[Dowly]

Extracts from a sergeant's war diary 1/5

Written by then sergeant H. Kolehmainen , translated using machine translation (w/corrections) from "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 1/1957.


6 February, 1940
The artillery barrage in the direction of Summa continues day after day. So do
the enemy attacks. Still our people have been able to repel all the attacks --
But for how long?

Today my platoon and I skied two tracks over the Leipäsuo and north of the
village of Kiltee behind Summa. The intention is to use the tracks to move our
battalion to the Summa sector for a counterattack or to plug a possible gap in
the defence. Besides shells, the air was full of all sorts of contraptions,
from large bombers to a fire-control plane that was almost stationary. The
station village of Kämärä was bombed a couple of times. An anti-aircraft gun
battery in Kiltee tried in vain to distract the bombers.And soon the division
was hit by artillery fire, which forced the gunners to take cover.

At the end of December there was still a solid forest around the village of
Huumola. Now all that was left were fragmented stumps and shrapnel from shells
lying scattered on the ground.

On our return in the afternoon, we almost skied into an "ambush". A rumour had
spread through the battalion that a large enemy patrol had got through
somewhere and was circling around in the rear doing damage. Then, when a
sentry had spotted a detachment skiing in a swamp in the distance, approaching
the camp area, he had sounded the alarm. A terrible commotion had broken out
in the camping area. All the companies were working on the support line. There
were only cooks, shoemakers, tailors, clerks, etc. The battalion commander
himself had started to get the defence together. Every able-bodied man, even
the slightly wounded, had been called in to help in the fight.

We approached the campsite at our leisure, the afternoon sun shining into the
eyes of those waiting in ambush. When we were less than a hundred metres from
the edge of the forest, the command "Stop or be shot!" rang out in our ears.
The skiing stopped immediately. To our question, "What is going on now?", came
the counter-question, "Are you Russians or Finns?" Well, it turned out that we
were on the same side, and belonged to the same battalion.
But the face of our sergeant-major Otto Hautakoski was worth seeing, when he
climbed out of the snow, shaking his coat and saying, "What kind of fools they
are, making even an old man scared of ghosts!"

12 February
"The enemy has entered our positions east of Summa," it was reported yesterday
evening. The breach is less than a kilometre wide and the enemy's advance has
been halted in front of the support line.

The artillery fire has continued day after day with the same hellish intensity.
Now it extends as far as the railway line, to the sector of the battalion
formed by the Pori Regiment. The boys of Pori were in a tight spot today, and
the second company of our battalion was sent there to help.

The fortification work has been completed and we are "ready to go in two
hours". Judging by the signs, departure will be soon, probably to the Summa meat grinder.

On the morning of 16 February at Kuikkalampi
The day before yesterday we got the order to leave. The enemy had broken
through the positions in the Lähde sector and continued to advance towards the
village of Kämärä. The other two battalions of our brigade had already the
night before scrambled to block the enemy's advance somewhere in the terrain
of the village of Kultakumpu.

We felt relieved to leave. For the last 24 hours we had been on "one-hour
standby", with shells hitting our accommodation area from time to time. At
record speed we crossed the three kilometre wide, almost open, Leipäsuo swamp.
The speed was increased by the shells falling all around us, guided by a
sighting ball seen in the direction of Lake Perkjärvi, and by the black-nosed
fighters testing us with the accuracy of their machine guns. The accuracy was
poor, with only a couple of men getting a hole in their skin in the wide
target area. After crossing the railway, we pushed north of the village of
Kiltee, to an abandoned campsite about a kilometre west of the village. The
artillery fire had died down, but the small arms fire could be heard fiercely
and sometimes quite close. Messengers skied past. From them we heard that the
2nd and 3rd Battalions of our Brigade had been in action all day, pushing the
enemy back. The losses were heavy. The worst problem had been the lack of
anti-tank weapons.

We huddled in cold tents and waited. It wasn't until 22.00 that we found out
what our mission was. We had to attack from the left along the trench of the
support line and close the breach. We were informed that the breach was about
a kilometre and a half wide and that there was a battalion of JR 62, I think
it was a battalion of JR 62, which had just arrived at the front, coming from
the right to roll the trench at the same time.

As the moon rose, we started to navigate across the terrain towards the base,
the eastern side of which was supposed to be ours. No one had any idea if
there were any enemies in the area between us. Therefore, the march had to be
carried out under cover. My platoon was given the task of securing the flank
and navigating. We skied in three columns.

As we were descending a gentle hill, all the patrols side by side, we came
across an enemy campfire, where a dozen of them were warming their hands. We
were frightened, but probably the others were more frightened, because without
firing a shot they retreated along their trampled path to the west. We opened
fire, but instead of staying to investigate its effect, we continued in the
direction of the objective. At about 3.00 o'clock we were at the dugout which
was our objective. There was only one man in the dugout, a lieutenant, with a
bearded face, eyes inflamed with fatigue, wearing a dirty rag of snow-suit,
dozing with his head between his hands beside a cold stove. He seemed almost
impossibly apathetic. He seemed neither pleased nor saddened by our arrival.
He answered a few questions about the situation with a sense of absence.

"Company Palo" was ordered to attack by rolling the trench and take up a
defensive position facing south. "Company Forssell" was to attack on the north
side of the trench and secure to the north.

As my platoon was the first of "Company Palo", it was tasked to roll the
trench. The other platoons of the company would come up behind and take care
of the defence.

