Free The Second World War by John Keegan Page B

other fronts – until the last day of the war.
    At the conclusion of the campaign the Wehrmacht, which had suffered 13,981 fatal casualties in Poland, immediately began to turn its victorious divisions westward to man the Siegfried Line or West Wall and prepare for a campaign against the British and French, who had made no attempt at all to divert German forces, except for a small flurry of activity between 8 September and 1 October known as the ‘Saar Offensive’. The only immediate military outcome of the Polish campaign lay not in the west but in the east. There Russia at once capitalised on the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to demand basing rights for its troops in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a manoeuvre which eventually led to the annexation of all three countries to the Soviet Union in June 1940.
     
The Winter War
    Stalin also moved against Finland, though with altogether less convenient results. Finland had been Russian territory between 1809 and 1917; when it won its independence after fighting against Russian and local Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, it had obtained a frontier demarcation which Stalin decided ran too close for strategic comfort to Leningrad and the Soviet Baltic ports. On 12 October 1939, a week after Latvia had signed its dictated treaty, the Soviet Union confronted the Finnish government with demands for naval basing rights and the cession of a large strip of Finnish territory in the Karelian isthmus leading to Leningrad. The Finns stonewalled until 26 November, when the Soviet Union staged a border incident. On 30 November the Russians attacked with four armies, deploying thirty divisions; for this blatant act of aggression they were expelled from the League of Nations on 14 December. The Soviet Union was eventually to commit a million men to the campaign. The Finns, though their total mobilised strength never exceeded 175,000, fought back with skill and success. Perhaps the most warlike of all European peoples, and certainly the hardiest, the Finns made circles around their Russian attackers in the snowbound wastes of their native forests, employing so-called
motti
or ‘logging’ tactics to cut off and encircle their enemies, who were regularly disorientated and demoralised by a style of warfare for which their training had not prepared them. While the main strength of the Finnish army defended the Karelian isthmus on the Mannerheim Line, named after the country’s commander-in-chief, who had won the war of independence in 1918, independent units attacked, encircled and destroyed Soviet divisions on the long eastern flank between Lake Ladoga and the White Sea.
    In December the Finns actually counter-attacked from the Karelian isthmus, after a series of operations by the Soviets described by Mannerheim as ‘similar to a performance by a badly directed orchestra’. By January, however, the Russians had taken the measure of their opponents, recognised their own underestimation of the Finns’ military prowess, and brought up sufficient forces to overwhelm them. During February they broke their way through the Mannerheim Line by main force, inflicting casualties which the Finnish government recognised its tiny population could not bear. On 6 March it treated for peace and on 12 March signed a treaty which conceded the demands Russia had made in October; they had lost 25,000 dead since the war had begun. The Red Army, however, had lost 200,000, of whom perhaps the majority had died of exposure while surrounded or out of touch with base. The experience of the ‘Winter War’, which would be renewed as the ‘Continuation War’ after June 1941, conditioned the Soviet Union’s carefully modulated policy towards Finland when the issue of peace came round again.
    Finland had briefly been an inspiration to all enemies of the Axis powers, with which, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union was identified during 1940. Britain and France had even considered