The destruction of Soviet divisions on the Raate road

Late on the morning of 7 January 1940 Finnish troops took the bridge over the Purasjoki stream, at the eastern end of the forest road that ran from the Soviet border through the village of Raate to Suomussalmi. It was the last point at which the Soviet 44th Rifle Division was still offering organised resistance. Along several dozen kilometres of road stood abandoned tanks, guns, lorries and field kitchens; thousands of frozen bodies lay in the snow, and in the forests Finnish patrols were rounding up exhausted, frostbitten prisoners. In the space of a week the 9th Division of Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo had cut apart and destroyed one of the better divisions of the Red Army, only days after routing the 163rd Division at Suomussalmi itself. In those days news of the double victory in the forests of Kainuu went round the world.

Two dates, one battle

Popular calendars of the war record under 2 January that the Soviet offensive in Finland had been halted by several Finnish victories and that the Russians had lost many tanks; and under 7 January that a great Finnish victory had been announced at Suomussalmi, where an entire Soviet division had been destroyed and the Finns had once again captured a wealth of equipment. Both reports in fact concern the same events, and they are best described together.

The first is a summary of the situation at the turn of the year. In the second half of December 1939 Soviet attacks broke down almost along the entire front. On the Karelian Isthmus the Red Army attacked the Mannerheim Line at Summa and on the Taipale River and left dozens of wrecked tanks in front of the Finnish trenches, and on 26 December the 7th Army went over to the defensive. North of Lake Ladoga the Finns routed the 139th Division at Tolvajärvi, and on the Kollaa stream they beat off repeated attacks by the 56th Division. In Lapland, at Pelkosenniemi, in the second half of December they threw back the Soviet 122nd Division advancing on Kemijärvi. At Suomussalmi they had destroyed the 163rd Division by 30 December. On the Raate road, by contrast, 2 January 1940 was the day of the first heavy fighting for the Finnish roadblock in the middle of the Soviet column: according to Finnish records a single anti-tank gun destroyed eight attacking tanks that day.

The second concerns the end of the battle. Organised resistance by the 44th Division ceased on 7 January, and by 8 January the Finns had cleared the forests along the road. Finnish communiqués and the reports of foreign correspondents, who were soon afterwards allowed onto the battlefield, carried the news around the world. For them the name Suomussalmi stood for the whole operation, including both battles, which is why people speak of the “victory at Suomussalmi”, even though the 44th Division perished a dozen or more kilometres east of the village.

A division on a forest road

The 44th Rifle Division came to the front from Zhytomyr, where it had been stationed before the war. In September 1939 it had taken part in the Soviet invasion of Poland. Its commander, the 40-year-old Kombrig Aleksei Vinogradov, was a Civil War soldier who had risen quickly during the years of the Great Purge: in 1937 he took over a regiment, in 1938, according to Russian biographies, he was on a special mission in China, and he was given the division in January 1939. With its attached units it numbered some 14,000–17,000 men, more than 40 T-26 light tanks, about 120 guns, hundreds of lorries and several thousand horses.

The division’s task was to relieve the 163rd Division, encircled at Suomussalmi, and then to advance with it on Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia, cutting Finland in two at its narrowest point. From 20 December its leading units advanced along the road from Raate, less than four metres wide and running through dense forest between lakes and swamps. About 12 kilometres short of Suomussalmi, on the neck of land between Lakes Kuivasjärvi and Kuomasjärvi, they ran into a Finnish barrier on the Kuomasjoki stream. Vinogradov could not bring himself to mount a determined attack, even though the encircled 163rd Division was fighting almost within earshot. On 28 December, just as the 163rd Division was disintegrating, his units were ordered to go over to the defensive. The column came to a standstill on the road over a length of some 30 kilometres, from the farmsteads of Haukila all the way to the border. The heavy equipment could not leave the roadway for snow half a metre deep, and the soldiers, mostly conscripts from Ukraine, had no skis and did not know how to move through a winter forest.

