Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 87 - Winter War Part 3: Comrade Zap Brannigan and the Molotov Cocktail

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Soviets launch unending frontal assaults against the Finnish Defenders. Little did the Soviets know that the Finns had a secret weapon: tens of thousands of empty booze bottles and balls of steel. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Grab a T Shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow us: @lions_by

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Lion's Lair by Donkey's Podcast. I'm Joe and burping into the microphone is Nick. I burped away. Burped away from the microphone. We're all about class here. Exactly. You know what else is classy? Winter War Part 3.

Classiest. Part 3 of 25. I have been researching this. I have brought a snowmaker into my home to better put me in the mood. My family has left me. My dog is no longer my friend. The garage is now a swamp as well. I've flooded my garage and then froze it and filled it full of landmines.

ATF, if you're listening, that is a joke. Please do not come and Waco me. But yeah, we are in part three of the Winter War. Alright. I normally say I don't aim for episode numbers anymore. Aiming for five. You're aiming for five? Aiming for five. Okay. It will be

slightly shorter than the war itself. Nice. So when we left you last week, the hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were storming across the Finnish border and the badly outnumbered Finnish soldiers were hunkered down for the assault. If you remember, the government thought that the Finnish working class was oppressed and starving and didn't even have shoes. Yeah. They were under the belief that Finnish leftists and communists.

I think Finnish shoes are just cubes of ice that they just stick their foot into. Well, it's hard to find shoes when your feet are actually ski-shaped. Oh, yes. They evolved to ski. All right, later. So they were operating under a bullshit idea that the Finnish leftists and the communists in Finland still held some kind of ill will towards the government as a repercussion from the white terror during the

war. And part of that is true. So don't flame me too hard in the comment section. That did exist. The white terror happened. It was terrible. And the leftists that survived the war weren't super happy about it. But that doesn't mean they wanted to destroy Finland. But something that Stalin seemingly forgot was that the hardline communists who fought in that civil war or who had supported the red effort had mostly fled to the Soviet Union or died. Or both. Outside of that, they were old. Yeah. the red effort, had mostly fled to the Soviet Union or died. Or both. Outside of that, they were old. It's now 1939.

They're not exactly like young firebrands. Stalin should have known this because he was fighting in the Russian Civil War at about the same time. And now he's like, hmm, these guys are all old Zion. They're probably not hitting the streets anytime soon. He probably thinks too highly of And now he's like, hmm, these guys are all old Zion. They're probably not hitting the streets anytime soon. He probably thinks too highly of himself where he's like, they're probably badass.

They're still good. Yeah, I could totally beat that guy's ass. He's like the 1930s tough guy that has his pants pulled up to his tits. And he's like the fat guy from... Oh, we know Stalin does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, he also believed that um they were just waiting for the soviet liberation um and so the the book frozen hell doesn't normally uh roast

people because it's not what it's about it's a frozen book it's a history book uh but he calls this political vaudeville, which is pretty fitting. So when the first towns that the Soviets took over, and I'm going to mispronounce this, it's called Teriyaki. No, I'm kidding, it's Terijaki. It doesn't have the umlauts over it. So Teriyaki.

Yeah, Teriyaki. I enjoy the restaurants here in Yelm. They're not bad. Once they took over the small town, it's not a town of note really at all. They immediately set up a puppet government that they called the People's Republic of Finland and dragged a veteran of the Civil War and founder of the banned Finnish Communist Party,

a guy named Otto Wilhelm Kusinen, to be its head. The problem is when when you're, when you're trying to do that, when you're trying to like, uh, kind of like split the country in half and, and force the, uh,

finished citizens to take sides, you kind of want them to have somebody to, to rally around. And Kusin wasn't exactly that guy. From what I know, people in bands aren't really reliable. Yeah. Uh,

now, uh, once in power, like a good puppet, Kusinan signed every single pre-war demand the Soviet Union had given the Finnish government that they refused to sign, as well as he signed the paperwork necessary

to absorb his imaginary version of Finland into the Soviet Union. Now, the idea was that once Kusinan was in place, he would inspire all these Finnish communists, leftists, whatever, to rise up because they're like oh shit look now there's a communist finland again yeah uh finland let's go support that one a couple problems with that one no one had any fucking idea who kusin was he wasn't like a household name to finish communists or or fins in general no one really understood who he was.

