Next target: Continuation war.:D

Thanks for the hard work Dowly. Good information on a part of the war we don't hear about much.

14 March 1940

Mannerheim issues Order of the Day Nr. 34

/thread

The Suomi Sodassa (=Finland at War) Youtube channel has released an hour worth of footage pieced together for the Soviet side of the Winter War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gtfxy_aTMU

:salute:

I don't think I've ever posted this Finnish documentary about Simo Häyhä (turn on eng subs), so here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfZuTLKDeXA

26 photos added to the thread and some low resolution ones replaced with higher resolution versions. New photos can be easily recognized by the smaller thumbnail I used (same as in the Continuation War thread).

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.

this video requires a little more Sisu from U!??:D

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.

Extracts from a sergeant's war diary 3/5

Written by then sergeant H. Kolehmainen, translated using machine translation (w/corrections) from "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 3/1957.

I have attached a map at the bottom of the post of the area with some points of interest marked. Click to see larger image. I am still trying to find out the unit the writer belonged to for some additional details.


21 February 1940, in the intermediate position

Our dugout is on the banks of the Pero River. It was built as a machine gun
emplacement, but its firing port faces the enemy and its area of fire is
limited. We have placed the machine gun in a trench behind the dugout. The
river at this point is 10 metres wide and heavily frozen. So heavy that it can
carry tanks, as evidenced by the tracks of the tanks that drove close to the
Road Base a few days ago.

The commander of the machine gun platoon, Sergeant Ovaska, also lives in our
dugout. This morning he went on an errand to the Road Base, but returned a
moment later to tell us that he had dropped in to take a peek at a stretch of
anti-tank trench that cannot be observed from our positions. The trench had
been full of Russians. He thought they could easily be destroyed by a small
surprise attack. We roused some of the men who were resting and, led by
Ovaska, crept under cover of darkness to the edge of the trench. Hand grenades
exploded in the pit. The submachine gun completed the job. Twenty-two were
deducted from the Russian strength, including one lieutenant. On our return we
had with us a watch, binoculars, map case, compass, flare gun, sniper rifle
and several semi-automatic and standard rifles.

The company commander ordered anti-tank mines to be placed in the tank tracks
leading past our dugout, in case the Russians thought of using the same route
again. The sergeant-major brought five mines by sleigh, and it was my job to
set them in place. We went to work with Jäger Lappalainen. With my field
shovel and two mines, I crept down to the river. I dug holes for the mines,
set them and crawled back. Then Lappalainen went out, dug the holes and
started to arm the mines. Something went wrong. There was a huge bang. There
were no more mines and no more Lappalainen. He was from Lapinlahti in Sakkola.
One Saturday, during the extra exercises, I was at his house in the sauna.

At dusk, a Russian soldier, Pyotr Sergein Shuvalov, tried to come and greet us,
but the man on guard duty was in such a hurry that he shot him in the head.
The stranger's friendly intentions towards us should have been evident from
the fact that he had dragged his rifle behind him along the trench, humming a
sad song as he went. In one hand he had an opened bottle of vodka and in his
pocket was another unopened one. How and by what means he had got into the
trench unnoticed by the guards is a mystery. From his documents, the
Russian-speakers could tell that he was from Kiev, 24 years old and a
mechanical engineer by profession. He had been something of a 'ladies' man',
as he had many pictures of beautiful girls in his pocket. Shame about the
girls. But the vodka was good.

23 February

Yesterday, the Russians stormed the road again, their artillery thundering from
dawn to dusk. They were content to fire their tank and direct fire cannons at
our company's front line, apparently because their own men were too close. The
distance between our positions is less than a hundred metres. But behind our
positions, the woods were reduced to a shrubbery. The second company held its
ground at the Road Base, regardless of casualties. Last night, a company of
the Uusimaa Regiment relieved them.

Our company had a bad day today. Not so much because of the enemy, but because
of the sour pea soup we had this morning. Peeling off the many layers of
clothing and equipment for a discharge is a demanding operation because it can
only be done without incident if your metabolism is normal. When the sour pea
soup festered in the intestines, the process was not successful at all, not
for anyone. In the afternoon, I don't think anyone even bothered to try it
anymore. We were reduced to the level of an animal. But animals have it easier
-- they don't have pants. We had to carry in our trousers what they leave
behind. In the morning, the boys asked to see a doctor because of their
diarrhoea, but we couldn't leave the positions empty. A medical officer went
around handing out kilos of charcoal tablets.

