The Battle of Suomussalmi begins

On the evening of 7 December 1939, at about 6.30 p.m., Finnish soldiers set fire to the buildings of the church village of Suomussalmi in the Kainuu region, some 40 kilometres from the Soviet border. The village burned all night. Early on the morning of 8 December two regiments of the Soviet 163rd Rifle Division, which had spent a week fighting their way there from two directions through forests and swamps, entered its smoking ruins. Almost at the same time Finnish General Headquarters sent a brigade from Oulu to the area under Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo, who on the evening of 8 December took command of all units around Suomussalmi with orders to destroy the enemy. So began the battle that over the next four weeks became the most famous Finnish victory of the Winter War.

The date

Some chronologies give 5 December as the day on which the battles of Suomussalmi and the Kollaa river began. That date does not correspond to any clear-cut moment in the fighting in Kainuu. The Soviet 163rd Division had crossed the border as early as 30 November, the first day of the war, and had been fighting Finnish covering forces ever since. For that reason some historians, Finnish ones in particular, date the Battle of Suomussalmi from 30 November. Others, including some reference works, take 7 December as its beginning, when the division reached the village and the Finns began bringing more substantial forces into the area. 5 December was a day of heavy delaying actions on the road from Palovaara, but not the start of a new battle.

Finland’s narrowest point

The Soviet war plan envisaged the 9th Army of Komkor Mikhail Dukhanov striking into central Finland, at its “waist”, where the distance from the Soviet border to the Gulf of Bothnia is shortest. Had the Red Army reached Oulu, it would have cut the country in two and severed the only railway link with Sweden, which ran along the coast through Tornio. It was by this route that Finland could receive arms, volunteers and help from the West. The severed north would have had to surrender, and the Finns would have been forced to fight on two fronts.

The task went to the 47th Rifle Corps of Komkor Ivan Dashichev (PL). Its main force was the 163rd Rifle Division of Kombrig Andrei Zelentsov, which with its supporting units numbered, according to various estimates, some ten to twenty thousand men, with artillery, a tank battalion and supply trains. It was to take Suomussalmi, an important road junction in the empty forests of Kainuu, and then advance through Hyrynsalmi to Puolanka. From there the motorised 44th Rifle Division, then being brought up from Ukraine, was to set off for Oulu. It was one of the divisions that had taken part in the invasion of Poland in September. Before the war the soldiers were ordered not to cross the Swedish border by mistake.

The Finnish command did not expect the Red Army to send whole divisions into the trackless north, where there were only narrow dirt roads and forest tracks. For that reason the Suomussalmi area was held by only two independent battalions, Er.P 15 and Er.P 16, a few independent companies and a handful of border guards – a little over 3,000 men in all. They came under the North Finland Group of General Wiljo Tuompo, who was responsible for the whole front from Kuhmo to Petsamo and, without artillery or anti-tank weapons, could at most delay the enemy.

The march on Suomussalmi

On 30 November 1939, the day the Soviet Union attacked Finland, the 163rd Division set out from the area of Soviet Ukhta (now Kalevala) and crossed the border at two points. Its main forces, the 81st and 662nd Rifle Regiments, advanced in the north through the village of Juntusranta, where the border was watched by a few dozen Finnish border guards without a radio. Their commander, Second Lieutenant Elo, reported an entire division, but his superiors did not believe him and urged him to “stop getting worked up”. The guards fell back for four days, losing more than half their men. Most of the inhabitants of Juntusranta did not manage to escape. The third regiment, the 759th, with a reconnaissance battalion, marched further south along the road from Raate, where it was held up by the Er.P 15 battalion.

At the Palovaara crossroads, which the Russians took on 4 December, the Soviet forces divided. The 662nd Regiment turned north towards Peranka to secure the division’s flank, but on 6 December it was stopped in the neck of land at Piispajärvi by the Er.P 16 battalion under Major Pallari, brought in from Kuusamo. The 81st Regiment set off south, straight for Suomussalmi, driving small Finnish units from one delaying position after another. Heavy fighting went on here on 5 and 6 December. The Soviet columns worked their way round the Finnish positions through the forest, and the defenders – often reservists and newly mobilised replacements – had to fall back so as not to be surrounded. On the evening of 6 December Major Kaarle Kari took command of all units in the area of the village and asked for permission to abandon it. The evacuation of the inhabitants had been under way since the morning.

On 7 December the 81st Regiment sent tanks into action for the first time. A Finnish company at Kylänmäki held out until the afternoon and then withdrew. On the Raate road the 759th Regiment was also attacking, and in the evening the Finns gave up their last positions on the neck of land between lakes Kuivasjärvi and Kuomasjärvi. During the night the Finnish units crossed to the southern shore of the lake and took up positions behind the Niskanselkä narrows and at the ferry crossing at Haukiperä. Behind them they left the burning village. The burning of Suomussalmi was part of the Finnish scorched-earth tactics: at a time when the temperature was falling to minus 30 degrees and below, depriving the enemy of a roof over his head was almost as effective as rifle fire. On the morning of 8 December the two Soviet columns, from the north and the east, joined up in the ruins of the village. The division’s first objective had been achieved.

