A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940
by William R. Trotter
28 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940:
“Stalin was especially furious with the "Leningrad Clique" of Zhdanov, who had assured him that the Finnish war would amount to little more than a police action, a nuisance that could be concluded in two weeks.”
“To be sure, the Finnish soldier was aware of the numerical odds against him, but he rendered those odds less terrible by cracking jokes about them: “They are so many, and our country is so small, where will we find room to bury them all?”
“One Soviet general, looking at a map of the territory Russia had acquired on the Karelian Isthmus, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead”
“The Soviet propaganda apparatus continued to crank out shrill, contorted documents attempting to convince whoever was listening that Finland was the real aggressor, that the Kuusinen government was legitimate, and the Mannerheim/Tanner/Ryti regime was enslaving the workers, etc.”
“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 Russians' wanton though often ineffectual attacks on civilians generated a wave of moral outrage all over the world. Typical was the reaction of former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, who denounced the Russian air attacks as a throwback to "the morals and butchery of Genghis Khan.”
“Incidents of Red aircraft strafing hospitals and hospital trains were so common that the Finns finally painted over any Red Cross insignia that were visible from the air.”
“Finnish troops knew they were in the army to fight, not to march in parades, and in the kind of war they were called upon to fight, that was precisely the right set of priorities.”
“this German officer produced a cigar before Mannerheim had finished eating and asked if it would bother the Marshal if he smoked it. Mannerheim fixed the Wehrmacht officer with a gaze that would penetrate armor plate and cut him dead by replying evenly: 'I don't know. No one has ever tried it.' ',”
“As President Kallio signed the document that gave the Moscow delegation authority to conclude the war on Moscow’s terms, he growled, “May the hand wither that is forced to sign such a document as this.” A few months later, the old man suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed in his right arm.”
“All told, Finnish fighter pilots shot down 240 confirmed Red aircraft, against the loss of 26 of their own planes. It was standard practice to send at least one interceptor up to meet every Russian bomber sortie within range. Not infrequently the appearance of a single Fokker caused an entire squadron of SB-2s to jettison its bombs into the snow and turn tail.”
“The blitzkrieg, in short, had been perfected for a sleek, hard-muscled, superbly trained, and passionately motivated army, such as the German General Staff had fashioned during the decades between the wars. It was quite unsuited for a ponderous, top-heavy army of ill-trained soldiers led by timid officers, overseen by inexperienced party ideologues, and sent forth to conquer a country whose terrain consists of practically nothing but natural obstacles to military operations.”
“One of them remarked, in a flat weary voice, "The wolves will eat well this year.”
“Finland alone, in danger of death—superb, sublime Finland—shows what free men can do. —Winston Churchill, January 1940”
“conventional, professional, military skills, the fiber of their discipline, the worthiness of their commanders—and above all else, on the depth and stubbornness of their sisu. That bristling little word was once the most famous Finnish idiom ever to become part of the outside world’s vocabulary. It can be translated as “guts” or “spunk” or “grit” or “balls,” or as a combination of all those words together. The word in Finnish has nuances that resist easy translation.”
“To maximize Finland’s bargaining power, the military strategy would be to hold on to every inch of Finnish soil and to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy—to present Stalin with such a butcher’s bill that he, too, would be eager for negotiations.”
“They are so many, and our country is so small, where will we find room to bury them all?”
“The average Finnish soldier looked at matters much differently. He knew, in his bones, that on a man-to-man basis he was worth several of his opponents. His ancestors, as far back as recorded Finnish history existed, had fought Russians on this same soil and usually won. The Finn knew what he was fighting for and why.”
“Mannerheim’s plans, therefore, were not based on the absurd hope of outright victory, but on “the most honorable annihilation, with the faint hope that the conscience of mankind would find an alternative solution as a reward for bravery and singleness of purpose.”3”
“While the meal was still in progress, “this German officer produced a cigar before Mannerheim had finished eating and asked if it would bother the Marshal if he smoked it. Mannerheim fixed the Wehrmacht officer with a gaze that would penetrate armor plate and cut him dead by replying evenly: ‘I don’t know. No one has ever tried it.’”12”
“Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic.”
“When Stalin says “dance,” a wise man dances. —Nikita S. Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers”
“The Russian Army had always believed in the power of artillery.”
“At the beginning of the war, Mannerheim's biggest problem was not men but materiel. Shipments of antitank and antiaircraft guns were arriving in small quantities and at a glacially slow pace.”
“scratch units made up of raw draftees, many of whom were so ignorant they didn't even know the name of the country they were invading.”
“Leadership beyond the NCO level was brittle, sluggish, and marked by a rigid adherence to the same primitive tactics overand over again, no matter what the actual situation.”
“Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands.”
“There were special problems involved in tending the wounded, too, for the same cold that immobilized a man with low blood pressure also tended to freeze drugs solid. Finnish medics went into battle with ampoules of morphine tucked inside their mouths or taped to their armpits.”
