[Dowly]

Extracts from a sergeant's war diary 2/5

Written by then sergeant H. Kolehmainen, translated using machine translation (w/corrections) from "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 2/1957.

February 19, at the intermediate position, at Kämärä station.

As soon as the soup was eaten in the morning of 16 February, our company moved
to the west of the village of Kiltee and began to form up for defence in an
area about a kilometre wide. In the middle of the defensive position was a
road leading to the Lähde sector and next to the road was a former
communications dugout.There were no other fortifications in the position.

With feverish haste we started digging foxholes, but the digging seemed
hopeless. The frozen ground reached more than half a metre. With bayonets and
knives, the boys dug up the earth a little at a time. For a couple of hours we
were allowed to dig in peace, but then shouts and commands began to be heard
from the front. A few shots were heard, but as nothing was seen we did not
return fire.

The company commander skied up to us and told us that there was a group of
enemy on the hill in front of our positions two hundred metres away. He
ordered me and my platoon to attack it and drive the enemy out. No fire
support could be provided. Once the enemy is dislodged we can return, but we
must leave a guard on the hill.

I gathered my men and explained our mission to them. We then moved behind the
ridge opposite our target, climbed it and skied as fast as we could to the
halfway point of our target hill. We left our skis there and continued on
foot. It was only near the top of the hill that we started to take rifle fire.
A bullet hit the head of our light machine gunner, but the assistant gunner
caught the gun and opened fire. There were only 3 or 4 enemies on the hill,
who, escorted by our bullets, ran away. On the back slope of the hill was a
rock about a metre and a half high and a metre wide. I shouted to the boys to
move behind it. I was a little ahead of the others and was just about to get
behind the rock when I noticed a large figure in a snow suit on the other side
of the rock. As I dove for the cover of the rock, I had time to notice that
the guy had a rifle -- I only had a pistol. It was a startling blink of an
eye. Within seconds, the question flashed through my mind: what to do -- who
would get the first shot? Guided more by instinct than reason, I swung the
bottom of my overcoat over the edge of the rock and -- the guy fired. I jumped
to the side of the rock and fired as I jumped. It missed, but it distracted
him enough to slow the loading motion. My pistol went off a second time, then
a third and a fourth -- aimlessly and as fast as I could squeeze the trigger
and he slumped from his knees to his stomach. Heart pounding, I jumped back.
It all happened so fast that it was only afterwards that the boys realized
what had happened.

Only now do I have time to look further afield. There was an unexpected view.
Along the road, a couple of hundred metres away, men in brown were lying side
by side. They were absolutely still, face down. The foremost were only fifty
metres away.

By gesturing, I got the boys to crawl into a position where they could see the
road. I gave the signal to open fire. It went off almost simultaneously from
all the guns. The brown mass came to life -- at least the ones that still
could. We fired for a couple of minutes. Then I left a guard on the hill, and,
dragging our fallen man with us, we returned to our position.

It was already evening when the sentries returned and reported that at least
five tanks were approaching along the road. For a long time we had heard their
rumbling, so the information came as no surprise. The frost was getting worse.
The digging of the pot holes continued. A cold and dreary night under the
twinkling stars lay ahead.

From the sounds we can deduce that a food truck arrived at the enemy. There was
a clatter of cutlery, shouts and the noise of a large crowd. Then the engines
of the tanks started to run. Two tanks approached on the road, their machine
guns discharging long bursts along the sides of the road. They drove up to our
positions, passed us for some distance, turned around suddenly and came back
along the same road. The spectacle was repeated again after a while, and then
again and again. The company commander tried to get some anti-tank mines from
the rear. At this point, however, they were nowhere to be found. The tanks
never once left the road, and the rain of bullets did little harm either, as
they mostly rustled high up in the trees. So we let them play on and just kept
an eye on the tanks to make sure the infantry didn't follow them.

It was the third day without sleep. The boys were already starting to fall
asleep in their holes. Sleeping would have meant freezing to death, and I
tried to keep myself and the boys awake by constantly rotating from position
to position. Often a man snoring in his hole had to be lifted up and shaken
before he began to show signs of waking up. Despite this, many of the boys'
feet were freezing.Among others, my combat messenger, Jaeger Valkolehto, had
to go to hospital.

In the morning, the sky filled with clouds and the frost eased. I asked for and
received permission to sleep for two hours in the company commander's dugout.

That's how I missed when the mortar team was performing anti-tank duties. There
were some good hits on the tanks. But grenade hits can't penetrate tank armor.
Heavy artillery shells can. In the morning, a artillery spotter appeared on
the scene, laid down a target on the road, pointed his guns at it, and when
the tanks on their next show approached, gave the order to fire. One of the
tanks remained stationary and the other left the scene. The crew attempted to
exit the disabled tank but were killed on the spot.