He just happened to be a Stalinist who lived in the Soviet Union who was Finnish. So Stalin's like, that guy. I'm going over here in Teriyaki. Now, even Kusinan knew this problem was dumb. And he told Stalin, like, there really isn't an underground communist movement in Finland. This isn't going to work. The ground's too cold to go underground you don't understand yeah there are literally no mole people here uh especially no mole communists uh kusin i'm assuming in the most lauding terms available he could think of told stalin that his idea really wasn't gonna work because you know

you can't tell stalin your idea isn't gonna work because that's how you get dead yeah i wonder how he put it uh he probably said very good idea sir let's do that but the fault doesn't fall on stalin himself as uh and by fault i mean not by picking kustanin that is stalin's fault but the the the botched idea of this puppet republic was really, really bad. And they picked a guy who could not run it. Just because you once led a political party does not, in fact, mean you'll be good at being the head of a government. For instance, Kustin had no idea what was going on in Finland anymore. Because you remember he was running around the Soviet Union probably trying his hardest not to die during the purges um he was so behind the times it was kind of hilarious for instance he attempted he's like well you know what nobody really knows who i am and most fins

don't like what we're trying to do here so we're going to try to win them over and that was we're going to work on land distribution um you know we're going to pass the uh we're going to try to break up some of these monopolies on land and give it to the working class, which is a common leftist tactic, and it's not entirely wrong. And also, we are going to establish an eight-hour workday to better benefit the working class. Now, there's a problem.

One, those are both very, very good ideas. The problem is they both have already happened in Finland 25 years ago. He didn't know it was hip at the time in Finland. This is like 25 years ago would have put him only a couple years removed from actually living in Finland. During his speech, he's like, I'm doing all this cool shit. We already have that. Yeah, that's like Elon Musk. That's like Elon Musk going on Twitter.

Elon Musk, that's like Elon Musk going on Twitter. He's like, the only way we need to alleviate traffic is through underground tunnels and public transit. And like, you mean a subway. You're talking about a subway. We already have those. But have you heard my idea of landing on the moon? Crazy idea here. Yeah, hear me out.

Sir, it is 2020. But yeah, like Finns were like, what? It turned out the real Finnish government had did that 25 years ago, and it was already encoded into law. Now, the land distribution that they did wasn't as extreme as what you'd imagine that Kusinan wanted, sure. But the fact was that they actually already did happen. Now, Kusinan also wanted to, he wanted to be more than a puppet, like a lot of puppet governments do.

He wanted to think of himself as an equal person in this partnership, which is insane because he was partnering with fucking Joseph Stalin. So he's like, I'm going to create my own army for the People's Republic of Finland. Yeah, I want to be invited to his apartment. So he created what was known as the Finnish National Army. Now, that is not a real army, and it will only be talked about for this one paragraph, so bear with me. Big did he get.

We'll talk about that. Nobody really gave a shit. And kind of like the Civil War, he never had a population base to get conscription off of, so it wasn't going anywhere. So instead, he enlisted a couple thousand Civil War veterans

to fill its ranks. Now, if you remember... That's more than I can get. They're in their late 40s now, most likely. There might be some child soldiers floating around or whatever, but they are not the cream-of-the-crop people you should be enlisting in to be a revolutionary army. This formation smells like Bengay. My back hurts.

So the whole thing was such a joke that they wouldn't even send it into battle, which is impressive because, I mean, look what they sent it to battle. Which is impressive because, I mean, look what they sent it to battle. Later, as the war pressed on, the Soviets and their puppet government functionaries were like, I got a better idea. We have all these Finns sitting in POW camps that we captured. Let's turn them to our side. Only 16 people joined them. 16 out of several thousand.

Oh, okay. Several thousand. Yeah, 16. I 16 i wonder how hey who wants to join there's just like a few spots here and there where people are like yeah raise these hands slowly and normally what happens is like if you join us we will treat you better and because like being in a pow camp in the middle of the dead of winter and fucking finland ran by the soviet union sounds like what nightmares are made out of like fuck it i'll join for a goddamn campfire right about now damn it i want a piece of bread yeah uh i mean that's kind of the i mean the ss did that during world war ii where uh they captured a whole bunch of people they're like hey if you join us we will treat you better like

there was i think it's called like the british legion or something like that they're like yeah you're gonna be the vanguard when the Nazi army takes over the UK and like 10 guys join them, I think. I don't even actually, I don't even think it was 10. I think it was less than that. But yeah, same thing. Now, instead of breaking apart, like the Soviet Union wanted them to,

along class and societal lines and ideological lines and everything else, the Soviet invasion actually unified finland under what i believe we have called the great unified fuck them theory on this show where it's like we don't like you but we don't like them a whole lot more and like fuck that guy and then all of everybody joins together to fuck that one guy and they're like we'll deal with each other later guy yeah uh and it now that in propaganda terms and what it is now called is called the spirit of the winter war um and it's not entirely wrong they don't it really did help unify the country together like

the soviet union probably had a much better chance of tearing apart finland if they just tried to like do some kind of i don't know political op yeah like instead of like actively attempting to destroy them uh but leftists from all shades end up joining the finnish military um and because they didn't totally trust the finnish government to have their best interest because like the communist party still banned uh like labor unions were still not a thing um because they thought the labor unions is a hotbed of leftism which is entirely incorrect so like if you formed a union in finland at the time like cool you're fired oh fuck okay um so like there was still you know quite a bit of animosity there uh but you know uh the idea of the soviet union being some liberator to them

