Books in Brief: The Winter War

The Winter War, by Eloise Engle and Lauri Paananen (Scribner’s, 176 pp., $7.95). The Russians thought it would be a week’s work: a Blitzkrieg against Finland to make her a Poland of the North. It became, instead, a catastrophe for Russia on the scale of the First World War: In less than four months of fighting, nearly a million Russians died. As an outraged world watched, the Finnish armed forces, with sharpshooters, skiers, scholar-generals, a tiny air force, and artillery dating to the Franco-Prussian war, held the Red Army on the Karelian peninsula and, in the North, trapped the enemy in pockets called mottis and annihilated them. The hard-won Russian victory—for tanks and a murderous artillery attack finally overcame the exhausted Finns—resulted in the abolition of the dreaded Red Army Politruks, the reinstatement of ranks, a reshuffling of the high command. It also taught the Russians that they could not count on machinery alone to win wars. According to the authors, 60 per cent of the Russian soldiers were untrained. Here was a horde if there ever was one: the khaki-clad infantry, hands locked together, shouting and singing, marching into the Finns’ deadly Suomi machine-guns. The watching Germans wrote the Red Army off: The Winter War is heavy with historical consequence. Engle’s and Paananen’s book is adequate to the task, but no more. They are understandably partisan to the Finns and they caricature their cheer and heroic abandon. The writing is sometimes limp, sometimes sophomoric (the Finns “laughed grimly” at a joke “as they noted their bullets bouncing harmlessly off the oncoming tanks”). The last and best word has not been written about this fierce struggle which shaped the destiny of Europe.

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J. H. Chatfield

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The Winter War, by Eloise Engle and Lauri Paananen (Scribner’s, 176 pp., $7.95). The Russians thought it would be a week’s work: a Blitzkrieg against Finland to make her a Poland of the North. It became, instead, a catastrophe for Russia on the scale of the First World War: In less than four months of fighting, nearly a million Russians died. As an outraged world watched, the Finnish armed forces, with sharpshooters, skiers, scholar-generals, a tiny air force, and artillery dating to the Franco-Prussian war, held the Red Army on the Karelian peninsula and, in the North, trapped the enemy in pockets called mottis and annihilated them. The hard-won Russian victory—for tanks and a murderous artillery attack finally overcame the exhausted Finns—resulted in the abolition of the dreaded Red Army Politruks, the reinstatement of ranks, a reshuffling of the high command. It also taught the Russians that they could not count on machinery alone to win wars. According to the authors, 60 per cent of the Russian soldiers were untrained. Here was a horde if there ever was one: the khaki-clad infantry, hands locked together, shouting and singing, marching into the Finns’ deadly Suomi machine-guns. The watching Germans wrote the Red Army off: The Winter War is heavy with historical consequence. Engle’s and Paananen’s book is adequate to the task, but no more. They are understandably partisan to the Finns and they caricature their cheer and heroic abandon. The writing is sometimes limp, sometimes sophomoric (the Finns “laughed grimly” at a joke “as they noted their bullets bouncing harmlessly off the oncoming tanks”). The last and best word has not been written about this fierce struggle which shaped the destiny of Europe.