Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 86 - Winter War Part 2: Molotov Bread Basket

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Stalin launches a war from his Apartment without any planning whatsoever. Hilarity ensues. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Check out our merch: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store?page=1 follow us on twitter: @lions_by

Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me as always is Nick. Me. And we are in part two of the Winter War. Now, before we get started in part two, we have to give a little shout out to our podcast co-co-host slash friend of the show, Rich, for completely redesigning our studio. Redesigning.

I mean, studio is, I know it's a strong term, but it sounds good. She bought a whole bunch of desks and bookshelves and slapped them all together as well as cleaned up our disgusting pigsty of a mess that we leave. I don't remember the last time we picked up beer bottles or cans in here, but I'm going to say a month. Yeah. She did all this for a Christmas present for the podcast and bless her fucking heart because she worked her ass off. Yeah. She did all this for a Christmas present for the podcast. And bless her fucking heart because she worked her ass off. Yeah. Now we can't find anything.

Yeah. It's that unfortunate things you've been living in your own shit pile for so long that once somebody like, I didn't mess it up. I simply organized like, I knew where everything was. Yeah. That's exactly how I feel right now. So when we left you last week, the Soviet Union was rattling their giant hammer and sickle-shaped saber against their tiny neighbor Finland, who simply had the audacity to not want to be part of Russia again.

Those fucking bastards. How dare you want freedom? Now, there's no question that the Soviet Union wanted to go to war. That's not what... It's not like some conspiracy theory here of what their intentions were. What's more important than their desire to go to war is just how easy they thought the whole thing was going to be,

which kind of explains why they were so eager to do it. Nobody's ever going to be super eager to do something that is really fucking hard. It's like the same reason why chores that are around the house simply pile up because that sounds like it's going to be difficult. Yep.

Or maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit. I don't know. I usually save them for the last minute. I mean, the same could be said for homework. Oh, so true. I never did it. Yeah. So just to underline

how easy the Soviet Union thought this whole thing was going to be, we go back to our boy Nikita Khrushchev, who was working in Soviet government at the time. So before we get into it, Nikita Khrushchev isn't obviously the biggest fan of Joseph Stalin. He was the architect of de-Stalinization after Joseph Stalin died. So obviously the man doesn't have a lot of nice things to say about Joseph Stalin. But in fairness, most people shouldn they should most people should um he is a huge critic of joseph stalin but he was one of the only people who has written openly about his time in stalin's government critically so we use him a lot when it comes to this also he was he was there for all these meetings uh so

you know i use what i can i use what I have, man. Pretty good source. So he said, quote, all we were going to have to do is raise our voices a bit and the Finns would obey. And if that didn't work, we will simply fire a shot and they'll put their hands up and surrender. Bing, bang, boom. Done. Easy. Easy shit. Now this kind of attitude is why Stalin did not put

a whole lot of thought into the idea of a war against Finland. Soviet leadership were let into Stalin's apartment to kind of, I guess, workshop an idea. It's hard to think of something going on in Stalin's apartment. Stalin's like, hey, everybody come over, come over. He lives on lawn chairs and shit. He doesn't have real furniture.

It's hard to think of actual government policy being formed in some dude's apartment. Everybody's waiting for the first guy to leave so then everybody can start leaving. Yeah, I got to go see a guy. Like, oh, come on. Well, if he's here, everybody's going to slowly trickle out. Like, Stalin's still wearing, like, his field marshal jacket, but he's wearing boxers and, like, foot cloths. Or just socks. I think we just... but socks with sandals because you know stalin fucking wears socks and sandals uh but they were

all had a meeting in stalin's apartment to talk about military action against finland and stalin was kind of in like a jokey jovial mood or at least as jovial as fucking joseph stalin could be because even think i know there's pictures of him smiling but thinking of him actually laughing is kind of weird he's not a man who enjoyed things he fucked with a scowl on his face when he came he just grimaced so he wasn't really listening to the

conversation to be like all the other people are like well if we did this or we did that you know coming up with plan A through C or whatever he's not really listening to any of it. He just knows that he wants to go to war and fuck Finland up. So like at the end of it, he kind of like disregards everything he's everything everybody else was

saying. And he said, let's just get started today. Like that's, that's an actual quote. Like after hours of talking about this, Khrushchev said, Stalin just kind of just shrugged his shoulders.

Like, well, let's just do it today. I feel like he just put up a map and like put up a giant secret and said, boom, right on Finland. Just, that's it.

Just threw a fucking, uh, a dart. It was like, huh, I guess it's Finland. Uh, after they pulled the dart out of Poland.

Yeah. Uh, so the officials in the room were kind of taken aback at the carefree attitude Stalin had towards the idea of going to war. They're in his apartment. They're in his fucking bachelor pad. They weren't going to say anything about it because it's Joseph Stalin.

I wonder how the tour was. I have a feeling you could see the whole thing from the front door. Hey guys, come on in. This is where the magic happens. Normally when we bring up people with really bad ideas, they either fall into, like, two camps. And that is they disregarded all opinions to the contrary or they were simply, like, brutal dictators

and nobody had the balls to say anything. Stalin kind of falls into both because people almost universally, even in writing, will be like, you know, we kind of tried to tell him this was a bad idea, but he just, it's Joseph Stalin. He's not going to listen to anybody. But this was, like, Khrushchev says, quote, this was Stalin's idea. Naturally, I did not oppose him. Khrushchev is also, like, noted as being quoted as saying, like, when Joseph Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.

