SUBSIM: The Web's #1 resource for all submarine & naval simulations since 1997 |
03-13-16, 07:43 AM | #136 |
Chief of the Boat
|
At the very least, a moral victory for Finland.
~SALUTE~ An excellent and informative thread
__________________
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
Oh my God, not again!! GWX3.0 Download Page - Donation/instant access to GWX (Help SubSim) |
03-13-16, 07:50 AM | #137 |
Navy Seal
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Banana Republic of Germany
Posts: 6,170
Downloads: 62
Uploads: 0
|
__________________
Putting Germ back into Germany. |
03-13-16, 08:31 AM | #138 |
Old enough to know better
|
Excellent work Dowly. I read it every day. Although I was vaguely aware of this conflict I didn't know any details. Thanks for posting.
__________________
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke |
03-13-16, 09:35 AM | #139 |
Lucky Jack
|
Well done Dowly, thanks for all that hard work you put in it.
Thread of the year.
__________________
Dr Who rest in peace 1963-2017. To borrow Davros saying...I NAME YOU CHIBNALL THE DESTROYER OF DR WHO YOU KILLED IT! |
03-13-16, 01:58 PM | #140 |
Lucky Jack
|
Thanks and glad you liked it!
I have added two maps to the March 13th entry that show the situation on the Karelian Isthmus and in Ladoga Karelia at the end of the war. |
03-13-16, 02:00 PM | #141 |
Navy Seal
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Banana Republic of Germany
Posts: 6,170
Downloads: 62
Uploads: 0
|
Next target: Continuation war.
__________________
Putting Germ back into Germany. |
03-13-16, 06:45 PM | #142 |
Ocean Warrior
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Kentucky
Posts: 2,527
Downloads: 77
Uploads: 0
|
Thanks for the hard work Dowly. Good information on a part of the war we don't hear about much.
__________________
Of all the forms of Martial Arts, Karaoke causes the most pain! |
03-14-16, 05:35 AM | #143 | |
Lucky Jack
|
14 March 1940
Mannerheim issues Order of the Day Nr. 34 Quote:
|
|
09-05-17, 03:06 PM | #144 |
Lucky Jack
|
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.
|
08-04-18, 08:02 AM | #145 |
Lucky Jack
|
I don't think I've ever posted this Finnish documentary about Simo Häyhä (turn on eng subs), so here you go:
|
08-14-18, 12:23 PM | #146 |
Lucky Jack
|
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).
|
11-05-21, 10:02 AM | #147 |
Lucky Jack
|
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. Last edited by Dowly; 11-20-21 at 09:32 AM. |
11-05-21, 10:16 AM | #148 |
Gefallen Engel U-666
|
this video requires a little more Sisu from U!??
__________________
"Only two things are infinite; The Universe and human squirrelyness; and I'm not too sure about the Universe" |
11-10-21, 05:20 PM | #149 |
Lucky Jack
|
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. Last edited by Dowly; 11-20-21 at 09:32 AM. |
11-12-21, 04:11 PM | #150 |
Lucky Jack
|
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. Last edited by Dowly; 11-20-21 at 09:33 AM. |
Tags |
talvisota, winter war |
|
|