An excerpt from Gordon Sander’s book, The Hundred Day Winter War
THE HUNDRED DAY WINTER WAR
Chapter One
"A Wild Day”
November 30, 1939
RUSSIANS START THEIR INVASION OF FINLAND
PLANES DROP BOMBS ON AIRFIELD AT HELSINKI
WAR STARTS AS U.S. MOVE FOR PEACE IS MADE
New York Times, November 30, 1939
I remember everything quite clearly. My memories are so clear they still torture me sometimes. When it's cold and snowy, I can picture myself in those trenches like it was yesterday.
-Dr. Eric Malm, who served as a platoon leader
with the 10th Finnish Regiment on the Mannerheim Line
What do I remember the most from the war? It was the incompetence of our army, as it could not deal with a handful of Finns in a proper manner and in good time. They [the Finns] showed us how to fight a war.
-Georgi V. Prusakov, Soviet medic who fought the war with the 100th Independent Volunteer Ski Battalion
Invading armies rarely signal their intentions with music, but something like that occurred on the afternoon of November 29, 1939, at the border village of Alakurtti, in eastern Lapland. The Finnish frontier guards stationed there that day were astonished to see a Soviet military band, in full regalia, suddenly appear out of the gloaming on the forest road leading to the Russian and Finnish customs barriers. Marching right up to the gate, the khaki-adorned orchestra suddenly stood fast. Then at a signal from the bandmaster, the musicians proceeded to play "The Internationale."
Uncertain how to respond, one of the perplexed Finnish frontier guards called up the commander of the area, Colonel Vila Villamo, a genial warrior who had been commander of the area since the Finnish Civil War twenty years before,and held the receiver out of the window so the former could hear the uninvited Red serenaders. Upon hearing the old Communist call to arms, the alarmed officer ordered the head guard of the normally sleepy outposts to issue ammunition and stand ready for anything. And so the tense guards did, as the musical berserkers proceeded to play an entire program of Soviet militant gut once again guards, as well as the trees, before disappearing into the twilight once again.
Villamo’s instincts proved sound: the very next morning, the Finns suffered some of their first dead at Alakurtti, by then, the entire country was under attack.
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The longest day in the history of modern Helsinki began quietly enough. Christian Ilmoni, a student at Helsinki University, was walking down Stenbackinkatu, a quiet residential street in the center of town, when he saw the first Soviet Tupolev SB-2 bombers plummet out of the low clouds covering the dark morning sky. The time was 9 A.M. The raid, the first of three conducted that day by the Red Air Force, marked the first time that Finns, no less than anyone in that part of the world, had seen a hostile aircraft at least since the Finnish Civil War twenty years before, let alone an entire squadron of bombing planes (as they were then quaintly called) flying in unison. It was also the first inkling to Helsinkians that Finland was actually, irrevocably at war with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, something that- despite the rapidly increasing tensions between the two countries over the past few days, including an obviously trumped-up border incident by the Soviets four days before-many of those like Ilmoni who were caught out by the surprise attack could not take in.
Ilmoni, who was on his way to class that morning, happened to be walking past the home of Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the Finnish minister to Sweden, former prime minister, and future president when he spotted the first Red bomber flying parallel to the street. Seven weeks before, on October 7, the twenty-one-year-old university student had been amongst the large throng of anxious Helsinkians who had accompanied Paasikivi and his fellow negotiators, Colonel Aladar Paasonen and Minister Counsellor Johan Nykopp, to the main Helsinki railway station, as they prepared to board the night train to Moscow, where Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov had "invited" them in order to discuss "concrete political questions."
To prove to the Russians that they weren't in the mood to do what the Soviets wanted, the stubborn Finns had decided to take the slow, fifteen-hour train to Moscow rather than fly, as their cowed counterparts from the other independent Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had recently done in response to their respective summonses from the Kremlin. Nineteen years before, Paasikivi had participated in the negotiations with the three-year-old Soviet Russian entity, then weary and impoverished after six cotinuous years of war and revolution, at the historic southern Estonian city of Tartu. The subsequent treaty--one of two the Bolsheviks grudgingly signed there, one with the triumphant Finns, the other with the no less ebullient Estonians, who had just won their own hard-fought war of independence from Moscow confirmed the new 1,600-kilometer- long Soviet-Fenno border, which, as the hinns insisted, mirrored the one they had shared with Russia during bygone Grand Duchy days.
Additionally, in line with Helsinki's wishes, the treaty they signed, known as the Peace of Tartu, granted Suomi the valuable, ice-free Arctic port of Persamo in exchange for a slice of the Karelian Isthmus, the 150-by-100-kilometer neck of land joining southeastern Finland with northwestern Russia, just as the benevolent Tsar Alexander Il had promised his Finnish subjects back in 1860. The steamer carrying Paasikivi and the other exultant Finnish delegates back to Helsinki following that successtul conclave, which effectively sealed Finland's century-long quest for independence from Russia, returned to resounding dockside cheers.
That was in 1920. Now, nearly two decades later, the ruddy-faced, sixty-nine-year-old Paasikivi, summoned back from what he had assumed would be his last posting in Stockholm, little thinking that he still had an entire political career ahead of him prepared to leave to meet with Joseph Stalin, now the all powerful head of a resurgent Soviet Union intent on reestablishing Russian influence in the Baltic basin. Now, in the second month of what would
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ultimately erupt into the five-year cataclysm known as the Second World War, it was, once again, the turn of the Communist heirs of Peter the Great and Alexander I to redraw the Baltic map in their favor. Now, as Paasikivi and his anxious four million countrymen knew, as he and his colleagues solemnly boarded the train for Moscow, they held nothing less than the fate of the Finnish nation in their hands. And yet, anxious though they were, the Finns who flocked to the great train station were not of a mood to appease the Kremlin. Then, as the fateful train pulled out and the avuncular Paasikivi doffed his homburg in farewell, the crowd spontaneously began to sing Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
As Max Jakobson, who witnessed the scene as a sixteen-year-old youth, would later write, the serenaders who came to see Paasikivi off, as well as those who met his train down the line as it chugged across Karelia, "showed an astonishing, almost unnatural lack of alarm, as if through an undirected, spontaneous, almost organic effort of self-discipline, [they] were silently bracing themselves to face some force of nature.... They did not sing patriotic songs on behalf of a policy of appeasement." As Paasikivi told Stalin, "They won't sing for us if we tell them that we have given away Hanko," referring to the historic, strategically located Finnish fort-cum-spa situated on the southernmost tip of Finland that the Kremlin adamantly insisted on having back for itself?
Seven weeks of on-and-off negotiations--which had ultimately foundered over the pivotal issue of Hanko--were helped along by a fabricated incident at the border town of Mainila. There, the Russians, stealing a page from the Germans (who had used a similar pretext for their invasion of Poland), arranged for several of their own soldiers to be killed by what they insisted was Finnish artillery fire. Christian Ilmoni thought he saw Paasikivi look out the windows. his house, as the covey of bombers flew by. "I wonder what the Old Man must be thinking now?" he wondered, as he recounted that traumatic day, still crystal clear in retrospect, seventy years later. At first, the unusually low altitude of the Soviet planes, which had flown undetected across the Gulf of Finland from one of the Soviets' new, forcibly acquired Estonian air bases, caused some unsuspecting pedestrians to mistake foe for friend. "The planes were flying absurdly low, less than a thousand feet; Ilmoni recounted. "Some of the people walking nearby actually thought they were our own." "Our own?!” he shouted. "Can't you see the Red star on the wing?”
Moments later came several massive explosions, followed by the sound of strafing, mixed with the slow pom-pom of the 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns that had recently been placed at strategic points around the city, belatedly coming into action to meet the surprise attack. Now, instantly, Helsinkians knew the terrible truth. Once again, as had occurred innumerable times over the centuries, through the Swedish-Novgorodian wars of the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s, through the Lesser and Great Wraths of the eighteenth century, through the Finland War of 1808 by which Finland was severed from Sweden and became a Russian grand duchy, Suomi was under attack from the enemy from the East.
Once again, the city's ululating air raid sirens confirmed, the Russian "tyrant" had come--except that this time he had come from the air. Mai-Lis Toivenen née Paavola, a veteran member of Lotta Svard, the Finnish women's auxiliary based in her hometown of Koivisto at the head of Vipuri Bay, who served in the organization along with I30,000 Other Finnish women during the Winter War, also remembered that epochal morning. The seventeen-year-old Mai-Lis, like
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so many of her countrywomen, had joined the Lotta Svard in the upsurge of patriotism that swept the nation the previous summer, and had worked in a canteen during the autumn. Now she was attending her first class of the day in Viipuri (then Finland's second largest city, located a mere fifty kilometers from the border on the Karelian Isthmus) when the town's alarm began ringing, signaling the start of the Soviet attack. Unlike her Helsinki kinsmen, Mai-Lis had no difficulty identifying the Red bombers. She had already seen plenty of Stalin's "falcons" or "eagles" as they were also called over the past summer as they engaged in arrant--and unchallenged-overflights of Finnish airspace. "I remember seeing how the Russian planes were flying so arrogantly over our skies. They flew so low one could see the faces of the pilots and the Red stars on their wings. It was very odd. Nevertheless we carried on with our lives as best we could." War tensions and Soviet bombers aside, Mai-Lis remembers the summer of 1939, the summer avant le deluge was a good one. "It was very hot that summer," said Toivenen. "I remember swimming a lot." The following day, as war clouds continued to gather over northern Europe and the mobilization continued, Mai-Lis donned the curiously sexless smock of the Lotta Svard and returned to her canteen work at the Koivisto Civil Guards house. Still, despite the proximity of war, including those "arrogant" Red fighters, the attractive teenager, like so many Finns of her sheltered generation who had been fortunate enough to grow up during the peaceful and prosperous 1930s, couldn't quite believe that war would actually come.
