The Winter War

The Russians have invaded on a broad front, stretching from the Karelia Isthmus all the war to the Arctic Sea, ten major incursions in all. When the Soviets attacked on November 30th, they did so without declaring war — they just rolled in.

As you heard last episode, by day two of the Soviet invasion, December 2nd 1939 the Finns were facing the might of the Red Army and the prognosis was not good. But they had a chance to carry out Finnish General Gustaf Mannerheim’s master plan, allowing the Russians to invade, then striking them behind their lines.

There wasn’t much else the Finnish Army could do, it was hopelessly outgunned and outmanned.

However, within 48 hours of the invasion, however, the Russian mechanised columns had bunched up, their lines of supply jammed bumper to bumper. Heavy snowstorms were also lashing the advancing columns adding to the chaos.

The token Finnish resistance also caused some of the Russian commanders pause, stopping when a single sniper opened fire, or a defensive position was spotted in the distance. Mannerheim wanted to throw his covering groups of 21 000 troops along the Isthmus forward of the defensive line, but his chief of staff General Hugo Ostermann thought this was a mistake. They were covering a string of villages here like, Uusikirkko, Kivinapa, Lipola, Kiviniemi and each day the remained behind these fortifications, was a day spent improving the defences, digging deeper, laying mines, blowing up bridges.

The Soviet military leaders believed that a decisive strike across the Karelian Isthmus would be the key to victory. The Soviet Seventh Army was based south of this Isthmus, 120 000 infantry, 1 400 tanks and 1500 artillery pieces, all backed up by over 1000 planes of various sorts.

The Finns along the Isthmus were led by lieutenant General Hugo Osterman who had 26 000 infantry, and 71 artillery pieces. The army was split with Two Army corps led by lieutenant General Harald Ohquist on the west side of the Isthmus and Three Army Corps on the east, led by Major General Erik Heinrichs.

Another division of Finns was behind the covering groups, being held back in reserve near the lakes Suulajarvi and Valkjarvi.

On the eastern side of the Isthmus, III Army Corps was made up of Task Force Rautu and the 11th Division Task Force Lipola — named after the villages there.

A change began to take place in the Finnish consciousness, and this was going to be very bad news for the Russian soldiers. The first few days of fighting had actually given the Finns a good idea about some of the Russians weaknesses — their slow witted officer class, fearful of their political commissars, unimaginative and ponderous.

The Finnish fox was outthinking the Russian bear. Stories began to circulate amongst the troops about how abysmally the Russians were fighting, despite their vast army, and this stiffened resolve. Sometimes morale is more important than ammunition. Desmond Latham blog

This is episode 3 and the Russians have just bombed Helsinki on the morning of 30th November 1939 — missing most of the vital infrastructure but hitting the residential area and a square in front of the main railway station, as well as a hangar at Malmi Airfield.

Two hundred people died in the first few hours of the invasion, most were civilians.

The Finns were caught totally off guard - their anti-aircraft gunners managed to fire off a few shots but by then Russian bombers had turned and were miles away.

As the planes disappeared to the east, air raid sirens began to wail, a belated warning which by then was a waste of time.

However, after lunch, the planes were back. Fifteen Red Air Force bombers swept in for another raid soon after the all-clear had sounded in Helsinki, the streets were choked with people clearing up after the morning attack — fifty more civilians died and at least 150 were wounded in this second bombing run.

The Russians also targeted other towns, including Viipuri, the harbour in Turku, and they took aim at the hydroelectric plant at Imatra and then bombed a small gas mask factory in Lahti.

The hydroelectric plant at Imatra was not the only target, the Russians bombed an important road between the northern shores of Lake Ladoga and Helsinki, north of the Mannerheim Line.

While this was going on, the Red Army landed specialist commandos on the uninhabited islands of Sieksari, Lavansaari, Suursaari and Tytarsaari —without firing a shot.

Back in Helsinki, the shock of the attack was visible on everyone’s faces. Parts of the city were on fire and it was through this maze of blackened buildings, corpses and craters in the roads that Field Marshal Gustav Mannerheim wound his way in his chauffered car.

There was no time to waste. Finland’s geography suited their initial plans. The Karelia Isthmus was the lynchpin, so Mannerheim was concentrating his defences there. The only other area that offered an immediate threat, was the 65 mile stretch just north of Lake Ladoga’s shores.

There were two good roads here, one started from inside Russia at Petrozavodsk, and the other from Murmansk along the rocky coast of Lake Ladoga. Both roads converged near the small town of Kitela, and a few miles from there was Finlands crucial rail network. It also was a point where good roads led north and south.

Mannerheim knew that the Russians were going to aim at these two areas and he was right. This central zone near Kitela was the backdoor to the Isthmus and could support a large army on the move.

The Finns were ready for this backdoor trick, they’d been practicing during war games in the preceding years for precisely this route.

The strategy was even more interesting. They would let the large Soviet Army move along these roads until they reached a line of defences that linked Lake Ladoga to Kitela and another Lake called Syskyjarvi.

Then they’d pin down the Russians, and hit their logistic route now strung out back eastwards, their left flank now up against Lake Ladoga, and the right exposed to Finnish soldiers on skis. The would cut off the head of the Russian salient and then methodically destroy the Russian army north of Ladoga. Desmond Latham blog

In the early winter of 1939 the Red Army was an unknown quantity to just about everyone, particularly the Germans who were going to miscalculate and invade the USSR within two years.

