NORTHERN THEATRE: Such Nastiness

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The Russians hurled their mechanized forces against these defenses blindly—although they had been sending aerial observers over Finnish territory since they began planning this war. Columns of tanks rolled between the lakes, piled into what looked like snowdrifts and struck sparks from the boulders beneath. Well-aimed Bofors anti-tank guns spat from snow-covered hummocks, piercing the thin hides of the old-style tanks. The Finns claimed they put out of action more than 100 tanks in 13 days' fighting. Then out of the swirling blizzard poured the Finns themselves, almost invisible with white capes covering their grey-green uniforms and white fur caps on their heads. Their machine guns barked and their knives were loose in their sheaths and they did not take many prisoners.

Balked in their mechanized attack, the Russians sent wave after wave of infantry into the forests, where the squatting Finns waited with rifles and machine guns. Selling their land dearly, the Finns dropped back. Many Russians fell, but more came on, converging on Viipuri, the key to southern Finland. At Perkjärvi they were halted, and still the strongest positions of the so-called Mannerheim Line (which is not a line but a series of lines) had hardly been dented.

Northeast of Lake Laatokka the Russians tried to outflank the Finnish defenses and penetrated a few miles to Suojärvi and Salmi. A column tried to cross the thin ice of the lake, fell in, bubbled, drowned. If the Russians could skirt the northern shore of the lake and attack the Finns in the isthmus from the rear, Viipuri would probably fall and a drive to Helsinki be started. But to round the lake they had to pass through a narrow corridor between Laatokka and Finland's central lake basin, and there the Finns would engage them. By week's end the Russian advance on Viipuri seemed to have lost its momentum, and in a house that belongs to Peaceman Alfred Nobel's family, and is now Finnish G.H.Q., the commandant of the Viipuri sector, quiet, youngish Lieut. Colonel Alexander Mellblom, hatched a counteroffensive to chase the Russians back to their swamps.

Experts who were amazed by the Finns' resistance had only to remember that in the limited terrain where the two armies were fighting Russia could not deploy her superior forces, and that the Finns have proved their superiority in hand-to-hand fighting in sailors' dives all over the world. The Finns' losses were small—but the report that one Finn had slain 70 Russians single-handed was only the way the Finns talk.

War in the North. If the Finns had surprised the Russians in the isthmus, the Russians turned the tables along the 800-mile frontier between Finland and Russian East Karelia and the Kola Peninsula. During the two months of bickering that preceded the war all good Finns pooh-poohed the suggestion that Russia might attack that frontier. The terrain was too difficult, they said; there were only two roads to the frontier on the Finnish side; each day was 20 hours of darkness and four of twilight; and besides, Russia could not maintain her supply lines. Nevertheless, patterning their strategy after that of the Germans in Poland, the Russians sent four swift columns into Finland, each thrusting westward toward a rail or highway centre, trying to cut the Finns' own supply lines.