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Old 09-14-18, 09:46 AM   #513
Dowly
Lucky Jack
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Finland
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There has been successful prisoner snatch missions by the Russians, I might have just not wrote about or they've not been mentioned in the HQ War Diary.

As I said a couple of posts back, if I needed to use the HQ War Diary I'd just pick one interesting entry (if there were any) for that day. That would mean that some of the smaller stuff (such as Russian prisoner snatch mission) might go unnoticed. This I very much did out of lazyness, not of bias (just putting that out there), the trench warfare period is rather boring. Now I do try to write about everything of interest. (excluding naval stuff which is usually reports of convoys etc.)

Having said that, overall, Russian success on the Finnish front has been quite insignificant. This can be seen by comparing the results of patrols for example: Finnish patrols appear to move much "stealthier" to get to a position from where to attack their target, destroy stuff and pull out vs. Russian patrols nearly always just attacking head on with artillery preparation and with maybe some flanking forces for distraction.

I've no knowledge of the Russian side of the war, but from reading captured radio messages (Finns were pretty good at capturing them), it seems the general mood with Russian commanders was: "failure is not an option".

If you like, I can try to find the messages and translate some of them, they are pretty interesting to read.
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