Then came the morning of November 30, the clanging school alarm and those droning Red airplanes. Moreover, these Red intruders were dropping bombs. Moments later, as Vipuri was enshrouded in geysers of smoke and debris thrown up by the Russian bombs, her frightened teacher led Mai-Lis and her schoolmates to a stone house across the street for protection.
Twenty-four kilometers and a windswept world away, in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, Mai-Lis's fellow auxiliary worker, Anna-Lisa Veijalainen, a member of the Society for the Care of Coastal Soldiers (RSHY), a women's organization which provided food and entertainment for the thousands of Finnish troops manning the dozens of fortresses along Finland's southern coast, was asleep in the upstairs room of the canteen hall of Tuppura, a small fortified island at the mouth of the Viipuri archipelago, on the morning of the Russian invasion. A year before, Anna-Lisa, then a twenty-one-year-old "domestic science" (as home economics was then called) student in Viipuri, had bravely if somewhat reluctantly accepted an invitation from the SCCS-whose 5,000 volunteer workers labored in the shadows of the far better known lottas- to be hostess of Tuppura canteen. Evidently the prior holder of the post, a flighty type, had fled in a panic after the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938 prompted the increasingly nervous Helsinki government to augment its garrisons on many of its island outposts.
Although the job took some getting used to, Anna-Lisa found that she enjoyed her duties, which entailed making large quantities of coffee and doughnuts for the soldiers and coastguardsmen assigned to Tuppura, as well as otherwise making them comfortable. "Work at the canteen started to feel meaningful," she wrote in her moving 2007 memoir, A Woman at the Front: 1938-45. "We tried as best as we could to create some coziness for the boys, who at that time rarely got leaves, so the war nest' was the only place they could spend their free time."
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Anna-Lisa also grew fond of the relatively large "war nest" itself, a converted officer's club, which featured a spacious kitchen, parquet floors, a recreation room with a working gramophone and a relatively au courant pile of records, a quiet room where "her boys" could write letters home before flopping on the couch, and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the restive green-blue sea. She also fell in love with Tuppura itself, with its yellow expanse of stonecrop and chives pushing up from every crack, and wild pansies. "And no place," she adds, "had bigger lilies of the valley than that island. We carried huge bouquets of them and pansies to the tables of our canteen for the boys to admire."
The main island was connected to Kuningassaari-King Island-so called because Gustavus Ill, the absolutist (and ultimately assassinated) eighteenth century Swedish sovereign had once alighted there to survey his stormy domain. On the rocky tip of the islet there was a lighthouse that guided the large cruise ships that called on Viipuri, Finland's second largest port, as they navigated the treacherous reefs off the surrounding archipelago. To her delight, Anna-Liisa discovered that the adjoining islet also housed a small, elm-enclosed tennis court where she could relax in solitude for a while before crossing the little white bridge that connected Kuningasaari with the main island to return to the cozy canteen and her appreciative charges.
Like her junior land-based colleague Mai-Lis, Anna-Lisa remembers the summer of 1939 as hot and hectic. By this time she had been serving doughnuts and coffee to the men of Tuppura for nearly a year, while Finland prepared for a possible war with its increasingly bellicose neighbor. All was relatively quiet until the morning of November 30, when the storm cloud of Red fighters arrived at Tuppura. It was, she later recalled, her co-worker Hertta Turunen's turn to go downstairs to heat the stove and boil the coffee for "the boys" that morning. She barely had time to get downstairs before the kitchen telephone rang," Anna-Lisa wrote, "when simultaneously several airplanes roared above the fortress almost at rooftop altitude." Even under the hair-raising circumstances, however, her co-worker was careful of her manners: "As a girl of good upbringing Hertta took the time to knock on the door before shouting in shock: “’The aide-de-camp called, we are at war!’” and Major von Behr [the commander of Tuppura] ordered us to get to the pier in less than an hour and to leave the island."
Quickly throwing on her clothes, the formidable auxiliary worker promptly called the major back. "I explained to [him] that I simply could not depart in an hour without leaving the entire stock of canteen possessions unguarded. I was responsible for them!" Shortly afterward, after throwing the canteen cashbox into a suitcase and otherwise doing her best to secure the premises as the furious officer stormed down the pier, Anna-Lisa and her two co-workers were physically shoved into a small tugboat for the ride back to Uraa, the largest of the islands in Viipuri Bay, where the Finns had greater forces and the women would presumably be better protected. Just in case, the self-serious major had told the skipper to make evasive maneuvers if and when the Russian planes returned, "although we found it difficult to see how a small tugboat could manage to evade airplanes on the open sea." Somehow they did." Eva Kilpi, the noted Finnish writer, was then eleven years of age and living with her family in the hamlet of Hitola, 200 kilometers north of Viipuri in Karelia. "Our house was on the shore of a small lake," she recalled, "and if I close my eyes I can imagine it is still summer. In Karelia it was
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always warm and sunny, it seems." Like many of her fellow Karelian schoolchildren, Kilpi had heard about the possibility of war and worried about it. "I used to pray to God to prevent the war. And I remember that I carried the fear of the war inside my child's heart. We didn't quite believe it would come, that it would come to Hiitola."
"But then, when we were eating lunch [that day], suddenly we saw planes coming straight toward our house and father shouted that we should go immediately back to the cellar. And then the bombs started dropping."
Martha Gellhorn, the famed American war correspondent, had just arrived in Helsinki the previous day to report on the growing tension between Finland and Russia, little suspecting that those tensions were about to explode into full-fledged war. Gellhorn was getting ready for breakfast in her room on the second floor of the venerable Hotel Kamp, where the foreign press was headquartered, when she heard the first bombs.
The glamorous thirty-six-year-old journalist had already gained international repute for her dispatches for Collier's from the Spanish Civil War, where she had met her current paramour, the novelist Ernest Hemingway, with whom she was then living in Cuba. In November, with Germany and Russia's joint annexation of Poland a fait accompli, Gellhorn, desirous of reestablishing her journalistic bona fides, wired her editor, Charles Colebaugh, in New York for a frontline assignment.
To the idealistic Bryn Mawr graduate, whose vivid dispatches about the American depression for the Federal Relief Emergency Administration had brought her to the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the stakes were even higher than they had been in Spain, now that as a result of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact the world's two greatest totalitarian states were on the same antidemocratic side. "This was the war to save our skins," Gellhorn wrote. "Now one could only ally one's mind and heart with the innocents-the various unknown peoples who would be paying for [it] with all they had to love and lose."
But where were these new innocents? Poland, divvied up between the Germans and the Russians after its valiant but futile five-week fight, was lost. The Western front was tense but quiet, as the French Army hunkered down in comfort behind the purportedly impregnable Maginot Line. Except for the war at sea, which was beginning to heat up, culminating in the dramatic Battle of the River Plate the only story that would, briefly, take the world's attention away from the Soviet Fenno confrontation that winter-and the occasional aerial skirmish between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe over the English Channel, there was no war. There didn't seem to be a war, just a Phony War, as people called it.
Colebaugh advised Gellhorn to go to Finland. "He thought something might happen there." Like most Americans, Gellhorn knew as little about Finland as she did about Poland. She didn't even know where Finland was until she looked it up on a map. Apparently, she hadn't even heard of Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish track runner and multiple Olympics hero of the 1920s, then
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the most famous Finn in the world except perhaps for Jean Sibelius, the great composer. Gellhorn did some more research. She liked what she found. In addition to being hardworking and fiscally responsible and fleet on their feet (and skis), the Finns, she read, were highly literate and talented beyond their numbers, "a good democracy" -a democracy worth saving.
And so on November 10, armed with her Underwood typewriter and a signed letter of introduction from Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn boarded a Belgium- bound Dutch freighter. Pausing a few days in still-neutral Belgium, Gellhorn crossed the North Sea again, this time by plane, bound for Stockholm, where she stopped for a day before finally flying on to Helsinki, arriving on the afternoon of November 29.
It was not yet three o'clock when Gellhorn's cab rumbled to a stop in front of the venerable seventy-year-old hotel, a legacy from Finland's Grand Duchy days. As Helsinki is wont at that time of year, the capital was already cold and dark. There was no time to take a tour of the city or get an update from her fellow correspondents, a motley crew of Americans, Britons, and sundry Scandinavians who had been covering the off-again, on-again Soviet-Fenno negotiations for the past month, and who, she could see, were massed downstairs desultorily going through the day's press communiqués. The storied old hotel, a long-time center of Finnish society and a watering hole for the Finnish intelligentsia at its palm-bedecked café had been requisitioned by the government for use as a press center. On the night of November 29, perhaps a dozen or so correspondents were in residence there, reduced to filing "local color" features about Finnish dress and cuisine.
Exhausted from her 4,000-mile journey, Gellhorn trooped up the stately old hotel's well-worn carpeted steps to her blacked-out room. Minutes later she was asleep. Then came the bombs. "I’ll be damned," Gellhorn muttered, as she ran to her window overlooking Esplanadi. Colebaugh, it turned out, had been right."