Motti on the Raate road

Once the 163rd Division had been destroyed, Siilasvuo turned all his forces against the 44th. The command of the Soviet 9th Army – led from 22 December by Komkor Vasily Chuikov in place of Komkor Mikhail Dukhanov – ordered the division to hold its positions on the road and wait for reinforcements. The Finns resolved not to give it the time. The forces of the 9th Division, numbering by various estimates from about 11,000 to some 15,000 men and almost without artillery, were divided into four groups named after their commanders: Lieutenant Colonel Karl Mandelin north of Haukila, Lieutenant Colonel August Mäkiniemi south of it, Major Kaarlo Kari in the area of the village of Eskola, and Lieutenant Colonel Uno Fagernäs further east, closer to the border. Instead of striking the head of the column, the Finns were to cut the road at several points, break the division up into isolated pockets and destroy them one by one. This was the classic motti tactic (PL), named after the Finnish word for a stack of firewood left in the forest to be collected.

Sappers and soldiers cut their own tracks through the forests and across the frozen lakes south of the road, along which battalions, ammunition and supplies moved up at night, on skis and with sledges. At dusk on 1 January 1940 the 1st Battalion of the Finnish 27th Infantry Regiment emerged unnoticed onto the road some two kilometres east of Haukila and destroyed a Soviet artillery battalion and a column of lorries stationed there. On 2 January Soviet units counter-attacked it from east and west, with tanks, but the Finns held on behind barricades of felled trees, and a single anti-tank gun brought up to the spot destroyed eight vehicles. On 3 and 4 January Group Kari took a strong Soviet strongpoint at Eskola, a few kilometres south of the road, with its guns and machine guns. Other units were closing in on the road further and further east.

The position of the Soviet soldiers quickly became desperate. The division was cut off from its supplies, and the frost reached 30–40 degrees below zero. Finnish patrols in white camouflage suits struck at night at sentry posts, campfires and the field kitchens around which the frozen Red Army men gathered. According to Finnish studies, in the final days the daily ration sometimes fell to two dry biscuits per man. Horses were dying of hunger. On the evening of 3 January Vinogradov reported to army headquarters that without supplies his men were incapable of fighting, and the attempts to break out made between 2 and 4 January had failed. The 3rd Border Regiment of the NKVD was advancing from the border to help, but it did not change the situation.

On the morning of 5 January, in a frost of nearly 30 degrees and with more than 40 centimetres of snow on the ground, the Finns launched their main attack: six battalions in the Haukila area, three at Eskola and one further east, at Likoharju. On the first day they gained little ground, but the position of the leading Soviet regiment grew ever more difficult, and in the evening the first prisoners appeared. On 6 January heavy fighting raged along the whole road. Soviet tanks tried to ram the Finnish roadblocks and were destroyed by mines, petrol bombs and the fire of anti-tank guns. Around midday the Finns noticed that Soviet units were beginning to slip away eastwards through gaps in their lines. Vinogradov concluded that further fighting was pointless. The 9th Army command agreed to a retreat on condition that the division did not abandon its equipment, and in the evening – at 9.30 p.m., according to Russian studies – Vinogradov gave the order to withdraw towards the border.

The order could not be carried out. The road to the east was cut in several places, and the artillery and transport could not leave it. The division fell apart. Soldiers abandoned guns, lorries and wounded and fled through the forest and across the ice of the lakes to the north and east. Many froze to death on the way. On 7 January units of the 27th Regiment took the stretch of road from Haukila to the small lake of Lauttalampi without difficulty, capturing more than a thousand prisoners, and Group Fagernäs retook the bridge over the Purasjoki. Before noon organised resistance came to an end. For the next twenty-four hours the Finns combed the forests. The remnants of the 44th Division made their way to the border in small groups.

The toll

Soviet losses remain disputed to this day. For years Finnish historians, and Western ones after them, put them at about 17,000 men, because they assumed that the division had numbered more than 20,000. In January 1940 Soviet propaganda claimed that the 44th Division had lost no more than 900 men, mostly to frostbite. A commission set up by the Soviet command in January itself counted, in a division that had numbered 13,962 men at the turn of the year, 1,001 killed, 1,430 wounded and 2,243 missing – but only from 1 January onwards and excluding the other units that fought on the road. More recent Finnish research puts Soviet losses at no fewer than 7,000–9,000 killed. The Finns took some 1,300 prisoners on the Raate road. Their own losses, according to Finnish figures, were about 310 killed, 92 missing and 618 wounded.

