NORTHERN THEATRE: Such Nastiness

For six centuries Russia tried and spectacularly failed to conquer Finland before Alexander I won it from Sweden in 1808-09. Alexander had two big advantages: 1) he made a deal with the Swedish gentry in Finland promising them self-government; 2) he waited until February to begin his invasion, when the Finnish lakes were frozen fast and he could bring up supplies by sledge. Even then it took him 19 months to quiet the Finns.

Russia’s Joseph Stalin began his invasion last fortnight with these advantages reversed. Instead of a disgruntled ruling class, he faced a nation which, almost to the man, hates the Russians as bloody oppressors.* And instead of clear weather and frozen lakes, Joe Stalin’s forces found themselves fighting in a blinding blizzard, which grounded aviation, smashed tanks against half-concealed boulders and granite tank barriers, and gave to the Finns, who fight guerrilla-style in small units, with short, light machine guns and short, razor-edged knives, an almost even break. By the end of the second week of the war the Russians, who had thought they were starting a Blitzkrieg, were still hammering desperately at the Mannerheim defenses in Karelia, while in the north (the only section they had succeeded in penetrating deeply) their supply lines were dangerously lengthened.

Surprised by the cleverness of Finland’s preparations, Russia’s press exploded in wrath. Wrote Nikolai Virta in Pravda (from Terijoki, where Russia has set up its joke People’s Government): “When our tired men wanted to drink, they found all the village wells filled with earth. . . . Hardly had the first Red fighter set foot on Finnish soil when an explosion rent the air—a mine! Mines are everywhere.” Even the Russian soldiers were indignant. Writer Virta quoted one as saying: “What cads! . . . They are masters of foul play. How well they make such nastiness!’1

Isthmian Drive. Even more nastiness was in store for the Russians—especially in the Karelian Isthmus, historic gateway into Finland and the one Alexander I stormed with 17,000 men in 1808. Not only were roads, bridges and buildings mined—even a new bicycle left leaning against a fence was a detonator—but the Finns had utilized the geographical peculiarities of their country shrewdly.

Lowlands had been flooded, augmenting the chain of lakes across the isthmus and leaving only narrow strips of land between the lakes as passageway for invaders. This land, wooded and boulder-studded, was a natural anti-tank defense, to which the Finns had added long lines of jagged, diamond-shaped boulders, three deep, as their main lines of defense against tanks. Above the narrow roads other huge boulders had been poised, so that the mere cutting of a cord sent them hurtling into the road. Concrete pillboxes, sunk into the earth and covered with sod, guarded all main avenues of passage. In the thick fir forests hid the Finns themselves, trained since childhood to use their knives as cleverly as an Alabama Negro uses his razor, and since joining the Army to aim their machine guns as accurately as a sharpshooter aims his rifle. Finally, there was the snowstorm.

The Russians hurled their mechanized forces against these defenses blindly—although they had been sending aerial observers over Finnish territory since they began planning this war. Columns of tanks rolled between the lakes, piled into what looked like snowdrifts and struck sparks from the boulders beneath. Well-aimed Bofors anti-tank guns spat from snow-covered hummocks, piercing the thin hides of the old-style tanks. The Finns claimed they put out of action more than 100 tanks in 13 days’ fighting. Then out of the swirling blizzard poured the Finns themselves, almost invisible with white capes covering their grey-green uniforms and white fur caps on their heads. Their machine guns barked and their knives were loose in their sheaths and they did not take many prisoners.

Balked in their mechanized attack, the Russians sent wave after wave of infantry into the forests, where the squatting Finns waited with rifles and machine guns. Selling their land dearly, the Finns dropped back. Many Russians fell, but more came on, converging on Viipuri, the key to southern Finland. At Perkjärvi they were halted, and still the strongest positions of the so-called Mannerheim Line (which is not a line but a series of lines) had hardly been dented.

Northeast of Lake Laatokka the Russians tried to outflank the Finnish defenses and penetrated a few miles to Suojärvi and Salmi. A column tried to cross the thin ice of the lake, fell in, bubbled, drowned. If the Russians could skirt the northern shore of the lake and attack the Finns in the isthmus from the rear, Viipuri would probably fall and a drive to Helsinki be started. But to round the lake they had to pass through a narrow corridor between Laatokka and Finland’s central lake basin, and there the Finns would engage them. By week’s end the Russian advance on Viipuri seemed to have lost its momentum, and in a house that belongs to Peaceman Alfred Nobel’s family, and is now Finnish G.H.Q., the commandant of the Viipuri sector, quiet, youngish Lieut. Colonel Alexander Mellblom, hatched a counteroffensive to chase the Russians back to their swamps.