The Siilasvuo brigade

The Finnish command realised the danger that threatened central Finland. General Tuompo asked Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim for reinforcements, and on the night of 6–7 December the Marshal gave him part of his meagre reserve, the 9th Division stationed at Oulu. This division was still being formed. Its 25th Infantry Regiment was sent to Kuhmo, where the Soviet 54th Rifle Division was attacking. Around the second, the 27th Infantry Regiment (JR 27) under Lieutenant Colonel Johan Mäkiniemi, a brigade was formed, which on 7 December left Oulu and Kemi in nine trains heading east to Kajaani and on towards Hyrynsalmi. Its commander was Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo, a 47-year-old veteran of the Finnish Jägers, who during the First World War had trained and fought in the German army. Siilasvuo commanded the North Ostrobothnia military district at Oulu and, after mobilisation, the 9th Division.

“Group Siilasvuo will be concentrated in the direction of Suomussalmi in order to defeat the enemy who has broken in there,” ran Tuompo’s order. Under it Siilasvuo was to take command in the Suomussalmi area at 8 p.m. on 8 December. All units in the area were placed under him, except for the Er.P 16 battalion fighting in the north at Piispajärvi. Siilasvuo set up his command post at Hyrynsalmi. According to the American historian Allen Chew, his brigade numbered fewer than 5,000 men. It had no artillery and no anti-tank guns. Some of the battalions he took over on the spot were exhausted by a week of fighting withdrawals. But the soldiers were recruited from northern Finland; many were lumberjacks and hunters who knew how to live and fight in a winter forest, and all of them were good skiers.

The first days showed that the Soviet division had come to a halt at Suomussalmi. On 9 December its attack across the Haukiperä crossing, on the road south to Hyrynsalmi, was repulsed. The ice on the lakes was still too thin for tanks. That evening fresh companies of JR 27 relieved Major Kari’s exhausted units in the front line.

Motti

Siilasvuo decided against a costly attack across the lake straight at the village. He resolved to do what the Red Army feared most: get into its rear and cut it off from its base. The Soviet divisions, weighed down with artillery, lorries and horses, were tied to the narrow roads and could not move in the forest and deep snow. Finnish units on skis could pass freely through the forest, strike the columns from the flank, cut the roads with barricades and split them into isolated pieces.

The Finns called such encircled groupings motti. In Finnish forestry the word meant a stack of cut timber left in the forest to be collected. An encircled enemy was to be just such a stack: immobilised, it could be destroyed piece by piece when the time came. The Finns aimed at the field kitchens and the campfires around which frozen Red Army men gathered, and night raids, the strain of waiting for an attack and hunger ruined the morale of men who often lacked even winter clothing. The tactic was not the invention of any single commander. The Finnish army had practised it for years, and in those same weeks fighting followed a similar pattern by Ladoga. But it was at Suomussalmi and on the Raate road that it produced its most spectacular results.

What followed

As early as 11 December JR 27 reached the Raate road east of the village and cut the 163rd Division’s shortest line of supply and retreat. On the neck of land between lakes Kuivasjärvi and Kuomasjärvi the Finns blocked the road along which, from mid-December, the 44th Division of Kombrig Aleksei Vinogradov was approaching. For a long time the village could not be taken. Only when, at the end of December, the brigade received two new regiments and was renamed the 9th Division did Siilasvuo launch a general attack, on 27 December. By 30 December he had routed the 163rd Division, whose remnants fled across the ice of Lake Kiantajärvi towards the border. At the beginning of January 1940 the Finns cut the 44th Division into pockets and destroyed it in the Battle of the Raate Road. Vinogradov and two of his closest subordinates were shot by sentence of a court martial in front of the assembled remnants of the division. As early as 22 December Dukhanov had been replaced as commander of the 9th Army by Komkor Vasily Chuikov.

Soviet losses at Suomussalmi and on the Raate road are disputed. Western authors estimated them at more than 20,000 killed, frozen to death and taken prisoner. Research based on Soviet documents points to much lower figures for the 163rd Division, most of whose soldiers managed to withdraw, but confirms the annihilation of the 44th Division. According to their own figures the Finns lost about 900 killed and about 1,200 wounded. They also captured huge quantities of equipment, including dozens of tanks and guns, hundreds of lorries and more than a thousand horses.

Place in the war

On 7 December 1939, at Suomussalmi, the Red Army was at the height of its success in central Finland. It never advanced any further on this axis. Finnish General Headquarters, which since the start of the war had had to fight for every battalion in order to hold the Karelian Isthmus, where the offensive against the Mannerheim Line had been under way since 5 December, took the risk of sending part of its meagre reserve far to the north. The risk paid off. The victory in the forests of Kainuu proved that a small army, well led and fighting on its own ground, could defeat an enemy with a many-fold advantage in numbers and equipment.

The battle had enormous psychological significance. Foreign correspondents who in January 1940 were shown the frozen columns on the Raate road made Suomussalmi famous throughout the world, and Siilasvuo became a national hero. The images from Kainuu strengthened sympathy for Finland in the West and revived plans to send it help, while at the same time convincing many observers, including Adolf Hitler and the German General Staff, that the Red Army, weakened by the Great Purge, was a colossus with feet of clay. In 1941 this conclusion proved catastrophically wrong. Joseph Stalin learnt his lesson from the defeat: in February 1940 the Red Army attacked the Karelian Isthmus with a carefully prepared offensive that Finland was unable to stop. In the forests of central Finland, however, it achieved no success until the end of the war.