The Winter War: Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940

338 Pages·2009·3.17 MB·English

by  Robert Edwards

THE WINTER WAR:
Russia’s Invasion of Finland, 1939-
1940
Robert Edwards
Contents
List of Maps
List of Photographs
Preface
Introduction: An Awkward Little Country
Prologue: The Stranger from a Sunken World
Chapter One: Naboth’s Vineyard
Chapter Two: Bear-baiting: The Emerging Crisis
Chapter Three: Questions of Command
Chapter Four: The Assault on the Isthmus
Chapter Five: Responses
Chapter Six: The Ordeal of Ninth Army
Chapter Seven: In Ladoga-Karelia
Chapter Eight: Counter-attacks
Chapter Nine: Manoeuvres: The Gate of the Year
Chapter Ten: A Hare-brained Scheme ...
Chapter Eleven: The Red Army Reforms Itself
Chapter Twelve: Endgame: Red Storm
Chapter Thirteen: Outcomes
Appendix The Russo-Finnish Treaty, of Moscow, 12 March 1939
Notes to the Text
Select Bibliography
Index
List of Maps
Stalin’s attack on Finland
Intended assault on the Isthmus The battle for Suomussalmi–Raate The
defeat of the 44th Division The battle for Tolvajärvi
The advance to the Aittojoki River Finnish counter-attack, 23 December
Plans for Allied relief efforts on Finland The Red Army’s advance into Ladoga–
Karelia The Red Army advance to Viipuri The Finnish border adjustments,
March 1940
List of Photographs
Mannerheim as Chairman of the Defence Council, 1937.
King Gustav of Sweden (left), Erkko and President Kallio at the Stockholm
Conference, 1939 (IWM).
Väinö Tanner, Paasikivi and Baron Yrjö Koskinen depart for Moscow,
October 1939 (IWM).
A ‘Lotta’ unit preparing food at a Finnish reservist camp, October 1939
(IWM).
A passenger bus takes a direct hit, Helsinki, December 1939 (Photo
Pressens Bild, Stockholm).
A Red Baltic Fleet bomber, one of many downed over the Isthmus. It would
be recycled very soon (IWM).
Life on the Mannerheim Line (IWM).
Morning prayers (IWM).
The northern front at Salla, where Wallenius had, early in the war,
distinguished himself (IWM).
The terrain at Tolvajärvi.
The monochrome landscape of the Winter War.
A Finnish machine-gun crew on the Karelian Isthmus, January 1940
(IWM).
A Finnish mobile kitchen (IWM).
A column of Red Army POWs after Suomussalmi, January 1940 (IWM).
Two Finns walk past some of the remnants of the Red Army’s 44th
Division after retaking the field. Suomussalmi, January 1940 (IWM).
Karelian refugees prepare to leave their homes, March 1940 (IWM).
Preface
FOR ANY STUDENT OF international relations, let alone those purely military
matters that arise from them, the history of Finland is of unique importance in
the general European context, let alone the narrower Nordic one. This book
examines the short, savage war that erupted between the Soviet Union and
Finland in late 1939—the Winter War.
Counter-factual history is an amusing parlour game, but seldom anything
more. To speculate upon the great what-ifs of the past is generally a fruitless or
frustrating exercise, but the first question that naturally arises when surveying
the course and outcome of the Winter War is one of particularly high impact.
Had this unique conflict led to a different outcome, would Operation Barbarossa
have even been possible? For once, perhaps, that question is worth asking.
Certainly, Soviet policy with regard to Finland was intended to forestall such an
event as Barbarossa and as such it clearly failed—but why? How on earth did the
largest force ever assembled, with total numerical and technical superiority in
every arm, manage not to annihilate one of the smallest?
My own interest in this subject goes back to the 1970s, when, as an
undergraduate reading International Politics, I found myself studying the
Russian foreign policy of ‘forward defence’ and, not unnaturally, the role played
by Finland in defining (and serially frustrating) that policy. The price it paid for
doing so emerged rapidly, if not necessarily very clearly. This is partly due to the
fragmented nature of published documents, given the unique nature of Russo-
Finnish relations, which very often functioned at a highly personal level.
Although there was little love lost between the two cultures as a whole, there is
ample evidence that the ebb and flow of actual relationships played an
extraordinary function in the broader bilateral one. The tangled but very intimate
nature of these matters even gave rise, post-1945, to a new word
—Finlandization, more or less defined as the attempt to exercise control over the
internal affairs of a neighbouring nation-state without actually possessing its
territory or even colonizing it.