Because that's something he actually fucking did. He used to have, like have booze-ass parties in the Kremlin or in his apartment or wherever. And he would be drinking water. And he would force everybody else to get drunk and dance for him. Yeah.

He just wanted them to be an ass. I think he also told people not to grow a better mustache or anything like that. God forbid you have a better mustache than Joseph Stalin. You're not only able to be purged, but so will your mustache. Or own more than 12 tracksuits. I don't think Stalin was a Gopnik.

The idea of a Gopnik Stalin is admittedly fucking hilarious. He only had 12. If you had more than 12, you're fucked. He just wanted to squat on the entire world. He wanted to redistribute squats so everybody could have a fair share amount of squats. But honestly, dancing to Gopnik music looks entirely like too much fun.

Yeah, Stalin isn't about that. Stalin ain't about that shit. So the first shots of the war, or the first seven shots to be exact, were fired on November 26th. Yep. November 26th, 1939. Now, we know this because they were targeted at three Finnish observation posts who took notes about the whole thing and radioed it forward.

And the soldiers manning them must have been pretty confused because these shots landed a full 800 meters short of them inside of Soviet territory. After that, nothing else happened. The firing stopped, and it just kind of ended. That was weird. That'll show them. You think we should tell the commander about that? Yeah, probably. I don't know.

They shelled themselves. So after that, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov sent an angry telegram to Helsinki, Finland. The telegram said that four Soviet soldiers had been killed after Finnish guns had shelled their position. Now, there's a problem with this for obvious reasons. One, Finland didn't shell them. And two, it's literally impossible for the Finns to have shelled them. See, now Mannerheim had very few pieces of artillery at his disposal.

And in order to preserve them in the case of any Soviet attack, he had actually withdrew them away from the border to preserve them from the initial Soviet blitzkrieg that he assumed would come over the border at any time. Am I saying that there's some kind of conspiracy here that the Soviets shelled themselves and probably really did kill four of their own people to start a war against Finland?

Yes. The reason why I say that is because Nikita Khrushchev fully admitted that's exactly what they did. He said the shots were set up by Marshal of Artillery and KVD agent Grigory Kulik. So there is a paper trail to prove this. That's awesome. Yeah. I also, I would love to think that they did it on accident like oh fuck like the whole like they were just drunk and fired off

some rounds an accident now kulik is an interesting guy and by interesting guy i made piece of shit sycophant uh like most people in the soviet army at the time he was raised to his position after the purges simply because he's a close personal friend of joseph stalin and he was a yes man he was so blindly loyal to stalin that when his own wife was kidnapped and executed on stalin's order he didn't even worry about it he's like yeah she probably sucked anyway she sucked she was a bad communist please don't kill my kids yeah he didn't even like slow him down he was also an nkvd agent before he was a military officer so he was a murderer for lack of a better term he murdered his way up the ladder oh that's good now obviously helsinki immediately denied that they were involved in these shellings whatsoever uh they even sent them copies of Mannerheim's order to withdraw those artillery

pieces from the border as proof. Now that mattered because you're not going to go through the hassle of launching a quite literally a false flag attack and then not follow it up with a war. I mean, ask Vietnam. A few hours later, Helsinki would be on fire by Soviet bombs and Soviet soldiers would be crossing over the Finnish border. But before we go into how this invasion played out, let's talk about the Soviet army. We talked about the purge last episode, but we're going to go a little bit more into that. Now, as we've already talked about, it had been gutted. Professional military mines are largely dead or dying in Siberia.

professional military minds were are largely dead or dying in siberia then you have people like gregory kulik who kiss ass up the ladder and up in charge of literally every piece of artillery in the soviet military um but some soviet generals did point out that this whole war against finland might not be as easy as everybody thought it might be and that was probably the last time they had a chance to raise any criticisms the soviet army had just taken over half of poland with only a thousand casualties and they smashed the japanese army at kolkengol in mongolia only a few months before the problem was poland was split in half between soviet nazi forces and and the whole thing kind of happened so quickly that they didn't end up fighting any kind of organized resistance it was all confusion until it was dark um and the japanese uh the victory of the over the japanese at colc and gall was was generally

a crushing victory over on they they were fighting a japanese army that was used to just crushing victories over untrained chinese conscripts So like when they fought another military that was even as out of date as the Soviets, they got their fucking asses kicked, which is the same reason why that like when world war two started, Japan's army was pretty much as a series of failure all the way until they got new. Yeah.

Um, the Soviet generals brought this problem up. Uh, there's a general named Shapo Shaskinov,inov that submitted a report to the Soviet forces should conduct a methodical buildup. Obviously, they weren't worried about any kind of Finnish counterattack or invasion of the Soviet Union. It simply wasn't going to happen. but what his his plan was like well let's treat this like an actual war let's build let's bring in all these elite forces from all over the soviet union makes sense yeah it takes a long time because it's a fucking war that involves literally hundreds of thousands of people yeah um stalin dismissed this immediately this wasn't because older dash he didn't like the man he actually did like shapskinov,

which was one of the only reasons why the man was still alive. And Stalin actually kept a copy of his book, The Brain of the Army, on his desk. Like Stalin thought highly of this guy, but not highly enough apparently. Shapskinov's book, The Brain of the Army, is quite literally taught, was taught as Soviet doctrine for decades.

