Russia’s World War II Invasion of Finland Eerily Mirrors Ukraine


Virginia Cowles
Mon, June 20, 20222

Geopix/Alamy Stock Photo

The war in Finland had started about three weeks before. When the headlines announced that Helsinki had been bombed I thought it would be another Poland—that the country would be obliterated so quickly there would be little chance of getting there before it was over. Then the papers began recording the amazing feats of the Finns; incredible though it seemed, the Russian “steam-roller” was being held in check.

I made my arrangements to go to Helsinki and left a few days after the New Year’s party. Maureen had a fortune-teller that night, and when he read my hand he said, “You are going on a long trip.” I was impressed until he added, “You will be surrounded by lights, gaiety, and laughter.”

I found none of those things.

It was a strange feeling flying from one war to another. The transition was a gradual one. When you took off from the aerodrome “somewhere in England” and flew over the North Sea in a plane with the windows frosted over so you couldn’t see out, it was very much World War No. 2. It was still World War No. 2 at Amsterdam and Copenhagen; but at Malmo, a port in southern Sweden, the issue began to get shaky. When you asked for the latest war news, the answer was, “Which?” And by the time you reached Stockholm there was no longer any doubt: “The war” meant Molotov cocktails and Soviet bombers.

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Stockholm was in a state of tension. The papers carried advertisements calling for volunteers, the restaurants were filled with women canvassing for funds, and the hotels decorated with posters saying, “Defend Sweden by Helping Finland Now.” The war on the Western Front was as remote as China. I stayed there only twenty-four hours; besides a general impression of excitement and confusion I chiefly remember how cold I was. I was wearing a thick suit, fur-lined boots and a sheepskin coat, but the biting wind penetrated my bones. I had a suitcase filled with sweaters, woolen underwear, woolen socks, a ski suit, and a windbreaker. I put on everything except the ski suit and tried not to think what it would be like when I got to the Arctic Circle.

I took a trip along the coast to Hanko. Here I saw for the first time what continuous and relentless bombing was like. The deep quiet of the snow-bound countryside was broken by the wail of sirens five or six times a day as wave after wave of Soviet bombers—sometimes totaling as many as five hundred—came across the Gulf of Finland from their bases in Estonia, only twenty minutes away. All along the coast I passed through villages and towns which had been bombed and machine-gunned; in Hanko, the Finnish port which the Soviets demanded in their ultimatum, 20 buildings had been hit, and when I arrived, 10 were still burning.

It is difficult to describe indiscriminate aerial warfare against a civilian population in a country with a temperature 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. But if you can visualize farm girls stumbling through snow for the uncertain safety of their cellars; bombs falling on frozen villages unprotected by a single anti-aircraft gun; men standing helplessly in front of blazing buildings with no apparatus with which to fight the fires, and others desperately trying to salvage their belongings from burning wreckage—if you can visualize these things and picture even the children in remote hamlets wearing white covers over their coats as camouflage against low-flying Russian machine-gunners—you can get some idea of what this war was like.

The roads were littered with mattresses, chairs, and household articles that the soldiers had salvaged from the fire. The charred framework of the houses stood out blackly against the snow, but there were no curious pedestrians to inspect the damage, for icy winds from the sea swept through the streets. I have never felt such cold. A 20-year-old army lieutenant detailed to show us through the town forgot to pull down one of his ear tabs, and a few minutes later his ear went dead white. One of the Swedish journalists shouted at him, and he quickly rubbed it with snow. Half frozen, we finally stumbled into a corner café. The proprietor brought us hot meat sandwiches and coffee. While he was serving us, he informed us cheerfully that the top floor of the house was on fire. It had been struck by an incendiary bomb two hours before. His sons were fighting it, and he was confident everything would soon be under control. Somehow it was an odd experience to be sipping coffee in a burning building; also somewhat of a contradiction trying to get warm in a house that was on fire.