"I saw a huge trimotor [sic] bomber go over at about 1,000 meters," she wrote Hemingway several days later. "Low and slow, just wandering around." But this plane was not dropping bombs but thousands of paper leaflets, which fell on the pavement or caught in the trees of the adjoining pocket park. As the reporter continued to peer outside, dozens of well-dressed Helsinkians, most of whom had been caught by surprise, began making their way to the vaestosuoja, the crude, timber-lined air raid shelters which had been constructed in the center of the park. Several stooped to pick up the Soviet leaflets." One read: "SOLDIERS! PUT DOWN YOUR ARMS RETURN HOME AND PROTECT YOURSELF! PREVENT STARVATION! WE HAVE BREAD!" And another: "Finnish Comrades! We come to you not as conquerors, but as liberators of the Finnish people from the oppression of capitalists and landlords. We must not shoot each other. At the behest of the imperialists Cajander [Aimo Cajander, the Finnish prime minister], Mannerheim, etc. have broken off negotiations and transformed Finland into an armed camp, subjecting the Finnish people to terrible suffering."
Those Helsinkians who bothered to read the leaflets were stupefied. The undernourished, downtrodden nation referred to in the crudely written Soviet pamphlets had no relation to the
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comfortable, well-fed country that they knew. Indeed, the crude agit-prop falling from the skies would have been laughable, if it weren't for those deadly serious bombs exploding nearby.
"Molotov's breadbaskets," an unknown wag had dubbed the explosives. The name stuck.
****
WHILE the astonished newspaperwoman was observing the surreal scene outside her window at the Kamp, Herbert Berridge Elliston, the British-born correspondent for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor ran to his. The previous day, the forty-four-year-old Elliston, a veteran of the First World War who had fought in the Royal Horse Artillery, had trooped up to his room, just across from Gellhorn's, after investigating the contrived frontier incident at Mainila. "I scrambled from bed and looked out," Elliston wrote,? "It was a perfect winter morning, with the sun coming out of a blue sky, unflecked save for one cotton wooly ball cloud. Inside that cloud were Russian planes. Through the trailing steamer of the cloud, a couple of planes could be seen in nebulous outline. With its destructive freight, the solitary cloud moved across the heavens like a Spanish galleon in full sail."
After the two-month lull in the West following the fall of Poland, something was finally happening, and Elliston and his excited fellow reporters were right there for the action. "You got the illusion, indeed," Elliston gushed, "that the clouds must have borne the machines all the way across the Gulf of Finland. Presently the cloud arrived overhead a little to my right. All this time noise continued without cease-the dull detonation of exploding bombs breaking through a continual screech of air raid alarms and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns, "
At least the newsman was under no illusions about the objective of the raid. "This was a Blitzkrieg designed to overcome and conquer the Finns from the air. I watched intently," Elliston continued, "because victory or defeat in this type of diplomacy-war [sic] depends upon the behavior of the people." Evidently, the raid was not having its intended effect. "There was no panic. The people in the park below stayed at the entrance of the bomb shelters and gazed skyward at the Soviet apparition."
In the Kamp press room, Elliston began making calls, trying to find more about the surprise Soviet attack. His first impulse was to ring Risto Ryti, the long-time chairman of the Bank of Finland. Ellison had already met Ryti two years before, during a prewar fact-finding mission to northern Europe in his capacity as financial editor and columnist for the Monitor. He had been told beforehand that the central banker - who ran unsuccessfully for president that year against the grandfatherly Kyosti Kallio - was one of the best-informed men in Europe.
Not that Ryti was of much help. When the reporter reached "Finland's Alexander Hamilton," as he admiringly described him, he was just as stumped as anyone by the Soviet attack. The
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perplexed financier told his journalistic acquaintance that he had heard a rumor that Norway had been given an ultima- tum by Moscow to hand over the Arctic port of Narvik.? Had he heard anything about this? Ryti asked the equally puzzled reporter, as bombs crashed and sirens wailed in the background. Well, if he did, asked the polite Ryti who, unbeknownst to him, would be appointed prime minister the following day to steer Finland through the crisis- would Elliston be so kind as to give him a ring?
"Of course," Elliston said, putting down the phone and shaking his head. "Storm over Europe!" he thought to himself. "What on earth had Stalin started in [this] part of the world? It was the beginning of a wild day."
****
FOR his part, fifteen-year-old Harry Matso was too busy shepherding his school- mates to safety to be afraid. He, too, had been singing his morning prayers - Jewish prayers - when the first Russian raiders dropped their mixed payload of incendiary bombs and propaganda.
As it happened, the school was located 500 meters from Hietaniemi, Helsinki's main cemetery, where the 200 pupils were quickly evacuated under the supervision of a gymnastics teacher. "Harry," the teacher told Matso, who was assisting him, after the orderly procession reached its destination, "pull all the children under the trees and behind the tombstones." The teacher, quite rightly, was concerned that the children's colorful clothing would make them easy tar gets for the strafing Soviet planes. Then, as a raider whizzed by a few hundred meters overhead, the teacher dove for cover himself as Matso followed.
When Matso carefully got to his feet, after the all-clear sounded a half-hour or so later, the youth saw that a house bordering the cemetery had been bombed to bits. A bereaved-looking man emerged, carrying the limp body of a young girl, apparently his daughter, one of the ninety-six Helsinkians who died on that horrific day.
Finnish prime minister Aimo K. Cajander, the same man whom several days before Pravda denounced as a small beast of prey without sharp teeth and strength but having a cunning lust"--actually a mild-mannered sixty-year-old botanist who had headed Finland's Forest and Park Service prior to assuming office in 1937--was preparing to chair an executive session of the Finnish cabinet in its large, mirror-lined room on the second floor of the main government building, when the first flight of Soviet bombers entered Finnish air space at nine o’clock? in fact, the flight had been timed to coincide with the meeting-_ one of the few things about the Soviet attack plan that went right.
The purpose of the emergency conclave was to discuss the meaning of the Kremlin's sudden
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and surprising decision to break off diplomatic relations the night before, which had been conveyed in a somewhat confusing note that the long-time Finnish minister to Moscow and former foreign minister Aarno Yrjo-Koskinen had abruptly been handed ten hours before. "The only aim of our nation is to safeguard the security of the Soviet Union," stated the baffling communiqué, signed by Molotov," and in particular Leningrad with its population of 3,500,000."
To be sure, the issue of Leningrad's vulnerability to the west--the concern that had originally prompted the Soviet "invitation" to discuss the issue with them--was not an unreasonable concern. After all, the Soviet Union's second-largest city was located very close to the border between the two nations-and the Finns had had very close relations with Kaiser Wilhelm, who had sent an expedition of troops to Helsinki that secured the German-backed Whites' victory against the Soviet-backed Reds during the civil war, and reasonably good ones with his eventual successor, Adolf Hitler. One could well understand that concern--which would be validated in June 1941 when the Germans used the "Karelian gateway" to invade northwestern Russia. What was confusing, at least to the Finns, was the next part of Molotov's note.
After accusing the Finnish government of bad faith, the blunt-talking apparatchik, who had replaced his more emollient predecessor, Maxim Litvinov, in May continued: "We can no longer tolerate the present situation, for which the Finnish government bears full responsibility. Our government has decided it can no longer maintain normal relations with Finland."
It certainly sounded like a declaration of war. On the other hand, Molotov seemed to leave some hope that the rapidly deteriorating situation between the two countries could still be resolved through negotiation, mysteriously stating that his country remained ready to meet Finland "more than halfway about territorial questions," including the Karelian peninsula, now half-divided between Finland and the USSR. He also thought he would even be ready to consider the question of "uniting the entire Karelian people and Karelia with their brotherly people, the Finns" (an outcome Molotov wound up ultimately achieving following the cession of Finnish Karelia, and the evacuation westward of virtually the entire population, though doubtless not in the way he envisioned). To further confuse matters, the démarche reiterated the Soviet's “utmost respect for Finland's sovereignty and independence.”
Did Moscow want war or not? It was hard to figure out. The cabinet debate went back and forth. Then came the explosions of the first Soviet bombs. Now the confusion was over. Now Cajander and his fellow politicians knew, as they rushed to the window and saw smoke billowing from the city center, that Finland was at war.
Actually, the cabinet was slightly behind the times. In point of fact, Finland and the Soviet Union had been in a state of belligerency since 6:50 that morning, when a goodly proportion of the nearly 2,000 field guns the Soviets had at the start of the war, which they managed to wheel up to the border without being detected by the laggard Finnish intelligence, unleashed a huge cannonade. The massive barrage, the largest such bombardment since the end of the First
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World War, was punctuated by the booming reports of the long-range guns of the naval fortress island at Kronstadt, thirty kilometers west of Leningrad, at the head of the Gulf of Finland.
Seconds later, the still snow-laden frontier became a roiling, roaring, white cauldron, as giant birch trees suddenly turned into twigs. Boulders went flying. The scattered farms and buildings within the fire zone, which had already been hastily evacuated by the government, disintegrated in a cloud of snow and dust. Unfortunately, neither Finnish intelligence, then overseen by an incompetent associate of Mannerheim's by the name of Colonel Lars Rafael Melander, nor the equally blind civil authorities, who were still not willing to believe that war would actually come, had done a very careful job of the evacuation, resulting in the capture of over 4,000 Finnish civilians.