was quickly evaporating when they watched the soviet union like high five with the nazis then take over poland like oh fuck and like and then it went from being like hey maybe the soviets will come and help us again to oh god the soviets are gonna come and try to help us again when the purges started yeah like okay now we're terrified of you. Like, we want nothing to do with you anymore. This is great. Because remember, like, when the Soviets helped them during the Civil War, that was like, I mean, Lenin has his fucking problems,

but he wasn't Joseph Stalin. But I feel like help from Stalin isn't really help. It's not. Well, it was a lot like the help that the Nazis ended up giving Finland during the Continuation War. Like, yeah, we're going to help you, but we're not going to fucking leave either. Yeah. And then they had to like physically be removed in a different war

altogether. Drop on your skis boys. Yeah. Now Finland, the leftists of Finland saw their only real salvation of maybe not dying in some horrible purge or a death camp of some kind was the actual government. And there's these areas called Red Villages that were

the villages that had supported the communist side during the Civil War. A lot of those guys joined the Finnish military like, yeah, fuck the Soviets. Now, there is some controversy because a lot of them died in greater numbers than Finns from other

parts of the country but that has been mostly attributed to the fact that uh kind of like a greater number of lower class uh people died in the vietnam war because like probably didn't have a great education you're gonna carry a rifle like and that sounds kind of shitty but it it's not true. They were mostly farmers, hunters, shit like that. You're infantry. Infantry's going to die a lot. Yeah. It sucks.

War's bad. Don't invade people. Just don't do it. But that, like a lot of things, never stopped Stalin from doing something stupid. And on that topic, let's talk about the hilarious Red Navy. Now we often talk about how backwards the

Red Army was at the time. And it was. The Red Navy was still firmly in World War I land. But worse kept and even worse led. Which is impressive. Most of the admirals had died during the purge.

And there is, I guess, a historical reason for that. The Red Navy, which before that was the Russian Imperial Navy, was kind of a hotbed of mutinies and being something of a vanguard for revolutions. It happened during the Russian Revolution. So Stalin really didn't trust the admirals like you might do that again die yeah like but we're communists like yeah so yeah um now the red navy had attempted to lay siege on the gulf of finland this the soviet name was it had largely been forgotten about since the revolution kicked off and got rid of

the Tsar. So it was about a quarter century behind the times. And the only reason it wasn't blown out of the water within 10 minutes of this war is because the Finnish Navy was even more backwards and was little more than a coast guard. It was like gunboats. But those were from

1914, 1950. That's awesome. It's 1939. Yeah. So, yeah. They did get their hands on two boats that could be considered cruisers, but it's the Gulf of Finland. In the winter, they were frozen in place and never fought. Oh, yes. We have another bunker.

Yeah, pretty much. We have an ice bunker. Speaking of ice, by the beginning of December, the entire Gulf had begun freezing, though it wasn't completely frozen yet. So the brilliant naval commander, Joseph Stalin, a man who never once served a day in any Navy, simply told his admirals,

use submarines to go under the ice. Now that would kind of work. There are icebreaker submarines and that does work these days. But again, this is 1939 and Joseph Stalin's using submarines that are from maybe 1920 um going into how dumb that is on face value the soviet naval officers point

the gulf was just too shallow like we'll just hit the ground sir i mean i imagine like the tower of it like dive dot and the tower's still sticking out. The guy's still sitting up on top like, ah, fuck, we hit the bottom. And it was also strewn with reefs that would just shred a fucking sub if it grinded up against it. Still hadn't ordered them into battle anyway. Now, the subs really didn't do much of anything because as dumb as the admirals were or the people in charge, they're like, we're not going to just order our sub to go sink itself yeah we'll just hang out yeah uh now instead of confronting the soviet navy on the water the fins decided being their best interest to duel it out from the shore

uh finnish coastal guns were uh older than everybody using them at that point a lot of them were leftovers from world war one the civil, some from the late 1800s. Oh, wow. But they did crew the best trained gunners in the entire Finnish military. That's awesome. I don't know how that works. Well, we can't afford guns, but we sure can practice on them a lot. So, sure.

Maybe they had competitions with those, too. Yeah. Let's go hunting reindeer with this fucking cannon. Soviet naval tactics were strikingly familiar to their land tactics. And so they kind of sent the boat version

of a human wave attack, which is they got really, really close. That doesn't sound surprising. Yeah. And it's because that their gunners were kind of shit

and their guns were shit and their boats were shit. So they're like, well, let's get really, really close so we can't miss let's surely die um didn't really work uh and each one was uh instead of like really seeing the finished guns and they weren't really well camouflaged either they just decided well we'll just obliterate everything over there we're just gonna broadside that whole swath of forest, or we're going to destroy that whole harbor where that one gun is.

