Citesc cu placere articole despre istorie, si am gasit asta acum, poate intereseaza pe cineva:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/c ... ?context=3
Finland
Military factors
The Finnish army, while lacking in equipment, was by ww2 standards a very well-trained force. Finnish conscripts served 365 days of conscription with a for the time modern training regime. The Finnish tactics revolved around late ww1 German tactics as learned by the Finnish officers and soldiers in the German Jäger units. Defence in depth, flexible counter-attacks, foreposts at the front and most men kept safe further back during enemy barrages and tactical flexibility on the attack, with infiltration and tactical flanking were German tactics developed to deal with the ww1 battlefield. As it turned out, these were superb tactics for the close-range forest fighting and large stretches of woodlands lacking fronts completely.
The Finns realised the potential of the mortar, especially in rough terrain (as much of the fighting would be in) early, and while lack of funds prevented them from having as many as they would have wanted, they had attached them to the infantry battalions with their own forward observers (sometimes with radios, but most often telephone lines) which gave the Finnish infantry battalion some direct punch, even if the mortars did not fire within line of sight.
The Finns raised their infantry from counties and companies from muncipalities. This meant that most men knew each other from before the war, and kept unit cohesion high. There's a tendency in battle to forget politics and nationalism and fight only for your comrades. Having men you have known for a long time next to you in the trench helps immensly. High casualties could and did cause some villages to have their male population nearly wiped out by this though.
Inter-war Finnish training had, like in most Nordic countries, put some emphasis on rifle accuracy. What many contenintal nations considered "harrasing fire" with rifles, the Nordic nations trained to be sharpshooting. The Finns were especially good at this. Combined with a long and strong hunting tradition, this created a large pool of very good shots, culminating in Simo Häya who in 90 days had 542 confirmed kills.
The Finnish infantry battalion were one of the few to have integrated the SMG in the rifle squad. A Finnish platoon contained two SMG squads and two LMG squads.
Finnish infantry battalion 1939:
24xSMG
24xLMG
12xHMG
The Finnish air force lacked a lot of equipment, and had very few fighters. In one sense, this was a blessing in disguise as the air force, lacking in planes could be extremely selective in who it accepted into service. Only the very best of the very best among the conscripts were chosen to become fighter pilots and the training was extremely hard. Finnish pilots were required to pass extremely hard shooting tests. To add to this core of well-trained pilots, the Finnish air force was the very first adapter of the rotten-schwarm/fighting pair-finger four tactic - in 1932. The Germans developed the same tactics when fighting in Spain 1938, and the British switched after learning them the hard way over France 1940 and used them to good effect during the Battle of Britain.
Generally, Finland wasa decently egalitarian society. Many of the officers and NCOs were conscripts themselves and led by example and worked to earn the respect of the men rather than use strict discipline. Being used to long distances to central authority, these men were not beyond taking initiative without orders when the situation required it, which further increased the flexibility of the
Finnish forces.
The Finnish troops were drawn from men used to long and hard winters and moving on skis during several months of the year. The Finnish army held regular winter exercises and skis were among the standard equipment of the army - in winter condition a unit on skis that have trained on how to move together can move very quickly in columns, where one man makes a track for the rest for a while, then stops, rests and lets the next man take over the hard task and then joins the last part of the column.
The Finnish army had inherited a lot of arms from the Imperial Russian army, as had the Red Army, and both sides used the same caliber on small arms, except for pistols, which meant that Finnish soldiers, always lacking ammunition, could loot the enemy dead an dload their rounds directly into their own weapons.
Political factors
While Finland has suffered a bloody civil war only 20 years earlier, the country had healed the most glaring wounds, and the threat of a foreign invasion did weld communists, socialists and whites together. Most Finnish communists who had fled to the Soviet Union had been killed in Stalin's purges, and one could not find that much support for Stalin even from the Finnish communists in Finland even before the war. During the inter-war years Finland had become a stable democracy - right wing movements such as the Lappo movement had disgraced themselves and lost all support and social reforms such as an 8 hour workday, vacation and social insurance had been enacted.
Generally, the Finnish people proved very willing to sacrifice for their nation and their democracy, and left and right united against the Soviets, something which the Soviets had not expected.
Stalin pulled out what few Finnish communists were left, several of them alcoholics, some of them from Gulag camps and created the Terijoki government (from the village where they were seated, one of the few slices of Finnish terrain the Soviets captured) under Otto Ville Kuusinen. This government proclaimed the "Democratic Republic of Finland" and signed to all Soviet demands. Leaflets were printed and distributed over Finland, often dropped by air. The promises were often completely out of touch with Finnish politics - one thing that was promised was an 8 hour workday! The Soviets expected a quick victory and to be welcomed by the Finnish communists. They were sorely dissapointed.
The first month or so of the war, the world cared little about Finland and its woes, but when it became clear that Finland was not only holding, but actually defeating Soviet invasion forces, a kind of mass hysteria of sympathy swept over the world to provide aid for Finland. While Germany, in order to keep relations with their non-aggression partner the Soviet Union, refused transit of arms and volunteers, there were still a lot of Hungarian and Italian arms that made their way to Finland. Britain and France, who both really needed to focus on re-arming themselves sent massive aid to Finland. The US sold or gave away much of its surplus arms, although most of the US weapons arrived after the war had ended.
However, nowhere did the mass hysteria reach the levels they did in Sweden. Sweden more or less depleted her stores of arms and ammunitions to send to the Finns. For example 147 000 mortar shells and 12,2 million rifle cartridges were sent to Finland.