Then, as green rockets fired up into the black sky, signaling the start of the assault, thousands of Soviet troops, many of them screaming and singing, plunged into the Rajajoki River (the river separating then Finnish Karelia and Russian Karelia, now called the Sestra) holding their weapons over their heads. They were followed by something that most Finns, or Finnish troops, had never seen before: tanks. Evidently the Kremlin meant business.
****
AS Harry Berner, then a corporal stationed in the medieval border town of Terijoki, recalled: "On November 28th, we had returned to the central barracks in Terijoki from a one-week reconnaissance of the area. Then the next morning we were awakened by this gigantic artillery barrage, through which we could hear the big guns at Kronstadt. None of us had ever experienced, or even imagined, anything like it."
Berner's unit, like most of the Finnish units that experienced the brunt of the Soviet attack, recovered from its shock soon enough and went into fighting retreat mode. "We were ordered out into the streets to delay the enemy as much as possible," he says. "I was posted by the general store. Then we saw Russian troops appear on the outskirts of town, as they poured out of the Rajajoki [River]. We exchanged fire. Those were our orders: fight, delay, retreat. Of course, we didn't have much choice."
The attack made for inspiring copy by Nikolai Virta, a well-known Soviet writer who had signed on with Pravda as a combat correspondent. Except in tone, Vita's breathless account essentially squares with Berner's:
“On the stroke of 8 A.M., the signal was flashed and from the south, the air was suddenly filled with the whistle of shells, the echo of their detonation, the deeper boom of howitzers, and the muffled roar of the heavies. From Kronstadt, one heard the distant echo of the great fortress
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guns. Thirty seconds later the horizon became a sheet of flame. The whole Finnish frontier was ablaze. Then began the rattle of machine guns, answered by those of the Finns. The cannonade continued for thirty minutes along the front of 140 kilometers, eighteen kilometers deep.”
“Then green rockets shot up, signaling the Red infantry to attack and the troops charged, cheering, toward the frontier. Plunging into the icy waters of [Rajajoki] river, they started work on pontoon bridges. At 9: 15 the section's first battalion crossed the frontier on bridges and entered Finnish territory. The forests, so silent an hour ago before the attack, suddenly filled with the roaring of the motors of tanks, the clank of caterpillar links, and the sirens of the machines along the snow-covered roads.”
Interestingly, Virta was sporting enough to give Berner and his fellow defenders credit: "The enemy resists with determination." The tone of his reportage would become more vituperative and less charitable toward the Finnish enemy as the Soviet advance bogged down, and would continue thus as scores of mines and booby traps that Finnish sappers had left behind in Terijoki began blowing up his comrades, but for the moment Virta was all gung-ho.
While Harry Berner and his colleagues were retreating before the onrushing Red hordes on the Rajajoki, 200 kilometers to the northeast, a mortarman by the name of Reino Oksanen was busy trying to stay warm. Like most of the men of his battalion, Oksanen hailed from the town of Messukyla near the southern central industrial city of Tampere. One of the strengths of the Finnish Army was that most of its men were drawn from the same area. "It was a good thing as we knew each other well when the fighting began. We knew each other's qualities.”
Oksanen completed his compulsory military training in 1935. It was then that he received instruction in the use of the light 81 mm mortar, one of nine such Weapons assigned to each company. Not that he expected to put that training to use anytime soon. After all, Finland and Russia were at peace or supposed to be. That all had changed in the fall of 1939, "Trouble had been brewing for a long time. But when they [the Army] started handing out calls for special training in October, we knew that this was serious. We were told to bring winter clothing. And guns. We were supposed to have submachine guns, but in reality, they were quite rare. I was given a standard Pystykorva rifle, as were we all."
Oksanen and his fellow soldiers from Messukyla were first assembled in a Tampere linen factory along with the rest of the 16th Regiment, which was nearby Lt. Aaro Pajari, who would later distinguish himself in the pivotal battle of Tolvajarvi. Oksanen slept side by side with his comrades on the floor of the factory. The next day, November 15, they were dispatched by train to the Luumak Taavetti area of Ladoga-Karelia, the area north of Finland's Lake Ladoga, where the entire division dug in.
Still, like the great majority of Finns, the men from Messukyla were skeptical that war would actually come: "Even then we debated amongst ourselves whether Finland would have to go to war." Still, the general mood was very defiant. "We took turns in bragging how we would annihilate the 'Russkies' or at least some of us did," Oksanen said. "There was this one man
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from Tampere who was full of enthusiasm when the negotiations were underway. He said he would be disappointed if peace endured. He was eager, he said, for Russky blood. Of course, when the fighting began in earnest he amounted to nothing."
****
MARSHAL Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was having breakfast with his niece's husband, Bjorn Weckmann, at his mansion in Kaivopuisto, Helsinki's fashionable diplomatic district, when they were startled by the sound of bombs.
It was a sound, one suspects, that the venerable Finnish general, who at seventy-two retained the ramrod posture of the imperial chevalier he had once been, at once dreaded and welcomed. Dreaded because it signaled the start of a costly war which he knew, as chairman of Finland's defense council, a post he had repeatedly resigned in frustration, Finland was not properly prepared to fight and couldn't possibly win.
Once again, as it had twenty years before, the country of his birth needed him. First, in I9I8, following Finland's declaration of independence from Bolshevik Russia, the Finnish government had turned to Mannerheim, asking him to take command of the disparate White counterrevolutionary forces and quash the nascent Red rebellion that Lenin had engineered. Additionally, he had to disarm the Russian troops still stationed in Finland. Few generals have ever been handed a more difficult set of tasks. But Mannerheim, who had spent the greater part of his adult life in Russia and was a member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and hitherto a virtual unknown in his own country, succeeded in bringing the brutal civil war, which cost an estimated 37,000 lives and included atrocities on both sides, to an end, securing the republic's independence.
Following that, Mannerheim, who later that year left Finland out of disgust with its increasingly pro-German inclinations, was asked by the Finnish cabinet to turn around and help batten down Finnish sovereignty, by obtaining recognition from the skeptical Allies. Assenting, the versatile soldier diplomat proceeded to wow both London and Paris with his dashing looks and courtly manners, as well as his manifest love and passion for his native land. “From capital to capital he went, pleading the cause for Finland," wrote Herbert Elliston. "He not only won recognition for Finland; he won friends for her."
Befriending or even understanding the enigmatic former imperial officer was a different matter. No man could be curter, as Henry Bell, Great Britain's first consul to Helsinki, discovered when he came to call on Mannerheim one day at the London residence of the aloof former Russian general. Mannerheim had generally been genial to him, Bell wrote.
"One day, however," Bell continued, "Mannerheim was more brusque. He addressed me in
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Swedish instead of the usual English. He hardly acknowledged my formal greeting, and he would not listen to what I had come to say. Sitting behind his great table, with a map of Finland and another of Russia in front of him, he said severely, 'Herr Consul, do you bring me good news today?'
"I blushed and stammered: 'I regret, Your Excellency… "Herr Consul,' Mannerheim interjected, 'if you do not soon bring me the good news that Britain has recognized the independence of Finland, your visits will no longer be welcome. Good day."
****
IN THE EVENT, the inscrutable Mannerheim succeeded so well at his diplomatic mission that in December 1918, he was summoned back to Helsinki and named Regent. There was talk of making him king; certainly, he had the ingredients of one. However, like George Washington, a figure to whom he was frequently compared, Mannerheim refused.
Instead, he preferred to run for president. However, Mannerheim, still bearing the bloody stigma of the excesses of the White forces during the recent civil war, in which scores of Finnish Communists had been summarily executed (and for which he seems to have been at least indirectly responsible), lost to the more homely, down-to-earth Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg. For most Finns, the distant, haughty, outspokenly anti-Communist general was, in the final analysis, too charged, too complicated a figure for them to entrust the peacetime destiny of their fragile young republic.
And so "The Liberator," as he was now called, at the relatively young age of fifty-one, rode off into the Finnish sunset. The finicky Mannerheim now gladly turned away from the untidy maelstrom of Finnish politics and devoted himself to humanitarian pursuits, becoming a major supporter of the Finnish Red Cross and helping to found Finland's first child welfare organization. As Douglas MacArthur, the great American general who was in many ways Mannerheim's spiritual kinsman, once famously put it, “old generals never die, they just fade away."
Except that, like many early retired generals, Mannerheim wasn't very happy about just fading away. Photos of Mannerheim from the interwar period, during which he also served as chairman of the board of Commercial Bank of Helsinki, show him looking tense and distracted. At heart, he was still a soldier. These were Mannerheim’s wilderness years, Reputedly, at one point during the late 1920s, the old soldier was so bored with civilian life that he inquired about joining the Foreign Legion.
In any event, if Mannerheim wished to fade away, he made sure that he did it within general
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viewing distance renting a large manor house in the Kaviopuisto diplomatic district (the same one that today houses the Mannerheim Museum), filling it with all manner of trophies and military mementos from his far-flung life, including the year he spent reconnoitering China on horseback for the Russian intelligence service, and quietly waiting to see if his services were needed again.
