The Battle of Kollaa begins

On 7 December 1939 the leading units of the Soviet 56th Rifle Division reached the eastern bank of the small Kollaa river (Finnish Kollaanjoki) in Ladoga Karelia, roughly halfway between Suojärvi, close to the border, and the railway station at Loimola (PL). That same day, straight from the march and with tank support, they attacked the Finns dug in on the western bank. The attack broke down under Finnish artillery fire. So began the Battle of Kollaa, which lasted until the last day of the Winter War. Despite the enemy’s superiority many times over, the Finns held this line for more than three months, and the phrase “Kollaa will hold” (Kollaa kestää) became proverbial in Finland as an expression of stubbornness and fortitude.

In many chronologies of the war the start of the fighting on the Kollaa, together with the start of the Battle of Suomussalmi, appears under 5 December. According to Finnish and Russian studies, the Soviet division reached the Kollaa and made its first attack on 7 December, while the Finnish units had taken up positions on the river on 3–4 December. On 5 December the Finns were still trying to recover, by a counter-attack, the line they had lost earlier on the Piitsoinoja stream, a few kilometres further east. On the same 7 December the Soviet 163rd Rifle Division arrived outside the village of Suomussalmi in central Finland (the Finns burnt it that evening, and the Russians entered it early on the morning of 8 December), where the second of the great battles of this war began.

Ladoga and the road to the rear of the Mannerheim Line

When the Red Army attacked Finland on 30 November, the main blow fell on the Karelian Isthmus, where the Finnish covering forces were falling back to the Mannerheim Line and the 7th Army was preparing to storm it. The plan, approved by Joseph Stalin and the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, and drawn up by the staff of the Leningrad Military District under Komandarm Kirill Meretskov, also provided, however, for a second, outflanking blow. North of Lake Ladoga the 8th Army of Komdiv Ivan Khabarov was advancing, directed from its headquarters in Petrozavodsk. It was to pass through the forests of Ladoga Karelia, reach the railways in the interior of Finland, then turn south-west along the shore of the lake and come out in the rear of the Finnish defences on the Karelian Isthmus.

The Finnish command expected at most secondary operations here. This roadless, forested country, cut up by lakes, had only a few roads, and their defence was entrusted to IV Corps, made up of two divisions, the 12th and 13th. The 12th Division under Colonel Lauri Tiainen, formed in October from Karelian reservists, defended a sector some 45 kilometres wide, from Suojärvi to Lake Syskyjärvi. The most important feature of this sector was the road and railway running from Suojärvi through Loimola and Värtsilä to Joensuu. Had the Red Army got through along this route, it would have cut the communications of the whole front by Ladoga and opened its way into the interior of the country.

Facing the 12th Division was the Soviet 56th Rifle Division of Kombrig M. S. Yevstigneyev, transferred in November from the Estonian border. According to Russian studies, on 30 November it numbered 15,876 men and had 138 guns and almost 100 T-26 and T-37 light tanks – more artillery and automatic weapons than the neighbouring divisions of the 8th Army. Its neighbour on the right was the 139th Rifle Division, advancing further north towards Tolvajärvi.

The first week: from Suojärvi to the Kollaa

The first days of the war went badly for the Finns. The battalions of the 34th Infantry Regiment (JR 34) under Lieutenant Colonel V. Teittinen, deployed around Suojärvi, delayed the enemy’s advance on all the roads leading from the border, and on 1 December Lieutenant Aarne Juutilainen’s company held up one of the Soviet columns for a time. But when the 139th Division began to work round the defenders’ left flank, divisional headquarters ordered Teittinen on 2 December to abandon the delaying positions, and Suojärvi fell into the Red Army’s hands. An attempted counter-attack along the road to Loimola ended in panic among the inexperienced soldiers, who had no anti-tank weapons while tanks bore down on them. On 4 December, when a rumour spread through the units that Soviet tanks had broken through to the rear, the Finns abandoned the line on the Piitsoinoja in disorder and fell back towards Loimola.

