The Soviet-Finnish Winter War - Dr. John Suprin

hello everyone my name is Quinn Reid and I'm a member of the Dole Institute's Student Advisory Board I'd like to welcome you to the Dole Institute of Politics and thank you for attending today's presentation the dole Student Advisory Board is composed of kayuu students committed to the work of the Dole Institute the dole Institute would like to hear from you if you enjoy today's program please let us know by contacting us on facebook twitter or through our website email before we begin today I'd like to remain remain you to please turn off your cellphone's after the interview we will have some time for audience questions and answers if you have a question please raise your hand and I will come by with a microphone to you please ask just one brief question no filibustering so and now please welcome a director of the Dole Institute bill lacy thank you very much Gwen thanks to all of you for coming out we really appreciate your support of the Dole Institute and appreciate your support of the first in a second series put on by the Leavenworth history department on July 6th 2011 I looked up the date Jim professor Ted Wilson from our history department brought Jim will banks by my office to talk about a new series Jim's idea was that he has an incredible crew of historians up at Fort Leavenworth and they wanted to put on a series here at the Dole Institute we immediately saw the value of that and out of that came a series that just concluded at the end of last year on the Cold War many of you probably caught a number of those and the quality of the lectures was just really unbelievable and so after that was over and I don't remember if I asked you first or you asked me first but I know I desperately wanted to do this again so Jim agreed they went off figured about it figured out what kind of topic they wanted to do decided on World War two which fits perfectly with doll Institute's mission and so that's the genesis of today's kickoff of this new series on world war ii we're delighted to have the series here at the Dole Institute it is going to be splendid and it is going to be very entertaining and interesting it's my honor to present Jim will bags Jim thank you Bill now we appreciate the opportunity to come over here this is a lot of fun for us as well the first series as bill said was a from our standpoint was a great success and so I asked dr. Janet back Valentine who's in the back room somewhere she coordinated the first effort and now is coordinating the second effort so this will be the first in a in a 10 part series that will extend into November H you've got a hand out there that lists the presentations over the next 10 months today we have John superin who is a former armor officer 23 years service has a master's from University of Washington and Russian and Baltic Studies and today he will be talking to you about the russell finnish war john well to start you should include and what you should not exclude what does the audience know what do they know we'll see how that worked but what we're going to have to do a little geography we're going to have to do a little politics we're going to have to do a little history a little tactics all of this that's going to be here and hopefully when I get through my presentation there will be enough time left at the end for you to figure out what it is you wanted to hear that I didn't give you so you can you can work that in anyway I hope this does the volume okay for this so a brief chronology of the events that shape what we're going to talk about today some of them directly related some of them indirectly related the first one up here is in 1938 when the war clouds are gathering over Europe most of northern Europe individual countries not any part not any part of any alliance traditionally are trying to craft a policy going into what they see as an upcoming European conflagration and unanimously the northern European tier elects to be neutral we all know how that worked out but it's it was a mighty effort of all of the countries concerned to not be involved in the next big war and that that shapes a lot of what they're trying to do and it also unfortunately leads them down many you know bad roads blind a blind path the Baltic States Latvia Estonia Lithuania all declared in 1938 that they would be neutral hoping that they would be uninvolved in any upcoming European hijinks the next thing that happens that's of note as you can see up there is the molotov-ribbentrop pact this is at the end of august 1939 a deal between Russia and Germany and the deal has secret protocols is anyone aware of those secret protocols more or less divides a German sphere of influence and a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe that includes all of these countries which are trying to be neutral after the fall and the division of Poland almost immediately the Baltics are called up individually by Moscow because Moscow has security concerns and the security concerns that Moscow has include volcana include the ability of the Soviet Union to stationed troops in their countries is anyone work how this worked out rather than providing endless security which is what the Soviet Union promised there's a subversion of independence and a takeover of all three states sequentially by the Soviet unit and that happens in 1939 the states finally lose their independence officially in 1940 and spontaneously join the Soviet Union now now as that's going on as the Baltics already have Soviet troops in their on their territory but have not yet formally lost their independence Finland is approached by the Soviet Union but with security concerns also now I'm going to show you a map in a minute hopefully it'll be bright enough on the slide where you'll be able to see the the areas of concern but there's a requirement for territorial adjustment Finnish borders are somehow incompatible with Russian security interests and so they would like an adjustment of the borders to help them with that they would also like the ability to stationed Russian troops on Finnish soil as a as a preventive measure against external adventurism among the countries listed as the external adventurist syn clued Britain in France although Germany is really probably the Soviet Union's biggest concern but because they have a non-aggression pact in fact in fact at the time that's not one that they mention a lot okay to continue