That will make you wonder: what was the big deal about Viipuri, and why did so many Finns get killed there within such short time spans?
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The explanation is that Viipuri used to be the second-largest city of Finland until it was ceded to the Soviet Union, along with one-tenth of the total area of Finland, after a ferocious war in the winter of 1939–1940, plus a second war from 1941 to 1944.
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Finland’s death toll in its war against the Soviet Union was nearly 100,000, mostly men.
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But it represented 2½% of Finland’s then-total population of 3,700,000, and 5% of its males. That proportion is the same as if 9,000,000 Americans were to be killed in a war today: almost 10 times the total number of American deaths in all the wars of our 240-year history.
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Even though the last death commemorated in Hietaniemi’s military section had occurred more than 70 years previously (in 1944), I saw fresh flowers on many graves, and families walking among the graves.
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But after Nicholas II became tsar in 1894 and appointed as governor a nasty man called Bobrikov (assassinated by a Finn in 1904), Russian rule became oppressive. Hence towards the end of World War One, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in late 1917, Finland declared its independence.
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When the Whites consolidated their victory in May 1918, they shot about 8,000 Reds, and a further 20,000 Reds died of starvation and disease while rounded up in concentration camps. As measured by percentage of a national population killed per month, the Finnish Civil War remained the world’s most deadly civil conflict until the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
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The Finns were willing to make some concessions, but not nearly as many as the Soviets wanted, even though Finland’s General Mannerheim urged the Finnish government to make more concessions because he knew the weakness of the Finnish army and (as a former lieutenant general in tsarist Russia’s army) understood the geographic reasons for the Soviet demands from the Soviet point of view.
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One reason for Finns’ unanimity was their fear that Stalin’s real goal was to take over all of Finland. They were afraid that giving in to supposedly modest Soviet demands today would make it impossible for Finland to resist bigger Soviet demands in the future. Finland’s giving up its land defenses on the Karelian Isthmus would make it easy for the Soviet Union to invade Finland overland, while a Soviet naval base near Helsinki would allow the Soviet Union to bombard Finland’s capital by land and by sea.
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The Finns had drawn a lesson from the fate of Czechoslovakia, which had been pressured in 1938 into ceding to Germany its Sudeten borderland with its strongest defense line, leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless against total occupation by Germany in March 1939.
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Stalin could not imagine that a tiny country would be so crazy as to fight against a country with a population almost 50 times larger. Soviet war plans expected to capture Helsinki within less than two weeks.
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The Finnish civilian casualties in that first night of bombing accounted for 10% of Finland’s total civilian war casualties during the entire five years of World War Two.
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The Soviet Union had a population of 170 million, compared to Finland’s population of 3,700,000. The Soviet Union attacked Finland with “only” four of its armies, totaling 500,000 men, and keeping many other armies in reserve or for other military purposes. Finland defended itself with its entire army, consisting of nine divisions totaling only 120,000 men.
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The world had already seen how quickly Poland, with a population 10 times that of Finland and far more modern military equipment, had been defeated within a few weeks by German armies half the size of the Soviet Union’s armies.
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Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim Line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called “Molotov cocktails,” which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals, sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank.
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Other Finnish soldiers waited in a foxhole for a tank to come by, then jammed a log into the tank’s tracks to bring it to a stop.
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Daredevil individual Finnish soldiers then ran up to the crippled tanks, pointed their rifles into the cannon barrels and observation slits, and shot Soviet soldiers inside the tanks.
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Naturally, the casualty rate among Finland’s anti-tank crews was up to 70%.
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Small groups of Finnish soldiers mounted on skis, wearing white uniforms for camouflage against the snow, moved through the roadless forest, cut the Soviet columns into segments, and then annihilated one segment after another (Plate 2.5).
They then climbed nearby trees while carrying their rifles, waited until they could identify the Soviet officers in the light of the bonfire, shot and killed the officers, and then skied off, leaving the Soviets frightened, demoralized, and leaderless.
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Rather than remain in their homes under Soviet occupation, the entire population of Karelia, amounting to 10% of Finland’s population, chose to evacuate Karelia and withdrew into the rest of Finland.