24 February

Our dugout is at the forest line, along which we can see for a kilometre across
the Pero River and diagonally behind the road. We built a lookout and sniper
post on the roof of the dugout on our very first night. During the daylight
hours there is always someone in position watching from behind the sniper
rifle we received from the Russians, which we first sighted in the rear. I
doubt the Russians have a clue where the death is coming from that is
harvesting their men behind the road 500-600 meters from our dugout. That's
apparently their footpath, as there's plenty of movement all day long. The
most diligent stalkers boast that they can get up to twenty kills a day. I
don't know. I mean, you can't verify every kill. But you can always count the
ones that the guys have to drag off the line. It's happened that they've had
to send four guys after another, when the first ones have always turned from
draggers to dragged. You can see that they think the cause of the casualties
is right on the front line and try to protect themselves in that direction.

The Russians tried again today with their tanks in the direction of the road.
Not along the road, but in the woods a few hundred meters from the road. That
attempt went badly wrong for them. The boys of the Uusimaa Regiment set fire
to eight tanks with their Molotovs.

Diarrhoea continues. Albeit already milder than yesterday. But it has made me
feel as if I am powerless. Fortunately, we will be able to rest for a couple
of days next night. The second company will take the front line.

26 February

We live in dugouts near the brigade headquarters. We are on our second day of
rest, and the worst of the fatigue has passed.

Washing up, shaving and changing underwear are mundane chores in everyday life.
Now they have a sense of celebration. Even if the water melted from a pack
full of snow doesn't make you feel very clean after two weeks of not washing,
it feels like you're becoming human again. So, happiness and joy in human life
are relative and dependent on the circumstances.

This time we got some rookies who had been in training for a couple of months
as replacements. Our company was reorganised today. The remaining old
replacements were transferred to the supply platoon and the young men from
there to the rifle platoons. The old ones looked happy. They believe that they
can keep their lives in their posts more surely than in the trenches. But the
part of the company supply man is not much better than that of the rifleman in
terms of safety. But they believe it to be so, and what a man believes is
truth to him.

27 February

Last night we took over the defensive positions of the third company. The enemy
is attacking fiercely in the terrain of Lake Näykkijärvi and Honkaniemi stop
and has made a small breakthrough there. One of the jäger battalions has been
ordered to restore the positions.

The boys of the 3rd Company have had a joint water opening with the enemy on
the ice of the Perojoki River. The water has been fetched in turns, and the
water fetchers have not been shot at. Just now at dusk a hasty recruit
happened to be on guard. He couldn't resist firing at a Russian water
retriever crouching 40 metres away. Probably now we have to melt the coffee
water from the snow, it's bad because for some reason there is only black snow
here.

However, more serious damage occurred a little later. Twenty engineers came to
mine the terrain on the front line. They had mines and other supplies in a
vehicle, which they drove close to the front line. I was given the task of
guiding the engineers to the mine site. I discussed the operation with their
leader and proceeded to walk ahead to open an opening in the barbed wire
barrier. The engineers stayed behind to move their mines into a sled. A single
mortar shot was heard from the enemy side, the shell whizzed over and -- hit
the sled. The pressure of the explosion knocked me over. Three engineers were
taken to the first aid station, -- of the others there was nothing left to
take anywhere.

28 February

In the morning, the enemy launched a massive artillery barrage. It continued
for a couple of hours, then gradually quietened down. We waited for the
attack. It did not come. All day long there have been noises -- as if moaning
-- from in front of the positions, and solitary enemies have been seen
crawling here and there. When the moon rose, we held an "area firing" with all
guns in front of our positions. The artillery took part with a few grenades,
as did the battalion mortar platoon. The voices fell silent.

Then a lone Russian started shouting repeatedly, "Stalin! Stalin! Stalin!"

The scream seemed almost eerie in the otherwise quiet night. It turned out that
the shouter was a wounded Russian who had become entangled in our barbed wire
barrier. We decided that if the Russians came for their man, we would let them
do it in peace. No retrievers came, and the shouting continued. Not wanting to
send any of our own men to be exposed to Russian fire, a burst of light
machinegun fire was sent out. The shouting stopped.

1 March

Last night, two patrols went out to investigate the area in front. They found
that the front of the positions was full of fallen Russians. There was not a
single survivor in the surrounding area.