The young Finnish lieutenant had spent considerable time in America and spoke English fluently. He was an engineer in ordinary life, and now his job was to detonate unexploded bombs. He told us he had heard only that morning that his house, some distance away, had been bombed and completely destroyed. Fortunately, he had sent his wife and children away the previous week. Apart from a few reserved remarks he did not discuss the war. It was only when we left and wished him good luck that he said, “It will take a miracle to save us, but perhaps a miracle will happen.” Then, almost beneath his breath, “It must happen.” This boy was typical of many Finns with whom we talked. Although they were aware they couldn’t hold out indefinitely in such an unequal struggle, they clung to a stubborn faith that some event, unforeseen though it was, would save them from final destruction.

If you happened to be lunching at the Hotel Torni in Helsinki when the air-raid sirens sounded, you could climb up on the roof and watch the city crawl into its shell. Between the jumble of ice-covered roofs, you saw the people running for cover, the snow trucks pulling up by the roadside, and the police officers taking their positions on the street corners. Soon there was a silence so ominous that you could hear a door bang many blocks away.

The Hotel Kämp was the capital’s war-time center. When I arrived late at night it was deserted. But when I went downstairs the following morning, I found it overflowing with a noisy conglomeration of people; there were Finnish soldiers, women volunteers, politicians, and foreign journalists and photographers of a dozen different nationalities.

Out of the general confusion I managed to find Webb Miller of the United Press and had lunch with him. He had just returned from the Mannerheim Line and was filled with admiration for the Finnish soldiers. “They’re the damnedest fighters I’ve ever seen. They don’t seem to be afraid of anything. And talk about improvisation—they invent their weapons as they go along. They’ve got a new trick which is to tie a mine to the end of a string, then hide in a ditch until one of the Russian tanks comes along and jerk it across the road. I talked with a soldier who’d accounted for three 30-ton tanks this way!”

I pressed Webb with questions about the war and he told me the only way to understand what was happening was to keep in mind that two wars were taking place. The first war was the regular trench warfare, based on Western Front methods, being fought behind the Mannerheim defenses on the Karelian Isthmus; the second war was the guerrilla fighting waged through the forests on all the other fronts in Finland. In the trench war, the Russian attack on the Mannerheim Line had been repulsed; and in the guerrilla war, not only had the Russian thrusts been halted, but the Finns, by brilliant strategy and ferocious courage, had succeeded in wiping out entire divisions.

When at last we reached a rather primitive hotel in the small town of Kajaani, the proprietress looked at us in bewilderment, as though we were part of a traveling circus. Soon, I think she decided a lunatic asylum was more likely, for during the next forty-eight hours her telephone rang with calls from New York, Amsterdam. and Copenhagen, and everybody sat up all night typing out endless stories. Besides Harold Denny and myself, there was Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, Edward Ward of the BBC, Desmond Tighe of Reuter’s, and Ebbe Munck, a Danish journalist.

Kajaani served as GHQ for the Central Command. There in the slender waistline of Finland, some of the fiercest battles of the war were taking place. During the previous seven weeks, over a hundred thousand Russian troops had crossed the frontier, in repeated attempts to cut Finland in two. But the Finns had repulsed the onslaughts with some of the most spectacular fighting in history; they had annihilated entire divisions and hurled back others 30 and 40 miles to the border from where they started.

To understand how they did it, you must picture a country of thick-snow-covered forests and ice-bound roads. You must visualize heavily armed ski patrols sliding like ghosts through the woods; creeping behind the enemy lines and cutting their communications until entire battalions were isolated, then falling on them in furious surprise attacks. In this part of Finland skis outmaneuvered tanks, sleds competed with lorries, and knives even challenged rifles.

The evening we arrived in Kajaani we dined with General Tuompo, the brilliant 50-year-old ex-journalist general, who had only begun his military career 10 or 12 years previously and who, before the Finnish war was over, took a toll of nearly 85,000 Russian lives. He arranged for us to visit a front-line position on the Russian–Finnish frontier, where we saw the patrols at work and had our first taste of Soviet artillery fire. We started off with the idea of, perhaps, accompanying one of the Finnish border patrols on a quick jaunt into Russia and back. Not that any of us imagined the frozen Russian landscape would prove interesting, but we all thought it would be fun to step into the Soviet Union without the formality of getting a visa.