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There, they were squeezed into rooms in apartments and houses of other Finns, until almost all of them could be provided with their own homes by 1945. Uniquely among the many European countries with large internally displaced populations, Finland never housed its displaced citizens in refugee camps.
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The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed.
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The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.
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But Russian archives opened in the 1990’s confirmed Finns’ wartime suspicion: the Soviet Union would have taken advantage of those milder territorial gains and the resulting breaching of the Finnish defense line in October 1939 in order to achieve its intent of taking over all of Finland, just as it did to the three Baltic Republics in 1940.
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The poor performance of the Soviet army in the Winter War had convinced all observers—not only in Finland but also in Germany, Britain, and the U.S.—that a war between Germany and the Soviet Union would end with a German victory.
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This second war against the Soviet Union, following the first Winter War, is called the Continuation War. This time, Finland mobilized one-sixth of its entire population to serve in or work directly for the army: the largest percentage of any country during World War Two.
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But Finland’s war aims remained strictly limited, and the Finns described themselves not as “allies” but just as “co-belligerents” with Nazi Germany.
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In particular, Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things: to round up Finland’s Jews (although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo); and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south. That latter refusal of the Finns saved Leningrad, enabled it to survive the long German siege, and contributed to Stalin’s later decision that it was unnecessary to invade Finland beyond Karelia (see below).
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As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation.
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Finland did have to agree to drive out the 200,000 German troops stationed in northern Finland, in order to avoid having to admit Soviet troops into Finland to do that. It took Finland many months, in the course of which the retreating Germans destroyed virtually everything of value in the whole Finnish province of Lapland.
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The Soviet Union’s much heavier combat losses against Finland were estimated at about half-a-million dead and a quarter-of-a-million wounded. That Soviet death toll includes the 5,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Finns and repatriated after the armistice to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately shot for having surrendered.
Interesting details.
The Finns certainly had to make hard choices to maintain their independence.
I am most struck by the flight and treatment of the Karelians, which speaks well of them and of the rest of Finns, although complete evacuation of a disputed territory oft times saves your lives but does the enemy’s work. No need to genocide or even oppress if everyone has left, and any future irredentist claim becomes pointless. The wisest course, though, when the enemy is unlikely to ever yield or be weak enough to retake the land.
Also, the rarely remarked need of the Finns to turn on and then fight the Germans in the far north. I was vaguely aware of it from some past reference, but have never seen any account of it.
And lastly, a notably measured attitude by Stalin to take conscious notice of the Finns’ attitude on Leningrad and to actually reciprocate by holding back. Although later revelations about how the Soviets penetrated Finnish government and society support the contention there was little need to annex it.
The Finns really deserve a better author than Jared Diamond to document and understand what happened in that war, in English.
Diamond’s treatment strikes me as superficial, trite, and couched in terms to make his arguments look good, with limited real respect paid to the realities of things as experienced by Finland and the Finns.
This is one of those cases where you wish you could deliver a metaphoric slap to the face for the author, and tell them to go find some other example, this one is for the grown-ups to discuss.
I suspect your second para in particular is applicable to a good deal of Diamond’s work, regardless of its potential other virtues.
I’ve had time for Taleb and for the 10000 hours guy whose name has genuinely slipped my mind, suggesting the weakness of his media strategies. I can see his face and hair. Still no name.
But time aside, we are really awash in this sort of pop theorizing about everything the past couple of decades.
I can’t decide if it’s just a continuation of the pop history and pop social science that was always around, a welcome expansion of debate outside the confined of increasing inward academic departments, or a mark of our increasingly nutty search for overarching simple pet theories.
Or maybe all those things.
I’m not impressed by Diamond.
A few very good bio-determinist points ruined by excess reliance on them (“This explains EVERYTHING!”) and mostly ignoring the consequent political / cultural / genetic feedback loops and awkward exceptions.
He’s an example of a “scientist” who thinks argument is piling up “evidence” rather than finding a theory which is least contradicted by observable data.