As the day wore on, things began to clear up. A patrol was sent out, which
stayed on its way for half an hour, and on its return confirmed the report of
the night patrols.

With the company commander and a few men, we went to investigate the area.
Behind the river there is a zone about 200 metres wide with large fir trees.
Then the marshland begins, with open areas and small islands of forest. The
forest zone revealed the tragedy that befell the Russians. In an area of about
four or five hectares, there were fallen Russians almost side by side. We did
not attempt to count their number. But an estimate based on the area of the
site suggests that the number of the fallen was certainly closer to four
hundred than three hundred. Many of them still had the bread in their hands
that they had been eating when the Retriever came. It turned out that the
Russians had brought a reinforced battalion within a couple of hundred metres
of our positions during the night of 28 February. Its purpose had been to
attack through our positions and then continue eastward, turning onto the
road, which would have put our troops -- three companies -- on the west side
of the road in danger of being encircled and their only supply route would
have been cut off.

Yes. This had been the plan. Maybe a good one for them. But there had been at
least one miscalculation. A mistake made by the man who drew up their
artillery fire plan. He had probably made a mistake in calculating the
distance of a kilometer when he set the targets.

A kilometre here or there -- What does it matter in a war. In this case it did.
It was downright fatal. For the fire preparation for their attack, intended to
defeat us, had fallen on their own battalion, ready to attack and completely
exposed.

There sat a fire control officer with a map in front of him and a telephone
receiver in his stiffened hand. He must have been hit as soon as the
bombardment began, because he had been unable to stop it. Heavy artillery
ammunition they must have been mainly. Large 16- to 18-inch fir trees had
fallen like matchsticks under their force. One of them had snapped in half,
and the top had fallen on the neck of a man sitting at the foot of the tree,
resting on the branches. The lieutenant-colonel had an open bread bag in front
of him. It contained wheat bread, tinned food and a slightly less than full
bottle of vodka. The Retriever had come to him, too, in the middle of his
'last meal'.

The battalion was no ordinary battalion, but an NCO school based in Leningrad.
It had been brought by train directly from the barracks to a place near Kämärä
station. Only two days before, they had been on an evening pass in the
amusement parlours of the big city.

They were all 22-23 years old, strong-looking young men. They wore new
overcoats of some silky fabric, with a plain military summer uniform, also
new, underneath, and two pairs of flannel, clean underwear. Their faces were
neither wrinkled by the winter winds nor blackened by the camp fires, but with
smooth faces and shaved beards they had gone to war as to a party.

In addition to the Lieutenant Colonel, the dead included officers from Captain
to Junior Lieutenant and many non-commissioned officers. The map cases were
full of maps and papers. And, amazingly, their maps were already printed in
the printing press with the unfinished dugouts, emplacements and obstacles of
our unfinished intermediate position. The maps also had thick arrows drawn in
coloured pencil showing the course of their planned attack.

It was a snowy day. The enemy remained silent. Only a solitary shell would
occasionally whistle overhead. We cut a hole in the barrier and trampled our
way to the killing field. We drove in one horse at a time and loaded the
sledge full of spoils. All the company horses and some of the battalion horses
came during the day to pick up a load of spoils of war. Twelve new machine
guns were loaded into the first loads. They had been painted white and were
still so new that they had not even been degreased. They could not be fired
immediately, but the Russians must have thought that the artillery made such a
clean job that there was no need to fire the machine guns - and there was
none. We got mortars, light machine guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles
and all the stuff that a battalion carries. No pistols appeared in the loads,
but the boys had plenty of them in their pockets.

One platoon at a time, the boys took it in turns to collect the loot. Each one
saved something for himself as a war souvenir. The fallen had an unusually
large amount of money. Paper money, coins and badges of all sorts. In the
afternoon, my platoon's trench was covered with Russian paper money as the
boys emptied the wallets they had collected from the pockets of the fallen. It
occurred to me that if you could put together a couple of rucksacks full of
them, who knows if you'd live to be a rich man, but where would you have been
able to find rucksacks in such a hurry? So the money was left to get mixed up
in the mud of the trench. Strangely shifting "values" in the world. The money
that people spend all their lives trying to accumulate, the money for which
the greatest crimes and villainous deeds are committed, now no one bothered to
deposit more than one or two notes, which were deposited not because of the
money itself, but because of the commemorative value it contained.