The problem was that the Finnish coastal gunners had balls of fucking steel, and the Soviet naval gunners were trained by Mr. Magoo. As badly aimed broadsides landed all around the Finnish gunners, destroying entire swaths of forest and whole harbors, like I said, the gunners simply stood there and waited for it to be over. So they would just wait and be like, well, the Soviets have to reload eventually. So they'd wait for the pause

so they wouldn't get their heads taken off of the fucking shell. And then in some cases, use their one single cannon to fire incredibly well-aimed single shots that turned the entire soviet navy back i can imagine the barrages all right they're done oh fuck an entire battleship does a backflip through the air it explodes like in in one case they did turn away uh a ship that was like bigger than anything in the Finnish Navy with one single shot because the way it turned I mean it was a completely lucky

shot the Soviet boat turned and it hit it right below the waterline and cause it like it to flood with water and it had to retreat or sink really cold water they really wanted to get like another case they hit a boat directly in the magazine which cause it to explode yeah it's like but you can't fucking do that twice yeah or two. They really wanted to get out of there. In another case, they hit a boat directly in the magazine because it exploded.

Yeah, it's like, bet you can't fucking do that twice. We're really good at this, or really lucky. Don't look that one too close. You don't want to find out that you're wrong. Let's just keep being lucky. Finally, the Gulf

of Finland froze up entirely, ending the naval war and saving the Red Navy from further embarrassment. Now, as we talked about before, the Karelian Isthmus was the main strategic point on land. And that's where the Soviet Union was really aiming its main push. The Finns knew this would be a case and evacuated all the civilians ahead of time so they wouldn't have to worry about them getting caught in the crossfire. And what's really crazy is, now the Finns conducted scorch-earth tactics to everything.

If somebody abandoned their house, then they burned it down. In one case, they actually, there was like a Finnish border guard who went to a house with like an old woman who was by herself. All of her kids were in the army now at the front or already dead.

And they're like, hey, we need you to leave and she's like okay and they let and the border guards walked away and they turned on she was torching her own house she's like i got this yeah i got this uh now obviously uh this was so that the soviets have nowhere to go there was no food except they carried it there's be no shelter shelter. If I can't have this, you can have this. And this would, of course, be the exact same fucking thing the Soviets would do in a few years against Nazis. Though the village was thoroughly destroyed and everything else that could be used

for anything was removed, they were also booby-trapped to hell and back. I think the Soviets learned a lot. They did, and that's kind of how this war ends. Stalin's like, this isn't fucking working. I actually have to promote someone competent. But we'll get to that point. There was definitely

a Soviet centers for lessons learned somewhere down the line. Now, mines and bombs were left everywhere in these villages, including wooden mines so the Soviets couldn't detect them. Oh, man. So the Soviets, after getting their shit fucked up in in these villages, including wooden mines so the Soviets couldn't detect them. Oh, man. So then the Soviets, after getting their shit fucked up

in a couple villages, were like, God damn it, we have to send scouts out to all these villages before we finally go up to them. So they sent scouts out, which would then immediately

get ambushed by snipers and then have their corpses booby-trapped. Snow mines. So they effectively worked the Soviet army into a feedback loop of ambushes forever now the isthmus was normally a string of swamps and lakes that were if you were to make a natural barrier the worst it could possibly be for military operations it would look like this but they had frozen over which is the

one time finland actually helped the soviets um this allowed soviet armor columns and soldiers to simply walk across frozen lakes because i mean these lakes are so solid frozen you drive tanks across them oh wow um but the fins do this is going to happen so they light they laid mines in the water modifying them in such a way that they would float. So then when it froze over, there'd be landmines just below the ice's surface. This is fucking some acne shit.

This is awesome. So you can see where this is going. There'd be an entire company and they would not put them at the water's edge. They'd be in the middle. So there'd be like an entire company,

battalion, whatever, of Soviet soldiers walking across the lake it would explode kill a handful of people but then it would fracture all the fucking ice and send everybody to the frozen water where they would die yeah and though it sucks and then they knew that like this this would only work once or twice and the so it's like all right all right no more walking on lakes you have to go Well, that's where they have the ambushes set up. They wouldn't ambush them while they were on the lakes, like, nah, let the lake handle

this one. Look, there's no winning here, guys. We either die in the water or we die on the road. There were some places where the ice had frozen, but they had not mined. But they're like, well, fuck, the Soviets are gonna find this out and they're gonna go that way. So how can we make it look like we've been here?

And from your Acme fucking playbook, they rolled in a giant unbroken sheet of cellophane over it. So from the sky, the frozen lake looked unfrozen. So the Soviets didn't even go look at it. I have no idea how that works. Like around the table, someone's like, fuck, what are we going to do? Someone's like, we could mine it.

No, we don't have the landmines for it. We could set up an ambush, we don't have the men for it. Someone's like, plastic wrap? Sell a fiend? My god. Like, who the fuck is this? Who let their dumb cousin come into the office? Fuck it, let's try his. They're like, oh, can't believe it worked.