I’m not even really that impressed with the “bio-determinist” stuff he comes up with, TBH. I don’t think we know enough about deep biology to really be able to say for certain what correlates to what.
Yeah, some of what he’s got to say makes sense–On the surface where he’s stuck with the rest of us. What’s going on out in the deeps? Who the f**k knows?
There’s enough really weird stuff in the biome to make you go “I don’t think we know enough to say anything for sure, right now…”.
And, when biology can start explaining the results of things like those freaky twins studies where the twins are separated at or near birth, and yet have terrifyingly parallel lives, down to the dates they broke their legs in ski accidents? Show me you have some understanding of the genetics behind that, and then start yammering to me about how it is that the New Guineans never developed past the tribal stage, and spent a lot of their time cannibalizing each other. Me, I’m going to look at all that and start wondering if there really might not be something to the claims of genetically-based culture and civilization features in the genome.
We simply do not know enough to be making these grand pronouncements that Diamond is so wont to do. His BS about Easter Island soured me on his work to the point where I won’t waste my money to have a charlatan preach at me.
“…A few very good bio-determinist points ruined by excess reliance on them (“This explains EVERYTHING!”) and mostly ignoring the consequent political / cultural / genetic feedback loops and awkward exceptions….”
This! I have commented before of this same topic that his idea of geographic factors (climate and availability of domesticatable livestock is interesting and plausible, enough that I bought the book, but he lost me by attributing EVERYTHING to this, rather than making it just another (albeit interesting and compelling) factor.
“…There’s enough really weird stuff in the biome to make you go “I don’t think we know enough to say anything for sure, right now…”.
And, when biology can start explaining the results of things like those freaky twins studies…then start yammering to me about how it is that the New Guineans never developed past the tribal stage, and spent a lot of their time cannibalizing each other. Me, I’m going to look at all that and start wondering if there really might not be something to the claims of genetically-based culture and civilization features in the genome.
We simply do not know enough to be making these grand pronouncements that Diamond is so wont to do.:
This in spades!
One of the things in Guns Germs and Steel I could never reconcile is his Bullshit about how intelligent the though the natives of New Guinea were, simply on the basis that could solve the immediate problems of survival in that environment, and he assumed that he could not.
Granted, they lived in a place with poor soil etc., but it was tropical! You barely need clothes, and while it is a lot of work to process sago, there is lots of it. As an alumnus of several survival and bushcraft schools and courses, I’m not particularly impressed by New Guinea, they don’t have any particularly unique talents of techniques than those you would find in any typical hunter-gatherer, or early agricultural society.
Well, the Papuans are very well-adapted to the environment they had, which speaks well of them or at least of their biological ancestral development, and I well recall Kirk in an earlier context rightly pointing out that a man perfectly adapted to his environment, whatever it is, does have a claim to high intelligence even against some Harvard grad dropped in untrained to the jungle or desert.
Whether that qualified as higher intelligence overall was a bigger question. And tough to test.
It would be skewed by the fact that urban civilization has the capacity to observe, record, and study all environments and to maintain people actually pre-trained to deal with them, at least to a degree.
But if you took an otherwise healthy and fit American who has hunting and survival experience in America, maybe gave him inoculations to remove the disease factor, and dropped him into upcountry Papua, and then took a healthy and fit Papuan who maintained traditional skills but had comparable sporadic exposure to urban environment in Port Moresby, and dropped him into Los Angeles, give him any inoculations if there are diseases Papua hasn’t seen. Remove the fact of language. Or maybe leave it in and give neither any instruction.
Which would be more adaptable?
It would probably be at least comparably unfair to drop an American like me [fat, urban, unfit...] into Papua, or a tribesman never off the Papuan mountains into LA. So I went for a median.
Have I skewed the test wrongly? Thoughts?
I must admit I never thought of Diamond as a ‘bio-determinist’. His focus was always so much on environmental, especially geographical factors, and the arbitrary benefits they provide to the lucky, that I always thought of him as a fairly hardcore egalitarian environmentalist.
But this thread actually causes me to reposition him. I still don’t think bio-determinist is quite right, but I see where that is coming from better than I would have.