Only Finland, superb, nay sublime. Sublime in the jaws of peril. Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed for all the world to see the military incapacity of the Red army and air force. -- Winston Churchill
Sixty years ago, little Finland, having rejected Soviet demands for territorial concessions, was in the fight of its life. Four Soviet armies -- infantry, armor, artillery and bombers -- invaded Finland on Nov. 30, 1939, expecting to occupy the country by year's end.Instead, Russia also found itself in the fight of its life with Finnish ski troops probing well across the Russian frontier in the world's largest armed conflict since the end of World War I.
It was brutally instructive.
In the bitter cold and snow of the 1939-40 winter, the Soviets found their mechanized equipment became virtually congealed in place. Poorly prepared and equipped for winter warfare, thousands of Soviet soldiers were killed by cold and frost and not by bullets and fragments.
The Finns, with little armor, artillery or aircraft, used the bitter cold and snow to their advantage. Clad in white and trained and skilled in cross country skiing, Finnish combat patrols cut Soviet supply lines, blew up their storage depots, ambushed Soviet units and disabled Soviet tanks by jamming logs in their treads.
Britain and France, which were brought into war with Nazi Germany because of their treaty obligations with Poland, talked of sending troops and aid. But neutral Sweden denied them passage. The United States was still two years from Pearl Harbor and could only sympathize and be awed by the Finnish resistance.
Churchill's powerful rhetoric on the Finnish resistance in February 1940 was only rhetoric. There was nothing any other country could do.
By March, the Soviets -- by then much bloodied and humbled -- had marshaled the artillery and armor to breach the Finnish lines. The Finns were worn down, short on ammunition and supplies. On March 13, 1940, the Finns and the Soviets signed a peace agreement.
The Finns had to yield 10 percent of their territory to the Soviets' strategic needs. But in exchange, the Soviets were forced to abandon their ambitious plans for the total occupation of Finland! And they had lost uncountable thousands.
The Finnish numbered 60,000 dead -- more than the United States lost during the decade-long Vietnam war. And the Finnish loss, from a far smaller population of 3.6 million, was far more devastating and traumatizing. It was, in terms of dead and national trauma, comparable to the American Civil War of 1861-1865 -- then the bloodiest war in human history.
There are ironies:
Today, a thousand miles south of Moscow, Chechnya, a north Caucuses Muslim community that has been part of Russia since czarist days, is now a state of the Russian Confederation. With a population of fewer than a million, Chechnya also resists Russian infantry, armor and artillery with a spirit akin to the resolve and ferocity of the Finns 60 years earlier.
While the outcome in Chechnya, facing the inevitability of succumbing to overwhelming Russian numbers and logistics, may be the same as for the Finns, the origins of the wars differ.
As early as 1937, the Soviet Union had called upon the West for a "Stop Hitler Now" movement. For whatever reasons, there was no response. Communism was as feared and loathed among the Western powers as Nazism. Further, there was deadly inertia in the West. Britain, France and the United States, with its "America First" noninvolvement movement, hoped the twin evils of Nazism and communism would war between themselves, thus ending two threats at the same time.
But in August 1939, Russia and Germany shocked the world by signing a mutual nonagression pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland from the west. Russia moved in from the east. Soon divided, Poland no longer existed as a state.
Thirty years later, the son-in-law of then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States and commented on that twisted compact: "We would have made a pact with the devil to get time to prepare."
The implication was that the Soviets, though having signed a nonaggression document with Nazi Germany, actually expected to be attacked sooner or later. Thus, with its own takeover of eastern Poland and the absorption of the independent Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Russia pressed its negotiations with Finland for certain Baltic islands and the Finnish mainland. They were strategic to Russia's defense.
The Finns refused to capitulate. On Nov. 30, 1939, 23 Russian divisions -- 460,000 men and more than 2,000 tanks -- moved against Finland's eastern border. The resistance of the Finnish people and the country's 160,000 army became the stuff of legend.