The Red Army was an untried theoretical instrument in 1939, after Stalin’s purges of their commanding officers. There had been that stunning one-sided victory when Marshal Zhukov defeated the Japanese at Khalkin Gol in August 1939 but that was seen as hardly a fair contest.

The Japanese had been riding roughshod over the Chinese up until then, and the Chinese army often couldn’t even supply its own men with shoes, let alone boots.

There was no air support, no armour, this wasn’t a fair fight at least that was the general perception of this time. The Japanese tanks of this time were even more rickety than the Italian tanks, and that was saying something. Zhukov had called down a comparatively vast air force and cut up the Japanese with his mechanised force. The fighting was on the treeless plains of Khalkin Gal, the open landscape of Mongolia, ideal for the Soviet’s style of full-frontal guns blazing tally-hoe assaults.

Finland was another story.

As Stalin put the finishing touches to his invasion of this Baltic nation, it would be the soviet’s first foray against a European foe and one which had been trained by both the Germans and the Russians.

The terrain as you heard last episode was like another planet — the Russians were going to find the fighting in the trees and bogs of Finland extremely hard going. Of course, Stalin was going to utterly ignore one of his generals who was aware of this threat posed by landscape, General Shaposhnikov, the Red Army Chief of staff. As the Russians built up their logistics prior to the invasion, he was studying the campaign with a rather more jaundiced eye.

In front of the first Russian tanks was forest. And then behind this was more forest. Then some more. The Finnish centre of operations was far away from the border with Russia, deep inside its territory. There were only a handful of roads.So the Russian plan was supposed to emulate the Germans, but turned into a slow moving sludge, moving into a meat grinder that was the Finnish army. Moscows plan was simple — just overawe the Finns by using vast quantities of manpower, at the same time use their airforce to bomb the Finnish towns in a kind of one-two punch. The Finns would be terrified, Stalin was convinced of this.

Soviet planners were also hoping that the communist sympathisers inside Finland would form the a large fifth column to further destabilise their enemy.

The Russians were going to invade with very few proper maps, but lots of brass bands and communist party banners and other paperwork. In the thickest forests of the world they brought in flat trajectory artillery when it called for mortars or howitzers that shot over trees. Even more shocking, the Russians dragged hundreds of anti-tank weapons into Finland, a country that had no tanks.

The key to Finland was the Isthmus, nothing else mattered. Desmond Latham blog

The Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 came as a bloody shock to the people of the small Baltic state, not least the government which appeared to have misread Joseph Stalin’s intentions.

The location for this terrible saga lies at the easternmost end of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and the huge Lake Ladoga, this is the rugged and very narrow Karelian Isthmus.

Flying over this territory in a light plane reveals its stark and stern beauty, cut laterally by crisp blue lakes, blanketed in an evergreen forest, stubby grey and reddy grey hills pop up here and there.

There was virtually nothing of value here at least at first, no minerals, very little agriculture as the soils are poor. That was going to change when the Finns discovered large deposits of nickel in the Petsamo region and would hand over mining concessions to the British.

The Russians did not like that one little bit.

But it wasn’t minerals that led to Moscow invading their much smaller neighbour, it was the fear of the Germans. This little bit of land was going to be fought over as it had been so often through history.

The Karelian Isthmus is a land bridge between the seething eastward mass of mother Russia and Asia, and the immensity of the Scandinavian Peninsular that swells downward to the west. It’s like a highway for tribal migration, a route for trade, a channel for cultural movements, and a gateway for conquest.

The armies that have stormed across this isthmus include the Mongols, the Teutons, Swedes, the Russians themselves. And as the drumbeat towards war in the 1930s pounded, Soviet president Joseph Stalin was acutely aware that the German’s could use this same route to attack Leningrad and Russia from the north west.

This Third Reich juggernaut could pass eastwards through the Karelian Isthmus at the point where it widens into the Finnish mainland, and hit Leningrad in a matter of hours. At least that was what Moscow convinced itself on the eve of World War II.

The fact that to get there the Germans would have to ship a vast quantity of material across the Baltic Sea was not really taken into account. It would have been a logistic nightmare which wasn’t really feasible at that stage of the war. Attacking via Sweden overland was even more difficult.

It made sense for Hitler and his generals to attack Leningrad, but using a far more common route via Lithuania. Leningrad is of course, St Petersburg, and St Petersburg is the hometown of Vladimir Putin. Another Russian leader who is paranoid about the Baltic States these days.

When the Russian revolution in November 1917 led to the Tsar’s overthrow, the Finns declared independence and Lenin could do very little — he was fighting his own civil war against the pro-Monarchy forces so Moscow initially recognized the new Finnish government.

Finland now experienced a series of social ructions, class struggles, famine, and a standard of living that plunged. There were 40 000 Russian soldiers stationed in Finland, and these joined the new Finnish communist Red Guard which began to fight the White Guard, the militant arm of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. A Finnish Civil war had begun.

A right wing uprising in 1932 collapsed and that pretty much ended the effectiveness of the Finnish fascists, the country had survived the depression, coup attempts, fascist uprisings and their economy seemed to be looking up.

Moscow kept the pressure up saying that Finland had to prove their good faith with a tangible, real world gesture.

Finnish Prime Minister Cajander put out feelers, what would this entail? Ah, that’s easy, replied the Russians, the most suitable gesture would be for Finland to cede, or lease, what the communist country called “the valueless islands in the Gulf of Finland” to Russia.

Both Cajander and Holsti rejected this as out of the question. Desmond Latham blog