This is a novel about the 100-day Winter War of 1939–40. A key character is Simo Häyhä, a Finnish country boy who won a nationwide contest as the best marksman in the country and went on to become the greatest sniper of the war. In the fall of 1939, Finland called up all the men in the Civic Guard. Village men were kept in the same unit, and Simo and his neighbors were assigned to the 6th Company near the border. The Russians invaded on November 30 on a broad front along the length of the border. Snow fell that first day as the Finns burned everything and slowly retreated. Simo’s unit acted as a rearguard, and in his first action he shot five officers in five seconds. As his unit marauded around the slow-moving, ill-equipped, and inadequately dressed invaders, he killed daily and became known as the White Death. The 6th Company successfully held off a much larger attacking force. The Russians were so enraged by the success of the White Death that they set a trap for him, with six mortars and five anti-tank weapons zeroing in on him in a single day. Miraculously, he escaped. He was circulated around the front whenever his services were required. At month’s end, his best friend was killed, and revenge became Simo’s only objective. The next day he got the Russian sniper—a 490-meter shot without a scope.
Indeed, the Red Army had been totally unable, after five weeks of war, to advance against the Finns. They were humiliated, and rumors began to surface at home. Stalin began to negotiate, and put Timoshenko in charge. He reorganized the army and, in mid-February, took a massive gamble. He sent an army across the frozen Gulf of Finland, 120 kilometers to the Finnish side. They fought on the ice for a week, during which 12,000 died, slightly more Russians than Finns. Across the entire front, the Russians kept throwing wave after wave of men into the maw of battle. The negotiations offered Finland the same terms as before the invasion, including Finland giving up land on its eastern border. On March 6, a Russian sniper hit Simo and blew off most of his jaw. His body was tossed on a sled with the dead until hours later someone saw him twitch. He was rushed by sled to the rear. A surgeon miraculously put him back together, but he was disfigured for life. On March 9, Finland signed an armistice, forfeiting ten percent of its land to the invaders. The Red Army had advanced fifteen kilometers. An officer observed, “All we’ve done is take enough territory from them to bury our dead in.” When Simo awoke, he learned that he could not speak, and that his farm was lost to the Russians.
The Red Army had lost 400,000 men, the Finns 70,000. The Finns, though, had created a nation. As Hitler watched the wretched performance of the Russians, he had no hesitation about attacking the following year. Simo underwent twenty-six operations and recovered his ability to speak. He retired to a farm near the border and was consistently honored throughout the nation. He lived to be ninety-six, and just before he died he released a memoir he had written shortly after the war. Whenever asked about all those he killed, he responded that if they hadn’t done what they did, there would be no Finland.
This is an absolutely great book. A fascinating aspect is the insight into the thought processes—the slowing of the breath, the focus, the emotional detachment, and the light touch on the trigger—required of a successful sniper. Much of what he did was accomplished while enduring temperatures as low −50°C. The obvious comparison to the Russian failure eight decades later is striking. Their disillusioned, poorly led and trained, often alcohol-fueled, indifferent warriors achieved fifteen kilometers in one hundred days. Today, they have failed to reach many of their objectives in a war fought longer than World War II. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
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