Reddit reviews Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940
We found 11 Reddit comments about Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Ah, here we are - it's "A Frozen Hell" by Trotter: http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
It's been a while since I read it, so I may have some of the details wrong, but I think the basics are right.
nice to hear, Finland is a country that the devs really need to get around to updating. If you need some help for the winter war stuff, look up a book called Frozen Hell. Very good on the finnish winter war
Well you can read the rest of the wikipedia article if you like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War
Or you could go read the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
But in the end, the Finns did amazingly well, avoided outright defeat and gave Russia a very public bloody nose. However, they didn't win. If they'd kept fighting, Russia would have defeated them absent strong Allied intervention.
It's hard to take those casualty estimates in the above link seriously. First off, they are all from Russian sources (only one Finnish one, and that one a low figure compared to other Finnish estimates I've seen). Note too how close they are to the official Soviet figure - which was released when the Russians were desperate to downplay their humiliation in Finland and how unprepared the Red Army was for war.
It's rare to find a conflict where casualty figures vary so widely but that has a lot to do with the Soviets suppressing the magnitude of their disaster in Finland. The Finns conservatively estimated Russian dead at 200,000. The Soviets claimed it was 48,000 but no one believed it at the time. Khrushchev, in his memoirs, claimed they lost a million men in Finland but that figure must have included wounded, captured and missing and was probably an exaggeration. I've read that the Germans estimated Russian losses as over 300,000 dead. Whatever they were, they were horrendous, even by Soviet standards. I can well imagine it was 3 to 4 times what they admitted at the time so an estimate of 200,000 killed sounds about right.
BTW, the best English language account I've read of the war is William Trotter's "A Frozen Hell" if you're interested to learn more.
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303855605&sr=8-1
Get him some interesting ammo, you should be able to find at least four or five different varieties to test out, both commercial and surplus, if you go to a gun show. Maybe get him a book to provide some history relevant to use of the Mosin Nagant rifle, i thought this one was interesting https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543462642&sr=8-1&keywords=a+frozen+hell. It’s not as much inside baseball as some military history.
My ideal Call of Duty would be Call of Duty: The Winter War
A campaign set in the Russo-Finnish War from 1939-1940. A Finnish Army of 40,000 Finns vs. the entire might of the USSR. Even though the Finns would eventually lose the war, they inflicted on the Soviets around 400k casualties by the end of hostilities. If you want to read about a largely unknown David v. Goliath conflict, read William Trotter's "A Frozen Hell" (Probably the best English language account of the war)
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Hell-Russo-Finnish-Winter-1939-1940/dp/1565122496
A sample of the insanity:
Ideally, the campaign would be broken up into three parts. A Simo Hayha storyline chronicling his achievements, a storyline following a unit of the elite Finnish ski infantry, and a third storyline following a teenager in the forested Mannerheim line battles of the late conflict.
Shit would be epic and a man can dream...
How about A Frozen Hell by William Trotter?
As an aside, the Finnish biathlete shenanigans were relatively unimportant to the war as a whole. The real heavy lifting was done by Finnish soldiers who fought on the Karelian Isthmus, which was mostly just a conventional war. This isn't meant to diminish what they did*, just that they didn't go biathlon-ing around very much. The ski war stuff was up north, where the cold weather and thick forest were impeding Russian progress plenty without any Finnish intervention.
This book is a great book about the Winter War. If you want to learn more about it, without all the gung-ho Finnish nationalism that colors most sources, you should read it. It's also really entertaining.
*They did things like run up to Russian tanks and kill the crews inside by spraying Suomi submachine guns into the view ports. One officer stood in front of two advancing tanks and fired at them with a pistol. The tank crews, thinking that it had to be some kind of a trap, retreated.
Excerpts from A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 on foreign support:
> Finland's early victories fired the imagination of the outside world. The so-called "Phony War" on the western front was beginning to bore people. The first month of the Winter War, however, raised the spirits of all those who were opposed to tyranny, especially since so few shots had yet been fired in tyranny's general direction. As historian Max Jakobsen elloquently put it: "So many small nations had been bullied into humiliating surrender, the dictators had won so many cheap victories, that idealism had been left starving...The Maginot Line might have reflected a feeling of security for those living behind it, but it could not inspire them as did the image of a Finnish soldier hurling a bottle at a tank."