Promote that man. Make him a division commander or something um now a huge amount of soviet armor and vehicles that they're pushing into the theater caused traffic jams on the few roads that went through the area because remember there's only a couple routes through because that's an incredibly rural area and finland doesn't exactly have a lot of fucking traffic going out that way so there's like two roads so they immediately went into gridlock these columns were then battled by horrible winter storms outright freezing soldiers to the ground and killing them the fins would then target their rear units uh because now the fins moved with small personal uh like kind of like burners that you'd use in camping to cook food they didn't

have huge field kitchens right they did this because one they simply didn't have the military infrastructure to support or supply these field kitchens into because they needed to move quickly they're even their defense is flexible um the soviets by their part brought giant field kitchens that belched out black smoke as they cooked because they were powered by wood. So the Finns were like, hey, look, there's a field kitchen because they could see a giant fucking pillar of black smoke

and they'd know it'd always be surrounded by soldiers eating. So they'd ambush them constantly. I can't even eat. Leave us alone. Look, all I did is invade your homeland. You don't have to shoot the cook. And that's the thing is is they would do those ambushes. And they were pretty, they did a lot of damage.

But just the word of Finnish resistance, like, oh, I hear there's snipers nearby or something. The whole Soviet column would just freeze in place for hours. And that would make the gridlock worse going back and back and back and back to the point there was traffic jams going clear across the country's borders. Jesus. Yeah.

If they had artillery or an air force, they could have absolutely wiped out the Soviets, but they didn't. Have you had one of those things, really? Now, Mannerheim was worried about the effects the Soviet tanks would have on his largely untrained and inexperienced troops many of them have never even seen a tank let alone had to fight one uh it

turns out this was a legit worry no matter how badass the the fins are largely made to sound um even though soviet armor tactics were you could call them dumb, unevolved. It was largely tank human waves because that's just how they did things, was human waves. It was just massive frontal assaults. It was enough to shake the Finnish soldiers the first time they saw them. Like, oh God, look at all those fucking,

because they had hundreds of tanks everywhere. In many cases, the soldiers were like, fuck this, I'm out, without even firing a shot. Because I mean, also, what were they going to shoot at them? Exactly. They had no anti-tank weapons. In some cases, like a scout going,

hey, there might be tanks, would cause companies to be like, fuck this, we're gone. Wow. So just the rumor of an armored attack was enough. The badly equipped Finns were largely desperate to come up with just some way, any way to just slow down Soviet tanks. Soon they discovered that if they got really close to the tanks,

they could attack them, which, sure. That sounds terrible. Yeah, if I got really close to you and shot myself in the face, I would probably also shoot you. Yeah. They would wait for the tanks to drive up to their position and then try to wedge logs or pry bars into the tracks. Oh,

so they, they like someone, uh, uh, brainstorm. Like I remember when I was 10 and I was riding my bike around, my brother shoved the stick between the spokes and I ate shit. What if I did that to a tank?

My pants got stuck in the chain and I flipped. What if I did this to a tank? Make big pants. Now, like if you did this to a tank i make big pants now like if you do this and i mean in modern day tanks like when i was on an abrams if something got wedged in there good enough you could totally fuck some shit up like it's gonna pop off road wheels break sprockets break track all sorts of shit and it was even more effective back then when shit was largely just bolted together in a factory by an illiterate person. Now once the tank was stuck dead they would just lob firebombs at it

which were christened Molotov Cocktails. Jokingly saying that it was a drink to go with all the bread. That's awesome. Like, oh we see your bread baskets, bitch. And they killed more people with Molotov Cocktails than Molotov ever fucking killed with his bread baskets, bitch. They killed more people with Molotov cocktails

than Molotov ever fucking killed with his bread baskets, which is impressive. Only like a couple, I think like 100, 200 Finns died by airstrike during the war, mostly because the Soviet Air Force is fucking competent. But they blew up a lot of fucking tanks with Molotov cocktails. Now, normally a bottle of gasoline, which is what a traditional Molotov cocktail

or firebomb would be made out of, would not do a whole lot to a steel tank or a tank made out of aluminum. Really any kind of metal tank. It's just shitty gasoline and fire. So the Finns came up with a special blend. Gasoline, kerosene, tar, and potassium chloride were mixed together to create

what is effectively an actual fire bomb. It exploded with fire. Instead of just being a fire that you chucked at somebody. I'll tell you about the time we tried making those. Yeah, this was back at Forehead. No. Yeah, so we'd empty our beer bottles after drinking them.

And we'd grab the gasoline because we were at a bonfire and you need gasoline to start up your pallets. Yeah, that went really bad. It went super bad. Because one of my buddies was like, all right, I got it. And it slipped out of his hand and it dropped. And we were all around our vehicles. And we're like, oh, fuck.

And I started fucking running. So I was like, fuck this. Oh, boy. That's exactly what I would imagine a group of soldiers would do with glass bottles and gasoline, honestly. Yeah, that's what happens when you've got butt lights. Get some BLs on you and shed light some shit on fire. Uh, yeah,

they, they, uh, evolved a shitty fire bomb that work really good on a group of people into a fire explosive that destroyed a lot of Soviet tanks. Um, these tank hunter squads were super effective in lieu of literally any other way to fight off the Soviet tanks.