****
THEY were. In 1931, as a resurgent Russia began to flex its military muscles, the newly elected president, Pehr Evin Svinhufvud, asked Mannerheim to assume the chairmanship of Finland's Defense Council, an advisory board charged with overseeing the build-up of Finland's armed forces and border defenses. Particularly important was the part man-made, part natural Karelian defensive line running from the Gulf of Finland through Summa to the Vuoksi River and ending at Taipale, which separated Finland from the Soviet Union and which Mannerheim himself initiated in 1918. Perhaps inevitably, it eventually took his name even though he himself had very little to do with the ultimate design of the line itself.
More recently, as the crisis with Russia reached a head, he also oversaw the partial mobilization of Finland's armed forces. This was Mannerheim's least happy posting. Angered at the refusal of the government, which had continued to remain complacent about the Soviet armed threat, to allocate adequate monies for defense, including for the as-yet incomplete Karelian defensive line, he resigned the position several times, including, most recently, in June 1939. Informed of the negotiations between the government and Moscow before the talks broke down, Mannerheim had urged the cabinet to try to find some way of satisfying the Kremlin without forcing a fight. "We must absolutely come to an agreement," he urged.
"Mannerheim knew how to be afraid," as Finnish historian Veijo Meri put it, "a good quality in a soldier." Also, to a surprising degree for a man who was on record as refusing to shake the hand of a Communist, he understood and even empathized with the Kremlin's legitimate strategic concerns, however clumsily expressed, about protecting the approaches to Leningrad in a future conflict.
"The White General, whom Communist propagandists liked to call the butcher of the working class; was probably the last person the Russians expected to see their point of view," Max Jakobson notes. "Yet Mannerheim stood then as later for moderation and flexibility in foreign policy, and as a former tsarist officer could appreciate the problems of Russia's defense planners."
After all, as Stalin had pointed out in the Moscow talks, the British had used Koivisto as an anchorage to launch a successful motorboat raid on the Soviet base at Kronstadt in 1919 as part
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of their "unofficial" but decisive aid to newly independent Estonia, then battling its own Red insurgency (as Finland had also successfully done, with German help, the year before). The Russians had sound reason to be fearful, too. As Stalin told the skeptical Finnish delegates who questioned his concern about another Great Power using Finnish territory to attack Russia at some future date, "Everything can change in this world" (true indeed, as Stalin would again learn in June 1941, when his putative Nazi ally turned against the USSR).
During the months leading up to the Moscow talks, Mannerheim continued to advise the Cajander government to cede the Russians as much as possible without destroying the country's power to put up a good defensive fight, proposing that it grant the Soviets several of the larger islands in the Gulf of Finland, as well as moving the Soviet-Fenno border westward and giving up some territory in Karelia. When the cabinet told him that it could not survive the public outcry that would follow even a suggestion of such sacrifices, Mannerheim went further, proposing to risk his own prestige and vouch for the necessity of such concessions. (The government did not take him up on the offer.) Moreover, he said, "The army cannot fight."
Of course, this was an exaggeration. What Mannerheim meant, of course, was that the Finns did not have enough to fight with, which was perfectly true. By the fall of 1939, after strenuous rearmament that he had instigated, the Finnish Army could place 265,000 men in the field, an extraordinary number for a nation of only 3.7 million. But What sort of equipment did they have with which to fight? The army possessed a total of ten battle-ready ancient Vickers-type tanks (half of which would be destroyed in a catastrophic engagement in February 1940). Some of the army's rifles dated to the 1890s. The then much-vaunted Mannerheim Line, often and wrongly compared to France's far more complex, far more sophisticated Maginot Line, in fact had only two "showcase bunkers," the so-called Poppius and Million Dollar bunkers that were anything like the Maginot's interconnected bastions; the other 10-odd strongpoints were fairly rudimentary.
Moreover, as historian Carl Frederik-Guest points out, unlike the Maginot, the Mannerheim Line was meant to delay an invader, not repel him, although it did a pretty fair job of the latter when the test ultimately came. The Soviet writer and war correspondent Leonid Sobolev, who later accompanied the Russian marines who ultimately overcame those three forts and their less heavily armored interlocking defenses, was certainly impressed:
“This powerful position of two armored bunkers, or, more accurately, forts, was built over several years. The art and skill of the best European engineers were invested into this ensemble of fortifications, which even the First-class European defense sector would envy. All forts, bunkers, trenches and snipers' nests protect each other. Then the best trained Finnish Home Guards were brought here, they were shown this concrete and steel, anti-tank rocks, underground galleries and mines, camouflaged anti-tank gun positions, sniper nests in trees, ten rows of barbed wire and full ammunition storage.”
“One could, indeed, hold out here as long as one had to. The splinters of our heaviest shells, which exploded next to the bunker, did no harm. Even a direct hit from a heavy round could
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only shake this monstrous shell; bite off a chunk of concrete, but not more. A direct hit from artillery at long range is a matter of pure luck, one chance in a thousand.”
Of course, the army would still fight. And so would Mannerheim. Although there was no explicit agreement about this, it came to be understood that, if worse came to worst and war broke out, Mannerheim himself would become commander-in-chief. Now, on that fateful morning of awakening, as Russian bombers darkened the skies over Helsinki, Mannerheim knew that his moment had come. Now, once again, his country needed him, and that was all that mattered. In the end, he wasn't so complicated after all. Mannerheim was going to do what he was born and bred to do, and the opportunity reinvigorated him.
Inside Mannerheim's trophy-festooned manse was a painting by his old friend and comrade-in-arms Akseli Gallen-Kallela, showing a group of imaginary Finnish ski soldiers swathed in white, apparently advancing through a forest clearing to strike at the historic Russian foe. The artist had executed it forty years before, in 1899, to protest Tsar Nicholas Il's notorious ukase suspending Finnish autonomy. Gallen-Kallela, who died in 1931, evidently had considered the painting too provocative to display publicly and had kept it as part of his private collection. After the civil war, in which the passionate nationalist served as Mannerheim's aide-de-camp, the artist, also known as "Finland's painter," had given his old commander the painting as a gift Mannerheim had hung the canvas on a prominent place of the wall of his study. Did he steal a look at it on this day, November 30, 1939, as that martial fantasy was about to become a reality and he suited up for his new command? Or perhaps he thought about Gallen-Kallela's son Jorma, then serving as an officer on the front line in Karelia, on whom he also doted.
****
AS smoke from the first Russian bombs rose in the distance, Mannerheim, in full regalia, strode to the Ministry of Defense on Korkeavuorenkatu, just a few minutes away from his Kaivo home. This was a different Mannerheim from the careworn elder of weeks before. Gone were the depression and weariness of old age. "I hereby give notice that I am assuming the post of commander-in-chief of which so much has been said," Mannerheim peremptorily declared.
The minister, Niukkanen, informed his top commander about the situation, The situation was not good. The Soviets, who evidently had been building up their forces for weeks, had invaded Finland at nine points along the winding, 1,600-klometer border separating the two countries, including a main thrust across the isthmus. Niukkanen estimated the invading force would be at least two million men, backed up by at least five thousand pieces of heavy artillery and several hundred parks, plus a thousand planes (Niukkanen's figures were somewhat off, the initial striking force comprised 400,000 men, 2,000 tanks, 2,000 field guns; and 2,000 planes, all of which would be doubled or more by the end of the war). In addition to Helsinki, the
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minister reported, numerous other Finnish towns and cities, including Vipuri and Lahti, were reporting air raids. There was more. The Soviet navy had also been in action, attacking several islands and coastal fortresses with heavy gunfire. If Mannerheim was daunted by the magnitude of the attack, or by the leviathan task that now awaited him, he did not show it. Taking his leave of Niukkanen, Mannerheim next visited the office of President Kallio, where he withdrew his most recent resignation and formally assumed the post of commander-in-chief, before returning to his house.
Word of Mannerheim's reappointment quickly spread. For most Finns, that was all they needed to know. That night, as the skyline of Helsinki was wreathed in flames, Herbert Ellison, the American writer, took note of the electric effect of Mannerheim's return on the populace: "As I walked among the ruins of Helsinki's bombed streets, I saw bill posters [of Mannerheim's appointment] being put up," he wrote. "I can vouch for the fact that no proclamation ever geared a nation into fighting mood more successfully than the proclamation making Mannerheim commander-in-chief.
"The second raid, a shorter but more lethal one involving even more bombers, began at 2:55 P.M., just as Helsinki was beginning to recover from the first one. This time, however, the Soviet planes only carried bombs and incendiaries. Once again, as during the first raid, which evidently had been aimed at Malmi Airport, the city's recently inaugurated international airport, the raiders aim was abysmal. Targeting the main railroad station, whence Paasikivi had embarked on his successive, frustrating sorties, the bombers instead battered the large square in front of it, including a commuter bus that had just taken on its passengers, instantly incinerating it; a photo of the bus with the mangled remains of several Finnish civilians, one of the indelible images of the terror attack, splayed across the front pages of the world's press the next day."
Several fire bombs were also dropped on Helsinki’s prestigious Technical University on Bulevardi, one of the capital's most elegant avenues, all but obliterating it and killing a number of staff and students; the Russians also managed to freak most of the windows of the large, nearby Soviet legation io the consider able satisfaction of the population. After unleashing their bombs, the planes from the second raid swooped down to machine gun targets of opportunity, mostly fleeing civilians, wounding or killing dozens more before returning to their bases in Estonia, while further eastward, their fellow Soviet airmen returned to their bases in Leningrad after wreaking havoc on Vijpuri. The Soviet planes were at brazen, treetop level, recalled Olavi Eronen, then a message runner from Vipuri stationed with his regiment at Kuolemajarvi, a small village located on the western side of the Mannerheim Line.