this just to get the slide finished there is a there are a series of visits where Moscow calls the leadership political leadership from Helsinki to Moscow for discussions about how they're going to work this deal there's three separate trips they end at the end of November 1940 and end of November 1939 with an impasse the Soviet terms are not met by Finland and on the 30th of November 1939 the Soviet Union attacks Finland the the other things that you see up here include a couple of the major events that we're going to talk about today during the war the war lasts 105 days from the 30th of November to the 12:00 13th of March 1940 some of the major events we're going to talk about are the summer saw me and rocky road battles the we'll also talk a little bit about the mannerheim line which is kind of the main effort area for both sides both the Soviets and the Finns the Timoshenko attacks which is the final Soviet attack at the end which finally breaks the the Finnish defense and then we'll see what the map looks like after it's all over okay let's see okay so up in the map here you have Finland I have a laser pointer which is is bright enough probably to blind me but not for me to indicate on the map anything to you so I'm going to try to talk you through the map a little bit you see Finland off on the on the right hand side there there's a there's an isthmus coming up right here you can see it that's the Karelian isthmus there's a lake right next to it called Lake Ladoga and then you can see southern Finland southern Finland is the part of Finland that has most of the population most of the infrastructure and most of Russia's security problems you see the Gulf of Finland at the bottom there at the bottom of Finland opening out into the Baltic Sea because the southern coast is Estonia and the Soviets already control Estonia what do you think it is that they're looking for they're looking for that pinch on the northern coast they want to be able to control the hunka Peninsula which if you look at Finland you go all the way to the Gulf Finland where it opens up wide there's a little teeny Peninsula right there they want to set up a naval base there they want at least for 30 years and they want to garrison it with 5000 Soviet troops and build an anchorage the Finns have a problem with that they also want the border on that isthmus move back because it's inconvenient Finland is too close to Leningrad and as Comrade Stalin says since we can't move Leningrad we need to move the border and this is one of the one of the the main terms that is given to the Finns the Finns monkey around trying to figure out if there's some way that they can accommodate the Soviets and at the end of the day the answer to that is they cannot so access to the Baltic Sea security of Leningrad and that if you look all the way up at the top of the map all the way at the tippity-top just up to the left of that little number one up there there's a there's a little tiny Peninsula out there and there's also security concerns the Soviet the Soviets want that too because access to Murmansk the Soviet port of Murmansk is up there and they don't want somebody else holding that so that's the other part of their security problem there's also some stuff in the middle that they don't like either they want a little bit of that shoved around but you know no big deal it's eleven percent of Finland's territory that they want what's that among friends ok in in discussions Prime Minister foreign minister of Finland go and talk to Molotov and Ribbentrop Molotov and Stalin rather three times in Moscow Stalin is there at all three of visitations ways in tells jokes makes comments including snide remarks and this is a telling quote as the as the Finns promised that their territory will never be used on their honor against the Soviet Union nobody will ever be allowed to stage Oh to Finland against the Soviet Union Stalin's code is more or less the great powers we included the Soviet Union included the great powers will never let you do that so it doesn't matter what you say you promise you can't deliver so therefore we will adjust things the way we want to adjust so military planning once the Soviet Union is pretty sure that Finland is not going to do what the Baltic states did which is just roll with the punches see how the treaty works and then be absorbed later there's going to be resistance then there's a requirement for some kind of a campaign plan and there are several that have floated the two main ones are Boris shaposhnikov shaposhnikov is probably one of the finest minds in the Red Army his idea is you wait very heavily conventional force structure going from Leningrad up that narrow isthmus which is where the Finns main defenses are and you barrel rooo using all your force in other words there's that one narrow front and that's the only place you fight Stalin thinks that that's suboptimal and the reason he doesn't like it is because it's not really fancy now you have to think about what has happened in the past Germany has been impressing the world with its various coos in in Europe and all the world is all atwitter about German capability and so Stalin believes that if the Soviet Union proceeds with kind of a de rig or regular old mass attack they're going to look like posers they're going to look like somebody who isn't with it and so Stalin prefers another plan a fancier plan a more modern plan a more enlightened plan so jeff posnick off is more or less set on the shelf for a while he still retains influence but his plan is disapproved and he moves away from center stage as far as the Red Army's plan against Finland goes so enter these two characters these two fellows up in the right hand side clemente Voroshilov and then Carole Moretz Gough in the lower left these are both where she left as a marshal of Soviet Union Moretz Gough is a is a colonel general but he will be a he'll he'll be promoted later these are both longtime confidant of Josef Stalin when I mean longtime confidant Stalin doesn't have as far as I can tell doesn't really have a real friend anybody that he would ever treat as a friend but he does have these longtime cronies that as long as they don't color outside the lines more or less live within kind of a semi security bubble around him both of these fellows are inside that bubble so in the 1920s in from 1917 up until the early 1920s 1920 1921 when there's a lot of fighting going on