The present work is an attempt to account for the necessity of such a policy,
and to explain how it came into being—to examine the attempt made by the
Soviet Union on the last day of November 1939 to effectively annexe the
territory of Finland by invasion, why they failed, and to introduce the reader to
some of the consequences.
This is a complex European story—the United States plays only a marginal
(and less than triumphant) role in it. The painfully convoluted development of
Anglo-French relations with both the Soviet Union and greater Scandinavia are
basic to it, but at the core of the story is that uniquely tough body of people, the
Finnish nation.
Robert Edwards
SOMERSET, 2006
Introduction
An Awkward Little Country
When you have a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Proverb
THE GREAT NORTHERN CRISIS of the winter of 1939–40, that period of uncertainty
triggered by the Soviet invasion of Finland, was a unique and dislocating event
during the first full year of the Second World War. It was by any measure a one-
sided struggle, involving at its height well over one million Red Army soldiers
against rather fewer Finns, and yet the Finnish fought the biggest army on earth
to a virtual standstill, on occasion inflicting such shocking casualties that Stalin
started to face the prospect of military as well as political defeat.
There was no event during the ‘phoney war’ period that served to question
more the organization, structure, motivation and effectiveness of not only the
Red Army, but also the Western Allies, who, although officially uninvolved in
the actual fighting, none the less viewed the Finnish war as an opportunity to
‘change the subject’. The attempts of a split Supreme War Council to manage its
way through a situation that was on the one hand a tremendous cause célèbre
(even a casus belli), but on the other clearly a hopeless undertaking, revealed
more than anything else the total unsuitability of these men to make effective
war in either Britain or France. This failure of policy led to the immediate
collapse of the Daladier government in France, and later—after the Anglo-
French-Polish Finland relief expedition was given more limited objectives in
Norway—the fall of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s eclipse did not, of
course, take place until the war in Finland was over, and the plan, originally
conceived as an expeditionary effort that would both aid the Finns and (more
importantly) cut off German access to Scandinavian iron ore, was put into effect
a month later with famous results—the first encounter between Allied troops and
the Wehrmacht in Norway.
The remarkable ‘shadowing’ of the Berlin regime by the Soviet one is
evident from the outset of the story, and the attempt by the Red Army in Finland
to ‘outdo’ the German attack on Poland—even down to the creation of a border
incident to justify invasion—is chilling in its cynicism, even given what we now
know about Stalin’s regime.
The most notable aspect of this story, however, is not Anglo-French
incompetence, or the manifest failures of a blundering, lobotomized Red Army,
or even the signal uselessness of the League of Nations (rather a given, by then);
rather, it is the extraordinary resourcefulness and resolution of the Finns
themselves. For 105 days, the tiny, under-equipped Finnish armed forces fought
the Red Army (and themselves) to a standstill; by March 1940 the Finns had
nothing left and were short of ammunition, food, sleep and, critically, people—
Europe, and particularly Britain, marvelled at their absolute refusal to surrender.
It was in all ways a prefiguration of the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’, a phenomenon that
Britain has traditionally made its own, but in truth was born in Helsinki, Turku,
Tampere, Kekisalmi, Viipuri and Sortavala, place names that, for a few months,
became familiar to those who followed the highly imaginative, but largely
inaccurate reports and dispatches that filled the front pages of the Western press.
There were other aspects to this extraordinary war that made it quite
unique; the way in which the Red Army was assessed—incorrectly, as it turned
out—by observers, particularly the Germans, who in a sense drew what they
wanted from the embarrassing early failures of the Russian war machine. The
German High Command came to its conclusions about the Red Army far too
soon—bizarrely, it did not listen sufficiently to its Finnish counterpart, who had
rapidly developed, at the combat level, a robust respect for the individual
Russian soldier.
Inevitably, by invading in 1939, the Soviet Union turned Finland from a