Like many if not most of his fellow soldiers, Eronen was taken completely by surprise by the outbreak of hostilities. "We did not believe a war would come," he later recalled. "We had this non - aggression pact with the Russians, so people stayed in their homes until the last moment. The night before I was at home and went to the sauna. At seven in the morning I left for my regiment. When I walked down the steps, my father opened the window and shouted that the war had started. The station master at Terijoki had called and said the big guns at Kronstadt
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had opened up." As the cannonade continued, Eronen hastened to the small town of Seivasto, near the fire zone, to evacuate the stunned residents. Looking up, he saw a fleet of Soviet bombers bound for Viipuri and other points west. "The sky was full of planes." Several hours later, the raiders came back, but at much lower altitude. "For some reason, they had been told to fly really low, just above the treeline. Apparently they had a doctrine that this was the safest way to return. Anyway, as I was escorting the villagers, I turned around after I heard a strange noise and realized that one of the Red planes was flying directly towards me. He was so low. I felt that I could almost touch him with my hand.”
"I fired several shots at it with my rifle, but apparently I did not hit anything vital," noted Eronen. Soon he thought better of such foolishness. "Only later did it occur to me that those planes had many gunners on them and that I was an easy target standing in the open." For its part, the Soviet Air Force, which would lose numerous bombers to ground fire during the successive raids of the next three days as Finnish anti-aircraft crews sprang into action, would later revise its policy. "Later in the war they did not fly so low," Eronen wryly observed.
****
MARTHA Gellhorn was having a hasty, belated repast at the Kamp when the second Russian raid began. "I never felt such explosions. The whole place rocked. Must have been like March in Barcelona," she wrote to Hemingway, referring to the Fascist Italian forces' attack on the republican Catalonian capital and its our skirts in March 1938; the two had developed a shorthand based on their experiences in Spain, "I went out and there was a huge curtain of smoke rolling down the street and people screamed ‘Gas!’ That was pretty awful, I may tell you.”
"Fortunately, it was a false alarm, one of the many noxious rumors that wafted about the shell shocked capital during those fist terror-filled days. Another rumor which also proved false or exaggerated was that the Russians were going to drop parachute poops on the capital. In fact, the Russians, who were probably the most advanced country in terms of paratroop tactics in the world and had made parachuting something of a national sport, did drop small groups of reconnaissance troops, including a number of Finnish-speaking spies, in several parts of the country, including the Karelian Isthmus and the Petsamo region in the far north, to disastrous effect: the vast majority were captured and shot on the spot, or picked off while still airborne. If they did manage to land safely, the paratroopers had difficulty assembling in the thick Finnish trees. Nevertheless, the very use of these troops--the first time this novel form of warfare was employed on a modern battlefield--was sufficient to send a wave of terror that reached Helsinki,?
But no, there was no gas. And no parachutists--at least as yet. Relieved, the intrepid American
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reporter plunged outside, following the smoke, soon coming across "colossal fires, four apartment houses- just plain people's homes-burning like tissue paper. One house, by a gas station," Gellhorn continued, "had a vast hole blown in its side and a man shapeless and dead the way our little man on the corner of Florida [was]," invoking her and Hemingway's shared memories of the Fascist bombing of Barcelona three years before.
Accompanying Gellhorn were two Italian journalists who had also just arrived in the Finnish capital in time to see the first Soviet bombs fall. Enraged by the memory of the Spanish war, which Francisco Franco, the rebel leader and current (and future) dictator had won with the aid of his fellow German and Italian advisors against their Republican foes and Soviet advisors, the American spitfire couldn't resist the opportunity to goad the Italians. "Now you see what it's like to be on the other side, gentlemen, don't you?" she asked. Later, Gellhorn would be surprised to find that those same Italian Fascist journalists she lambasted that afternoon were actually along with their enraged leader, Benito Mussolini on the right side, the Finnish side, the democratic side this time, at least for the moment.
In the event, Il Duce had little sympathy or understanding for the non-aggression pact his ally, Nazi Germany, had signed with the Soviet Union. To him, as well as to many of his Fascist subjects, the Russian invasion of Finland was simply Communist aggression, and he had no qualms about saying so, even writing Adolf Hitler a pointed note to this effect. Over the next few days, Rome, like many world capitals, was the scene of violent anti-Soviet protests as well as effusive demonstrations of sympathy for Finland. Hundreds of enraged Italians deluged the Finnish embassy offering to take up arms for Helsinki." Indeed, Mussolini, for his part, was so put out about the Russian action that Hitler dispatched his foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, to Rome to get him to calm down and not say or do anything that might offend the Kremlin.
Not that Hitler was particularly happy with the Russian invasion himself. Although the pact he had signed with Stalin had theoretically given the Kremlin a free hand to operate in the Baltic, he had at least expected to be warned of such a drastic move. He had not. Moreover, Hitler, like many Germans, felt a natural bond with and sympathy for Finland, with which Germany had long enjoyed a special political and cultural relationship dating back to the nineteenth century. When Finnish high school students studied a second language--or, rather, a third one, after Swedish, the language of their prior mother country--it was German. It was an expedition of German troops in 1918, during the civil war, which had helped decide the matter in favor of the Whites, under Mannerheim's command, thus securing Finnish independence.
In many ways, Finland, which had suppressed its own abortive Fascist putsch in 1932, but still had many officers or former officers of a right-wing bent-including one, Kurt Wallenius, who would rise to fame during the Winter War--was a natural partner for the Third Reich (as it would become during the ensuing Continuation War, when the two countries were co-belligerents). The Finnish and German armed forces, including the Finnish and German intelligence services, also enjoyed extensive cooperation during the 1930s. However, for the moment, Hitler needed the Russians more than he needed the Finns, as much as he admired
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them and their commander-in-chief, so the Fuhrer, who was capable of compromise (at least at that stage of the war), said nothing (at least publicly), and told his unhappy Italian ally to do the same. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, also hewed to the party line, publicly reprimanding the Finns for their obstinacy and ties with Nazi Germany's principal declared enemy, England, although for several days he allowed the first upbeat Finnish military communiqués to run side by side with the equally roseate (and misleading) Soviet ones, before he reluctantly suppressed them. No, those Italian journalists who were the butt of Martha Gellhorn's barbed remarks were actually on Finland's side, too. The unexpected Russo-Fenno conflict, which most observers assumed would be a quick walkover, blurred a lot of ideological lines--at least at first. Indeed, it would take some days before Gellhorn and a lot of other people could comprehend the surprise Russian attack and all of its political implications. All she knew for the moment was that she had unwittingly stumbled onto the biggest story in the world, and she went with it, turning in some of the finest prose of her career. "War started at nine o'clock promptly," began "Bombs from a Low Sky," her first lengthy dispatch from Helsinki for Collier’s:
“The people of Helsinki stood in the streets and listened to the painful rising and falling and always louder wail of the siren. For the first time in history. They heard the sound of bombs falling on their city. This is the modern way of declaring war. The people moved unhurriedly to bomb shelters or took cover in doorways and waited. That morning Helsinki was a frozen city inhabited by sleepwalkers. The war had come too fast and all the faces and all the eyes looked stunned and unbelieving... There were five great explosions and afterward the stillness itself was dreadful. Then a rumor flew through the quiet, broken streets: poison gas. Anything was believed now. We shuffled through broken glass in the streets. The gray afternoon was darker with smoke.”
“The bombed houses on this block were so shrouded in flames that you could not see through into the ruins. Turning left, we ran toward the light of another fire. The Technical School, a vast granite square of buildings, had been hit. The houses around it and on the next street were gutted clean, with flames leaping out of all the empty windows. Firemen worked fast and silently but there was nothing much to do except try to put out the fire. Later they could dig for the bodies, Clearly, despite the weeks of preparations and drills, the city authorities--who until recently had been more concerned with the preparations for the eagerly anticipated 1940 Helsinki Summer Olympic Games and had only established a civil defense office for the capital but two months before--were badly caught off guard by the aerial firestorm. Witness the helter-skelter nature of the evacuation of the capital that began immediately after the first raid, which particularly shocked Gellhorn.
At a street corner, in the early oncoming night, a woman flagged a bus and put her child on it. She did not have time to kiss the child good-bye and no one said anything. The woman turned and walked back into the bombed street. The bus was collecting children to take them away, anywhere, no one knew but out of the city. A curious migration started that afternoon and Went on all night. Lost children, whose parents were gone in the burning buildings or were separated in the confusion of the sudden attack, struggled out alone or in twos and threes, taking any road
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that led away from what they had seen. Days later the state radio was still calling their names, trying to find their families for them. Just as she had in her partisan but essential reliable reporting from Spain, Gellhorn her allowed her anger at the aggressor to seep through: "I thought it would be fine if the ones who order the bombings would walk on the ground some time and see what it is like."
Pack at the Kamp, Gellhorn's colleagues were jubilant. Now, after all the weeks or waiting, finally there was something to write about. One Canadian journal. I had just come back from the Western front, where all was still quiet, far too quiet. Only [a few] casualties over there and we have been hanging over there for weeks," he exclaimed. Obviously this new dustup between Finland and the Soviet Union was going to be a better show. One Danish journalist, who had witnessed the bomb attack on the train station and the attendant carnage, was perversely delighted. "I have an idea that this is going to be the best story of my career," the pleased scribe declared to no one in particular. "I’ve just been plain lucky. Everything has gone so well for me. Bus burning and everything.”