That's cool. So he knew his shit, I mean, say what you will about Soviet doctrine. It won World War II for the large part. So his book did better than yours. Yeah, my book has yet to win any wars. Okay, that's true. Any American general currently serving

in the United States Army. Now, it's weird that someone obviously respected this guy, but eh, not so much like I only respect you enough that you hang around in your dress uniform I don't actually want you

to open your fucking mouth that's why you don't come to the apartment yeah this is only for bros yeah yeah he kept his book on his desk but Stalin thought that the plan would take

too long I feel like he never read the book probably not he just had it there I don't feel like Stalin was a guy who read an awful lot. Because when you read, you come upon ideas that are different from your own. I feel like he just did a quick little flip, like, done. I feel like the last thing Stalin read was something by Lenin before he died and he took over the Soviet Union.

So, like, he's not a theory guy. Unless I wrote the book myself. Yeah, Stalin's book is just pictures of Stalin staring fiercely at you, and you have to just nod along. Oh, this is a good part. Yeah. But now there is one guy that Stalin did listen to, and that is a pretty much deathly loyal Stalinist, a guy named Zhedov, who was the political boss in Leningrad. He was not a military officer, important to point out. There's a lot of these guys running around. He would end up in charge of the military.

There's a lot of those guys running around too. Zhanov convinced Stalin that the military district around Leningrad, which had about 150,000 troops and tanks, artillery, stuff like that, that enough would be enough to win this war. Just send in the Leningrad soldiers. Okay. Yeah. Another problem with the planning process was the inclusion of political officers, which are popularly known as commissars.

You might know them from Warhammer 40K. Yes. Now, we already did talk about the commissars and barrier troops and stuff like that in a previous episode of pavlov's house um we're not going to go into that too much more um just know that commissars had a lot of fucking power um so dissatisfaction with war planning would be thought as disloyalty and uh so if you were like i don't really like these plans even if like you're gonna do normal soldier complaining yeah like these these orders are kind of dumb you're gonna do them anyway but you're gonna bitch about them the whole time yeah exactly that was not allowed you'd go to a camp oh yeah not a fun camp no no no you you would probably see like a fucking drunk mkvd officer who'd probably shoot you behind the head with a pistol

it's like uh there's a common disconnection uh in the popular narrative when it comes to political officers and commissars it was like oh the commissar will just take you out back and shoot you. That's very rarely the commissars. They would arrest you and take you to the NKVD, which then executes you. Yeah. It's different. Same, but different. Yeah, same, same.

So, for instance, when Kulik submitted his plans for the war and was procuring ammunition for his artillery remember kulik is also a gutless yes man which is kind of interesting here uh he he had to go through the chief of logistics named voronoff uh when kulik said that he only needed enough artillery shells for 12 days voronoff laughed at his plans and said because the voronoff had been familiar with the finnish countryside uh and it's it's important to be um kind of familiar with the finn. It's important to be familiar with the Finnish landscape for this whole war to make sense. It's a little snowy.

It should be just as formidable to invade as Russia itself. Everybody says, oh, Mother Winter, Finland will fucking kill you. You'll drown in a swamp or freeze to death. Yeah. But Voronov laughed, being very familiar with finland and said that uh if if he if he was going to invade finland he would need an ammunition for

at least two to three months kulik a deputy commissar with no military training and only sent to his rank due to party loyalties said that voronov should base all ammunition and supplies on the 12-day timetable that he had supplied and nothing else. And thus, that is how it was done. Wow. Like, it wasn't, it's hard because, like, sometimes when I'm reading the book Frozen Hell, it kind of makes it sometimes seem like that the military officers come up with a plan, and then the commissars are like, that's a good idea, we should do that. And they, like, kind of meet in the middle, but that's not how it worked.

A military officer would have a plan, and the commissar would go, no, let's do this instead. And then they went with the commissar's plan. Oh, great idea. It's not like mine was planned. It's like the joke about marriages, like my wife wanted a puppy, and I didn't want a puppy, so we compromised and got a puppy. It's that, but you're going to die. Okay.

Yeah. The Soviets also had an obsession, as a lot of people did at the time. The Nazi tactic of Blitzkrieg that had stormed across Europe at that point. Now, we know that a lot of Blitzkrieg successes were due to luck and beating up on unprepared enemies, but there was some legitimate revolutionary tactics there, the combined arms stuff.

And as Tom pointed out seemingly forever ago in our German tank episode, the idea of combined arms warfare was absolutely nothing new, and it existed since the first time a cave person chucked a rock at somebody else while their friend was also trying to stab them with a stick. The Germans simply made it work better. And, I mean, sometimes that's all innovation is. However, the German tactics only worked in certain areas, as we saw. The fast-moving armored columns swept through parts of Europe with modern rail and road systems. It also benefited from knowing where the enemy's hubs of communication, resupply, and deployment were.