The one stroke of luck in this misfortune was that a prepared position was already waiting on the Kollaa. Originally it was to have been merely one of the delaying lines, but JR 34 occupied it on 3–4 December and within a few days had brought it to a reasonable state of readiness: emplacements were dug, wire was put up and the artillery was ranged on the ground in front. The Kollaa was no wider than a stream, and the frozen ground in its valley was hard to dig, but the position had one advantage. The front along the railway and the road was only about three kilometres wide, and to the north and south of it stretched dense taiga, through which the heavy Soviet columns could not force their way. The sector was to be held by the II and III Battalions of JR 34, a battalion of the 12th Field Artillery Regiment and Armoured Train No. 1. The headquarters of the 12th Division was at Loimola, not far behind the front.

Meanwhile the command changed. After the loss of Suojärvi, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim on 4 December dismissed the commander of IV Corps, Major General Juho Heiskanen, and gave the corps to Major General Woldemar Hägglund, a First World War veteran of the Finnish Jäger battalion in the German army. The corps’ northern flank, threatened by the 139th Division, was from then on covered by Group Talvela under Colonel Paavo Talvela, subordinated directly to the Commander-in-Chief.

7 December and the first attacks

On 7 December the vanguards of the 56th Division reached the eastern bank of the Kollaa and immediately, without reconnaissance or preparation, attacked the Finnish positions, sending the tanks in first. The Soviet commanders evidently expected the Finns, demoralised by their retreat, to fall back once more. This time the defenders held, and their well-ranged artillery shattered the attacking columns. Before midnight the Russians began shifting some of their forces to the south. The tanks, moving in columns along the only road, became easy targets for Finnish anti-tank guns and artillery, and the terrain did not allow them to deploy to the flanks. According to Russian studies, the division lost 13 vehicles in the fighting of 7–9 December, largely because nobody had reconnoitred the obstacles and mines in their path beforehand.

8 December was relatively quiet: the Russians were waiting for the last units of the division to come up. The Finnish command used the pause to form the troops on the river into Battle Group Teittinen, made up of JR 34 and JR 35 (each less one battalion), an artillery battalion and a sapper company. On the morning of 9 December another Soviet attack came and was again repulsed. That day the Finns identified the presence of all the regiments of the 56th Division, and from 10 December attacks followed almost daily, preceded by artillery fire that lasted throughout the short winter day. According to Russian research, two battalions of the Soviet 37th Rifle Regiment abandoned their positions without orders after two days of fighting, and the regiment had to be replaced by the 213th Regiment.

When the frontal attacks failed, the command of the 56th Division tried an outflanking move. On 11 December about two battalions crossed the river south of the railway and set off through the forests towards the Finnish rear, and a few days later other units began working round the Finnish positions from the north, around Lake Kollaanjärvi. The Finns, who from the outset had sent ski patrols deep into the forests, detected both manoeuvres in time. In the south, by 15 December, they had surrounded and destroyed the outflanking units, and one company of Red Army men surrendered the next morning. By 18 December the situation in the north had also been brought under control, and the Soviet division went over to the defensive and began to dig in.

On 14 December Juutilainen’s company, the 6th Company of JR 34, carried out a raid on the eastern bank of the Kollaa. According to Finnish figures it destroyed five tanks and captured two anti-tank guns and three machine guns. Russian studies confirm that panic broke out in the Soviet 37th Regiment, and that a platoon of T-26 tanks, thrown into a counter-attack without reconnaissance, drove into an anti-tank ditch and was destroyed. On 20–23 December the Finns themselves tried to encircle the enemy division with two battalions, from the north and from the south, intending to close the ring a few kilometres behind the Soviet line, but in 25 degrees of frost and against strong resistance both attacks failed. On 24 and 25 December further Soviet attacks supported by tanks were repulsed, after which relative calm settled over the front. According to Russian figures, the 56th Division lost 2,822 men in December, 678 of them killed. Even more soldiers were put out of action by frostbite: up to 70 per cent of the Red Army men went into battle in wholly unsuitable footwear.