Although we have had an easy day today, the enemy has been attacking more
fiercely towards the Honkaniemi stop and has made a deep breakthrough there.
The intermediate position is abandoned. In a few hours the delay phase will
begin again. Supply is already withdrawing behind the Valkjärvi track. Our
company sets up a delaying position in the terrain south of the Pilppula stop
at the halfway point of Lake Kämäränjärvi. A battalion of the Uusimaa Regiment
will leave patrols at the intermediate position to maintain contact with the
enemy.


https://i.imgur.com/IqqeWhM.jpg

Extracts from a sergeant's war diary 4/5

Written by then sergeant H. Kolehmainen, translated using machine translation (w/corrections) from "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 1/1958.

4 March 1940, in Lyykylä

After leaving the intermediate position, we skied along the road leading to the
village of Kämärä. During the twelve days we had been in the intermediate
position, the scenery had become unfamiliar. All that was left of the forest
were ragged, jutting stumps. Grenades had ploughed the road into a lumpy field.

It is remarkable how your eyes adapt to "night life". When the moon was behind
a thin veil of clouds, it was hard to tell whether it was night or day. All
objects were clearly visible, even plain text was easy to read.

From Kämärä road we turned to the horse road leading to Pilppula and stopped
approximately in the midpoint of Kämärä lake. There we had to establish
delaying positions. The last of our own troops passed us. The day dawned, and
it was the first warm day of winter. It was very quiet at the front. It was
only in the afternoon that the first artillery shots rang in our ears.

The second platoon stayed in position by the road, the third platoon near
Kämärä lake and my platoon between them about 300 meters from the road. Each
platoon was reinforced with a machine gun. We prepared the positions from
packing snow. The terrain was hilly grassland where there had been a forest
fire a few years ago.

There was a sand pit in my team's area. We chose it as a fallback position,
where we placed our skis and backpacks. Our actual position was 70-80 meters
away on a small hill.

It would have been a great day to rest, but according to battalion orders we
were not allowed to pitch tents, and sleeping on snow even in warm weather is
no rest. This order was grimly cursed. The messengers told us that the
battalion headquarters slept in peace and quiet 7 or 8 kilometres to the rear
of our positions in some house.

But we couldn't sleep. We walked, shuffled and wrestled to stay warm. And so
evening came and night came. Still the same shuffling. We changed sentries and
shuffled. At night it became cold. Our wet clothes and boots froze. We stayed
awake and shuffled in our armour-clad clothes.

Finally, the tops of the trees began to turn red, a sign that the sun was
rising. At the same time, a swarm of fighter planes flew over us, and from the
direction of the road the sound of tanks could be heard in the distance. We
drank the soup sent by the sergeant-major to refresh our weary limbs and then
walked along the path to the position and began to wait.

There was gunfire and the sound of fighting from the direction of the road. A
tank had been set on fire as a tall column of smoke rose above the forest. We
waited and froze in our snow holes.

Then it appeared in front of us. A hundred and fifty metres away, a line of men
came towards us in two columns. Two large men in snow suits were in front,
side by side, knees high, trampling a path for those behind them. Our gunfire
erupted and the queues disappeared into the snow. But the approach did not
stop, but continued -- inside the snow. The Russians had learned the art of
"swimming" and "diving" forward in the snow. Occasionally one of them would
rise slightly and several guns would pop out at once to catch the unwary.

We were so engrossed in the stalking that we were not paying attention to what
was happening elsewhere. I happened to glance behind us and -- the blood
almost froze in my veins.

Along the path leading to our fallback position and very close to us, two tanks
roared in succession. The woodland in front of the one in front swept like hay
under a mower.

That's the end of it -- flashed in my mind. They're sure to run us over and
crush us under their treads. In a metre deep snow we can't outrun them. But
maybe they don't know about us -- hope whispered in my ear. "Take cover in
your holes!", I managed to yelp as the foremost tank was already roaring on
our positions and so close to one of the men that a piece of his overcoat was
chipped off under the track. The tank that followed stopped twenty meters
behind us.

What the hell am I supposed to do now -- I thought. Less than a hundred meters
ahead of us were Russians, swimming in the snow, getting closer by the minute,
behind us on our only path was a tank, and all around us was more than a meter
of snow.

I already had time to order the group on the extreme left to start trampling
the path diagonally backwards to the third platoon's position. It was at least
300 metres. When the first man stood up he was immediately shot in the chest.

