December. When they entered, the town was burning; the retreating Finns had set fire to it with their own hands, so as to leave the enemy not a single roof. The Soviet soldiers found themselves in the middle of snow-covered rubble.

The Finnish unit sent to the area was the 9th Division under Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo. The force at his disposal was not even half of what faced him, and in heavy weapons there was no comparison at all. But the terrain was on his side. There were no roads here, there was one road; beyond it lay frozen marsh, lakes and coniferous forest. A motorised division could not leave that single road. A convoy stretching for kilometres was turning into a line too thin to defend itself.

The Finns began to cut that line. The name of the tactic later passed into military literature in its Finnish form: motti. The word is in fact a forestry term, describing a stacked cubic metre of firewood. And that was exactly what was being done. Small units on skis slipped through the forest to the flanks of the convoy, set up roadblocks a few kilometres apart, then melted away the groups trapped between those points one by one. Once a motti had formed, the Finnish commanders were in no hurry. They waited until the encircled unit ran out of hot food, of fuel, of fire. The cold fought in their place.

That cold was extraordinary. The winter of 1939-1940 was one of the harshest of the century; in January the temperature at some measuring stations fell below minus 40 degrees. Most of the Soviet soldiers had come from Ukraine and from regions further south, they did not know how to ski, their uniforms were khaki and they were visible in the snow from kilometres away. They had to light fires to keep warm; and the smoke of the fire gave the sniper an address.

Between 27 December and 30 December the 163rd Division fell apart. The survivors fled eastward across the ice of the frozen lake Kiantajärvi; on open ice there was no cover at all.

When Moscow heard of this disaster it sent reinforcements: the 44th Rifle Division. This was a showpiece formation, raised in Ukraine, well equipped, motorised, with armoured support, some 17 thousand strong. It began advancing westward along the Raate road to rescue its encircled comrades. The place where it became stuck was a few kilometres east of the place where the division it had come to rescue had died.

On 1 January 1940 Siilasvuo's troops closed the road. Then, by the same method, with roughly 6 thousand men, they set about cutting the 44th Division apart piece by piece. Because the divisional commander, Alexei Vinogradov, was ordered to hold his position and force the road open rather than pull the column back, his troops waited for days in a narrow strip, jammed in among their own vehicles. The tanks could not turn, the trucks were locked against one another. Finnish mortar and machine-gun fire came down onto that crowd.

By 7 January it was over. According to Finnish estimates, between 7 and 9 thousand Soviet soldiers lost their lives on that road and around 1,300 were taken prisoner; Soviet reports gave a far lower figure. Siilasvuo's losses were 900 dead and 1,200 wounded. The spoils left in the snow became one of the most photographed images of the war: 43 tanks, 71 field guns, 260 trucks, more than a thousand horses, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and a quantity of automatic weapons the Finnish army could not until then have dreamed of. A frozen scrapyard kilometres long, lined up along both sides of the road.

On 11 January Vinogradov, together with his chief of staff and his regimental commissar, was brought before a military tribunal and shot in front of the surviving soldiers. The charge was that the unit had abandoned its heavy weapons to the enemy. Perhaps the clearest document of the panic that events on the Raate road created in the Soviet chain of command is that execution order.

What happened at Suomussalmi was not an accident confined to a single sector; the same logic was at work along the whole of Finland's central and northern fronts. The Finnish army's real weapon was not its guns or its tanks, but the way it used the terrain.

Skiing in Finland was not a military skill but a part of daily life. A Finnish patrol could move through the forest at close to ten kilometres an hour and pass unnoticed alongside a column stranded on a road. White snow smocks were the cheapest and most effective piece of equipment of that winter. The soldiers slept away from settlements, in tents, under canvas with a stove burning in the middle; sentry rotations were arranged so that men stayed warm. The other side, for the most part, had to spend the night in the open, and the number of those who froze to death rivalled the number killed in combat.

Against armoured vehicles there was nothing decent to hand, so ingenuity became a necessity. Tank hunters jammed logs between the tracks and threw petrol bottles onto the engine grille. The name of that petrol bottle was born in this war. When Vyacheslav Molotov said that what was being dropped on Helsinki was not bombs but food sent to the hungry Finnish people, the Finns answered that statement with sarcasm: they called the cluster bomb the Molotov bread basket, and, as the drink that went with it, they named the incendiary bottle the Molotov cocktail. The state alcohol monopoly produced roughly 450 thousand of these bottles by the end of the winter, each crated together with a burning wick in place of a match.

But the most feared inhabitant of the forest was not a weapon but a man. In the north, northeast of Lake Ladoga, at a place called Kollaa, Soviet units failed to break the Finnish lines from the beginning of December until the end of the war. When an officer in the sector was asked whether the line would hold, his short answer became the slogan of the entire country: Kollaa kestää, that is, Kollaa holds.