The enemy artillery was apparently moving to a new position, as its fire was
unusually light. Stubbornly, however, the infantry tried one attack after
another along the road. The attacks were repulsed.

At about 14.00 an unexpected order to withdraw was received. The company left
for Kiltee, but my platoon had to stay in position for half an hour to ensure
the withdrawal. The company left for Kiltee, but my platoon had to stay in
position for half an hour to ensure an undisturbed withdrawal.

After half an hour we went after the company. Just as we were about to reach
the road leading through the centre of the village of Kiltee, an officer rode
up from Kämärä and informed the troops that the Russians had captured the
village of Kämärä and that tanks were coming from there to Kiltee. They had
recently shot up one of our trucks carrying the wounded. Our retreat was
blocked.

The troops that had reached the village started to return, and at the same time
troops from defensive positions on the west side of the village kept arriving.
The supplies were already behind the intermediate position in the Kuikkalampi
terrain. Within a quarter of an hour our entire brigade and nearly a hundred
vehicles were assembled in the village clearing of Kiltee.

In the autumn, there had been a horse track from Kiltee across the Leipäsuo
swamp to the supply road leading from Kattilaoja to Kuikkalampi. It had not
been used since Christmas, so it was now deep in snow. Two vehicles were
unloaded and a few loads were lightened. The empty vehicles went first and the
lightened loads followed. Then there was enough of a trail for the other
vehicles to follow with the help of the men.

But they had not yet moved when 25-30 Russian fighters appeared over the
village. The clouds were hanging low, and visibility was poor due to snowfall.
The planes flew low, circling and curving over us like a swarm of mosquitoes
on a summer evening, but -- not a shot was fired. Someone told me they saw the
pilot of one of the planes peek over the edge and wave. They had mistaken us
for one of their own.

After the fighters left, the vehicles moved off, and the battalions and
companies skied alongside them across the swamp. At Kuikkalampi,
sergeants-majors with already steaming kitchens had even set up tents ready
for their reduced companies.

Sleep was tasty after the wakefulness and excitement. But it didn't last long,
because before the next morning the alarm came. The enemy had already attacked
the intermediate position in the evening and during the night, and it was only
with difficulty that the inexperienced troops gathered there had been able to
repel the attacks. A particularly close call had been in the direction of the
Kämärä road, where the enemy had tried to break through with their tanks. It
was there that our company had to hurry.

The intermediate position is unfinished. Not even the barbed wire barrier is
continuous, with large sections still to be built. There are sparsely spaced
firing positions, a few dugouts, a bit of trench here and there, and a patch
of anti-tank obstacles.

The Road base was already occupied by company Toivio from Detachment Berg. Our
company was assigned to the same location. So there were two companies working
side by side.

The fourth and fifth squads of my platoon went to reinforce the Forward
position, 300 meters in front of the actual defensive position, on the edge of
the fields of the station village. If enemy pressure became unbearable, they
were to withdraw to reinforce the defences of the Road base. At the Forward
position the officer in charge was an officer from Toivio's company with his
platoon. I placed the rest of my platoon in a stretch of trench next to the
Road base, separated from the previous one by 50 metres of open terrain. In my
platoon's area was the only crew dugout in the immediate vicinity. At the Road
base, a hundred metres from the road, there is a machine-gun position and, on
either side of the road, a light machine-gun position. These positions were
built so high that they were guaranteed to stand out from their surroundings
and be visible far into the enemy's line of sight.

The artillery fire was weak, and the enemy did not show any special willingness
to act on this occasion. But if you glanced across the field from the Forward
position, you had to look twice before you believed what you saw. There stood
dozens of tanks, lined up at regular intervals as if on parade. They stood in
the open field in their strength, aware of our powerlessness. We had two
anti-tank guns next to the road, but from there they could not fire into the
field. The previous evening, when the Russians had tried to break through with
their tanks along the road, three of our guns had been destroyed and the crews
had suffered losses. Two gun crew leaders, among others, had fallen beside
their guns, but they had nevertheless managed to prevent the breakthrough, and
behind a broken stone barrier stood six destroyed and burnt tanks. Somewhere
they had managed to get intact guns to replace the broken ones.

In the evening, our company commander made an attempt to harass the tanks
parked in the field. He and his men pulled an anti-tank gun through the snow
to the Forward position. It managed to fire five shots and got one of the
tanks on fire, when the other tanks directed such a hellish shower of fire at
the gun that there was no longer any chance of getting near it. After dark the
broken gun was towed away. The tank burning in the field lit the night
landscape a misty yellow.

In the early hours of the morning, a couple of groups of engineers arrived with
a load of box mines. I was their guide as they set their mines in front of the
barrier. They were left to finish their work when, at dawn, I returned to my
platoon.