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> Everybody wanted to get involved, now that it looked like Finland might have a fighting chance. Unfortunately there was a rather extensive global conflict going on, and that made it hard for well-intentioned volunteers to reach Finland. Nevertheless, spontaneous gestures of help were made from every direction. Eight thousand Swedes volunteered, and they at least were both close and acclimated. No other foreign volunteers saw as much action as the Swedes. Eight hundred Norwegians and Danes volunteered. A battalion embarked from Hungary. Italian pilots flew north at the controls of Fiat bombers. Three hundred and fifty Finnish-American volunteers sailed from New York on the Gripsholm. Among the stranger volunteers on record were a Jamaican Negro and a handful of Japanese.
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> From London, the incurably romantic Kermit Roosevelt, son of the Rough Rider president, announced the formation of an "international brigade" optimistically entitled the "Finnish Legion." His recruiting bulletins were worded to imply that anyone who had ever donned a pair of skis was qualified to join, without further training or conditioning. Roosevelt rounded up a total of 230 men for his "Legion" and managed to get them to Finland by the end of March, too late to fight but not too late for them to become a major nuisance. The Finns who processed these warriors found them to be a motley crew indeed: 30 percent were declared unfit for active duty, due to age, outstanding criminal records, or gross physical infirmities. Several had only one eye, and one over-the-hill idealist showed up sporting a wooden leg, just the thing for ski combat.
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> Their fates were as diverse as their personal stories: sixty of them tried tried to return to England via Norway but managed to land in Oslo, in April, at the same time the German Army did. Some were detained as prisoners, others managed tos curry back across the border to Sweden. About 100 of them just settled in Finland, doing whatever came to hand: farming, logging, teaching English. One man ended up as the resident pro at the Helsinki golf club. Another, a journalist named Evans, obtained a post at the British Embassy and eventually became Harold Macmillan's press secretary. The rest simply vanished from the historical record, blending in with their surroundings either in Finland or Sweden. It is even possible that a few of them eventually realized their desire to fight the Russians by serving in the Finnish Army during the Continuation War of 1941-44.
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> The Finnish public was certainly flattered by all this attention, and the rumor mills worked overtime, cranking out increasingly fabulous yarns about imminent and massive foreign intervention. To the average Finnish civilian, it must have looked as though the entire Western world was flexing its muscles to help "brave little Finland."
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> The muscle flexing, of course, was mostlly rhetorical. The sad truth was that few Western countries, no matter how sympathetic to Finland, were in any position to help out, due to overriding concerns of foreign policy. Nowhere was this more true than in neighboring Sweden, where the gulf between cold-blooded political reality and public emotion assumed the dimensions of national schizophrenia. Popular sentiment was accurately reflected in the recruiting posters of the Swedish volunteer movement:
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> > WITH FINLAND FOR SWEDEN!
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> > NOW THE WORLD KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FINN -- IT IS YOUR DUTY TO SHOW WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SWEDE!
> >
> > join the swedish volunteers!!
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> Apart from the extreme step of actually volunteering, hundreds of "Help Finland" projects were underway by mid-December; everyone wanted to help. Everyone, that is, except the Swedish government, who found the Finnish situation acutely embarrassing. Sweden's ruling politicians did not dare offer enough help to make a real difference in the odds. To do so would have compromised Sweden's neutrality at a very precarious time. Direct intervention on behalf of Finland might have meant war with Russia, or it was feared, some sort of hostile move, eventually, from the Germans. Regarding the Germans, the Swedes were being overly sensitive. It was not, after all, in Hitler's best interests to allow a Soviet republic to be established only five minutes' flying time away from the strategically priceless ore fields in northern Sweden. At the very least, effective Swedish aid would have prolonged the conflict, and that, too, would have been in Hitler's interest, since the Finnish war kept Stalin tied down in the northland and turned away from the Balkans. Hitler would not have moved a finger to stop ten Swedish divisions from marching to the aid of Finland.
