The Soviets launched their siege on the defenses but quickly fell into a predictable rhythm. They would move out just after first light, slowly approach the defenders, make furious assault after assault in tight formations, causing few Finnish casualties but resulting in piles of Soviet dead, sometimes numbering a thousand an hour. The Russians would retreat at dark and form defensive circles around huge campfires. Then the Finns would reoccupy any lost ground and snipe at the nervous Soviets all night. Some attacks broke up under well-aimed artillery; others evaporated from intense machine-gun fire. Throughout December the Soviets pushed against various sectors of the Finnish line only to suffer the same results everywhere. Finnish gunners mowed down row after row of attackers who slowly moved forward in virtual suicide attacks, unprotected by any trees or tanks. The Soviet dead were so numerous that some Finnish soldiers broke down emotionally from the stress of killing so many of the enemy. True to form, the Soviets never wavered in their tactics.
Finns live for winter — they know how to dress, ski through the dense woods, quickly remove the skis for fighting, and keep warm. The Soviet army, despite living in an equally cold country, inexplicably knew none of this. Many didn’t even know where they were. So while the Soviet troops suffered miserably from the cold in their dark uniforms that stood out against the white world in which they had plunged, the Finns donned camouflaging white sheets, slept in well-stocked and -heated dugouts, and even enjoyed the occasional sauna. The Soviets built huge campfires every night and the men huddled around, easy targets for snipers. For the invaders, simply surviving another day became an achievement. It was almost an unfair fight, except the Soviets had ten times the strength. Actually, it still was an unfair fight.
As the battles raged at the Mannerheim Line, the Soviets threw divisions against the overmatched Finns on the north side of Lake Ladoga. Here the Soviets pushed relentlessly forward as the Finns engaged in a fighting retreat. As the Soviets approached key crossroads that would allow them greater movement, Mannerheim committed his reserves in early December. Even with his forces boosted, the Finns were still greatly outnumbered. Mannerheim knew he needed a victory to revive the spirits of his men. On the moonless night of December 9, two companies of Finns crossed a frozen lake to attack the camped-out Soviets. One company got lost. The other, led by Lt. Col. Aaro Pajari, snuck up on an entire regiment of Soviets, took careful positions, and opened fire. In a few minutes it was all over and the entire regiment lay dead, over a thousand men wiped out. The raid unnerved the Soviets, who remained immobile for two days, while the Finns found a new bounce in their step knowing the Reds could be beaten.
The Finns kept pushing. One Soviet probe of about 350 men got ambushed by a Finnish task force, killing every Russian. Another Russian night attack into the Finnish rear was halted when the attackers stopped to eat sausage soup from an abandoned Finnish kitchen. As the Russians dined al fresco, the Finns regrouped and wiped out the sausage eaters. The Finns spotted another Russian night advance on a lake and opened fire, not stopping until all two hundred Soviet attackers lay dead on the ice.
On December 12 the Finnish commander Mannerheim moved his troops forward. They pressed the attack, despite fierce Soviet resistance. When the Soviet troops were too beaten up, they would just call up fresh ones. The Finns lacked this luxury, but they kept fighting with their dwindling numbers. By the time the attack petered out on December 23, the Finns had pushed the Russians far enough from the main roads to feel secure. The cost was about 630 Finnish deaths and over 5,000 Soviet dead and another 5,000 wounded. While a stunning victory for Mannerheim, it also showed that even with a 10:1 kill ratio, the Finns would run out of troops well before the Soviets.
By Christmas the Soviets paused to regroup, still not home. They had thrown more than seven divisions against the Line, and the Finns sisued them all back, destroying about 60 percent of their armored vehicles. The Mannerheim Line was undented. Now, when you have purged most of the officers in the army, staged mock trials to eliminate your political friends and rivals, and airbrushed out any historical inconveniences, you have not established a system for obtaining strong feedback from your underlings. But the chief of the Soviet armed forces, Kliment Voroshilov, foolishly lay the failure at Stalin’s feet for his army purges and backed up his point by smashing a suckling pig on the table in front of the Russian Rex. Instead of killing Voroshilov, the evil genius in Stalin extracted revenge by making Voroshilov his whipping boy for years to come, always keeping the specter of the firing squad on hand. Most attackers would have either changed strategy or simply given up. Stalin had a different system. He brought up fresh divisions from the virtually limitless supply of unhappy manpower and readied to repeat the whole affair. Soldiers who declined to volunteer for suicide attacks faced the firing squad. It was mass murder under the guise of determination.
Incredibly, farther north the Soviets suffered even worse defeats. Roads were fewer and not much bigger than paths. Soviets tank columns quickly bogged down, and a division might stretch out over more than twenty miles. A key battle took place for weeks at the Kollaa River, where the Finns dug in along its north bank. At first the Soviets threw a division of troops against a few thousand Finns. Then the Soviets added a second, then a third, and finally a fourth division. Still the Finns held firm. In late January the Soviets launched an all-out offensive, but they simply totted up about a thousand dead a day to the growing casualty list. In one instance, four thousand Russians attacked thirty-two Finns. There the Line cracked. Finally, the Soviets had found their winning ratio.
To fight the overwhelming odds, the Finns adopted the tactic called motti: cut the long Soviet column into tiny pieces and slowly destroy each fragment. Mannerheim knew the tactics would work as he anticipated the response by the petrified and doltish Russian officers. The Soviets would fight hard but would never venture into the dense woods, and if a column got cut in half, they would simply sit tight and wait. For what, no one is sure, but that was the closest thing to a plan in the Soviet playbook.
The first use of motti took place against a Soviet division on the shores of Lake Ladoga. Here the Finns minced a well-stocked Soviet division into little pieces and slowly strangled it. The Soviets formed defensive pockets but slowly succumbed to the cold and hunger, fighting with dwindling supplies of ammunition.
But the real Soviet disaster occurred in the far north woods. There the Finns perfected motti against the 163rd Division. About 10 percent of the division died from the cold before the first shot was even fired. On December 12 the Finns sliced through the Soviet division in short, sharp, and well-planned operations, cutting the division in two. The Finns launched two or three of these raids a day, slowly chopping the division into smaller and smaller sections.
To rescue the division the Soviets sent in the Forty-fourth Division. A series of quick raids on December 23 stalled its advance. It simply stopped, its commander suffering from an outsized case of brain freeze. After a month of warfare the Soviets still had no idea how to gain the initiative or counterattack effectively. The Finns turned up the tempo on the 163rd, and it collapsed on December 28. A few breakout attempts by survivors failed, and in a typical Winter War battle, about three hundred Soviets got machined-gunned in the open with not one Finnish casualty. Meanwhile the relatively fresh Forty-fourth Division simply stood idle.