Pekka Tilikainen, a younger reporter for YLE, Finnish state radio, whose dispatches from around the battlefront would make him a star, interviewed some of the troops who bore the brunt of the first fighting: "We then came to Oravakyto," Tilikainen wrote in his memoir, Radioselostajana tulilinjoilla (Radio reporter at the front), "where we met the first troops who had been in the fighting. This was an infantry unit. In a darkened house we learned what war feels like. " Amongst the soldiers Tilikainen interviewed was a lieutenant by the name of Viskari and a sergeant named Reponen. "I asked them only one thing: 'How did it look and feel?' Usually in radio reporting, these questions are too bland to elicit a response, but not this time. [The boys] told of being right on the border when a few guards on a bridge met their deaths from a hail of bullets from an enemy machine gun. And then the action started."
According to the Finns Tilikainen interviewed, they had gotten the better of the invaders: "The Russians tried to attack, but were bloodily beaten back. Some of the enemy were able to advance in the gloom right up to a machine gun emplacement, but a merciless hail of bullets beat the Ivans back. The first attack was repulsed," wrote Tilikainen in Manichean terms popular at the time, "and the cradle of Karelia drank up the blood of the enemy. The snowdrifts were painted red.”
For his part, Geoffrey Cox, the veteran correspondent for the Daily Express who arrived in Helsinki on the evening of the thirtieth to find the city wreathed in flames, couldn't comprehend the reasoning behind the raid.
"Why did the Soviet carry out the raid?" wondered Cox, a native New Zealander who also had covered the Czechoslovak crisis and the Spanish Civil War for the British daily. "Was it a deliberate attempt to stun civilian morale? The answer [was] known only to the commanders of the Red Army." Cox concluded-and examination of Russian documents bears him out on this point- that the raid was intended for military objectives, but had been carried out clumsily. And yet the Kremlin must have known that even if the raid had been more accurate, it still
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would have caused civilian casualties. "What I believe to tell the truth," Cox decided, "is that the Russians made the attack because they thought the social structure of Finland was so rotten [that) one push would dislodge the present rulers [and] bring home the fact that the Russians meant business."
If so, as subsequent events would prove, the Russian rulers were badly misguided: "The Finns were more socially united than at any period since 1918. This sudden blow from the sky cemented cracks that still remained in that unity. Men of the Left who would have resented the return of Mannerheim were so infuriated by the brutality of this raid that they supported the war wholeheartedly. "Indeed," Cox continues, "the raid and the photographs it provided were used throughout Finland in the first month of the war as the main weapon of home propaganda. On every front, I was to visit later man after the man spoke angrily of this afternoon of November the 30th. I saw newspapers with photographs of the burning streets of Helsinki in peasants' homes and workers' flats all over the country. Not a little of the steel strength of Finnish morale in the war] was due to the raid on Helsinki."
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ELEVEN kilometers away, CBS Radio Berlin bureau chief William Shirer, then on holiday in Switzerland, angrily listened to the first reports of the Soviet sneak attack from the capital of their erstwhile German allies. Constrained by the dictates of the Soviet-friendly German censorship, Shirer later reported the attack in equal tones. Privately, the noted American broadcaster could hardly contain himself. "The Soviet Union has invaded Finland!" he confided to his journal, which would later become the famous Berlin Diary. "The great champion of the working class, the mighty preacher against Fascist aggression, the righteous stander up for the 'scrupulous and punctilious observance of treaties, (to quote Molotov of a month ago), has fallen upon the most decent and workable little democracy in Europe in violation of half a dozen "solemn' treaties. I have raged for thirty hours," the livid radioman wrote, "[and] could not sleep.”
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ACROSS the Atlantic that evening, in Washington, D.C, a train bearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt back to the capital from a short trip to his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, was just pulling into Union Station when a special delegation from the state Department, comprising Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary Sumner Welles, drove to the
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terminal to personally inform the president of the news of the Russian offensive. Special late editions with banner headlines about the attack were already on sale at the great terminal where the somber group went to meet Roosevelt's train.
Roosevelt, who six years previously had taken the politically unpopular move of recognizing the Soviet regime, was nonplussed by the news. Several hours earlier the cable informing the State Department of the Soviet invasion had triggered an internal debate there about the proper response, which would continue to roil Washington for weeks to come. The normally even-keeled Welles, in a rare temper, advocated breaking relations with the Kremlin. Hull, his ever. cautious superior, was doubtful. Such a decision might be exceedingly popular, he noted, but gradually the tide of indignation would recede and the State Department would be left "holding the bag. " Twenty-five years before, President Woodrow Wilson had been equally shocked by Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium--the "rape of Belgium," it was called. The invasion, along with the well-publicized atrocities against Belgian civilians, was the first of a series of steps which helped break down American isolationism, and which led, two years later, to America joining the war.
Now Roosevelt used similar terminology to describe Russia's invasion of Finland. "This dreadful rape of Finland," the president described it in a letter to his friend, Thomas McVeagh. "People are asking why one should have anything to do with the present Soviet leaders because their idea of civilization and human happiness is so totally different from ours. The whole of the United States is not only horrified but thoroughly angry." At the same time, the interventionist-minded president was legally bound to follow a policy of strict neutrality. It was a policy FDR had been working to whittle down via a series of neutrality acts, a process that had begun in 1937 with his "Quarantine the Aggressor" speech in Chicago, a process that would culminate, two years later, with the United States becoming a virtual co-belligerent of Great Britain before the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor vitiated American neutrality.
Unquestionably, the Russian invasion of Finland was one stop on that journey. As Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle recorded in his diary several days after the Russian invasion, "U.S. neutrality is not as safe as it was a week ago." However, as much as FDR and millions of Americans sympathized with Finland, the fact remained that large segments of the American body politic, particularly business and labor, were still firmly isolationist (and would continue to be right up until Pearl Harbor). Evidently, all options were discussed at State, up to and including going to war. While Roosevelt pondered the matter, he agreed to meet with the Finnish minister, Hjalmar Procope.
Procope, who had become a familiar person in the U.S. business world in the 1930s owing to his position as head of the Finnish Paper Association, had agreed to head the small, three-man Finnish legation in 1938 as tensions with the Soviet increased, with a view toward enlisting American diplomatic support to intercede with the Kremlin. Tall, suave, and well-spoken, Procope was already a fixture on the Washington cocktail party circuit. Now that Finland had suddenly become the cause celebre of the Christmas season, he would become even more
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sought after, never failing to seize an opportunity to use his considerable charm to plead Finland's case. Meeting with the president, Procope urged Roosevelt to break off relations with the Kremlin. FDR agreed to consider it. At the same time, he hoped to be able to help broker peace between the Finns and the Soviets, and he wondered if sundering relations with Moscow would prove counterproductive in that regard. (Ultimately, on the advice of Hull, he decided against it.)
Still, U.S. prestige, as well as popular opinion, demanded that the chief executive make a strong statement on the matter. Roosevelt's first move was so cautious as to be virtually meaningless: to issue a strong but generalized statement deploring the bombing of civilians that had occurred that day in Helsinki and urging both sides in the as yet undeclared war to forswear more such bombing. As one writer aptly put it, "The United States was now on record as being against evil.”
At the same time, the pigskin-loving president, former assistant naval secretary and diehard Navy football fan who was a fixture at the annual Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, had intimated that because of the Soviet invasion he was considering not attending the game: after seven years in office, the social schedule of the savior of America was followed with the same interest as that of a king. Not attending a football game: now that would be a statement.
By the following day, Roosevelt had considerably ratcheted up his rhetoric. He also made it perfectly clear whom the bad guys were: "The Soviet naval and military bombings within Finnish territory has come as a profound shock to the government and people of the United States. Despite efforts made to solve the dispute by peaceful methods.. one power has chosen to resort to force of arms." Strong words. And the president still hadn't decided yet whether he was going to attend the Army-Navy game. However, 350 Finnish Americans--in their excitement, the Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily, reported 3,000 had already decided what they were going to do: they were going to fight. A week later, the men, who called themselves the Finnish American Legion, would sail for Helsinki to join the 12,000 other volunteers from around the world who voyaged to Finland to join the fight.
On the other side of the Bothnian Sea, the government of the other neutral country most affected by the war, Sweden, was also having an internal debate about how to react to the invasion. Some cabinet members, led by the activist foreign minister Rickard Sandler, advised all aid short of war, including setting up a joint defense with Finland to defend the Aland Islands, the semi-autonomous, Swedish-speaking, Finnish-controlled archipelago lying between the two countries. Other ministers demurred. Unlike the distant United States, which was in no immediate danger itself no matter what action it took, Sweden had to watch out. The wrong move could immediately bring down Russian--or German--bombers on its head.
Publicly, the government, led by Per Albin Hanson, the devoutly neutral Social Democratic prime minister, maintained a strict silence. There was no doubt, however, about how the Swedish public felt about the matter. "It is difficult to express the feeling of horror and anger that has swept the entire population of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark as the result of Russia's
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attack on Finland," wrote the Nordic correspondent for the New York Times on December 2. That same day 2,000 Swedish students descended on the Finnish embassy in Stockholm, crying, "We are for Finland!" and other pro-Finnish slogans, much as their kinsmen in Rome, Paris, and other cities had done.