Uh, but as you can imagine, charging tanks full of firebombs on a suicide mission killed a lot of people. I imagine tank hunter squads didn't last long. 70% of them died on their first mission. Oh God. Now the surprising part is like,

they never had a shortage of people like, yeah, I'll do it. They actually had to turn people away. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. They wouldn't, I never found a single account in the book that someone's like they were ordered

to do this they only took volunteers because they're like you're probably not coming back bro understandable yeah i just like fire yeah it sounds like i just i really want to feel the heat like yeah send that guy i want to see the fire dance. Burn with me. Now, these Molotov cocktails became such an effective tool for soldiers at the front that they ran low on bottles. So the state liquor board rushed 40,000 empty fifth bottles to the front. Oh, they sent them full. You got to drink them.

The book says empty. I think they were emptied into the soldiers yeah they're like sure we need the bottles uh conspiracy theory the fins were just drunk the whole time they never actually use molotov cocktails like yeah keep telling them to send us glass bottles just drunk and slaughtering people uh that inexperience on the front line that manor heim and virtually every virtually every other Finnish officer was worried about also went all the way through the chain of command Finnish staff officers were

largely acting in that role for the first time reacted badly when rumors of Soviet attacks came up ordering their soldiers to retreat or to attack with no evidence like in one case a Finnish officer ordered a counter attack and there's no soviets there

what are we attacking i don't know we just keep going for the bushes yeah yeah um finnish speaking soviet soldiers also uh broke into the finnish radio networks which were largely unencrypted and uncoded it's like we speak a different language. They couldn't possibly learn that even though we share this giant fucking border with them. Were they just using the fucking Walmart walkie-talkies? Oh, I found their channel. They're on channel

one. I got this icon at Walmart or fucking state radio store two. Now, once they got into the radio networks, they just started spreading rumors and confusion like fake orders like ordering units to retreat and like i guess we're leaving now even though you think this would be a really good way to completely hamstring an army it really didn't work all that great it was one of those things like they figured out what was happening

within like a day and then immediately worked to counteract it. Within a day, they were back under control. And instead of being demoralized by this as they should have been, the Finns actually rallied behind it as a joke. They got pissed. That's awesome. Confusion aside, they had engaged the Soviets and won. Like Finland still exists. The Mannerheim line holds.

Fuck them. We're still here uh they had been outnumbered as many as 40 to 1 in some cases and there had been no poland style breakthrough they had held off the soviets the fins who survived defending the border area had withdrawn to the manorheim line uh which actually in some cases that didn't happen. There was almost like a peninsula of Finnish territory that went into the Soviet Union, which is almost immediately cut off and surrounded and destroyed.

A lot of the Finnish soldiers or border guards in that area decided that like, well, what do we do? We can't get back. And it was like, let's go live in the woods. And a lot of them just fucking vanished into the woods until the war ended. What?

Some of them did like occasionally pop back up to shoot Soviets as they walked by. Like, I'm kind of bored. What are you going to do? Well, let's go shoot that. Let's go shoot Ivan over there. Let's go shoot that fucking guy. It's like, me?

Oh, fuck. Yeah. But like the ones that did pull back to the Mannerheim line brought this enthusiasm like, hey, we fucked them up.

See, they came back happy like, yeah, we got surrounded but we fucked their shit up. And they also remember they learned a lot

being the first people to fight the Soviet army which at that point the soldiers not at the border were like, oh my God, they're going to stomp us into the ground.

They're like, no, those guys fucking suck. We can do this. While the Soviets are in earshot? Yeah. Hey, that's not cool. Not like, sure, all these guys at the border had been pushed back. But they were just this simple weight of numbers. Like, I only can kill so many people.

I ran out of ammo. The Soviets were moving so slowly, though. simple weight of numbers like i only can kill so many people i ran out of ammo uh the soviets were moving so slowly though they really couldn't take advantage of any of their victories in the front because they were just moving so goddamn slow i mean by simple weight of numbers all of the losses that they took as crippling as they should have been to any other army at the border like yeah whatever we got another hundred thousand people like nobody gave a shit yeah instead uh they would like assault the position, take it,

force the Finns back, and then withdraw because the Soviets did not want to fight at night fucking ever, ever, ever, ever. The Finns worked around the clock. Instead,

they would literally circle their tanks and trucks, turn their headlights on, and face them outward, and then form a giant bonfire in the middle of the wind where an entire company would sleep around without any kind of guards around.

Oh, wow. So the Finns would creep out, uh, from the, from the Mannerheim line where they'd fallen back, back into these positions. They had just drawn from raid,

the Soviet supplies and ammo from the dead, which the Soviets had tendency to just leave out. Uh, and then take up their positions again. Sometimes they would just raid the fucking Soviets, shoot a couple while they were asleep, then go back to their positions. So the Soviets would wake up like nothing had happened.