In one of the infantry regiments defending that line there was a private of 34, a farmer by background, around 1.60 metres tall: Simo Häyhä. Before the war he had competed in marksmanship contests with a hunting rifle, and trophies hung on the wall of his house. The weapon he was handed at Kollaa was a Finnish-made marksman's rifle, and it had no telescopic sight. Häyhä refused to use a scope. His reasoning was entirely practical: the glass of a scope glints in the sun, mists over in the cold, and forces you to raise your head a few centimetres higher when aiming. Firing over open sights made his silhouette in the snow smaller by those few centimetres.

His methods amounted to patience. He would pack down the snow in front of his position until it hardened, so that the gas from the muzzle would not throw up a cloud of snow. He held snow in his mouth so that the vapour of his breath would not show. He dressed in layers beneath his white camouflage and waited for hours without moving. According to Finnish records, in a period of a little over a hundred days, 505 confirmed hits were registered; targets he shot with a light machine gun were outside that figure. The name given to him among Soviet soldiers became the best-known nickname of the war: the White Death.

It should also be added that all of these figures rest on front-line records, witness statements and company ledgers; historians point out that numbers of this kind are by their nature open to debate. But the fact that Häyhä's name entered Soviet reports is an indication of how a single soldier can change the psychology of a line. The other side used artillery fire against him and sent its own snipers. In the end it was a marksman who succeeded. On 6 March 1940, during a fresh assault on Kollaa, a bullet struck Häyhä and shattered the left side of his jaw. Those who carried him back on a stretcher did not think he would live. When Häyhä came out of his coma the war was over; his face carried the mark of that day for the rest of his life, and he died in 2002 at the age of 96.

What this war of invisibility cost Finland was not apparent from the outside. The world's press told the story of white-cloaked skiers stopping a giant army as a piece of romance. Yet in the same week Finnish companies were losing men they could not replace. When one of its divisions was destroyed, the Soviet Union could send three more in its place; Finland had no such reserve, and the country's most precious resource, its people, was running out as the month drew on.

What took place in Moscow during December and January was the real turning point that determined the course of the war. The Soviet command, instead of concealing its losses, changed its method.

On 7 January Semyon Timoshenko was placed at the head of the forces on the isthmus. What Timoshenko did was not a display of tactical brilliance but, on the contrary, a ruthless simplification. He abandoned entirely the practice of sending deep columns through the forests. The adventurous operations in the north were halted; the whole weight was shifted to the Karelian Isthmus, the only open ground where tanks and artillery could be used. Behind the front, exact replicas of the Finnish defensive positions were built in poured concrete, and the assault units drilled on these copies for weeks. How the infantry and the tanks would move together, which bunker would be silenced by which artillery battery, was planned in advance to the minute. Heavy howitzers were pushed forward and positioned to fire over open sights, targeting the concrete positions one by one.

On 1 February 1940 the bombardment began. In the first days hundreds of thousands of shells fell on the Finnish lines. This was no longer a war of manoeuvre; it was the operation of physically erasing a particular point on the line together with everything on it. The soldiers in the Finnish trenches waited for days underground, unable to speak, unable to sleep. The legend of the Mannerheim Line dissolved here as well. Soviet propaganda had compared it to the Maginot Line; in reality most of the line consisted of earth trenches, barbed wire and granite tank obstacles, the number of concrete positions that could be called modern was around forty, and most of those dated from the 1920s.

On 11 February the line was broken in the Lähde sector, next to the position at Summa. The strongest concrete position in the area, a bunker known popularly as the million-mark bunker because of the money spent building it, was smashed by direct fire and the tanks came through behind it. The Finnish command threw in its last reserves to close the breach and could not close it. On 15 February Mannerheim gave the order he had avoided giving since the start of the war: abandon the main line, fall back to the intermediate line. At the beginning of March a second withdrawal followed.

By the end of February the Finnish army was fighting the laws of physics. Artillery shells were being distributed by daily quota; batteries were told how many rounds they could fire at a target. The strength of the companies at the front had fallen by half, and the replacements arriving were often old men or very young ones with two weeks of training. On roads with no anti-aircraft cover, supply convoys could not move by day.

At the beginning of March the Soviet forces made a move nobody had seriously expected: they walked across the ice of Viipuri Bay. Finland's second largest city, Viipuri, the town known today within Russia's borders as Vyborg, was thus threatened with encirclement from the west. The Finns tried to break the ice with artillery fire and flood the water over it; the ice was so thick that light tanks were crossing it. As the ring around the city tightened, the government in Helsinki was no longer making a military calculation but an arithmetical one.