Experts who were amazed by the Finns’ resistance had only to remember that in the limited terrain where the two armies were fighting Russia could not deploy her superior forces, and that the Finns have proved their superiority in hand-to-hand fighting in sailors’ dives all over the world. The Finns’ losses were small—but the report that one Finn had slain 70 Russians single-handed was only the way the Finns talk.

War in the North. If the Finns had surprised the Russians in the isthmus, the Russians turned the tables along the 800-mile frontier between Finland and Russian East Karelia and the Kola Peninsula. During the two months of bickering that preceded the war all good Finns pooh-poohed the suggestion that Russia might attack that frontier. The terrain was too difficult, they said; there were only two roads to the frontier on the Finnish side; each day was 20 hours of darkness and four of twilight; and besides, Russia could not maintain her supply lines. Nevertheless, patterning their strategy after that of the Germans in Poland, the Russians sent four swift columns into Finland, each thrusting westward toward a rail or highway centre, trying to cut the Finns’ own supply lines.

One column reached Nurmes, cutting the railroad that runs diagonally across Finland from Tornio on the Swedish frontier to south Karelia and the isthmus. Farther north, another column took Suomussalmi and turned southward toward lisalmi, a rail junction in the centre of Finland. Still farther north, a third column bore down on the roadhead of Kuusamo. Most daring of all, the fourth division crossed the low mountains to Kuolajärvi and thence sped westward past Kemijärvi toward Rovaniemi, which lies on Finland’s highway to the Arctic. From Rovaniemi this column might strike southward to Kemi and Tornio, thereby commanding not only the Arctic highway but Finland’s rail supply line from Sweden.

In the farthest north the fate of Petsamo was still in doubt while, to the west, one Russian column pushed southward for an enveloping attack.

These thrusts were as dangerous as they were daring. Although Finland might be cut in half laterally and Petsamo crippled as a supply base, the Finns in the south could still get supplies from Sweden by way of the Gulf of Bothnia. Meanwhile the Russian columns were in peril of being cut off from their own bases. The Blitzkrieg was becoming a war of supply lines.

In the Air the Russians’ overwhelming superiority was slowly being balanced. Italy sent 80 Savoia-Marchettis to Finland and Britain sent 30 Bristol Blenheims. If the sub-zero temperatures and the shortage of daylight did not cripple their effectiveness, the Finns had a good target in Russia’s two main supply lines, the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway and the Baltic-White Sea Canal. Aggressive and continuous air attack on the rail line would leave Russia’s raiding columns marooned in the wastes of north Finland. By week’s end the Finns had taken to the air and were reported to have bombed the railway.

The Finns used some of their limited supply of planes to bomb the Russian base at Baltiski, Estonia. This was not pure cockiness, as it seemed, because the Russians are short on seaplanes and need land bases from which to operate. If these bases could be destroyed, Helsinki and other Finnish cities would be spared many terrors.

At Sea the war was quiet. Finland announced that she was fortifying the Aland Islands and had mined their approaches. There was no protest from Sweden, which alone might object to the proximity of big guns to Stockholm. Russia announced her blockade of the Gulf of Finland, and Finland said it was illegal. There were some sporadic exchanges between Finnish coastal batteries and Russian warships in the Gulf (the Russians shelled Hanko without much effect), and Finland suspected Russia of planning to land troops before the Gulf begins to freeze around Christmas.

Finland’s Chances depended on what she was playing for. Failure to crack the Mannerheim Line had already hurt Russia’s prestige. (In twelve days Germany had taken every major Polish city but Warsaw and Lwow.) Effective help from Italy, Great Britain and especially Sweden (which was most threatened by her traditional enemy’s advance) might enable the Finns to hold off the Russians for many months, and in many months many things could happen. One thing that happened this week was a U. S. credit of $10,000,000 to Finland. But if no further military help was forthcoming, the Finns could hope only to sell their country for much Russian blood. This they were prepared to do. Cried Premier Risto Ryti in a nationwide broadcast: “The Finnish people at this moment are fully united, firm as steel and ready for the greatest sacrifices in behalf of their independence and their existence. … If compelled to do so, we shall fight to the end—even after the end.”

*The Finn gets emotional only after much brooding, and usually without much logic. Today he forgets that under Tsars Alexander I, II and III his people were the best-treated minority in the world. Instead, he remembers the blundering misrule of Nicholas II. Even the fact that in 1918 many Red Finns fought hand-in-hand with their Russian comrades against Finnish and Russian Whites cannot change his traditional hatred and contempt for the Slav.