But I didn't have time to finish my cigarette when the tanks in the field
opened fire with all their weapons and the artillery joined the orchestra. A
moment later the commander of the Front base crawled out, wounded in the leg,
and it was not long after that the men came after him. They told us that the
tanks had shot the outpost to pieces and then started moving towards it.
Several dead had been left there, including two replacements who had arrived
yesterday. I ran with my men to the Road Base. There, too, things were a mess.
The Russians had used their tank guns to fire in through the gaps in the
machine-gun emplacements. In the light machine gun position nearest the road,
several men had been wounded, and all the others had gone to "escort" them to
the rear. At the machine gun emplacement, the gunner had fallen, the assistant
gunner was wounded and the machine gun was lying on its side among the debris
on the floor of the emplacement. Here too, some of Toivio's men had thought it
best to move on to safer ground, first-timers in combat as they were.

However, these things only became clear afterwards, because as soon as we got
to the machine gun emplacement, we saw that a closed section was marching on
the road almost at the light machine gun emplacement. Some of the men were
wearing snowsuits, and it therefore occurred to me that those must be our own
engineers, now returning from their mission. I jumped to the edge of the
trench and shouted something to the men. When they turned their heads at my
shout so that their faces were visible, it was immediately clear that they
were Russians, and from my position I fired my submachine gun in the direction
of the column and the boys joined the firing. Some of the Russians ducked to
the ground, but others ran into the light machine gun emplacement in front of
them and into the trench, where those who had ducked to the ground also began
to rush. I had snatched the submachine gun from the edge of the trench.
Shrapnels had cracked the barrel, and after a few bursts it stopped working.

Corporals Pöntinen and Jäppinen seized the machine gun lying on the floor of
the nest, lifted it to the edge of the trench and made it work. This was the
trick that -- in my opinion -- prevented the intermediate position from
collapsing that day.The Russians kept feeding new troops down the road to the
battle, but Pöntinen and Jäppinen's machine gun cut them off before they
reached the trench, and those who had already reached it were unable to extend
their break-in. The machine gun was in a sheltered rear position, so the
Russians could not fire at it from a distance.

On the orders of the company commander, we tried a counterattack to expel the
enemy who had reached the vicinity of the light machine gun position. Perhaps
we would have succeeded, had it not been for the sudden intervention of three
tanks that had come through from the right flank and were now rushing behind
our positions. Because of them our counterattack had to be stopped.

Then the anti-tank men of the brigade and our company took action. After some
time they managed to set all three tanks on fire. Black clouds of smoke rose
into the sky and the Russians did not send more tanks into our rear. But the
infantry attempted to advance in the direction of the road, and those who
reached our position in the morning fired from the rear at our men who were at
the machine-gun emplacement. One man after another got a bullet in the skin.
Among the casualties was our excellent light machine gunner, Jaeger Ulmanen.
In the afternoon, both corporals who were in charge of the machine gun were
wounded, and by then the base was already stretched to the limit.

But then a platoon of Swedish-speaking first-timers arrived to help us. They
had had very bad luck when they arrived, because on the way they had already
lost their platoon leader, their platoon sergeant and two squad leaders. The
two remaining squad leaders spoke Finnish, but none of the boys did. They had
started their war in a bit of a rough place and seemed nervous at first, but
soon settled down and took things like men.

As darkness fell, we thought that the Russians must have had their fill for the
day. But no. Their political officer had come to the front line and a hundred
metres from our positions was shouting his incitements in a shrill voice. With
all weapons we let out a brief burst of fire in the direction of the sound.
The speech halted, but then continued. It ended with a triple "Uraa! Uraa!
Uraa!" which, admittedly, seemed a little forced. Here comes the assault -- we
thought, and opened fire again in the direction from which the shouts were
coming. There was no assault, but soon the political officer began to shout
and shout some more. He shouted for a while and then again "Uraa! Uraa!
Uraa!". We opened fire again, and again there was no assault.

Gradually it became quieter on the opposite side. A messenger came to inform us
that at 21:00 the 2nd company of our battalion would take over the front line
at the Road Base.

The rookies were pulled out first and the changeover went smoothly. The
sergeant-major had sent my platoon dry food. It was our first meal after
yesterday. There was plenty of food, as it had been sent according to the
previous day's strength, which was 29. Now there were only eleven of us to
share the food.

All the platoons in our company had suffered heavy losses during the day. The
leader of the second platoon, Lieutenant Ojapelto, had been wounded.
We were given a dugout for the night, with walls but no roof. We built a fire
in the middle and huddled around it to spend a cold and smoky night.

This morning, the remaining personnel of our company were divided into two
platoons and two bases were formed in our defensive area. I was assigned the
one on the left, closest to the road. It has two covered machine gun
emplacements and a small dugout attached to them. Half the men in my base
could just about fit into the dugout at any one time, but no more could be
removed from the positions anyway.

The enemy has not attacked in the direction of the road today either. But they
have got their artillery in position and are now preparing the way for their
attack.