in Russia as a result of the the Soviet the the Bolshevik Revolution and also the Russian Civil War Stalin is in service with what's called the 1st Cavalry Army the commander that is a guy named boo Joanie who's also hanging around in the back but boo Johnny's not boo Joanie is is in the protected bubble but he's not bright enough to come up with a plan so he's doing something else having a sandwich or something on the other hand these two guys are more central for a sheila is politically reliable he he will when Stalin says jump he says how high he's one of these guys it's in the Red Army that Stalin never hasn't worried about remember what anybody know what's happening to the Red Army at this time in terms of it's officer management program yeah yeah they're they're purging their officer corps and the the purging is not anything like you get a cash benefit and you get to leave and yeah this is the small caliber pistol at the back of the head you know scale adjustment and so a lot of guys who are who who got to be generals because they're good have become threatening to Stalin not necessarily because they're threatening because Stalin thinks they're threatening and so there's a large scale you know process ongoing in the Red Army right now which is taking relatively experienced senior officers who really know what their jobs are and turning them into fertilizer for Sheila although he is one of the marshals of Soviet Union one of the very few I think there's two of them that don't get killed for Sheila's one of them boo Johnny's the other one these are the dim bulbs but they are politically politically reliable and so when someone says hey can you guys come up with a good plan to you know go after Finland that's more to my liking where she lives right there to say yes he needs somebody who's a little smarter than him so moretz Goff crafts a plan now that plan is well as it says here take a look at this anybody have any any military education or a military background attack everywhere you know now that the frontage the frontage on the on the Karelian isthmus that that narrow place that you push the COFF wanted to attack that's about 60 miles soup-to-nuts across and that's where he said we're going to attack with everything there when you take Finland all of this all of its land boundary with the Soviet Union it's over 600 miles and so the the for Sheila Moretz coffe plan is we're going to attack using several armies spread out all over that 600 mile attack now why does that seem like a good idea anybody well you know here's what they know about the Finns and some of what they know about the Finns is true and some of what they know about the Finns is not true the Finns in 1918 when they became in fully independent had their own internal civil war and there was Reds communists and socialists and there was whites and the whites end up winning and so they end up with a non communist government but the Socialists don't go away there's still plenty of socialists in Finland and so over time this idea that Finland is still ripe for the pickin into the socialist camp kind of sticks in Moscow's head now what's really happened is this there are people who are mightily disaffected by the whites winning in Finland but over the the period of independence which is about twenty years the Finnish economy has done relatively well and so this idea of being a Finn and being independent has almost trumped party allegiances to the point to at least the point where if a foreign country wants to put pressure on you there's a desire to work together as opposed to work in different directions this is something that's invisible to Moscow because it's happened over time and they weren't sensitive to the changes the other thing is the Finnish army is is is not being and it's not really well equipped their artillery park is a collection of museum pieces not a lot of it all kinds of different calibers not much ammunition their military budget is so miserably low one of the things that they do when they mobilize is they have a they have a term a slang term in the army and it's the it's the Prime Minister's name in and collie under the the collie under uniform and what that means is you're wearing civilian clothes and they gave you like a hat because you know stocks of military equipment were just so small under this government and this is this is like this guy was in power up till the almost the beginning of the war a few months before but the budgets are so small there's no real upgrading of anything there's no real modern equipment there's no really professionalized training most of the officer corps when they mobilize are people who are like teachers and businessmen and all this other kind of stuff they do have a small professional corps and they do have something that's called a civil guard which is almost like a voluntary National Guard that does a lot of tactical training in their copious free time and so there's some military capability there but it isn't really visible as top-of-the-line military capability it looks kind of amateurish and if the Soviet Union amateurs don't cut it the Soviets have more armored vehicles than the rest of the world combined Soviets have more aircraft than the rest of the world combined they're not going to let something like Finland who can't put shoes on their soldiers feet stand in the way of the Soviet agenda so what the heck is wrong with 600 miles they'll have planes from north to south they'll have tanks from north to south they'll have divisions and cores and armies all over the place and the Finns won't be able to match that Finns that will really want to be independent anyway and so what's the big deal the interesting thing about this slide is if you look at the knot the fact that it has all this you know we're going to use mobility and armor and aircraft that's all kind of cool and it shows your modern and shows your industrialized and that's what stone really wants but if you look all the way at the bottom once they decide to do that they actually have some guys in the Red Army and they ask questions like okay so how long do you think it's going to take and one of the planners that's that's working for Moretz cos says and this is a I'd be happy if it was done in two or three months and he's reprimanded immediately he says how can the reprimand is how can you think that it's going to be twelve days so plan it for 12 days now what does this do