It gave them something to target. But the main thing the German army benefited from was good communication and the ability to give frontline commanders initiative to do what they thought was necessary on the fly. Small unit leadership. Things that are all familiar to anybody, familiar at all with how really any modern day military works. Now, instead of making jokes here, I'm going to quote directly from Frozen Hell, because he does a pretty good job at just roasting the Soviet military.

Quote, The Blitzkrieg, in short, had been perfected for a sleek hard-muscled well-trained and motivated army such as the german general staff had fad fashion during the decades between the wars it was unsuited for a ponderous top-heavy army of badly trained soldiers with timid officers overseen by inexperienced party ideologues and sent forth to conquer a country whose terrain consists of practically nothing but natural barriers to military operations. Nice.

Yep. So it's like, have you ever met anybody who's like really wants to DIY stuff? Like they want to upgrade their house, but they have no idea how to do construction. Yes. That's the Soviets in blitzkrieg. That was the dude.

We bought all the tools though. That was the dude that lived at the house that I'm currently at. Holy fuck. There's a shit ton of stuff fucked up. Like the sink about to fall out of the wall. Impressive. Yeah. But he bought all the tools and watched it on YouTube. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Now, instead of Blitzkrieg, they instead

unleashed something that the Red Army of the Era is pretty well known for. Unguided and badly led human wave attacks. With some tanks. That's all you need. In hearkening back to our Soviet-Afghan series, the quality of troops thrown into those human waves attacks varied wildly.

Some units had been well-trained, but they were the minority because remember the purges did a pretty short work of most of the good soldiers. Yeah, did a number on them. Most were raw draftees who had never even fired

their rifles before. And most of them didn't even know they're invading Finland. Really? Like, I don't know. I mean, it's not surprising. I mean, it's worth noting, you know,

the Soviet Union is a vast fucking country. And it has so many millions of people and so many different socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though they like to think they created some kind of classless society where everybody was equal, they definitely did not. There was parts of it where people were terribly educated to the point that like a lot of,

like there was a certain submachine gun that was really, really popular within the Finnish army that the Finns tried to sell to the Soviet Union before the war, way before the war. And one of the reasons that the Soviets turned it down is they thought that their normal draft, you'd be too dumb to be able to use it. Oh,

so like they're having a... The bar is low for what is considered okay to fire a rifle, which is common amongst armies of the time. Right. The Soviets were a little bit worse off, not to mention they were coming off of civil war and famine and

uncertain leadership changes. It wasn't a good time to be a draftee in the Soviet Army. I don't know if that was ever a good time to be a draftee in the Soviet Army. It never sounds good. No. We're a draftee in any army. Yeah.

It's true. So the invading Soviet forces also had no intelligence. Because remember, the invasion was just kind of a half-assed idea that Stalin shot from the hip one day out of an apartment chair. And there was no further thought really put into it. Now, the area that they wanted to invade was packed full of swamps and dense forests. It was kind of a place you wanted maps of

so you could carefully route your plan of advance. The Fortunes did not have any of that. Very few maps were given out, and the ones that did were badly out of date and were of an entirely different part of Finland. What? It's like that joke. That's awesome.

It's like, this is a tourism map, sir. You know what they did bring? Trucks of propaganda to include entire formations of brass bands, which is not something I normally think of when I think of the Soviet Union. I feel like that's like some pomp and monarchy type shit. Like, we brought the band with us. Play our war music.

Just some guy slapping a potato. Remember, the Soviets thought this whole war thing was a lark and it was just going to be a side note to the main game, and that would be standing up a Soviet puppet state in Helsinki and making it part of the Soviet Union. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the future in detail because it is dumb. Because they did do that.

An attempt was made. It was not a good attempt. A lot of attempts we're talking about. Yeah. Now before we go too much further into the story of the Soviet Union's advance, we have to talk about the army Finland was trotting out to defend its borders. This is what I want to hear. And I use the term army very loosely.

The Finnish army was... Like a group? More like a large collection of dudes with rifles. The Finnish army was lean and understrength due to budget concerns. They were authorized 15 divisions on paper, but only had 10. And those 10 divisions were mostly demobilized and people just went home. A full mobilization

had never actually been attempted before so when it came it was confused and problematic nobody really had any idea where to go and officers didn't know what unit they were in uh so when officers so when the few officers who did show up ready for duty it was not uncommon for them to be like well you're an officer you went to the academy even if you're a lieutenant you're a battalion commander now oh make it work and it's simply because they were the first ones to show up and there was like no unit cohesion um and this did later change and a lot of people end up fighting alongside people from their block or

whatever but like in the very opening salvos of the war people who had trained with other units and other jobs and like another equipment were just like oh you're with him now that's awesome yeah it was all slapdash. This is awesome. There's a very good reason why Mannerheim did not want to fight the Soviet military. He knew how strong they would be.

