To many, the bitter, bloody war between Finland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the winter of 1939-40 is only a blip in history. What they do not realize is that its total effect on the course of subsequent events was far greater than its three-and-a-half months’ duration suggests. Few remember, if indeed it was ever generally known, that although 25,000 Finns died, one million Russians were lost.1
How could such a grotesquely lopsided score have been racked up? Everybody knows that the Finns were highly motivated, were fiercely brave, and had superior winter warfare skills, but to this day only a handful know the real reason for their success (to my knowledge, heretofore not made public).
In 1963, Rear Admiral L.H. “Jack” Frost, who earlier had been Director of Naval Intelligence, was commandant of the Washington Naval District. We had worked together in the Special Branch (Y) of Naval Operations just after World War II. I dropped in one day for a chat about familiar things. “Did you ever hear how the Finns lambasted the Rooskies in the 1939-40 war?” he asked. “Now keep this under your sombrero,” this quintessential spook admonished, although I am sure the Kremlin had long been aware of what he was about to tell me, even if the American public was not. (It has been “under my sombrero" until this moment.)
“Just following World War I,” Jack said, “the Versailles treaty cut back the Germans to a 100,000-man army, no tanks, no military aircraft, a general staff supposedly abolished. Furthermore, the German military had no confidence or trust in their own government, the strongly Socialist Weimar Republic. So they set up a mutually beneficial arrangement with the fledgling Soviet government to establish on Soviet territory training and development bases for tanks and aircraft. The highly sophisticated cryptographic department, well honed on their recent Imperial Russian enemies, was transferred to Finland for safety and security from the snooping Allies, as well as from Weimar government leaks. The Finns were good friends. Remember that 8,000 German troops helped the White Finns run the Reds out of Finland in April and May of 1918, and thus helped establish the country’s independence.
“Of course the German cryppies were in place in Finland in 1939, where they had been working on Soviet systems for almost 20 years. They were able to supply the 12 highly mobile Finnish divisions with a constant flow of detailed information on the projected movements of the 46 Soviet divisions strung out along the frontier from Leningrad to the Arctic Sea. This allowed the Finns to place their far smaller assets at the right spots.
“So that,” said Jack, “is how four million Finns managed to humiliate 150 million Russians.”
Rather than attack the strongly fortified 20-mile-long Mannerheim Line northwest of Leningrad, the Soviets had elected to spread their forces along the 600-mile border in maneuver groups of one or two divisions each, not mutually supporting. This was monkey meat for the flying columns of Finnish ski troops dressed in nearly invisible white parkas, gliding over the waist-deep forest snow to cut the starving, freezing, floundering Red troops to pieces with light automatic weapons. (It is said that Finnish children are bom with skis already attached to their feet. Those ski troops certainly proved it.) With supply lines to the rear cut, tanks out of fuel, horses frozen or eaten, more Russians froze than were put down by bullets. Several Soviet divisions simply dissolved.
The war was brought to a close by the Soviets massing 25 divisions—some 600,000 men—and hundreds of tanks, aircraft, and guns before the Mannerheim Line, crashing through by mere dint of overwhelming body count and artillery shells.
(In 1962, Eloise Engel and Lauri Paananen published The Winter War, The Russo-Finnish Conflict, 1939-40 [Charles Scribner & Sons, New York, 1962], Not aware of the German cryptographic help that had wholly changed the nature of the conflict, they covered the action from start to finish in deeply researched detail, wondrously recounting how the dexterous Finns always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. It is a fascinating, accurate account of a David-Goliath encounter, near unique in martial history.)
Admiral Frost’s Finnish War story explains the root of the third critical military setback the Russians had suffered in the 20th century through the same fault—the others involving Japan in 1904 and Imperial Germany in 1914. To the end that there be no fourth, the Soviet Union requested the United States to supply them, via Lend-Lease, over one million miles of field telephone wire—enough to encircle the globe 18 times—most of which was delivered.2 Why?
By 1904, primitive radios had been installed aboard Russian warships engaged with the Japanese, whose eventual victory boosted Japan to the status of a world power Worthy of serious consideration. So in 1907, the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation recommended to the General Board 'he assignment of two or three officers to be instructed in 'he Japanese language. The General Board’s endorsement 'hereto, signed by Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, agreed, adding that: “It appears from reliable sources that during the recent Russo-Japanese War the Japanese defied advantage on several occasions from their ability to interpret intercepted wireless messages from Russian ships, while the Russians were unable to translate those of 'he Japanese.”3
Did this Japanese advantage help at Chemulpo? Port Arthur? Tsushima? Unfortunately, Admiral Dewey does not tell us, but the inference is clear.
At the beginning of World War I, in 1914, two Imperial Russian armies charged into East Prussia with unexpected elan and success, upsetting the German war plans and probably saving Paris. In fact, they got so far so fast they soon outran their supplies of field telephone wire and started using radios (the Russian Popov having invented the radio in 1895 contemporaneously with Marconi). Old Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who knew Prussia like a rabbit knows his briar patch, was dusted off from retirement and hurried to East Prussia to stem the “Russian steamroller,” as the world had come to term the Muscovites’ magnificent advance. Von Hindenburg habitually waited until 11 P.M. to write his orders for the following day, having digested the Russian intercepts. The two invading armies soon were destroyed, from which the Russians never fully recovered. Clearly, this markedly changed the course of the war and advanced the Russian Revolution.
In three wars during half a century, Russia had suffered grievous strikes through its enemies’ ability to read its radio traffic. But by the fourth, Ivan had wised up and used the telephone. (Toward the end of World War II, the Germans had begun reading the Russian field telephone messages by means of a two-mile loop laid in the forward trenches, which picked up the grounded side of the enemy’s transmissions, the faint signals then enormously amplified.4)
The really supreme irony is that the Germans, by supplying the Finns with vital intelligence, prolonged what the Soviets had expected to be a 12-day war into one of over three months.5 As a result, their humiliating setbacks and enormous casualties moved them to overhaul radically their command, supply, and tactical organizations, to shelve some military anachronisms like Marshal Kliment E. Voroshilov, and, most importantly, to modify the deep political control of troops that had hamstrung the military commanders down to platoon level. Had they not done these things, the near collapse of the Soviet Army and Air Force at the outset of the German blitz in June 1941 probably would have been total, with profound effects on the war’s and the world’s subsequent courses.
1. Edward Crankshaw, editor, Khruschev Remembers (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 155; see also Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), p. 94.
2. Report on War Aid furnished by the United States to the U.S.S.R., Dept, of State, Protocol and Area Information Staff of the U.S.S.R. Branch, and Division of Research and Reports, 28 November 1945.
3. General Board letter, 1907.
4. From the author’s conversations with a wartime operator of the described apparatus.
5. Marshal of Artillery S. S. Voronov, Na Sluzhbe Voennoi (On Military Senice) (Moscow, 1963). Pages 136-37 deal with Voronov’s coverage of the planning and execution of the war against Finland.