when you plan a military operation for 12 days and that's part of the instructions I think about things like food fuel ammunition replacements if it ain't 12 days is there going to be maybe a problem and so this this is one of the things that you're going to see come back to haunt the planners a little bit later okay so here's the troop dispositions there's our friend bar she'll if again a dashing man and you can see the troop dispositions those those big ovals most of the Soviet forces are going to actually still be in the Korean Peninsula and what's called Corelli and laga and that's that troop concentration just to the northeast of Lake Ladoga and the job of those troops is to move around the lake and towards Helsinki Helsinki is off to the left you can see that there's a little goose egg 2/3 of the way to the to the Baltic that's where Helsinki is they're going to move around la Daaga and they're going to they're going to flank can you see that little line there that what looks like a fortified line down in the isthmus that's the main finished defense so they're going to flank around that cooperate with those guys that are going straight up then in smiths and then they're going to move towards towards Helsinki out of the 30 ish divisions that the Soviets are going to use and six tank tank brigades all six of the tank brigades are going to be in those two southern groups and 22 of the 30 divisions are going to be in those southern groups and the rest of it is going to be spread out in those northern groups the middle group that big long long group there those guys their job is to cut the narrow part of Finland and you know cut across where it's narrowest and the objective there is to cut the fins off from any aid from outside and those guys have a terrible time but we'll get to that later up north the Russians actually do fairly well and the reason is because they have three divisions all the way up near petsamo at the very top of Finland the Finns if anybody knows the force structure Russian division about 17,000 guys all of them have 20 something tanks organic to them and so the Russians have three of those up there the Finns have about one battalion now one Finnish battalion is about 650 guys okay so up there the Russians don't do too badly the problem of course is there's nothing up there there's no roads there's no railroads and so once you take your little objectives you just can't sweep over the ground because there's no way to logistically support yourself so they are the massive masters of their own destiny up there the Soviets are but after they take their couple of objectives up on the coast they're more or less a boil what the Finns call a boil and they can't expand themselves to too far beyond that okay so now to the Finns on the right-hand side here there's a picture of Field Marshal Gustav mannerheim Mannerheim is an interesting guy kind of the George Washington of independent Finland father of his country served the Czarist Russian army his whole adult life comes back from service with the Czar in 1918 to preside over Finnish independence he knows the Russians better than they know themselves he knows what they need he knows what they do he knows what their strengths are he knows what the weaknesses are and so he's a he's a relatively important asset he is also not connected to the political infighting that is Finland because there was he's not political personally he's relatively right-wing but he is not a political player so he's he's separate from that so when the country begins to war fight he's made the commander-in-chief there's a there's a legal kind of escape clause in the Republic of Finland the president is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces and so that's all there is to it it's got to be the president except under what's called exceptional circumstances and so once the Russians get ready you get their war paint on and start coming across the border it's exceptional circumstances and so they bring a little old Mannerheim out of mothballs and put him in charge of the Finnish army here's what his his plan is he's going to defend with he he has the equivalent of 10 divisions broken down into three cores and then a few stuff in non core a core is usually two or three divisions and then he has some forces that are not assigned to any specific Corps down in that most dangerous area where the Russians are more concentrated he has two cores on that narrow isthmus with a fortification system known as the mannerheim line which is not really a fortified system that that we would recognize but I'll show you pictures of what it looks like but it's the best defendants can do and it's serious business for the Finns they do it on purpose they do it as well as they can they do it with the with the means they have and they plan to fight it there's also another core that's on that on that left flank those so the Russians that would be trying to come around the northern part of Lake Ladoga there's another Army Corps there so it's a second and third on the on the isthmus the fourth Corps on laga and then from there all the way north who are talking about 400 miles there's not much but the not much has skis and that matters too okay so there's always this thing that you know what is the matter Highline Mannerheim line and where is the mannerheim line if you if you have read anything about this war the term has probably come up you've probably seen it so here's where it is here's that isthmus and once you get to the northern part that it's mmus finland opens up ok gets wider down in this area here there's lots of rivers and lakes and water lots and lots and lots of water and so this is not traffic Abul by in other words this is not one big highway there's ways you can go and there's ways you can't go and so the Finns try to tie together all of that natural obstacle you know all that water all those rivers into a defensive plan to try to make it more defensible once the russians get out of that narrow isthmus now their numbers matter because the finns would not have enough to seal the wound so it's important for the winner whoever the winner is going to be to command that isthmus okay you can see the border between the Soviet Union and and Finland down at the bottom there that's that first red line and then there's the mannerheim line and between the one in the other the Finns have stationed about three brigades so Brigade 3000 men