Like even through sheer force of numbers, it wasn't good. But for all of Mannerheim's problems, manpower was the lesser of two evils. Looming over it instead was a crippling shortage of supplies, hardware, weapons, planes, tanks, and everything you need to

kill people when they invade your country. The usual. Yeah. First of all, I said tanks. Finland didn't have any of those. Not a single one. They did have a couple for training, but they've been broken down. They were just in a fucking parking lot somewhere. Well, the tanks,

the concept of tanks was relatively new to the whole war thing, having been trotted out during World War I. And a lot of world powers simply thought they were a lark. They were something to break trench warfare, and they weren't going to have a lot of use. But people still had a lot of them, just in case. And people like the Germans and the French were developing new tactics for combined arms warfare using fast-moving armor formations. And the Red Army did have a fuckload of tanks. Finns had none. Not a single one.

Yeah, you don't need them. I mean, the Red Army tanks were incredibly old, but it doesn't matter if you're not fighting any other tanks. Though we would find out that would end up not working so well for them. Furthermore, the Finns and their army had almost no experience training or fighting tanks. Most people had never even fucking seen one in person. So, like, there's... I imagine there's a lot of people back at that time that have not seen a tank. Well, I mean, for thousands of people who are supposed to be World War I veterans,

you would expect to have a vague familiarization, but those guys are getting older. I've heard stories. And some of the officers who did fight in the german imperial army during world war one even though that was decades ago and those guys were not going to be in the front line anymore and not to mention back then tactics normally fell upon let's just blow them the fuck up with cannons which brings us to another problem finland had virtually no anti-tank weapons or really any artillery of any kind. Really?

The few guns that they did have did it all the way back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and literally came out of a museum somewhere. That's awesome. They did have some World War I artillery, like the French 75s from World War I, but they only had a few of them. I imagine how they're going to get the ammo

for these things, since they don't have the pieces. A whole lot of people accidentally blowing themselves up in factories trying to get them out of work. Oh, fuck. Yeah, the munitions side of things, we don't really talk about a whole lot.

But a lot of it's in the opening stages, because eventually ammunition does come pouring in from outside sources, mostly Nazi Germany. But they do steal a lot that's one thing the soviets are really good at is leaving shit behind oh yeah and they also manufacture their own shit uh sometimes it does not work so well all this is accompanied by a severe lack of ammunition for everything from artillery to individual rifles. Now this is because Finland was still largely trying to recover their industry

output from the civil war, as well as suffering the effects from the great depression. And when I say great depression, I don't mean like the, like the American great depression. Finland's is a little bit different, but the whole world suffered from it. So, you know, same, same.

There's just happening a little different because they're also trying to rebuild their weather. They're also trying to rebuild their entire country at the time, which made things a little worse. Because while America was very, very poor and people were starving during the Great Depression, they hadn't just ended a civil war. That's true. I mean, that was a couple of that was like a generation ago for us. So, you know. I always find it kind of hard to explain to our largely American audience how unprepared most places are for an outbreak of war

that simply don't have millions of guns and piles of ammunition laying around. But they just didn't. Most people only had like 12 rounds to the rifle when it was issued to them. Jesus. Yeah, it wasn't good. By the time the wars started,

the entire country only had enough small arms and ammunition for 60 days of fighting and artillery shells for half of that that's only for certain calibers in comparison to the soviets could afford to fire more shells of a single caliber on a single day than were contained the entirety of the finnish reserves that's insane not good no it's not good so it should not surprise anybody when i say that when i was talking about the lead-up of hostilities where manor heim was telling literally anybody who would listen and also a lot of people who wouldn't that for the love of god just give soviets what they want like because like you know what they want karelia fine fuck it give it to them you won't worry about that sucks it's it's

fucking swamps man it is like there's more to it than that. Mannerheim, he didn't want to fight, but it's for a good reason. He knew they were going to lose. Now, obviously, Mannerheim would kind of end up being wrong, but not entirely. But Mannerheim knew his army. At one point during a meeting, he literally stood up and pounded the desk and screamed at the prime minister that, quote, the army is in no shape to fight and cause other people to boo him. I mean, he doesn't seem wrong. His army looks like shit.

And it really seems like the Finnish cabinet was mostly full of sycophantic yes-men who were nationalists. So, like, the concept of giving away anything to the Soviets. Now, I'm not dumb. Either was Manorat. He was practical. He knew that the Soviets got what they wanted. They would simply demand more or come in and take the rest of Finland. That was their end goal. There was

no ifs, ands, or buts about that. But he thought it would give Finland enough time to build defenses and maybe stockpile some more than a dozen rifle rounds per person. Maybe pick the war you're going to fight, not this one that's just going to show up on your front door. Yeah.

Instead, what happened is he resigned from his post. Now, this is partially upon request from the prime minister declaring that Mannerheim was too timid to be a proper Finn. Ah. Yeah. Noted literal Finnish future war hero. Really? Also, Mannerheim was a household name at this point already besides the fact from his post but from the civil war everybody fucking knew who he was so like saying he was too timid to be a fan is like

uh no he Mannerheim could have fought it but he didn't want to work for a government that disregarded literally everything he said so he's like fine fuck it I'll resign but that did that did not mean before his resignation that Mannerheim did not prepare for a coming war. Hence the birth of the Mannerheim Line, a massive defensive line that stretched across to Karelian Isthmus and eventually bore his name. The problem was this line was created throughout the turmoil of post-Civil War Finland,

where money was tight and corners were cut. Now this is, it's hard to explain. When I tell you a named line, you're probably thinking of the Hindenburg line or the Maginot line where they have these. I'm thinking this line's probably awesome. It's not. Bad ass.