No help came from outside, because it was not possible for it to come. Emotional support was abundant: newspapers all over the world were writing about Finland, donation campaigns were being organised. The Swedish government did not formally enter the war but opened its border to volunteers, and more than 8 thousand Swedish, Danish and Norwegian volunteers served on the northern front; a small group of Americans of Finnish origin also crossed the Atlantic. Britain and France, for their part, offered to send an expeditionary force. But for that force to reach Finland it had to pass through Norway and Sweden, and both countries refused permission in order not to lose their neutrality. Moreover the plan had another leg that was not spoken about openly: the same route ran through the region containing the Swedish iron mines that fed Germany's war industry. The Finnish government could get no clear answer as to when the promised divisions would arrive or how many men they would bring. Mannerheim reported the situation to the government in a soldier's language: the army could hold out for a few more weeks, and he could guarantee nothing beyond that.

Peace talks began at the end of February through Swedish mediation and were signed in Moscow on the evening of 12 March. The ceasefire came into effect the following day, at 11 o'clock on the morning of 13 March 1940. At that hour there was still firing at the front; when the order to cease came, some Finnish companies at first thought they had misunderstood it, because they were being told to give up ground they had not once abandoned.

The terms were far heavier than those rejected in October. Finland handed over the whole of the Karelian Isthmus including Viipuri, the Karelian region north of Lake Ladoga, the area around Salla in the north, the islands in the Gulf of Finland and part of the Rybachy Peninsula. The Hanko Peninsula was leased as a naval base for thirty years. In total, 11 percent of the country's territory and roughly a third of its industrial capacity changed hands.

The human equivalent of those lines is this: 422 thousand people, that is roughly 12 percent of Finland's population, left their homes. Almost everyone living in the ceded region chose to go rather than stay. In less than ten days a column of migration formed, moving westward loaded onto sledges and horse carts; herds of cattle, farm implements, church bells and stones prised out of cemeteries were part of that column too. The rest of the country was obliged to carry out a land reform in order to settle these people. On the day peace was declared the flags were lowered to half-mast; it was marked not as a victory celebration but as a day of mourning.

The balance sheet was heavy for both sides, but it was not symmetrical. Finland lost 25,904 dead and had more than 43 thousand wounded. On the Soviet side, according to the calculation published by the Russian military historian Grigori Krivosheyev after the archives were opened, irrecoverable losses came to 126,875: 71,214 killed in combat, 16,292 who died in hospital of wounds or illness, and 39,369 missing or taken prisoner. To these were added roughly 265 thousand wounded, frostbite cases and sick. In other words, a winter war of three and a half months had cost the Soviet Union more than five times the number of Finnish dead. After the war ended, most of the Soviet prisoners who were returned were sent not to their home towns but to camps; having been taken prisoner was in itself an accusation.

But the longest-lasting effect of this war was felt neither in Helsinki nor in Moscow. It was felt in Berlin.

The reports of the German military attachés described Soviet tanks abandoned on the snow, divisions falling apart, commanders being shot. The conclusion drawn from this picture was that the Red Army had been left headless by the purges that had been running since 1937, that its officer corps was incompetent and its units demoralised. The conclusion itself was not entirely wrong; what was wrong was assuming it to be a permanent condition. Hitler's description of the Soviet Union as a giant with feet of clay, and the remark reported to have been made to his inner circle during the preparations for Barbarossa that it was enough to kick in the door, came directly out of this reading of the winter war.

Yet Moscow was reading the same reports and had drawn a different conclusion. As soon as the war ended, a meeting attended by senior commanders was held at the Kremlin in April. It was an accounting of a candour rarely matched in Soviet military history: the units had no winter training, the maps were wrong, radio communication did not work, commanders were afraid to take the initiative. The results came quickly. In May 1940 the People's Commissariat of Defence was taken from Kliment Voroshilov and given to Timoshenko. Command ranks were restored. In August, the authority of the political commissar attached to each commander to countersign orders was abolished and there was a return to the principle of single command. Automatic weapons production, winter equipment and joint tank-infantry training were given priority. None of these reforms had been completed when June 1941 arrived, and the Soviet army suffered the greatest defeat in its history in the first months. But the door did not fall in from a single kick.

For Finland, too, the story did not end in 1940. The lost territories and the Soviet base at Hanko drew the country, fifteen months later, into a second war alongside Germany in the hope of taking back what it had lost. It did not come out of that war with any territorial gain either. But what remained standing at the end of both was the thing the other small states around it lost: Finland preserved its independence and its own political order.

Today, east of Suomussalmi, beside the Raate road, at the place where the column was crushed in those January days, a monument stands. It is made up of roughly 20 thousand stones; each stone represents a soldier who lost his life on those few kilometres of road, and they are not separated according to which uniform he wore. On the pole at the centre of the monument hang 105 bells, one for each day the war lasted. When the wind blows, the bells strike against one another. Those who go there in winter describe how silent the forest is apart from that sound.

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