so there's about 9,000 guys in that area that are over watching obstacles calling some artillery fire trying to fight positions where they can and then eventually they will retrograde back to that line where there's some amount of fortified fortified fighting positions and things like that okay so what's the mannerheim line look like well it's not the maggio line is anyone ever seen pictures of the marginal line all these kind of mechanical turrets and elevators and underground cafeterias and shells that move on little railroads and it's really really sophisticated the mannerheim line is not that the mayor timeline is big rocks in a row and barbed wire tied to trees and trees cut down so they're in your way and in open areas cut so when they're full of men you can kill them this is just taking nature and adjusting it so your weapons will kill people in it the fighting positions the Finns make or mostly dirt and logs as a late-breaking extra they introduced that high-tech invention called cement but it isn't really good cement because they don't have any money almost immediately before the war there's a there's a big shipment of steel plates that go out to try to reinforce these bunkers with steel plates but at the end of the day this is not a fancy fortification this is just the best these guys can do to try to build some kind of fortification based on the terrain ok another picture of the mannerheim line those are boulders that's an anti-tank line so cut trees sunk in the ground connected but but with barbed wire to hang up the infantry line up a bunch of boulders that stops tanks which is very interesting because you know when you stop a tank what do you do what do you do then hey I got them stopped what I do now hey mom hey mom what do I do well if you're a sophisticated army you use some kind of an anti-tank system to destroy the tank when it's hung up the finnish army the whole thing has about 60 anti-tank guns and so they have what they call anti-tank teams so when the tanks get hung up here's their plan anybody know what the anti-tank team's main weapon is the Finnish state liquor board has a roll in it in the few that the Finns are actually the those who come up with the term Molotov cocktail in a Molotov is the foreign minister of the Soviet Union at the time who has done them the big disservice of kind of working them into this war and the Molotov cocktail is the primary anti-tank system of the Finns they use dynamite they use hand grenades they use crowbars all kinds of interesting things but the point is get as close as you can you know disable the tank prevent it from moving light it on fire as you can and then when the crew tries to bail out kill them with small arms and that's that's sophisticated for the Finns now if you're the Russians you'd think this is all about foolishness the problem is Finland has her own defences organic to the country pine forests these pine forests are extremely dense and if you want to move especially in an armoured column with heavy vehicles you're going to have to move on the roads if you get off the roads you're going to get stuck you're going to get between trees you're going to get you're going to sink in the water there's all kinds of things that prevent you from this kind of sweeping maneuver that would allow armored vehicles to actually shrug off infantry trying to chase them with a bottle of gasoline in Finland do you really can't do it that well now that doesn't mean to say that this isn't gutsy stuff you know tanks don't come in onesies and twosies they usually come in bunches tank guys don't like to be killed so when they see people running around you know their first impulse is to fire everything you have at everything everything you see and so this this is still you know a high adventure proposition here's what the Finns kind of lack so so they have the benefit of you know decent defensive terrain they do a mobilization and so there they're able to kind of wring out of the population about 300,000 troops some of these guys have almost no training some of them have more but they do a relatively effective job of squeezing a population that's not very big to get a relatively large field force one of the things that they did an inter war period is they have large women's auxilary units that are already trained they call them Lauda's and there's almost a hundred thousand of them and so in the in the rear areas of Finland the the the anti-aircraft observers the nurses the logistical services running the Finnish railroads are all done by female auxiliaries freeing up male manpower to go to the frontline units and so this is the way that they take a relatively small population and ring as much as they can out of that population to generate combat forces but you know the bad part of course is artillery ammunition don't have much of it either one the Finns estimate that in a war they have 21 days worth of ammo how many days did I say this fight goes on 105 days well so so they have an advantage because the Russians think it's going to be twelve days so there's going to be a little bit of an advantage where at least at least the Finns know that they've got 21 days of ammo and so they can they can play with that but at the end of 21 days one of the benefits of being the Russians is the Russians produce their own stuff you know the Russians are going to produce their own replacement tanks their own replacement artillery their own ammunition whatever it is that they lose or need they produce it the Finns produce almost nothing so they have to either buy things or beg for things and then those things have to be delivered and there's a problem with delivery and we'll talk about that too anti-tank weapons the Finns have a few anti-tank weapons they're working on an anti-tank weapon that's just about to be fielded but really they're going to have to use bottles of gasoline and tar and detergent with a lit rag later on they get sophisticated and they have a a sulfuric acid ampule as the trigger so that's the cool that's the cool Molotov cocktail it has like a real military trigger on it but it's still throwing a bottle of gas at somebody communications gear they have less than 200 radios in the hole in the whole army how many miles did I say that front was six hundred miles okay they have about they have about a hundred radios in the army most of them are thirty kilometer more sets so the maximum range is thirty