The Russo-Finnish War

On the 30^th of November 1939 Joseph Stalin entered into one of the most epic of military blunders. It was an error that helped set the stage for the Hitlerite stab in the back that was the invasion of the Soviet Union. Fresh from his easy occupation of Poland, Uncle Joe decided to add some more territory to his Bolshevik Empire. In quick secession the Soviets occupied the small Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Next on the bill of fare was Finland.


On paper it did not look like that much of an issue, Finland was tiny; it had a miniscule Army with next to no heavy weapons. Russia on the other hand had a huge Army buttressed by a monstrous territory containing boundless supplies of men and materials. The great Stalin, the terror and awe of his subject peoples, was to relearn the painful lesson that battles are not won on paper but in the real world where Murphy's Law always sides with the hidden flaw.


Not that the flaws in the Soviet juggernaut were all that hidden. The entire nineteen thirties was one long display of Soviet Russia being ripped apart by the paranoid megalomaniac ruler at its center. Show trial followed show trial and the military along with all other governing structures was ruthlessly purged. The officer core of the Red Army was decimated. Experienced cadres were cashiered and then liquidated by Stalin's security apparatus. Many qualified leaders ended their days with a bullet to the back of the head or the slower death of the Gulags. Thus when the Soviets entered Finland their officer corps were both green and incompetent.


Finland on the other hand was lead by one of the true military geniuses of the 20^th Century, Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim. With his highly motivated troops Mannerheim made a hash of Soviet military operations. Using the rugged terrain of Finland to his advantage Mannerheim waged a persistent guerilla war against the Soviets. Big and blundering, the Soviet Armies were picked apart piece-by-piece by the quicker, more flexible Finns. The Finns became the ne-plus-ultra of asymmetrical warfare, as case study of how a small nation can humiliate a much larger power.


Stalin did not appreciate the lesson the Finns were offering. He especially did not like the fact that he was being made the fool in international affairs. The greater war in the West had entered the doldrums making the conflict between the Finns and the Soviets the only action of note. The performance of Soviet Army under the harsh light international attention was a constant embarrassment for the Soviet state in general and Stalin in particular.


Worse for the Soviet leader, the misbegotten war emboldened Hitler who thought that the Soviet Union would be an easy mark for invasion. If tiny Finland could run roughshod over the Soviet Army, just think what Germany could do. Hitler was convinced that his blitzkrieging Armies would make short work of the Red Army. In Hitler's mind he saw Soviet Union a carbon copy of the old Imperial Russia that fell apart in WWI. Just one well placed blow would bring the whole rotten Bolshevik structure crashing down. The Finnish war was proof positive that Russians were Untermenschen, subhuman louts, who were no match for the superior Aryan race. The Winter War breaded a dangerous contempt for Russia by Hitler. Fifteen months later that contempt would become manifest in Operation Barbarossa.


The only good that came out of the Finnish War for Russia is that it was a huge wake-up call for Stalin. The military purges ended, the lucky few who survived the NKVD's clutches were returned to lists. The greatest commanders of WWII were graduates of the harsh school set up by Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. They learned their ruthlessness and monomaniacal drive from the tender ministrations of their jailers. These men had learned the lesson of absolute obedience to Stalin's orders. Stalin, by way of contrast, learned to trust these mens' military judgments and mostly let them get on with the business of defeating Hitler's Germany.


It was a near thing for Stalin though. The reforms that finally helped Soviet Russia defeat the Nazi menace were not all in place when Hitler invaded. In 1941 and 1942 Soviet Russia would pay dearly for Stalin's paranoia and purges. The cities that paid the highest price still are a by-word for unimaginable suffering: Leningrad and Stalingrad. Both have been renamed since the fall of the Bolshevik Empire, Leningrad is once again St. Petersburg, Stalingrad is now Volgograd. Still history lies heavily on both these cities and the citizens of both metropolises remember and deeply honor the sacrifices of those who preceded them.


The chain of causation that history records can be a seriously tangled one; uncoiling this particular serpentine form is never easy. A short and foolish war for some frozen patches of real estate in 1939 lead , by twist, turns and the most improbable of Gordian Knots, to the greatest military operation of the 20^th Century: the Ostfront—the Eastern Front of WWII. History is full of these kinds of improbabilities. It is filled with rulers who rush into places were angels dare not thread. It offers object lessons in the cruel mechanics of unintended consequences. The tragedy is so few bother to pay the least attention to these lessons.

December 7th 1941

December 7^th 1941Yesterday was the day that will live in infamy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a beautiful Sunday morning all those years ago. The United States was fat, dumb and happy; isolated from most of the world. England had been in a death struggle with the Nazis for over two years. The Soviets were just getting over Operation Barbarossa, surprising the freezing Vermark interlopers with fresh Siberian troops that literally came from nowhere. Japan had been tearing around China for over a decade by this point and thanks to a U.S. embargo of oil and scrap metal was in serious logistical trouble.

The military junta that ran Japan decided to erase this problem by sinking the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. With no Navy to defend its far-flung possessions the U.S. could not prevent a Japanese takeover. Other Colonial possessions of other powers would be seized as well. All would be folded into the "greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese rallying cry was "Asians for Asian" with the small caveat that Japan would be the top Asian Nation.

Needless to say the Chinese were not very thrilled about this particular arrangement. China felt that if anyone was to be the leading nation in Asia it should be itself. China had the largest population by far and it had the longest history to boot. China had been the great transmitter of culture, philosophy, governance, style and writing to Asia. Japan was a parvenu, a backwater nation with no resources to speak of that only a century before was wallowing in feudal stasis. Still in only fifty years it had gone from cultural and political regression to great power. It was China, via Korea, that was the first victim of Japan's expansive politics.

The Japanese Imperial designs on China  began in earnest after the puppet state of Manchukuo was founded in 1931. They went into overdrive after the Marco Polo Bridge "incident" of July 7, 1937. By 1941 Japan had torn a huge slice of China from the Nationalist government and had occupied it. The Nationalists kept losing ground and retreating further into the interior of China. Japan kept "winning" in a purely Pyrrhic way getting further bogged down in China's vast spaces. Instead of accepting that there was no way a small, resource poor nation like Japan could ever cow the vast land and population of China, Japan decided that if they could just stop the "interference" from Western powers they could deliver a knock-out blow to the Chinese cause.


Japan assumed that a quick decisive blow against the United States was just the remedy for what ailed it militarily. A sneak attack would demoralize the U.S. and they would no longer aid the Chinese. It was a crackpot theory that missed the mark by several country miles.

At first it went swimmingly enough. Japan did deliver a crippling blow to the fleet at Pearl. Bureaucratic incompetence and bad military judgment greatly aided the Japanese. Almost everyone knows about the SNAFUs that plagued the Hawaiian military command structures that day. What is less know is how other commands, specifically MacArthur's in the Philippines, also suffered under negligent, incompetent foolish leaders. MacArthur especially should have been cashiered for his pre-war planning. His plan of action for the defense of the P.I. bore zero resemblance to the facts on the ground.

In the end the U.S. recovered from the initial disasters and Japan learned, much to its eternal regret, the penalties for pulling the American eagle's feathers. Little did the Japanese planners know on that date that they were the midwife to a global superpower. Little did they understand the overarching military-industrial power the helped bring into the world. Since Pearl Harbor the U.S. has maintained large continuously standing armies, something it manage to avoid from its founding in 1789 to 1941. From Pearl Harbor forward the U.S. has been either one of the preeminent military powers on the globe or the only preeminent military on the globe. We are the military one-thousand pound gorilla of the world stage today because of that fateful Sunday so many years ago.