The Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 came as a bloody shock to the people of the small Baltic state, not least the government which appeared to have misread Joseph Stalin’s intentions.
The location for this terrible saga lies at the easternmost end of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and the huge Lake Ladoga, this is the rugged and very narrow Karelian Isthmus.
Flying over this territory in a light plane reveals its stark and stern beauty, cut laterally by crisp blue lakes, blanketed in an evergreen forest, stubby grey and reddy grey hills pop up here and there.
There was virtually nothing of value here at least at first, no minerals, very little agriculture as the soils are poor. That was going to change when the Finns discovered large deposits of nickel in the Petsamo region and would hand over mining concessions to the British.
The Russians did not like that one little bit.
But it wasn’t minerals that led to Moscow invading their much smaller neighbour, it was the fear of the Germans. This little bit of land was going to be fought over as it had been so often through history.
The Karelian Isthmus is a land bridge between the seething eastward mass of mother Russia and Asia, and the immensity of the Scandinavian Peninsular that swells downward to the west. It’s like a highway for tribal migration, a route for trade, a channel for cultural movements, and a gateway for conquest.
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The Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 came as a bloody shock to the people of the small Baltic state, not least the government which appeared to have misread Joseph Stalin’s intentions.
The location for this terrible saga lies at the easternmost end of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and the huge Lake Ladoga, this is the rugged and very narrow Karelian Isthmus.
Flying over this territory in a light plane reveals its stark and stern beauty, cut laterally by crisp blue lakes, blanketed in an evergreen forest, stubby grey and reddy grey hills pop up here and there.
There was virtually nothing of value here at least at first, no minerals, very little agriculture as the soils are poor. That was going to change when the Finns discovered large deposits of nickel in the Petsamo region and would hand over mining concessions to the British.
The Russians did not like that one little bit.
But it wasn’t minerals that led to Moscow invading their much smaller neighbour, it was the fear of the Germans. This little bit of land was going to be fought over as it had been so often through history.
The Karelian Isthmus is a land bridge between the seething eastward mass of mother Russia and Asia, and the immensity of the Scandinavian Peninsular that swells downward to the west. It’s like a highway for tribal migration, a route for trade, a channel for cultural movements, and a gateway for conquest.
Episode 2 - The order of battle as Russia begins its invasion of Finland
The Winter War
22 minutes 17 seconds
1 year ago
Episode 2 - The order of battle as Russia begins its invasion of Finland
In the early winter of 1939 the Red Army was an unknown quantity to just about everyone, particularly the Germans who were going to miscalculate and invade the USSR within two years.
The Red Army was an untried theoretical instrument in 1939, after Stalin’s purges of their commanding officers. There had been that stunning one-sided victory when Marshal Zhukov defeated the Japanese at Khalkin Gol in August 1939 but that was seen as hardly a fair contest.
The Japanese had been riding roughshod over the Chinese up until then, and the Chinese army often couldn’t even supply its own men with shoes, let alone boots.
There was no air support, no armour, this wasn’t a fair fight at least that was the general perception of this time. The Japanese tanks of this time were even more rickety than the Italian tanks, and that was saying something. Zhukov had called down a comparatively vast air force and cut up the Japanese with his mechanised force. The fighting was on the treeless plains of Khalkin Gal, the open landscape of Mongolia, ideal for the Soviet’s style of full-frontal guns blazing tally-hoe assaults.
Finland was another story.
As Stalin put the finishing touches to his invasion of this Baltic nation, it would be the soviet’s first foray against a European foe and one which had been trained by both the Germans and the Russians.
The terrain as you heard last episode was like another planet — the Russians were going to find the fighting in the trees and bogs of Finland extremely hard going. Of course, Stalin was going to utterly ignore one of his generals who was aware of this threat posed by landscape, General Shaposhnikov, the Red Army Chief of staff. As the Russians built up their logistics prior to the invasion, he was studying the campaign with a rather more jaundiced eye.
In front of the first Russian tanks was forest. And then behind this was more forest. Then some more. The Finnish centre of operations was far away from the border with Russia, deep inside its territory. There were only a handful of roads.So the Russian plan was supposed to emulate the Germans, but turned into a slow moving sludge, moving into a meat grinder that was the Finnish army. Moscows plan was simple — just overawe the Finns by using vast quantities of manpower, at the same time use their airforce to bomb the Finnish towns in a kind of one-two punch. The Finns would be terrified, Stalin was convinced of this.
Soviet planners were also hoping that the communist sympathisers inside Finland would form the a large fifth column to further destabilise their enemy.
The Russians were going to invade with very few proper maps, but lots of brass bands and communist party banners and other paperwork. In the thickest forests of the world they brought in flat trajectory artillery when it called for mortars or howitzers that shot over trees. Even more shocking, the Russians dragged hundreds of anti-tank weapons into Finland, a country that had no tanks.
The key to Finland was the Isthmus, nothing else mattered.
The Winter War
The Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 came as a bloody shock to the people of the small Baltic state, not least the government which appeared to have misread Joseph Stalin’s intentions.
The location for this terrible saga lies at the easternmost end of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and the huge Lake Ladoga, this is the rugged and very narrow Karelian Isthmus.
Flying over this territory in a light plane reveals its stark and stern beauty, cut laterally by crisp blue lakes, blanketed in an evergreen forest, stubby grey and reddy grey hills pop up here and there.
There was virtually nothing of value here at least at first, no minerals, very little agriculture as the soils are poor. That was going to change when the Finns discovered large deposits of nickel in the Petsamo region and would hand over mining concessions to the British.
The Russians did not like that one little bit.
But it wasn’t minerals that led to Moscow invading their much smaller neighbour, it was the fear of the Germans. This little bit of land was going to be fought over as it had been so often through history.
The Karelian Isthmus is a land bridge between the seething eastward mass of mother Russia and Asia, and the immensity of the Scandinavian Peninsular that swells downward to the west. It’s like a highway for tribal migration, a route for trade, a channel for cultural movements, and a gateway for conquest.