Accompanied by a Finnish army lieutenant, we left at four o’clock in the morning, hoping to arrive at the front before dawn. But the roads were so slippery our car skidded into the ditch three times, delaying us considerably; it gave us a small idea of what the mechanized Russian units were up against. We approached the village of Suomussalmi just as dawn was breaking, and here I witnessed the most ghastly spectacle I have ever seen.

It was in this sector that the Finns, a few weeks previously, had annihilated two Russian divisions of approximately 30,000 men. The road along which we drove was still littered with frozen Russian corpses, and the forests on either side had become known as “Dead Man’s Land.” Perhaps it was the beauty of the morning that made the terrible Russian debacle all the more ghastly when we came upon it. The rising sun had drenched the snow-covered forests, their trees like lace valentines, with a strange pink light that seemed to glow for miles. The landscape was marred only by the charred framework of a house; then an overturned truck and two battered tanks. Then we turned a bend in the road and came upon the full horror of the scene. For four miles the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun carriages, maps, books, and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood and the color of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes.

All were frozen in the positions in which they had died. I saw one with his hands clasped to a wound in his stomach; another struggling to open the collar of his coat; and a third pathetically clasping a cheap landscape drawing, done in bright, childish colors, which had probably been a prized possession that he had tried to save when he fled into the woods. They were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of grotesque wooden corpses; in the ditches, under the trees, and even in dugouts beneath the snow where they had tried to escape from the fury of the attack. I learned, with a shock, that they had been members of the 44th Division—the same division that just a year ago I had seen swinging along the country roads in the Ukraine.

How had the Finnish Army, with a force of scarcely more than 300,000 men, been able so far to stem the sweep of the Russian tide? I think it was due first to a free people fighting, with a courage never surpassed, against an Asiatic despotism for their homes, their liberties, and their lives; second, to the brilliant strategy of the Finnish military leaders; third, to the natural obstacles of the terrain which was broken by 70,000 lakes and three-quarters covered with forests; fourth, to Soviet blunders.

From a military point of view, the Russian onslaught will be studied as one of the most fantastic campaigns in history. All through the north the Russian High Command ignored the elementary necessity of keeping open its lines of communication. Thousands of Russian soldiers were sent into the wilds of Finland to be isolated from their bases and swallowed up by the forests. This extraordinary stupidity was hard to understand. The only explanation was that Russia had reckoned on a blitzkrieg lasting only a few days and had organized the campaign accordingly. The first divisions had been equipped with an enormous amount of propaganda, banners and pennants, which they had expected to distribute among a vanquished people; and in the north, a division entered with a brass band, actually expecting to be welcomed by the people it had been sent to “liberate.” The reason the Kremlin was so grossly misinformed as to the political stamina of Finland may have been due to the fact that Soviet observers were afraid to reveal the true state of affairs for fear of being shot as saboteurs.

For days I was haunted by the scene of those frozen, twisted bodies of the 44th Division. But the story of this division (one of those, incidentally, which invaded Poland in September) was typical of the whole blundering strategy for which the dictatorship of the proletariat now paid freely with the lives of the proletariat. It had crossed into Finland on Dec. 30 to relieve the 163rd Division, which was cut off, without supplies, near the small village of Suomussalmi. It marched 20 miles along a hard, snow-packed road cut through the heart of the forest, but was unable to join forces with the other, six miles away, across a roadless country. The Finns succeeded in first routing the 163rd, then turned their attention to the 44th; they cut off its supplies, and five days later attacked and annihilated the entire division.

Before we left Kajaani, one of the Finnish press officers took us to an internment camp at Pelso, where we heard a version of the battle from a high-ranking officer of the 44th Division, who had been captured by the Finns. The officer was a clean-shaven man of middle age who had served with the Red Army for 22 years. The Finnish warden requested that we withhold his name and rank, and informed the prisoner he was not obliged to answer any questions unless he wished.

The officer, however, gave an account of the battle which dovetailed completely with the Finnish version. He said the division was cut off on Jan. 2 and was without food until the final debacle on Jan. 7. The only supplies they received were six bags of hard tack dropped by plane. He told us that on Jan. 2 several of the officers begged the commanding general, Vinogradov, to retreat, but the latter replied it was impossible without an order from the Kremlin. And the order came too late.