It's only cool when you think of it. It's also a cool name. It is. Mannerheim's unarguably a fucking sweet name. But it's a defensive line, which I've never really seen before or read before about and ends up working better than either one of the lines i just named uh so despite everybody knowing the threat of the newly formed soviet union the first bunkers and lines have been built up of unreinforced

concrete making them pretty useless to anything that isn't just small arms fire right like a grenade would fuck those up this was eventually improved upon but as bunkers became better built the costs went up. So at the beginning of the war, Finland could only afford about three or four of them in a year in an area literally meant to defend hundreds of miles of territory. But the Finns constantly found ways around these small details. The line was not like the Maginot Line.

It wasn't made up of concrete monoliths and huge bunkers. The bunkers were small, and when they ran out of money uh for concrete and rain and like the rebar to reinforce them they simply build them out of natural terrain such as logs and boulders and cut trenches behind them to make them even bigger that's awesome yeah they literally built a fortress out of nature to do it yourself bunker yeah and unlike the majno line and the hindenburg line, the Mannerheim line worked. And that's because it had an interesting function. They were realistic.

It had that rustic, outdoorsy look that everybody wants in their kitchen. Yes. Those other gigantic defensive works that I named, or like the Atlantic Wall in Western Europe or whatever, were all created to repel or stop an invasion. That was not the Morheim line's goal instead it was meant to delay a coming attack and change and bend around which became known as flexible defense so it could give way it was designed to do that nice so like who gives a shit about building this giant concrete bunker we just have to retake it anyway yeah that makes sense yeah that makes lines incredibly hard to snuff out as there's no easily identifiable strong point or command post.

Think of it as like a weird, large-scale, irregular warfare at a national fucking level. Lincoln log bunkers. That's what I'm thinking right now. Put them back together, boys. Ho, ho, ho. Think of it as like if 10 Soviet divisions crashed into the Mannerheim Line, which they did.

The flanks of that part of the line would simply fold around it surround them snuff them out and then reform on the line now i imagine the trench is actually going there's some hinges yeah hold on to something we're swinging around now it's important to point out that manorheim or nor anybody in the finnish government thought finland standing toe-to-toe or fighting out against the red army and winning was an option that existed. Nobody was that dumb, though some were dumber than others. The entire strategy was to delay the Red Juggernaut

in their vastness of the frontier long enough for the rest of the world to get off their ass and come help them. It's the same game that Ethiopia played against the Italians. Didn't work out too well for Ethiopia, but you can probably figure out why.

Racism. It's racism. Now, the freshness of Western anti-communism was still in their head. After all, most people don't know this, but an international coalition of Western powers actually invaded Russia to aid the whites during the Russian Civil War in a place called Archangel.

This included American soldiers. What? They didn't stick around for too long because they realized, like, wow, the whites are getting their shit fucked. This is after World War I. We gotta go. Yeah, yeah.

So it was reasonable to think that they'd come to the aid of a mostly free democracy under the threat of a Stalinist empire. If that didn't work, they would fuck up the Red Army for so long and so hard that Stalin would eventually come to the table and negotiate again, and they would strike a deal that would save the rest of Finland. They knew they'd have to give some up, but they were going to make him fucking pay for it. If Stalin meant to destroy Finland and subjugate it entirely,

which quickly became obvious that was his goal, They would fight until they had a final bullet and one last man. Or in Mannerheim's word, the most honorable annihilation. That's a nice way to say it. There was actually a German officer. There was a German Nazi officer at the time because they talked a lot. And obviously in the Continuation War, they became allies. They said if Finland stood against the soviet empire there'd be nothing but a an honorable note in history like dark yeah but the most honorable

annihilation is pretty baller it is it sounds really good it reminds me of uh like the general during bastogne oh yeah you're surrounded nuts i would have used sunglasses to slide. Mud dick. Most honorable animation. Mud dick. Mannerheim throws on sunglasses and fucking Naruto runs

out the door. I just ruined his entire legacy by saying that. No historical character could ever be taken seriously

if you think about him and Naruto running across the battlefield. Now back to the invasion because I just ruined enough stuff. As the first bombs fell into Helsinki, Gustav Mannerheim,

a man several members of the government thought was afraid of the Russians and untrustworthy, was immediately made the commander of chief of the Finnish armed forces as his resignation had not been formally accepted quite yet. His paperwork was still sitting on the prime minister's desk. Must have been a four dayday weekend, you know. As the bombs fell on the capital of the small nation,