The booty was enormous. According to Finnish records, on the Raate road alone they collected 43 tanks, 10 armoured cars, 71 field and anti-aircraft guns, 29 anti-tank guns, 106 heavy and 190 light machine guns, more than 4,800 rifles, 260 lorries, 20 tractors, 47 field kitchens and 1,170 horses. Soviet documents speak of the loss of 37 T-26 and T-38 tanks and about 80 guns. For the Finnish army, which was short of almost everything, this was priceless plunder: the captured rifles replaced obsolete weapons in units in the north, and the guns and tanks strengthened the Finnish artillery and armoured forces. Among the trophies were the instruments and sheet music of the divisional band, which was to have played at the victory parade.

The fate of Vinogradov

Kombrig Vinogradov did not die on the Raate road. Together with his chief of staff, Colonel O. I. Volkov, and the head of the political department, Regimental Commissar I. T. Pakhomenko, he broke out of the encirclement and reached the Soviet side of the border. There they found waiting for them the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, Lev Mekhlis, sent to the 9th Army by Joseph Stalin to find those responsible for the defeats. The 9th Army command wanted to put the blame on the commander of one of the regiments, but Moscow decided otherwise. Vinogradov, Volkov and Pakhomenko were accused of abandoning the division at the decisive moment and handing its equipment over to the enemy. On 11 January 1940 the military tribunal of the 9th Army sentenced them to death, and the same day, near the border village of Vazhenvaara, they were shot in front of the assembled remnants of the division. Mekhlis had demanded the execution as a warning to other commanders. Vinogradov was rehabilitated only in 1990 by the military court of the Leningrad Military District. Historians point out that the decision to leave the division on the road after the defeat of the 163rd Division had been taken by higher command, not by him.

The fate of the ordinary soldiers was little better. The Finns buried the bodies of thousands of the dead in mass graves in the spring of 1940, and handed over to the Russians only about 300 bodies from Raate. The prisoners returned to the USSR after the war, where, like all Red Army men coming back from captivity, they faced NKVD interrogations and the camps. For decades Soviet historiography kept silent about the destruction of the 44th Division.

Place in the war

The destruction of the 44th Division brought to a close the Battle of Suomussalmi, which had begun in December when the 163rd Division entered the burned-out village. The Soviet plan to cut Finland at its “waist” had finally collapsed. The front in central Finland fell quiet, and the Finns were able to shift some of their forces elsewhere: at the end of January Siilasvuo’s 9th Division attacked the Soviet 54th Division near Kuhmo and encircled it in several pockets, which held out until the end of the war.

Photographs of the frozen road choked with abandoned equipment and bodies filled the newspapers of Europe and America and became a symbol of the Winter War – the struggle of a Finnish David against a Soviet Goliath. A few weeks after the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations, they strengthened sympathy for Finland in the West, revived plans in London and Paris to send it help, and encouraged volunteers in Sweden and other countries. At the same time they confirmed many observers, including Adolf Hitler and the German General Staff, in their belief that the Red Army had been left weak by the Great Purge. In June 1941 that conclusion proved catastrophically misleading.

Stalin drew lessons from the defeats at the turn of the year. On the same 7 January the North-Western Front was formed under the command of Komandarm 1st Rank Semyon Timoshenko, who took command of the troops fighting on the Karelian Isthmus. Until then operations had been directed from Moscow by the Headquarters of the Main Military Council, with Stalin and the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov. The Red Army gave up attempting swift marches through the trackless wilds of the north and concentrated on the Karelian Isthmus. There, in February 1940, after careful preparation and with an overwhelming superiority in artillery, it broke through the Mannerheim Line, which in March forced Finland to accept harsh peace terms. In the forests of central Finland, however, it achieved no success right up to the end of the war. The motti tactic, tried and tested on the Raate road, became a subject of study in many armies, and the experience of it influenced the Soviet military reforms of 1940: new regulations, training for fighting in winter and in forests, and the formation of ski units.