I guess some instinct led me to the right decision. I shouted to the boys
"Follow me!", got up and headed straight down the path towards the tank -- and
there was no shooting. I passed the tank a meter away, came up behind it on
the path and the boys followed. At the edge of our fallback position, we set
up another fighting position. The Russians in the tank had mistaken us for
their own men.

I realised that I had made an unforgivable mistake by leaving our skis in the
fallback position. It had actually been done without thinking, -- out of old
habit. I had been taught, and I in turn would teach, that when going to
fighting positions you leave your skis behind. Only luck had saved us from the
unfortunate consequences of that teaching.

Then a messenger of the company commander crawled towards us along the track
left by the tank. He had a rucksack on his back and it was visible above the
snow. Somewhere a machine gun cracked and the messenger's backpack jerked as
bullets hit it. And the boy laughed. Laughed truly as death scratched his
back. In the past, this boy had shown a downright contempt for death. There
hadn't been much of a shellstorm that he'd bothered to take cover unless a
superior told him to. And yet bullets and shrapnel seemed to skirt him. If he
had a normal self-preservation instinct, he kept it in check in an abnormal
way. The word 'fearless' can be used with perfect justification. Otherwise, he
was a man of silence, and no one ever heard him bite his tongue against even
his heaviest duties.

He brought orders from the company commander that these positions be abandoned
and the company move to a new delaying position one kilometre further back.

Through the forest we skied straight north for half an hour and then turned
sharply left. By chance we came to the spot where the company's roadside
element had taken up position. We were told that there had been some heavy
fighting on the road. The brigade's anti-tank platoon had been involved and
had destroyed four tanks. A corporal in the platoon had jumped on the rear
armour of a moving tank, placed a satchel charge at the base of the turret and
then jumped into the snow. The explosion had left him with minor scratches.

The Russians started attacking again, and the company commander sent me and my
platoon to occupy the positions near the Pilppula stop.

It was already afternoon. There were large rocks in the terrain, and we each
prepared a position for ourselves behind the rocks. The elements of the
company in front began to retreat to our level, and the engineers hurriedly
laid their mines. A few tanks could already be seen across the clearing. One
of the tanks broke away from the group and started to drive along the road
towards us. The engineers threw snow on their mines and jumped behind the
nearby rocks. The tank approached and -- explosion -- seemed to leap into the
air. It was out of action, but only one track was broken. The gun lowered and
a dozen rounds of rapid fire boomed out of the tank. The tanks behind them
approached in jerks. They moved in for a moment, paused to fire, and then
moved in again. The infantry tried to follow, but our fire forced them to
resort to swimming in the snow. The men left in the stalled tank were tired of
waiting. They opened the hatch and one after the other tried to jump behind
the tank. The first to try succeeded. He even managed to take the light
machine gun with him. But the next two got caught halfway outside the hatch.
In the course of this, Jäger Savolainen got too excited and raised himself too
high from his rock, and a bullet in the middle of his forehead extinguished
his enthusiasm. The sun was close to the horizon. The Russians drove a second
tank behind their immobilized tank and, under cover, managed to attach a wire
to the broken tank. A hundred meters away from us they were banging and
rattling on their tank. It would have been a great target for artillery or
mortars, but we had neither.

A messenger brought an order that the company would leave Pilppula and take the
forest road to Lyykylä. And the company went. But I had to stay with my
platoon for at least an hour to make sure the enemy couldn't interfere with
the march. A patrol from the light detachment would then stay behind to keep
an eye on the enemy's activities.

An officer-led patrol came, as was supposed to. We listened together for a
while to the enemy's repair efforts, and then, in the light of the rising
moon, I set off with my platoon after the company. At first we tried to carry
the body of Jäger Savolainen in a sledge with us. But the sledge also
contained ammunition and hand grenades, and the heavy sledge slowed us down.
The tired men grumbled against pulling the sledge. So we lifted the body under
the fir trees beside the road and folded the branches to cover him.

Early in the morning we arrived in Lyykylä. The village was full of troops, and
we had to ask at several houses before we found our company. Everyone was
asleep, and so we also got down on the floor with the others.

It was already afternoon when we woke up to the sound of an officer shouting
from the door of the house:
-"Wake the hell up! The Russkies will be here soon. All the other troops have
already gone and you are lying there like in an inn."
He was the commander of the burning detachment and was going around getting
the houses ready for burning.

The horses were put in harness and we moved a couple of kilometres towards
Karisalmi, where we stopped for lunch. We got to Karisalmi and were put in
reserve in our brigade.

