Free All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings Page A

December offensive was to replace failed senior officers – one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag – and to commit massive reinforcements. Ice roads capable of bearing tanks were built by laying logs on trampled snow, then spraying them with water which was allowed to freeze. The Finns had started the war with three weeks’ supply of artillery ammunition, and fuel and small-arms ammunition for sixty days; by January, these stocks were almost exhausted.
    The world greeted Finland’s initial successes with awe: Mannerheim became a popular hero in western Europe, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier promised the Finns reinforcements of a hundred aircraft and 50,000 men before the end of February, but never lifted a finger to make good on his pledge. The writer Arthur Koestler, in Paris, wrote contemptuously that French excitement about Finnish victories recalled ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’. In Britain the left, represented by its weekly organ Tribune , at first offered reflexive support to Moscow’s cause, then abruptly switched allegiance to back the Finns.
    Churchill regarded Soviet action as direct kin to Nazi aggression. Britain’s First Sea Lord exulted in Stalin’s failure, declaring in a broadcast on 20 January: ‘Finland, superb – nay sublime – in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a Nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.’
    The Finns were heartened by such rhetoric. British Tory MP Harold Macmillan, who visited Finland, reported a Helsinki woman ticket-collector saying to him: ‘The women of Finland will fight on, because they believe that you are coming to help them.’ Eight thousand Swedes, eight hundred Norwegians and Danes, together with a few American and British civilians, volunteered to take up arms; some reached the war zone, but none served to any effect. Britain had few enough weapons for its own armed forces, and had nothing significant to spare for a nation which might be struggling gallantly, but was not fighting the power against which it was itself making war. Thirty Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters were dispatched, of which eighteen were lost in action within ten days; the Finns were obliged to pay cash for the aircraft, a foretaste of neutral American policy towards Britain.
    There was no doubt of the strength of British popular sentiment in Finland’s favour, but next to nothing was done to translate this into action, save to prepare an expedition to Narvik, neutral Norway’s northern ice-free port. The Allies were attracted by the notion of exploiting the pretext of aiding the Finns to land in Norway and sever Germany’s winter link to Sweden’s iron-ore mines. The cynicism that had characterised Allied policy during the Polish campaign thus reasserted itself. In the early months of 1940 London and Paris urged the Finns to keep fighting, because if they quit there would be no excuse for intervention in Norway. A wild French proposal to land an expeditionary force at Petsamo on the north coast was vetoed by the British, who still declined to clash headlong with the Russians.
     
     
    In mid-January, a new wave of assaults on Finland began. In one position 4,000 Russians attacked thirty-two Finns; they lost four hundred men, but only four defenders survived. On 1 February, the invaders launched a massive bombardment of the Mannerheim Line, followed by infantry and armoured drives in overwhelming strength. The Finnish artillery,