The Soviets were humiliated. But in the end they were able to reinforce their Baltic positions. And their premonitions were borne out when the German massed divisions and panzers lanced across the length of the Russian frontier on June 22, 1941, in hopes of securing the Soviets' Caucasus' oil fields.
But they had valuable instruction from the Russo-Finnish Winter War. Namely: Winter-trained and -equipped soldiers could devastate a far greater number of lesser trained and equipped troops.
The Soviets yielded before the savage Nazi "lightening" punches, burning farms, homes and fields in a torched-earth policy before the Nazi advance and moving their factories east of the Urals. Then, when the German army and its allies were thinly stretched across hundreds of miles of the steppes and far from supplies, the Russians stiffened, bringing in their own hardy winter troops from Siberia.
Slowly but surely, from the cold, snow-covered outskirts of Moscow and Stalingrad, Russian troops, artillery and tanks and white-clad Russian soldiers -- many on skis -- began to drive back the German armies that had reached so brazenly and boldly into the heartland.
Churchill, by then prime minister of England, was to insouciantly note that Hitler had obviously not been well-instructed in history: As Napoleon was to learn in 1812, it gets cold in Russia in winter.
Others also learned lessons. Taking note of the Finnish success in the "Winter War," U.S. Ski Patrol founder Charles "Minnie" Dole went to the United States War Department in 1940 and convinced Gen. George C. Marshall to form a winter and mountain unit.
Thus, in early 1941, the U.S. 10th Mountain Division began at Fort Lewis and Mount Rainier, Wash. It then expanded, moving to a 9,000-foot high Camp Hale, Colo., high in the Rockies. By late 1944, it was battle-ready and assigned to the American Fifth Army in Italy.
It went into action in early 1945, first with ski reconnaissance and combat patrols and then with an all-out assault to breach the German "Gothic Line" defenses in the northern Apennine Mountains.
Unfortunately, the 10th Mountain Division got little attention for its successes. For on the very day of the 10th's first major action in the Apennines, Feb. 19, 1945, all eyes in America were turned to the Pacific, where thousands of Marines began a bloody assault to take the island of Iwo Jima, only 800 air miles from Tokyo.
The 10th was decommissioned shortly after the war with little fanfare or celebration. Veterans, after waiting their turn for processing over the next six months, returned to families, colleges or careers. Little was heard of America's ski or mountain troops for the next decades.
Only in recent years did the United States' World War II winter and mountain troops begin to be acknowledged, and that was for their contributions to what is now the American ski industry. Many of veterans were involved in founding ski areas, ski schools and ski equipment manufacturing concerns
Finland's trials did not end in 1940. In 1941, it joined Germany in its attack on Russia to recover the lands taken by the Soviets. But by late 1944, anticipating German defeat, the Finnish army then turned on the remaining German army units in Finland and drove them out.
Possibly because of its inspired resistance to the Soviets, there was little post-war vindictiveness by the Western powers toward the Finns. None would ever forget that "Finland shows what free men can do."
The Soviets, victorious in war, reclaimed the territory they had so dearly gained in the 1939-1940 Winter War and exacted reparations from the Finns.
Nevertheless, in 1952, a little over a decade after bombings by the Soviets, Helsinki hosted the Olympic Games. But the price of Finland's resistance lingered for years. The war reparations depressed its economy. A visitor in the late '50s recalls noting the overwhelming numbers of Finnish women without men.
As in 1939-40, Finland still keeps a force of ski troops ready to fight in winter wars. And in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Army reincarnated the 10th Mountain Division as the 10th Light Division, a rapid-response unit based at Fort Drum, N.Y. Tenth soldiers have seen duty from Somalia to Haiti to the Balkans. Other units both in the United States and abroad include winter training in their military skills.
But in no time since has winter warfare been so definitively expressed and waged as in the "sublime" example of the Finns 60 years ago.
Robert H. Woody, a retired journalist, trained and served with America's 10th Mountain Division in Italy in World War II. He lives in Salt Lake City.