Like, oh fuck, the position's full of Finns again. It was just like, your dead buddies around you? Yeah. Like, where did all their clothes go? They would just wake up and they would be back to square one all the time that's not good like i would hate to wake up to that yeah yeah like you wake up to take a piss like uh i remember we charged that position a couple hours oh shit guy shooting at me again

now the red army seemingly not learning their lesson would be a normal part of this war they launched their first major attack on the manorheim line on the left flank manorheim knew this uh due to the obvious buildup of soviet forces like they did not try to hide it at all so three soviet divisions it's hard to find hide yeah they weren't very good at it i mean they were there's just so many of them and this the area they were attacking is the one flat death trap they could have picked in the entire Karelian Isthmus. So it's like, hey, look, some Soviets. Now, the Soviets raid three divisions against a single Finnish one.

The Soviets brought 84 artillery batteries, which would later be increased up to 111 against nine Finnish ones. Wow. And it should be said, those Finnish guns really didn't have any ammo. They were just there. They only had enough rounds for a couple per cannon per day. The thing was, is they could not have picked a worse place to attack the Mannerheim Line.

The left flank was nestled on higher ground with a flat open death trap in front of them with interlacing sectors of fire of machine guns, artillery and rifles and landmines and barbed wire creating a killing field. Eventually they'll run out of ammo. Just keep going. And then the Soviets went full, the battle of the Somme,

like, fuck it. We'll just batter him with artillery and then we'll go in and pick up the pieces later. Uh, and the Finnish guns, knowing they couldn't, you know, effectively fire counter battery and like an artillery duel just didn't shoot back they just like buried them and hoped that they would still be alive after the fucking artillery

bombardment had passed after four hours of non-stop artillery fire thousands of rounds had been shot at the fins did, did very little fucking damage. Because remember, the Finns didn't build things out of concrete or anything. They were earthen trenches reinforced by more boulders and logs and shit. So as soon as they had a chance, they could just reinforce them with nature. Yeah.

It's all around us. Yeah, like, bitch, you're literally fighting Finland right now. Yeah. Now, as soon as the fire ended, thousands upon thousands of soviet troops long and tanks launched a frontal assault um only then when those troops were out in that killing field did the finnish artillery open fire on them um and the soviets ran for their

fucking lives i imagine like oh god they do have artillery uh hundreds of them died within seconds they launched frontal assaults over and over again each one uh having been destroyed by finished artillery um the fins waited so like uh there was they're only a couple hundred meters away from the trench when the artillery fired because their guns are old. Some of the sights are out of date. They can't fire them very well. So they had to be really sure they were within the operating ranges of these guns. These things aren't very

trustworthy. Let's wait until we can see them. Where are your sights? This one's based off a feel. It's just some old guy licking his finger and sticking it up in the wind. We're good. He fucking wipes the ground, licks it, and goes, yeah, we're good. Go ahead and shoot him. Like, oh, cool, they're 20 feet in front of us.

It's like the don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes, but in Finland. These frontal assaults being literally turned into nothing but blood, shit, and piss and screaming wounded never slowed the Soviets down. Wave after wave of soviet soldiers came at them as one broke another one would just come in right after him entire platoons got caught in barbed wire which was hidden in snow banks and it doesn't detail if that was a plan or they just had barbed wire which was then snowed on i mean for sure yeah why not both because i think the fins were like oh cool they don't see it. This is great.

Whole Soviet companies were annihilated by air-bursting shrapnel shells firing by Finnish coastal guns because the coastal gunners got bored and there's no more Navy ships to shoot at. Piles of Soviet dead had to be kicked out of the way by Finnish gunners and soldiers because they obscured the fighting positions.

It'd be really tiring to be a Finnish guy on that line. Your fingers just getting cramps? Yeah. In just 24 hours, 2,000 Soviets had been killed. Jesus. And they finally gave up the attack. Like, yeah, alright, alright, we'll see you tomorrow. The Soviets

actually gave up on a major offensive in the Taipal area. That didn't mean that they stopped. Now, they realize that they're not going to break this left flank, but that doesn't mean that they were fully committed to it. They're prairie-dogging their offensive here. It doesn't really make

a lot of sense. They never committed that much to try to break it again, but they continued trying to attack it, which is dumb. Like you couldn't break it with three divisions and hundreds of artillery pieces, but you're going to try with like platoons at a time too.