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov announced that they were not bombing Helsinki. No, no, no. That's not something the Soviet Union does. Instead, they're dropping breadbaskets to the starving population of the capital city. Because remember, I told you before they churned out propaganda saying Finns were barefoot and starving. Were the breadbaskets city because remember i'd i told you before they they they turned out propaganda selling

fins were barefoot and starving where the red baskets blowing up oh yeah yeah okay they were cluster bombs so they weren't being fed uh nope no no uh the soviet bombing campaign was also badly planned as they only used nine bombers and they managed to blow up their own embassy what which i know like targeting technology wasn't fucking great no it wasn't but like don't bomb this one building out of the whole city they're like that one now the fins being fins jokingly nicknamed these soviet cluster bombs which did kill around 100 people during this they called them molotovs bread baskets a sarcastic nickname that needs to be remembered for the next joke to land. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet

soldiers soon surged over the border into Finland, starting in the beginning of the largest embarrassment in Soviet military history, which is saying something. The Soviet military planned for a swift assault across the Karelian Isthmus. There are still reasons for that. The Soviet forces really brought

nothing for them to combat the horrible subarctic winters that punished the area. Seems like a trend. Yeah. It's kind of funny seeing it happen to the Soviets because everybody thinks of like, you know, General Winter and like it killed Napoleon, it killed Hitler. Yeah. Well, the Soviets got it too.

We're a different breed. It turns out General Winter just kind of shoots in every direction. Yeah. He's a fucking wild card. We're a different breed. It turns out General Winter just kind of shoots in every direction. Yeah. He's a fucking wild card. We're one with winter. Now, as it was November, it was the beginning of what could be considered the cold season in that area. But it wasn't supposed to be that cold. It was an unseasonable early winter.

And it shouldn't have been cold enough to start freezing men where they stood, but cold enough to freeze miles of swamps that cover the area. The Soviets knew that, and they were kind of leaning on that pretty hard. When you say that's not that cold, get fucked. I mean, it's cold as shit. Yeah, yeah, but I mean,

you're talking about like a sub-Arctic country that people literally freeze to death standing. I'm from California. Now, as I said, the Soviets brought no winter uniforms. And what has to be the biggest case of historical irony I've ever heard, they also brought nobody knowledgeable about

how to fight in the snow. We all think about them to be like these goddamn snow warriors that can trudge through anything wearing white camouflage. Nobody else thought about that. Well, guess what? They were wearing fucking green. You don thought about that. Well, guess what? They were wearing fucking green. Yeah.

You don't need it. They also brought no trained ski soldiers, which sounds kind of hilarious because when I think of skiing, I think of downhill skiing. I also think of the douchebags on the movies

are mainly skiers. And the good guys are always the snowboarders. Which is why I snowboard. Well, just think of the Finns as using snowboards throughout the war. Totally radical brawl. Oh, fuck yeah,board. Well, just think of the Finns as using snowboards throughout the war. Totally radical, bro.

Oh, fuck yeah, dude. Now... Oh, life jacket! So, like... There's places where snowbanks will pile up taller than you are. So you can't walk across them. No.

The only way to make it across them is skiing. That reminds me of the time where we went... What is it? Sledding? I don't know what we were doing and we were out in this parking lot we were in the parking lot of this giant snowbank and we're me and you and our other buddy were going down it yes uh and you when you're standing on

the top of it you sank up to your motherfucking waist yeah i did now imagine doing that wearing combat kit and you have to march like 20 fucking miles. Wearing green. That's what the Soviets were trying to do. While people were actively trying to kill them. Meanwhile, the Finns, for a lack of most things, they did know how to ski because otherwise they would have died out there. Yeah, I imagine they do that everywhere they go. Yeah, they turned the Karelian isthmus into the graveyard of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers pretty, pretty rapidly because of this. The Soviets knew they had to act fast.

And that's where I defer back to the description of the Blitzkrieg and the weaknesses of the Red Army. Soviet columns of tens of thousands of soldiers were slow to get moving and quickly got lost using their old shitty maps or their no maps at all. Officers and commissars attempted to fight one another for control of their own military formations. And this is before Finnish resistance showed up. They were already grinding to a halt, fighting themselves. That's awesome. And then the Finns showed up. Now, it should be pointed out the first Finns to fight the Soviets were not soldiers.

They were a collection of cops and border patrol guys. The only cool cops and border patrol guys that ever exist. The only cool ones it sounds like. Though oddly, still racist. Put them in a camp now uh they're also pretty scattered because obviously you can't imagine these guys are in like a barracks of hundreds of people uh so it would be like small groups of like a couple dozen people or sometimes even a single guy uh would would pop up and harass an entire Soviet division and then keep them pinned down with scattered rifle fire.

Because the Finns had a, or the Soviets had a tendency, when they get shot, they just stop. So the Finns would sometimes just fire around near them and then ski off and leave them trapped out on the road. Oh, way to go. I mean, there was sniper attacks where like one Finnish sniper

and we're not even talking about Simio Haihai yet. Yeah. Where like he would pin down a Soviet company and like keep them pinned down

for so long by himself that he'd kill all their officers and commissars and just walk away. And then the Soviet soldiers have no idea what to do so they just start walking back the other way.

And then the Finns would let him because like because like no they're not fighting us anymore yeah they're just walking by yeah um in the lake lagoda route of the advance the soviets quickly became stranded you see if you look at a map and i don't have a map handy but just you know google one or something i'm pretty sure that's what finland looks like it's our whiteboard yeah um the roads didn't exist um the route looks the looks uh more looks a lot more clear than the karelian advance um but the the the isthmus route cut through swamps and waterways um and but those were frozen and so they expected to drive over them the lagoda region was seemingly custom built to fuck the soviets never do i want to hear hey we got to drive over it. The Lagoda region was seemingly custom-built to fuck the Soviets. Never do I want to hear, hey, we got to drive over it. It's frozen. You'll be fine.