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> Matters were not helped by the hypocritical vacillations of Sweden's leaders. The Swedish people were passionately proud of their volunteer effort, and if a plebiscite had been taken about the matter, they would probably have voted overwhelmingly to go to war for their neighbor and former province. Large segments of the Swedish population viewed their own leaders as spineless and craven. Some public officials resigned in protest and shame. When Foreign Minister Sandler spoke in the Riksdag and labeled his government's policy "neutrality carried to the point of pure idiocy," he was rewarded with a standing ovation.
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> The Germans allowed some arms to pass through the Reich, until a Swedish newspaper broke the story and Hitler initiated a policy of stony silence toward Finland, in response to frantic diplomatic pressure from his new "ally", the USSR. Oddly enough, however, some of the strongest sympathy for Finland was manifested in Fascist Italy. Huge crowds, including hundreds of Black Shirts in uniform, demonstrated emotionally in front of the Finnish Embassy in Rome, then, carrying the Finnish ambassador on their shoulders, marched to the Russian compound and vigorously stoned it. Italy dispatched substantial shipments of military equipment, including seventeen Fiat bombers and 150 volunteers, one of whom was killed in combat. Väinö Tanner even made attempts to enlist Mussolini's diplomatic influence to bring about peace negotiations with Moscow. Il Duce, however, brushed aside those appeals. Like Hitler, he too was happy to have Stalin's attention turned from the Balkans, where he had dreams of aggrandizement equal to, if less reallistic than, those of the Führer.
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> In America, popular sentiment was almost totally pro-Finland. To the American people, Finland was almost a "pet" nation: a tough, brave little country that always "paid its debts on time," spawned great late-romantic music, and enthralled sports fans with the exploits of its champion athletes. In New York, Mayor La Guardia sponsored a "Help Finland" rally in Madison Square Garden. The American Red Cross sent substantial humanitarian aid. Stokowski and Toscanini conducted benefit concerts --- all Sibelius, naturally.
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> Franklin Roosevelt was caught in an awkward position by the conflict. He wanted to help Finland, but he was hemmed in by strong isolationist feelings in Congress and by the restrictive neutrality laws that were still on the books from the Spanish civil war. When the first reports of mass bombings of civilians blazed across the front pages of American newspapers, FDR actually contemplated severing relations with the Soviet Union. He was bombarded with so many political arguments against doing that, however, that he finally went too far in the other direction. The American ambassador in Moscow was instructed to deliver a gutless and generalized appeal for "both sides" to refrain from bombing civilian targets, stating that the U.S. government did not approve of bombing nonmilitary targets. The upshot of this policy statement, one historian acidly observed, was that "America was on record as being against evil." Nevertheless, Roosevelt permitted high-level American diplomats to confer with their Finnish coutnerparts for the purpose of finding ways to get around the letter of the law. The outcome of these discussions was a scheme by which, under certain conditions, certain types of arms could be purchased by nations friendly to the United States, provided that the deal was made on a cash only basis, and that any items thus contracted for were shipped from America only in vessels flying the flag of the purchaser.
My favorite book is Frozen Hell. It's a book on the Finnish-Russian war, how the allies were diplomatically barred from participation, and how the Finns waged a successful war inspite of insurmountable odds.
Edit - I guess I should have read the post more carefully. I don't know about a comprehensive history book. I personally like to delve into smaller portions in detail.
>the Finns were fully committed to fighting.
I think one of the biggest misunderstandings of the Winter War was how brave and well organized the Finns were.
As far as why they lost - the Soviet regrouping you mentioned complemented the growing lack of equipment of all kinds that the Finnish were facing. Many began depending on looted ammunition and they became unable to launch any kind of meaningful counterattacks or the like.
Also, due to the Nordic countries not allowing (Franco-)British men/ammunition/etc to pass through their land, the Finnish quickly ran out of artillery and tanks as well.
For others reading this, this is a pretty good book about the war, in general. It goes into pretty good depth about the loss.