The assault section was soon formed: a submachine gunner, two grenade throwers
and the rest of the platoon as back-ups and grenade suppliers. We had
practised this very thing to the point of boredom in Käkisalmi a few months
earlier, so now it was just a question of applying the exercise. The skis were
pushed into the grenade craters around the dugout, and then we followed the
lieutenant who had been sent to guide us into the connecting trench, or rather
the caved-in trench that pointed to it. A hundred metres further on the
connecting trench branched off into a perimeter trench. On the right, just
round the first bend, stood two men whose form and appearance told us that
they, like the lieutenant, had reached the limit of human endurance, and it
seemed that only instinct could have kept them going. Silently, they pointed
to the next bend in the trench and followed their lieutenant back down the
trench to the left. We were in the thick of the battle with the enemy.

The trench ran right through open terrain. As far as we could see in the
moonlight, it looked like a lifeless, cratered ditch. Burnt-out ghosts of
tanks loomed here and there on either side of the trench. A strange smell of
explosions and burnt flesh hung in the air.

But we didn't have time to admire the landscape. Two hand grenades flew around
the next bend, and when they exploded, the submachine gunner rushed after
them. And so it began. It felt a little strange to step on a half-frozen or
still warm human body in a dark trench. But you had to step on them, for there
were many of them, twisted into the strangest positions, some only partially,
others almost completely buried under the crumbled gravel, a mixture of Finns
and Russians. However, progress was rapid. Bend after bend was recaptured. The
enemy seemed strangely unresponsive, dying in place almost without a fight.
Perhaps they too were overcome by frost and fatigue. We, on the other hand,
warm from the skiing, were refreshed. From the front we could hear the clatter
of tanks, but we paid it no attention. We managed to advance about three
hundred metres and then came to a halt. We ran out of hand grenades. We made a
collection from the platoons behind us. But it took about ten minutes.

Although smoking was banned, a couple of boys lit up a cigarette while waiting.
It was their last. Up ahead, about two hundred metres away, there was a bang,
and at the same time a cannon shot hit the heads of the smoking boys. Only now
did we realise that the enemy had driven tanks to block our way. One of them
loomed crosswise over the trench, its cannon pointing towards us along the
trench. On either side of it we could see other tanks. We knew the game was
lost. We had no anti-tank guns, and in the open terrain there was not the
slightest chance of engaging the tanks from close range. However, we still
tried to keep rolling and made some headway, but the bullets from the tanks
and the cannon fire that exploded in the walls of the trench soon stopped our
advance.

Then we waited for something to happen, but to no avail. The hours of the night
passed slowly. The tanks guarding the trench occasionally fired a few bursts,
and the cannon roared as if in defiance: "Come on over here!"

The day dawned before eight. The traces of the battles were now revealed in all
their horror. Shell holes, tank wrecks, corpses, broken or abandoned weapons
and equipment everywhere. But the day revealed more. Russians marched along
the road leading to the Kämärä station on the western side of Munasuo. A line
of trucks and wagons marched in a kilometre-long line, as if in a peacetime
exercise.We had no artillery, not a single artillery spotter.We tried firing
small arms at the column, but it had no effect. Our mortar team also tried to
fire, but none of the shells even exploded -- the fuses were frozen. For
another hour we watched the march, and there seemed to be no end to the column.

Then came the order to leave the positions and move to the Lakusuo terrain. We
were the last to leave, as my platoon was the furthest away. At least we all
still got our skis from the dugout, although not the ones we had skied with on
the way in. Everyone seemed to be in a terrible hurry to get off that death
field.

About half a kilometre away from the aforementioned dugout, I came across a
strange sight. A man was crawling along the track, or rather dragging himself
along with his hands, shouting and begging for someone to stop and take him
with them: 'Boys, boys, don't leave me... shoot if you don't take me with you!'

But no one stopped. Everyone skied past the man as if in a race.

I stood next to him, calling for the two men behind me to stop, but they
wouldn't listen. I fired my pistol after them to get their attention, but that
only increased their speed.

I was alone with a man who was unable to move, in an unknown forest, perhaps
surrounded by the enemy. He had a bullet wound in his thigh, and because of
his panic he was almost out of his mind. I helped him onto my skis on his
belly, put the ends of the poles in his hands and, pulling on the other end of
the poles, set off to drag him along the trails, wading in the metre-deep
snow. The going was as difficult as possible. The man's belly was dragging
snow between the skis, the skis tended to break apart, and pulling a heavy
load in snow like that started to take its toll after only a few tens of
metres. Metre by metre, however, the journey continued. Sweat was dripping
from every pore. Every now and then I had to stop and rest. Every moment I
waited for the enemy to appear on the track. It would have meant certain
death. At best, capture. At noon, I finally reached the road. It had taken
more than two hours to cover less than two kilometres. Almost immediately, as
if on cue, a horse from a pioneer troop drove along the road, which I managed
to stop, even though the driver was also in a hurry to get away from the
enemy. We lifted the wounded man onto the load, and the driver promised to
take him to the first place he met where the wounded were treated.

It was only at dusk that I found my group. The company had not received any
provisions for a day and a half, so the company commander sent me out to find
a supply crew and direct those bringing provisions and ammunition to the
company. The battalion supply and company supply troops were already moving
into the Kuikkalampi terrain. The previously cooked food had gone sour and had
to be dumped on the ground. While waiting for the new soup to cook, I have
written down these events I have narrated.