Extracts from a sergeant's war diary 5/5

Written by then sergeant H. Kolehmainen, translated using machine translation (w/corrections) from "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 4/1958.


We are staying in a house on the edge of the woods. We don't know who we are
intruding on, as the host had already left the house before we arrived. They
had cleaned their house before they left, as if for guests. We have a good
sauna and it has steamed from dusk till dawn both nights. Everyone has already
had one bath, but it is a treat that I would gladly enjoy more than once in a
row now. The basement of the house is full of canned berries -- strawberries,
raspberries, currants -- you name it. It felt criminal to take them just like
that, even though common sense says they're in danger of going to waste if
unused.

The front line is 4-5 km away. Our brigade's II and III battalions are in
position there. The enemy has remained calm here, but there has been heavy
fighting a little further west on the isthmus between Lake Repola and Lake
Kärstilä.

8 March 1940

The reserve period was short. At noon we received a report that the enemy had
advanced on the railway line near the Tali station. We immediately had to
occupy blocking positions along the eastern shore of Lake Repola up to the
railway line.

The position was occupied. It is just a line on the map. There are not even ski
trails on the terrain. But there were grenade craters, and new ones were
constantly appearing. We huddled among the rocks and watched the Russians
march along the road on the opposite shore of the lake. With binoculars, the
Russians' activities were startlingly visible. Sergeant Potinkara positioned
his machine-gun platoon and fired a few belts with four guns. The Russians
didn't seem to mind, but we were immediately greeted by heavy artillery shells
on our heads.

Only one platoon was left in position for the night and the others were taken
to rest in a dugout that was still under construction. At midnight there is a
changeover and then in the morning everyone is back in position.


10 March

Yesterday we started digging positions. The terrain is almost a ruin of stone.
The enemy's activity has intensified. Twice already today they sent troops
across the lake, a company each time. The first attempt was repulsed halfway
across the lake, but the second time they had armoured shields with them,
which they pushed ahead on skis. This allowed them to get close to the shore,
as a rifle bullet could not penetrate the shield armour. The defence had to be
arranged so that we could shoot from the sides behind the shields. It worked
and the line of shields became motionless.


13 March

Peace. It seems unbelievable, but it's true. When the battalion messenger this
morning brought the news that peace had been concluded in Moscow and that not
a single shot should be fired after eleven o'clock, the announcement seemed
more like a joke than anything else. The Russian guns roared even more
fiercely. Their infantry attacked across the ice, as they had done yesterday.
Men were wounded. At half past ten, a horseman fell near the dugout under
construction. No -- we have been betrayed. A few minutes to eleven and still
the guns roared...

And then -- total silence. A lone enemy plane was returning to its own side.
Water droplets dripped from a nearby fir tree, and a pair of sparrows chirped
on a branch...

We cautiously climb out of our holes. Light a cigarette. Is this true after all
-- peace. The Russians who were on the ice have also emerged from behind their
shields and from their snow holes.

-- That's how close they were already!

The Russians wave their arms and raise their weapons. No one responds to their
gestures.

Then comes another order. One last look at the front area, backpack on and
silently we start to ski to the supply platoon. There, the sergeant-major has
the loads ready and the horses harnessed. We move to the road about a
kilometre away. The soup is ready. We eat. New troops arrive. Officers are
passing by. Even the battalion commander, who hasn't been seen since we left
Leipäsuo. We wait...

The hours go by. We are still waiting. What are the peace terms? Where will the
border be? There are rumours. Someone knows to say that Viipuri, Käkisalmi and
Sortavala must be left to the Russians -- supposedly having heard Tanner's
speech on the battalion headquarters radio. Nobody believes it. A lively
argument ensues on the road.

Finally comes the company commander. It's true. Nobody says anything. Not a word.

There is no order or command. The commander takes the lead, and the company
starts skiing after him.

We arrive in Karisalmi and stay in the same house where we stayed two weeks
ago. Everyone collapses on the floor and sleeps.

Windows are not covered. The lanterns burn without being dimmed. There is no
guard at the door. There is peace.

"Counter-attack"

Translated from story told by Paavo Linnanterä, a company commander in Taipale area, in "Kansa Taisteli"-journal issue 1/1957.

The battle of Taipale in the Winter War reminds me vividly of the
counter-attack of 11 February.

The situation for me that day was that my company had been ordered to the
position at Karmankolo, that famous dugout, as a sort of fighting reserve.