kilometres and the only signal it sends is sand and that's all there is to it most of what they're trying to do is with field phones but they don't have a lot of those so most of what they actually do is using civilian telephones hello this is me I'm calling from mrs. pnina's house and this is a this is a problem coordinating fights okay and Manpower's now let the last thing of course there's some of your Lauda's that those are anti-aircraft auxilary those three there are anti-aircraft axillary x' but you know the the good part of the the axillary program that finland had was you don't really have to do anything with them other than column to the colors because during peacetime they actually had a training program so the nurses knew how to nurse and the any aircraft auxilary knew how to do their functions and everything else and so they were like anything else they had they had the right training to fall into their jobs once once the balloon went up as it were okay so here a little bit of statistics for you just so you can see kind of the the scale of the problem that looks pretty good looks pretty fair and i think you can probably see why stalin would look at this and say this is not a big deal the the aircraft that the soviets have a lot of them are quite good the modern generation of aircraft that they've been producing for about the last year or so before the war it is really quite good the finished stuff is another collection of bits and bobs and museum pieces and biplanes and everything else you can imagine the Russians tended to fly from air bases that look like air bases when they landed they got a hot meal they slept in a bed the Finns tend to work underneath a tent with the air crews using blow torches to keep the engines hot so they wouldn't freeze up when they started them draining the engine every night and keeping the keeping the engine oil warm so it wouldn't freeze and then point it back in the morning been sleeping the crews aircrew sleeping on the ground with thermoses of coffee and sandwiches so you know very campy you know a bonding experience the the Finns had some tanks they had 32 of them about 15 of those were British tanks that because of fiscal problems you know buying them buying a tanks expensive as you might well imagine anybody have one you see and so one of the things that the Finns did to cut costs is when they bought these you know dozen or so tanks from the British they bought him the cheap way was with no sights and no guns so when the war came they had some tanks available with no sights and no guns and they had to kind of work that as an extracurricular project also okay so just December 1939 so the 30th 30th of November the war starts here's some pictures of the Soviets rolling into into Finland it's a t26 tank and the t26 is a is a relatively good tank for the time compared to a German tank of the age it's it's pretty sophisticated the armor is nothing special but nobody's really was in 1939 so the the armor will stop a bullet it won't stop an artillery piece it won't stop an anti-tank shell but it'll stop a bullet and it'll stop fragmentation from artillery and that's what it's supposed to do it's relatively reliable as long as the Russians haven't messed it up with kind of you know not very good maintenance and it has a 45 millimeter anti-tank gun on it which has a dual purpose gun which has a high-explosive shell and also an anti-tank shell which is relatively sophisticated as you saw the numbers the Russians have a lot of these look at the terrain this is what the Russian advance into Finland looks like it's on the road with heavy vehicles and so this is where this this relatively light finnish army is going to be able to take advantage now when this stuff shows up I would be a liar if I told you it wasn't extremely scary to the fence there are instances of Finnish units breaking and running as soon as they were attacked by tanks the first time the from the Finnish standpoint this happens at the beginning and then stops happening so once they kind of get their legs underneath them it's less of a problem in the Finnish army but initially there is a lot of what you call tank fright okay so here's the main front if you look at the bottom of that map you'll see a dotted line and that's the border with the Soviet Union where that fortification line so Seventh Army up to Summa 13th army up to those those bodies of water that's as far as they get before the end of December and at the end of December what you find is the Finns have actually succeeded in stopping the advance of the Red Army causing it great losses grinding it to a halt and so that line becomes static from the end of December till the beginning of February this has not done it low-cost so lots of Russians get killed lots of finns get killed but the finns are capable of stopping russian forward progress and also busting a lot of their morale so a lot of the units are going to have to be replaced by other units to continue forward okay so i want to talk about this there's anyone ever hear the term multi mo TTI it's it's a finnish word it refers to something like a it's a it's a bunch of wood firewood and there's something in this war that's referred to as the multi battles and here is briefly what the multi battles are russian units bound to their road network form these long tendrils going into finland the Finns find that if you find the right pieces of ground you can stop the snake you can stop it at its head and then the thing arrests itself in place now you have this long column the russians have almost no mobility off the road they have no logistics off the road they fear the forest because they are lost and so they tend to stay relatively close to the road and relatively close to their vehicles the Finns on the other hand move up and down the column and they more or less pick places to break the column and when they break the column they break it in two components the mati the mati is supposed to be a unit that is too small to effectively back and so what you do is you isolate these groups that's kind of step one and then step two is you figure out who the weak sister is and you begin to annihilate those pockets one after the other and this is what's referred to as the multi battles these are tremendously effective and this is one of those things that before the war there's no such thing as doctrine like this the Finnish army never thought this is what we'll