The Soviet Union
Military factors
While the Soviets had huge amounts of equipment, they were in the midst of a modernisation program. The vast majority of the equipment of the Red Army was still arms inherited from Imperial Russia. The artillery was ww1 vintage, and so were the rifles. Only LMGs, airplanes and tanks were decently modern. However, the main tank of the Winter War was not the T-34 (which had yet to be produced) not the KV-1 (which went through field trials in a few examples towards the end of the war) but rather the much smaller and weaker T-26.
The Soviets had sold off massive amounts of old and close to useless equipment at high prices to the Spanish Republic, but still retained large stockpiles of ww1 vintage equipment. The Red Army of 1942 and 1943 was an entirely different beast to the one 1939.
Communication in the Red Army was bad and in many cases catastrophic. There were very few radios - tanks and planes often lacked them, as did lower infantry units. Phone and telegraph lines were often cut, either by artillery fire or enemy patrols. Command and control suffered heavily and there are several reports of Soviet infantry being shelled by their own artillery or Soviet airplanes attacking their own forces.
Soviet forward observers for the artillery were not as well-trained as their western counterparts and had problems getting close enough to spot the target in the heavy forests of Finland. Finnish sharpshooters loved to take out forward observers as well. The Finnish tactic of keeping most of the men in underground wooden bunkers (korsu) during a bombardment combined with the ww1 vintage artillery, lack of communication equipment, a stiff and inflexible command structure and many other factors rendered the massive Soviet artillery much less effective than it should have been.
The Soviet mechanised formations were bound to the road, both for operation and supply. Considering that most roads of eastern Finland at the time were few and far apart, not even speaking of being single-file dirt roads, the Finns knew exactly where the Soviets would be - on the road. Raiding, patrol warfare and eventually motti warfare (cutting the long columns up in pieces and dealing with one piece at a time) was very effective against the Soviets.
Soviet logistics were a shamble and it quickly got hard to supply units with everything they needed - and ammunition had higher priority than warm clothes and winter equipment.
However, the worst part of the Red Army at the time was that it had forzen completely as a result of Stalin's purges. While the purges themselves mostly affected Generals and other in the higher command, the message sent and understood by the entire army was to sit still in the boat, do not rock it. The Red Army become tactically completely inflexible and utterly devoid of initiative, as no-one dared to anything wihtout order. Combined with the bad staff work and lousy communications, this was a recipy for disaster. This recipy was further spiced up by the attempt to blame the failures of the Soviet system in Spain on a lack of dicispline and elan rather than a lack of tactical skill. Dicispline, preferably draconian such, and zeal were to be the key to success. In practice, however, it was the key to absolute disaster when human wave attacks were thrown against impossible odds.
There are some authors who describes the Red Army at this time as more of an armed mob than a proper army.
The Soviets used mostly troops from the Ukraine and southern Russia during the early war, and had not equipped them with skis nor winter clother or winter equipment. When they did realise the need for ski troops, they quickly cobbled together a brigade partially consisting of interwar ski sports champions. These men often lacked military training and were cut to pieces by the Finns.
Soviet infantry battalion 1939 (practical organisation, as the new 1939 organisation had not been implented):
36xLMG
18xHMG
2xMedium mortars.
Note that the formation completely lacks SMGs, a very valuable weapon in the Finnish forests. While it has more mortars (the Finns had 4 mortars at regimental level, so 1,33 per battalion) and LMGs and HMGs than the Finnish battalion, it is not that much stronger, especially since it lacks SMGs.
Political factors
As opposed to what many people seem to think, Stalin was actually very careful and a suspicious opportunist. He secured German approval of his campaign aginst the Baltic states and Finland before he moved on them and he seem to have been intent on regaining as much of what Russia lost 1918 as possible, probably as a buffer against the western aggression he suspected would come.
Scrounging up the Terijoki government and some troops for them was hard. The troops were not used in the war, probably both because their frontline combat value was low (they numbered about a reinforced brigade) and that the Terijoki government would need them to establish control over Finland.
It is obvious that the Soviets thought that a victory over Finland would be quick and easy and that the Finnish communists would welcome them as liberators. Perhaps they fell for their own propaganda, perhaps no-one dared question it for fear of being labeled a counter-revolutionary defeatist and set to the gulags. Soviet forces attacking the north of Finland were found with maps clearly marking the Swedish border and orders to not cross it.
Since the Soviets expected the campaign to last a few weeks at most, winter equipment for the troops was not a bit priority. When this turned out to not be the case, and much larger forces was needed, the lack of reliable logistics saw the Soviet troops suffer. A man can stand a lot of cold as long as he can sleep warm and have warm and nutritious food to eat. Neither was possible when caught in a motti.
The Soviets were sensetive to the world's reaction to the war, and part of their decision to make peace in March 1940 was due the increasing support the Finns were receiving - the US was sending supplies, France and Britain were promising forces (but Sweden refused to allow them transit, knowing that they would want to occupy the iron mines in Sweden to deny their production to the Germans en route) and planning for air strikes from Syria against the Baku oil fields.
Stalin's plan had been to snatch Finland from under the world's nose when the Germans and western allies were at each others throats. And this was not happening. The war was dragging out, and while the Finnish army was at its last in March, the Soviets did not know it.
Thus Stalin conveniently forgot about Kuusinen and his Terijoki government, which he only three months previously called "the only legal government of Finland" and made peace.
Am 3 partide in 2 si una solo la activ de RW si mai urmeaza o partida saptamana asta (cum am mai zis, vreau sa joc un wargame de cat mai multe ori inainte de a trece la altul) . CC:E e pe lista de asteptare