The pressure on the front line was high. At noon, Major Saarelainen arrives,
very winded. I hear the call for me in my dugout and then the words of Major
Saarelainen:

-" We must go now, quickly. The situation is getting difficult!"

While we were running out of that dugout, a soldier between us got a bullet
through his nose. The man was left to the care of the others, we had to hurry
on foot towards Base 3. What had happened. Saarelainen said that the base crew
was dead to the last man, and my job was to prepare for a possible attack soon
to retake the front line.

After some time, the 3rd Company was ordered to retake this base. Later I heard
that this company had been beaten back in a bloody fight, and the casualties
had been heavy.

After dark, I was ordered to retake the base. The battalion commander briefed
me on the situation in his dugout. He did not give any instructions, he just
said "do what you want, but we have to get the base back". After a moment's
deliberation, I expressed my wish to receive as many hand grenades and
submachine gun magazines as possible.

We were in a situation where first the defenders of the base had fallen to the
last man, then 3rd Company had tried to retake the base, but without success,
and now I would be the third to try to do the same. It was quiet in that
dugout after the briefing. The men around me, many of whom were strangers to
me, looked on in silence, many of them holding out their hands and silently
wishing me luck.

Coming out of the dugout, I crossed my hands, praying for God's protection for
this company of mine, who had been given a very difficult task. After all, we
had to start by attacking over an open field some 700 metres wide.

A battle plan was then drawn up. From the remnants of the Third Company, I
remember I got 16 men, and from some of them, some of my own company, a
assault group was formed to try to get into the trenches. The main part of the
company was to use a false attack to draw the enemy's attention to itself in
order to make the task of the assault group easier.

Standing there in front of the company at the briefing, my men may have sensed
my silent thoughts about the difficulty of the mission. But since in Taipale
it had become accepted that an order is an order that must be carried out,
there was also a husky remark from the rank and file, after the situation and
the mission had been explained:

-"It's a clear order, that's all we can do."

Thus, this was the start of this attack, for which artillery preparation had
been promised. But there was a great shortage of grenades, and so the
assistance of the artillery was limited to five or six grenades.

When the fighting started, I was with the main part of the company. So there
were two assault groups from the company pushing into an enemy-held base. I
think I have never been under such machine-gun fire as I was then, and like a
mole I tried to crawl out from under the fire. Soon, too, I found that the
charge into the base had already begun. With waving and shouting I tried to
get the company there. I succeeded, and inch by inch we then began to roll the
positions held by the enemy. This was done one bend in the trench after
another, and took perhaps four or five hours. My men had more than their share
of difficulties, loading and carrying the magazines of the submachine guns was
no easy task in that battle, where the defenders were tough, but even tougher
were my men, who had been through the fire and were experienced.

What sticks in my mind from that battle is the action of a soldier who had come
from near Joensuu as a replacement as a submachine gunner. When the trench was
cleared, I remember how he was wounded twice and still had visions, explaining
that the enemy was still in the area. I tried to reassure him and get him to
the first aid station, but he was still so intent on his mission that even
wounded he could not bear to give it up. Finally, I went to the front of the
line to the "enemy" he claimed was there, thus demonstrating that there was no
one there. The man calmed down and got over his shock.

In particular, I would like to mention the activities of Lieutenant Toiviainen
as the platoon leader of the 3rd Company. During this counterattack, he was
the leader of the assault group whose achievements led to the capture of the
trench.

The company was hit hard by the loss of two platoon leaders, of whom the fall
of Lieutenant Seitola in particular was a heavy blow, not only to me, but to
the whole company. He was a brave, well-liked leader. He was not found, in
spite of all the searching, until the early hours of the morning, bent over on
his knees in front of the base. There he had received a bullet through the
heart.

Steady, silent, heads bowed, in icy snowsuits, we then marched to the Jyväshovi
terrain, where we were greeted with hot juice and maybe a drop of alcohol.

This happened during the morning hours, between 6 and 7 am. I assumed that now
we could get a proper sleep after all we had endured. But -- it wasn't long
before a messenger arrived in the dugout with an order:

-"To the front line, for another counterattack!"

Note: The writer appears to misremember the base (Kirvesmäki 3) his troops attacked against. From the war diary of Infantry Regiment 21, it seems the base in question was Base 1 (Kirvesmäki 1). See aerial photo below.
https://i.imgur.com/1iutjgD.jpg