do it just this is just how it works out a lot of their guys have experience as woodsmen they have experience living in out in the outdoors the cold weather and it's extremely cold doesn't vex them as much as it does the Russians their clothing is better their equipment is better for what they're doing and when they see a problem their basic idea is and this is kind of how command works in the Finnish army when you see a problem figure it out and solve it and that's really what their doctrine is and so based on what the Russians do they come up with an antidote which is break them up into groups and kill the groups one at a time okay so this is the opposite of high tech this the photograph is not very clear but there's reindeer pulling sledges and in front of it there's ski troops the ski troops heavy equipment is pulled so heavy machine guns mortars ammo food wounded are pulled on these sledges that are pulled by reindeer reindeer are pretty good in the cold weather they don't mind it horses got a feed a horse got a feed a horse horse food right this is different than what you find in the forests of Finland in the winter and so what's the primary prime mover of anything Russian that isn't motorized horses and it's going to be hard to keep them fed and once you can't keep them fed you're not going anywhere the Finns use a lot of horses too which they keep fed but places where it's hard to do logistics they tend to use reindeers can only pull a light load but you can pull stuff with it anyway I'm not sure I'm going to go into excruciating detail on this other than to say on the left hand side right in the middle of that map there's a place called sumo saw me sumo saw me and what's called a rata road there's a road going from east to west from a town called rata more or less on the Soviet border and that's the narrow waist of Finland to Soviet divisions are destroyed trying to make that crossing they cross about halfway to so Masami they are then arrested and locked into motty's the Finns then destroy both of the Motta's and I'll show you what that looks like in terms of numbers okay so here here are the things that caused this to be bad for the Soviets the Soviets have a basic doctrine that says when you go somewhere you don't retreat and so once you extend yourself and the Finns trap you the basic idea in there in the Red Army is stay put okay this is not going to work well but but that's their basic doctrine logistical support once everybody is locked into place what kind of logistics you think is coming up from the rear none another problem of course is Russian heavy vehicles tear up the roads which make it even harder for wheeled vehicles when they can get through and so these folks that are in Finland stranded in these little groups are more or less eating whatever they have and then they're going to they're going to begin to starve and they're going to be they're going to start eating their horse prime movers and they're also ill clothed the only logistical support they have is from the red Air Force which drops them things what happens if you wander away from the road in the woods the Air Force can't find you and drop you things you know you don't change your mailing address without telling the post office where you're going and so this is another thing that locks the Soviets into these kind of death cauldrons because they they can't effectively walk away from them so you get the logistical support the doctrinal part the breakout so that if you actually move away from from your little little mati hell the finns will just follow you and set up another one wherever you stop so you really don't solve the problem being lost in the wilderness is something that terrifies the russians and they all are lost in the wilderness so they don't want to wander away the forest - the finns equals safety the forest - the russians equals terror so in this environment even though they're a small army with not much equipment there are a lot of advantages to fighting the way that they choose to fight so here's what the strength looks like at those in that map that I just showed you in the middle Soviets start off with two divisions trying to make that crossing with add-ons about 48,000 men the Finns actually stop them with 400 now the number 17,000 once they once the 400 that there's a cat there's a captain who's in charge of two companies about 400 guys all told decides that if he just lets this go it's going to go it's going to go to its objective and so he decides that the thing that he can do with 400 guys is not try to stop them because you can but if you attack them then they'll stop because it'll confuse them and one of the things that you find is when you hit the Russians what do they do they shoot like hell so even if a few guys show up and kind of do something there's all kinds of return fire how much ammo do these guys have twelve days worth okay so so one of the things that they begin to do is they look at the knee-jerk reactions that the Soviet troops have to use to cause them to burn their ammunition up the other thing they do and this is not nice but it's in just in case you're mad at anybody you can try this it's really cold the Russians have mobile field kitchens it's a it's a trailer that you can cook soup and stuff like that in as soon as you identify multis you wait for the guy to fire up his field kitchen because you'll be able to see the smoke coming out of it you destroy that with a mortar so whoever's there ain't getting any child okay so photograph dead Soviets piles frequently two three four deep destroyed Soviet tanks same place as a Beatty Beatty fives another very sophisticated tank those things these things on nice firm ground can go 3540 miles an hour but they're not going 35 40 miles an hour here more destroyed Soviet tanks same place and when the Finns destroy each one of these things they'll strip the whole place of anything that's usable all the artillery all the ammunition anything that looks useable they'll ship it back French the Finnish army will redistribute it and then they move to do the next one so actually the Finns have more guns more artillery and more ammunition at the end of the war than they did the beginning of the war this is a term the Soviets coin for the war the war the white death finish officered so Missoni take a look at that real quick this is this is one of the two divisions that the two divisions destroyed with a