Back in the Karelian combat zone, Olavi Eronen was busy shepherding the benumbed villagers of Seivasto westward to safety behind the Mannerheim Line. "I left at nightfall and gathered the people of the village together,” said Eronen. “Of course, all the able-bodied men were in the service, so only women, children, and the elderly were left. Never have I seen such silent people. Nobody said anything. Each one had their valuables wrapped up in a sheet. That was all that they could take with them. Of course, everyone left willingly. No one wanted to be overrun by the Russians. I drove them behind the lines, then another truck took them from there."
Amongst those who were evacuated from Karelia were Eva Kilpi and her family. "We were very much afraid of being taken to Siberia," she said. "Every child knew, rightly or wrongly, that they could be taken to Siberia. And that was a terrible feeling. We also knew that it was a total fight, that if we're not safe here, we're not safe anywhere."
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TO be sure, the first Russian troops to penetrate into what had formerly been Finnish Karelia found the going surprisingly easy, as Dmitri Krutshih, then in command of a small Soviet patrol unit, later remembered. Krutshih had been told that there was a large wooden fence at the border:
“So at 6 A.M. on November 3oth we arrived at the border, I asked the border guards, where is the Big Fence? There was no fence, just a path, that was it. So we Captured the first village. Then we moved forward. We captured the second village. Then we entered the third village… We surrounded Finnish forces and blew them to pieces.”
Seven hundred and twenty kilometers to the north, along the densely wooded, lightly defended Soviet-Fenno border near the central Finnish parish of Suomussalmi, advance elements of the Soviet 163rd Division, a scratch division that the Leningrad Military District had cobbled together for the operation, was also making excellent time. Its mission was to cut Finland off at its waist. The thousand or so people living in that remote area, mostly farmers and their families, most of whom were only vaguely aware of the recent tensions between the two countrie were if anything, even more surprised by the Russian invasion than their countrymen in the south, as one young resident of the nearby village of Saarikyla recalled E. (who the author interviewed, but who prefers to remain anonymous). E, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a
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farmer, calmly going about her normal chores on the afternoon of the November 30 when her father went out for a walk. "When he returned," said E., "father said that there was a big fire in the direction of Juntusranta [another village]. He was wondering what was burning there." In the event, they soon learned, the smoke was coming from the main school building in Juntusranta, which the few panic-stricken Finnish civil guardsmen in the area had put to the torch in order to impede the rapidly advancing Soviet forces. The family soon discovered just how rapidly the Russians were advancing several hours later when E's father left the house to further investigate and ran smack into a number of Russian soldiers on horseback. Soon other mounted Russians appeared in the window of the farmhouse itself, to E. and her mother's consternation.
"My mother said that I must not go out, he will kill us," said E. "But I decided to go out to show them that there were only children inside. As I left, I ran into one of the soldiers and we looked each other in the eyes. 'Finski soldat?'" Were there any Finnish soldiers, the Russian asked in broken Swedish? "I said no, and with my hand I tried to show that we were only children," E. recalled in an emotional interview sixty-nine years later. "The soldier showed me his gun and asked me if I was afraid. But I was brave and said no. He laughed." All in all, the commanders of the four armies and twenty-six Soviet divisions participating in the initial, border-long assault could report to Kliment Voroshilov, the clueless defense commissar who was nominally in charge of the operation, that all was going according to plan.
What was the plan? Actually, there were two plans: the original plan, emphasizing one main thrust through the Karelian Isthmus, drawn up by Boris Shaposhnikov, previously the head of the Leningrad Military District, now head of the Soviet general staff, reflecting a clear-eyed assessment of Finnish capabilities, which Stalin had angrily discarded; and a subsequent, much flashier one, clearly influenced by the recent German blitzkrieg of Poland, and which the widely dispersed Soviet forces were now executing. The first plan, which Shaposhnikov had developed during the summer when the possible necessity of a "retaliatory strike" against Finland first arose, before the outbreak of the Second World War, had--wisely—assumed a harsh and difficult war lasting months, at least.
Shaposhnikov, one of the few tsarist holdovers who had managed to reach a high rank in the Red Army, as well as survive the purges of the 1930s, knew of which he spoke. He had visited Finland several times during his long career, including during his posting as commander of the Leningrad Military District-the same entity that had been entrusted with the new strike against Finland- between 1935 and 1937, before he had been promoted to chief of staff. He also—presciently--emphasized that any war against Finland had to be carried out quickly, or she would receive significant help from outside. Stalin, however, who generally valued the fifty-seven-year-old general's advice, scoffed at the latter's conservatism.
"You are asking for such immense strength and resources to defeat a country like Finland," he declared. Instead, Stalin ordered Kirill Meretskov, who had succeeded Shaposhnikov as head of the Leningrad Military District, to draw up a new plan that would accomplish the desired result in a much shorter time. Meretskov later recalled the extraordinary scene when he met
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The Boss (as he called him). Also present was “an important Comintern official and well-known activist of the world Communist movement" by the name of Otto Ville Kuusinen. "I was told of the concern caused to our leadership by the anti-Soviet line of the Finnish government."or "Finland," Stalin said, "could easily become a bridgehead for anti-Soviet action by either of the two main imperialist groupings--the German or the Anglo-French. If Finland should strike, various counteractions were made open to us. I was made responsible for drawing up a plan to protect the frontier from aggression, and to plan a counterattack against the Finnish armed forces. "
"An amazing scene!" wrote the Russian historian Edward Radzinsky. "Not one of those present, of course, seriously thought that little Finland would attack the immense [Soviet] empire. Nobody seriously believed that Hitler, with whom they were just concluding successful negotiations, or England or France, to whom they were also talking, would launch an 'action against the Soviet Union' from Finland." Meretskov, Stalin, and Kuusinen "all knew they were really talking about preparations for the annexation of Finland.
"The negotiations with the Finns over territory had been a ruse, after all, or at least partly so. At some point during the fall, the Russian dictator, evidently encouraged by the Soviet embassy's fanciful reports that the "oppressed' Finns were ripe for "liberation" as well as the urgings of Andrei Zhdanov, the Communist boss of Leningrad, who had long been making aggressive noises about Finland, had revised his plans. Now he no longer merely wanted Finnish territory; he wanted Finland. Not the type to ask questions, Meretskov, one of the few middle-level Soviet generals of any ability who had survived the purges, hastily proceeded to devise a “defensive" plan to counter the Finns' contemplated "aggression" in two or three weeks by means of a co-ordinated westward advance by four different armies at eight different points along the entire length of the Soviet-Fenno border.
Under that plan, one army, the 7th, comprising twelve to fourteen divisions, would attack Finnish defenses along the Mannerheim Line on the isthmus. A second army, the 8th, composed of six rifle divisions and two tank brigades, would turn the northern flank of the isthmus defense by circling around Lake Ladoga's north shore, breaking through the relatively thin Finnish lines there, and striking south to take the fortifications from the rear. A third army, the oth, consisting of five rifle divisions and a number of attached armored units, was to thrust westward across Finland's waist at Suomussalmi toward the Bothnian Sea, cutting the country in half. Finally, a fourth army, the 14th, consisting of three divisions with attached armor, would sweep down from the north, capturing the arctic port of Petsamo, and eventually the Lappish capital of Rovaniemi.
In truth, Meretskov's revised plan had a number of things going for it. The meteorological timing was right: Finland's rivers and lakes had begun to freeze, allowing Soviet forces to move rapidly, particularly in the isthmus, while the snows of deep winter that the Finns thrived in had yet to arrive. Also, the new plan had the element of surprise: as Mannerheim readily admitted, he was not prepared for the number of troops the Russians used north of Ladoga. It even might have worked--indeed, at one point during the first week of the war, came close to
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working--had the demoralized, poorly led and coordinated Red Army of 1939 with which it had been entrusted been the better led, pre-purge Red Army of 1937. Nevertheless, as would soon become clear, Meretskov's plan was far too ambitious. It dispersed forces amongst too many salients and was also based on both an insufficient understanding of Finnish topography and, perhaps most important, a gross underestimate of the intelligence and character of the Finnish soldier and the resilience of the Finnish nation."Not that Stalin himself was concerned. So confident was the Soviet generalissimo of the success of his armies and the flashy, nine-prong invasion plan "that he didn't even bother to take a meeting [of the Politburo]," future Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev recalled. "He thought all he had to do was fire a few artillery shots and the Finns would capitulate."
Shortly past midnight on December I, as a train evacuating the eduskunta made its way to the secret location in the town of Kauhajoki in Ostrobothnia and Helsinki continued to blaze, Gustaf Mannerheim's first order of the day was broadcast over national radio.
His stirring message was directed as much to the Finnish people as to the hard-pressed Finnish army, now struggling to contain the Soviet intruder. It was difficult for some Finns to understand Mannerheim, a member of the country's Swedish-speaking minority whose command of Finnish, the country's main language and that of go percent of his troops, was rusty. Few Finns minded.
"Brave Finland soldiers," he declared. "I undertake this task at an hour when our hereditary enemy once again attacks our country. Confidence in its chief is the first condition of success. You know me and I know you, and I know the whole country is ready to fulfill its duty unto the death."
Now the Kremlin, and the world, had its answer: Finland would fight. But for how long? And with what?
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