The officer made three points of interest: He declared that the army had been misinformed as to Finnish resistance, many of the leaders actually believing they were entering to liberate Finnish people, that the army was badly organized for a severe campaign, and that the Russian troops, superstitious by nature, were particularly unsuited to the Finnish terrain as they were mortally afraid of the dark forests.

When I questioned him regarding the commissar system, he replied evasively that the commissars were necessary to infuse the soldiers with the proper spirit. I asked what he thought the final outcome of the war would be, and he hesitated; it was only when the warden bade him give an honest opinion that he replied he felt the Soviet Union, with its preponderance of men and material, was bound to conquer in the end.

Out of the 44th Division of 18,000 men there were only a few hundred survivors. We went through the jail and talked with them, accompanied by the warden and a Russian interpreter. In the first room there was a group of 30 or 40 dressed in their brown tunic uniforms and high felt boots. Many had frozen hands and feet, wrapped in bandages; but compared to their comrades, lying in heaps along the roadside, they were lucky.

When I questioned them about the war, they replied that they had been mobilized to repel a Finnish invasion of Russia. Some of them said they now realized they had been grossly misinformed, but I was astounded to find that many of them were still unaware of the fact that they had been captured on Finnish territory; they thought the battle of Suomussalmi had been fought “somewhere in the North of Russia.”

When we questioned them about general conditions in Russia, a small, wiry little man with a black beard became the self-appointed spokesman of the group by silencing his comrades with menacing looks. With typical Slav cunning, he answered the questions in a manner which he thought best likely to please. He denounced the Soviet Union with such an exaggerated emphasis and paid the Finns compliments of so lavish a nature that his replies were obviously worthless.

The second room into which I was taken was filled with Russian lorry drivers who had been in the Army Service Corps attached to the 44th Division. Most of them, I discovered, had never had military training of any kind; they were merely truck drivers picked up off the streets of Kiev. They spoke bitterly of the fact that they had been mobilised and, pointing to one of the group, said, “And look at Feodor. He is over 40 years of age with a wife and many children.” Feodor seemed pleased to have the spotlight turned on him and nodded his head emphatically, declaring that, indeed, he was 42 years old and had never heard the sound of a gun until he found himself driving a supply truck on the Suomussalmi front.

The most amazing story of all, however, was from the Russian nurse with whom I talked. This 23-year-old girl, the only woman prisoner in Finland, was captured when the Finns routed the 163rd Division. She was a girl of medium size, with broad Slavic features and eyes which were filled with sadness. She wore a wool dress provided for her by the Finns; her only other clothes were the man’s army uniform she had been wearing when captured.

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A few months before, she had been living quietly in Leningrad with her husband and small child; then she received a mobilization order. Thinking it was only for the autumn maneuvers, she was not particularly worried. In November, however, she was attached to the 163rd Division and a month later forced to cross into Finland. Although miserable and frightened, she was sent, with two other nurses, to a front-line first-aid post. The other nurses were wounded and removed to a field hospital behind the lines; when the retreat came, the girl was unable to get back to the base and for twenty-four hours wandered through the woods with a Russian doctor. The pair were finally picked up by a Finnish patrol on the shores of a lake.

The bodies of the other two nurses were later found by the Finns in the field hospital—an old farmhouse—alongside the corpses of hundreds of soldiers. Ebbe Munck, who had visited this hospital four days after the retreat, told me it was a ghastly sight. The yard at the back of the house was piled with naked bodies; when patients had died, the Russian doctors had simply thrown the corpses out of the window to make way for newcomers. Inside, hundreds of wounded men had died in their beds; when the order to retreat came, they had been abandoned. Ebbe said a man had even been left, half cut open, on the operating table.

When the Finnish warden heard this story, he remarked bitterly, “And that’s the civilization they want to bring to Finland.”

From the book LOOKING FOR TROUBLE: The Classic Memoir of a Trailblazing War Correspondent by Virginia Cowles, Foreword by Christina Lamb. Copyright © 1941 by Virginia Cowles. To be published on Aug. 9, 2022 by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.