forty fourth and the 163rd at a 17,000 men 1,700 made it either either made it back to Soviet lines or became prisoners so 90 percent were killed human blood froze there's weird things that happen to you when it's really really really cold people can't breathe properly gangrene starts really quickly in the cold and so the Soviets are amputating arms and legs for light flesh wounds and when fins come and find field hospital sites they find piles and piles of arms and legs that have light flesh wounds on them because they're so afraid of gangrene so how cold is it temperatures down to 58 below zero Fahrenheit the lubricants on the weapons freeze so you can be firing your weapon and you pull the trigger weapon fires you can't open the bolt the Finns use a workaround they use a glycerin alcohol mix and that allows them to function you get their weapons functional Soviet lubricants freeze Soviet engines can't be stopped for more than 15 minutes how much fuel do you have in that tank 15 minutes the engine components will freeze into each other and you'll never be able to start it again and this is significant also when you're trying to sneak up on somebody if there's a bunch of guys stuck on the road every engine is running so if you're the Finns yeah they're over there if you're the Russians you can't hear the Finns because I'm Bob Bob your engines are running until they're not running and then and then when your engines stop running you get kind of banging on the Finns will frequently bang on a tank and use their pidgin russian to say death is knocking on your door okay ski troops Russians try to use ski troops also you go back down to the bottom you'll see what what happened to them Stalin dissatisfied at the end of at the end of December early January for Sheila if his old chum who he's mad at says you know part of this is your fault you killed all generals American involvement fins are asking Americans for help take a look at that equipment from outside a lot of this doesn't get delivered because of the how it what countries it has to go through and what holdups there are in each country nobody wants to make Germany mad nobody wants to make the Soviets mad so there's a lot of starting and stopping and a lot of late arrivals of equipment these are volunteers to actually fight on the ground 8,000 Swedes 800 Norwegians 800 Danes 450 Hungarians 350 Americans - on 30 British 150 Italians and so this is what happens after a break in the action in January Russians get themselves together put Timoshenko in charge Timoshenko replaces the old team he wants to do the plan that was disapproved in the first place we're going to barrel through this is his words we will compel him to lose blood something he has less of than we this is very brutal direct here's a guy who knows what his tool can do and he's not interested in dancing around and looking modern so he had done moving up in February on so look at this map in the middle there you see the Sohma line that's where the line was in the end of January when the Russians launched in their next attack you see those arrows and you see those arrows that are crossing the water because the Gulf Finland is frozen up to 3 feet thick and so you can run tanks across the water the Finns can't defend that wide so the line is flanked Finnish artillery actually fires into the ice Asha's the ice tanks fall in guys fall in trucks fall in they come again this is the endgame when when the line is finally broken open mayor hon consoles the government to seek peace immediately because while he still has an army you still have a leg to stand on if the army get if the army is lost there's no negotiating that's the loss of terrain you can see the red bits here's your casualties and I've been being heckled in the back for a while but I guess I guess we have a few minutes for questions I don't know how many but we have a couple of minutes for questions hi good presentation I was wondering you know after the purges in the 1930s would you be willing to say that this finished war it helped the red military get prepared for the onslaught in 1941 and had this war not occurred I mean the Germans might have taken Moscow in 1941 because we only have two minutes hello sir yes I think you yes there are a lot of lessons learned the Russians go out of their way to try to learn them they're their clothings better their winter Fighting's but all of that stuff is better as a result of the terrible tasting they took in Finland a brief question at the beginning of this talk you talked about two different plants one that was rejected by stalling because I get the impression did the second plant made a louder international statement as far as what they were trying to accomplish result was that they lost a huge amount of troops and materiel if they would have gone with the first plan do they do it what kind of difference was that have made it more specific well I I'm guessing because there the first plan that the one that was disapproved ends up being what they do at the end anyway that probably had a better chance of being successful and the reason is logistically if you take a look at it the Russians would have had an easier logistical time reinforcing and reinforcing that that narrow fight until they finally broke through and they wouldn't had to lose all those other guys and a lot of the guys that they lose in in large numbers are those guys that are that are actioning north of that you know up in kind of central finland to ever consider guerrilla warfare um actually a lot of the fighting that's done in the middle looks like guerrilla warfare they're using regular troops they tended to withdraw their civilian population as far away from the fighting as they could most of the most of the land that was taken finished land that was taken by the Russians there were no civilians there because the Finnish army had already evacuated them but they did use hit-and-run guerrilla stipe type oper relations with their regular troops especially I've been northern Finland

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 161,394

Rating: 4.7805486 out of 5

Keywords: 2013, Ft. Leavenworth, Soviet-Finnish Winter War, Dole Institute of Politics, John Suprin, Finland, Dr. John Suprin, WWII, World War II, Dole Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Soviet Union

Id: xUl4C0VvN5k

Length: 60min 42sec (3642 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2013