“Kollaa will hold”

The first weeks of fighting gave the Finnish language a phrase. According to tradition, Major General Hägglund, visiting the front line in December 1939, asked Juutilainen: “Will Kollaa hold?” (Kestääkö Kollaa?). The company commander is said to have replied: “Yes, General. It will hold, unless we’re ordered to run.” Another version attributes the words “Remember that Kollaa holds” to the mortally wounded Lieutenant Martti Uosikkinen, an Olympic medallist, who was killed in the last days of the war. The saying was already going round among the soldiers during the fighting, and it was popularised throughout the country by the novel Kollaa kestää by Erkki Palolampi, a signals officer from this front, published in the summer of 1940.

Juutilainen himself was an almost legendary figure. Born in 1904 in Sortavala, he had served for five years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, from which he brought back the nickname “the Terror of Morocco”. His younger brother Ilmari became the most successful Finnish fighter pilot of the Second World War.

Simo Häyhä

Fighting in Juutilainen’s company on the Kollaa front from the very first days was Corporal Simo Häyhä, a 33-year-old farmer from the municipality of Rautjärvi on the Karelian Isthmus, a member of the Civil Guard (Suojeluskunta) since his youth and a prize-winner in shooting competitions. He used the Finnish variant of the Mosin rifle, the M/28-30, with iron sights rather than a telescopic sight, which would have given him away by its glint and forced him to raise his head. In a white snowsuit, in frosts of 20 to 40 degrees below zero, he hunted Soviet soldiers, who for most of the war had no winter camouflage.

According to Finnish army documents, as early as 22 December 1939 he was credited with 138 sniper kills in 22 days, and on 21 December he is said to have killed 25 enemy soldiers, his highest total in a single day. The final figures vary from source to source. The regimental chaplain recorded 259 confirmed kills with the rifle up to 7 March 1940 and a similar number with the submachine gun, while Häyhä himself, in memoirs discovered in 2017, estimated his total at about 500. The nickname “White Death”, under which he is known around the world today, probably originated in Finnish propaganda and later literature rather than with his enemies. On 6 March 1940 Häyhä was severely wounded in the face. He survived and died in 2002.

Place in the war

The first weeks on the Kollaa brought no decision, but they were of strategic importance. The halting of the 56th Division, together with the victory over the 139th Division at Tolvajärvi on 12 December and the checking of the 168th and 18th Divisions on the shore of Ladoga, wrecked the Soviet plan to outflank the Mannerheim Line from the north. On 13 December command of the 8th Army passed from Khabarov to Komandarm Grigory Shtern, but he too was unable to break the Finnish defence.

The battle went on for another three months. In January 1940 the Soviet 164th Rifle Division arrived at the front, while the Finns, weakened by the transfer of part of their forces to the fighting against the encircled divisions by Ladoga, defended the Kollaa with only four battalions. In March the Red Army threw several divisions against this sector, with massive artillery support. The Finns lost some 1,300 killed on the Kollaa in March alone, and on 12 March Soviet troops broke a kilometre into their positions. The commander of the 12th Division was already considering a withdrawal, but the next morning, 13 March, news came that peace had been concluded. The Kollaa front was never broken, although Finland ceded the land it defended to the Soviet Union in the Moscow peace. It recovered that land briefly in 1941, during the Continuation War, and lost it again in 1944. Today the area around Loimola lies in Russian Karelia, and all that remains of the Finnish positions are the remnants of trenches and war cemeteries.

For the Finns Kollaa became, alongside Suomussalmi, a symbol of what they called the “spirit of the Winter War”: the conviction that a small army of reservists, well led and knowing the terrain, could stop an enemy many times stronger. For the Red Army the December fighting in Ladoga Karelia was one of the first lessons in how little numerical superiority counts when soldiers cannot ski, commanders are afraid of taking independent decisions after the Great Purge, and tank columns are tied to a single road through the forest.