Oh, yeah. I never want to hear that. It quickly becomes even worse than you could imagine. So the Lagoda region was mostly barren. The roads that did exist were single-track wagon roads that were unpaved and were normally used by horse and buggies. There would only be about one road for miles and no shelter in any direction as the area was almost completely devoid of human life.

Finnish people didn't even live there. That place sucks. The Red Army swarmed these areas with literally thousands of takes and tens of thousands of men quickly turning the few roads into fucking traffic jams with their own people. Crossing through the forest was nearly impossible without trained skiers as snow drift snow drifts would normally pile up to six or seven feet.

Once confined to the roads, they became easy targets for Finnish riflemen who could launch hit and run attacks on stranded soldiers who had nowhere else to go. Now, the Finns refused to budge once they had them pinned down. And unlike the badly led and already demoralized Red Army, the average Finns morale was pretty fucking high for someone fighting

these kind of odds. He was defending his homeland. He knew their ancestors had squared off against the Russians so many times that he lost count in the same countryside and won.

At most, Finnish army units were recruited and based regionally, making these men literally fighting in their own backyards. They're also having a blast because they're skiing. And I mean, like, they're hunting. Yeah, basically. Yeah, they're not even getting shot at, really. The average Finn was a crack shot with his decades-old Mosin-Nagant rifle.

And hunting and community-based marksman competition were normal. For instance, Simu Haifa had won a fucking two dozen goddamn rifle marksmanship competitions before he ever fired a shot. Wow. Yeah, he was one of the best marksmans in the country before he ever had to shoot a person.

And then he became one of the best snipers. It was something that the Finns really had well done. They have a small army. Like they have a small army. They still have a small army. I mean, most people have a small army compared to us, but they, they train them to shoot competitively rather than like just shoot for your

marksmanship or whatever. Yeah. And it's like largely community based. So like every area with that draws soldiers from all has a shooting range. So like competitive shooting is pretty uh deep in the system and it was then too also other finnish small arms were superior to their soviet counterparts owing to the fact they only had a fraction of of soldiers to equip rather than the fucking unknown hordes of the right army they used the lattes uh light machine gun uh which was it it was the first

real functional assault rifle um and i'm using that to say that like the browning automatic uh uh rifle is also kind of considered an assault rifle we're not gun guys i don't really give a shit it was the browning automatic weapon before the browning weapon existed and it was uh better for the most sounds super familiar yeah i believe it's in battlefield one i don't remember um as well as well as the sumi submachine gun a gun so terrifyingly adept at churning soviets to paste that the red army eventually copied it which gave birth to the pps ppsh burp gun yeah uh that you can thank the finish for that also that was one that the lottie was the one they were going to sell to the Soviets.

Wow. It wasn't the most reliable weapon. You had to clean it a lot. And it had a lot of small parts. So the Soviets were like, yeah, we're too dumb to figure this out. I mean, that's the long and short of it. It's not the greatest description of why they turned it down. But mostly it came down to our conscripts won't be able to figure this out.

They're too stupid. Kind of. I mean, that's not the first time of why they turned down but mostly it came down like our conscripts won't be able to figure this out they're too stupid they're simple i mean that's not the first time armies have turned stuff down oh no i totally believe it um there there was armies that turned down the grand because of that um stuff like that so it's not even complicated oh i'd say that out of being around it for a while yeah you learning about it when you first used it it was uh fucking generations old already. Fucking badass. Now, whereas the Red Army thought the Finns were starving and oppressed people waiting for liberation, as that is what they've been told. Do you have bread baskets?

We have plenty of bread baskets now. The Finns knew their enemy was better armed and outnumbered them by millions. So they had the right mindset going into it. While the Red Army stomped into Finland thinking this was going to be a pushover, the Finns were like, I'm probably going to lose.

It's a mentality thing. Yeah. A common joke by Finnish soldiers during the war were, quote, they are so many. Our country is so small. Where will we find room to bury them all? That's fucking awesome.

That is metal as fuck, dude. And that joke would become a cold reality for thousands of Soviet troops. It sounds like a little Finnish girl probably said that and the general's like, that's a pretty fucking badass little girl. Promote that woman to general. And that is where we'll pick up next week.

Daddy, where will we bury them all? Where will we find room for all these dead people? We'll eat them, daughter. We'll eat them. So that is part two of our winter war series i do not know how long it's gonna be i'm gonna try to keep it it's fucking badass already this will be the first war that we're gonna cover that the series is almost as long as the war itself so that's fun i like this a lot so if you like our show and you think it's

with a dollar you can give it to us on Patreon. Our show will always be free but your contributions help us greatly. You can get free bonus episodes. You get stickers. You get books. You get episodes early and you get our communal discord that we share a hell of a way to die. If you don't want to do that, that is perfectly fine. Just like, share, and review our shit

and help us crawl up the iTunes rankings because that sort of thing always helps. We also have a Teespring store full of professionally designed and unprofessionally designed shirts. And you can buy one of those. So thank you for tuning in and we will talk to you next week.

Later.