Oh God. Cool. That single division, the Finnish 10th division would stay there the entire war. They held that line without relief for months uh the soviets ordered frontal assaults on them seemingly at random every couple of days and like clockwork the fins would just mow them down and go and kick the bodies out the way uh if you're thinking that this affected the soviets more than the fins you would somehow be wrong finnish soldiers were so

badly shaken by the mindless slaughter of their Russian attackers that several soldiers had to be evacuated because they became emotionally unstable. I mean, I imagine. Like, maybe that was their plan all along. Like, the Soviets are the Zap Brannigan here. Like, the Finnish soldier has a preset

kill limit. And if we just keep sending wave after wave, they'll eventually just shut down. And then they'll eventually just shut down and then they'll go home and they'll start apparel company and start making coffee it'll be weird but it'll work um yeah in some cases uh as the soviets were attacking finnish soldiers wave their hands around trying to get them to turn back around telling them that they didn't have to throw their lives away like this and it wasn't worth it look i'm tired come on we actually saw that in world war one with the italian soldiers fighting the austrians like go home you don't have to die here

and like they held their fire until they're only 50 meters away hoping the soviet soldiers would just be like they have a point yeah yeah uh. The next Soviet attack came in the Sumo sector, which is the center of the Mannerheim line. Defended by, again, a single Finnish division, this one being the 5th. Now, the odds of the 5th division were about as bad as anywhere else in the Finnish army at this time,

but they had the added level of bad being that their commander actually had no faith in his own soldiers. The men of the 5th had yet to see combat like many units in the Finnish army but their commander just already was like yeah we're not going to be able to stop the Russians here. Which is

definitely what you want to hear your commander say. I would love to hear that. Imagine like sir we can do this. No we can't. No we can't. Shit. That's Imagine like, sir, we can do this. Like, no, we can't. No, we can't. Like, shit. I mean, that's a real confidence builder right there. Like, normally, even when your leader sends you into a suicide mission,

like, for the fatherland? Just questioning it? I'll see you 20 miles in the rear, kids. Well, the Russian sappers blew up the Finnish antiish anti-tank obstacles which isn't a good start uh and they did it like pretty pretty well covered the fins didn't know they were there um and these untrained troops immediately came under armored assault which is not how things should start um now even though the commander definitely dd'd the fuck out of there as fast as he could his soldiers did not like fuck that guy we'll handle this on our own which strangely enough happens a lot in this war but uh instead

these soldiers stayed put in their trenches and waited for the russian tanks to pass now kind of like world war one the russians didn't really have combined arms warfare they had the tanks acting as a mobile cover for infantry so they're like well if we just wait for the tanks to pass by then we just have the infantry to shoot at and the tanks will be all by themselves the tanks don't even know what's going let's go they turn around they're all dead behind them also remember they have no communications for the most part and they're arguing with their commissars constantly so uh so they they let the tanks pass and now that those russian soldiers unprotected were just standing in for their machine guns.

Imagine the Russian soldiers were like, oh, this is easy. Yeah. And then the Russians immediately ran for it after they ran face first into a finished machine gun, which then forced the tanks like, oh, fuck, all of our infantry is dead. And then they retreated. In another section of the line, Russian sappers were killed by their own artillery cover which is fun and because they can't communicate and everybody assumed that the sappers did their job

the tanks then just charged through with the obstacles still in place there were explosions over there that must have been the sappers what do you mean the sappers didn't come back fuck it they ran into the obstacles at like full bore causing them to high center themselves they had you know like everybody's familiar with What do you mean the sabers didn't come back? Fuck it. They ran into the obstacles at full bore, causing them to high center themselves.

Everybody's familiar with the cross-shaped hedgehog tank obstacle that the Germans famously put on Omaha Beach. They did that, but with rocks and boulders. That's real Finnish of them. Yeah. So the tanks would become high centered on the floor of the tank or the tanks would become high centered on these and the you know the floor

of the tank or the the bottom armored tank is virtually unarmored because why would we get hit there uh which allowed the finnish gunners to target the weak spots of that tank with their incredibly out of date anti-tank weapons as the only way they ever worked um the crazy part is this entire offensive was going on totally independently from Finnish high command. And by that, I mean the command structure that was in charge of that sector of the Mannerheim Line had no idea they were under attack. Wow. Russian artillery had destroyed the phone lines and World War I vintage Finnish radios all broke or burnt out from overuse or broke from exposure in the harsh winter. Or sometimes simply

they were just being used too much. Also, there's a lot of times they just didn't work. Like, oh, we got a radio issued to us from high command and it's broken. Cool. Which, that still happens. There's no hand mic. You know, it's a radio. Touch the wires together.

Now, this meant that all these early defensive victories that like the commanders didn't think were going to work were all shouldered on the lowest level of Finnish leadership. Small unit leaders and sometimes just trench lines with all the officers who already held ass with no support whatsoever

from command. All while facing down more soldiers and tanks that were in their entire army. So like conscripts and and E1s and some lieutenant who somehow was in charge of Italians. Like, yeah, we got this. Fuck the generals. That's insane.

I mean, general officers are the most useless officers on the totem pole. They don't really do much. They don't seem to. But if they win, which we will see, they'll immediately take all that credit though always i was in that trench yeah well i was in command of those soldiers yes i was 50 miles away no i couldn't talk to them but they were under my command but if they lose

i was 50 miles away and i didn't even have i couldn't even talk to them i couldn't command them gotta flip that Gotta roll the dice. Now, with this total failure of communication, the Finns immediately had to improvise. And that was use switchboard operators on unsecured lines. Kind of like old-timey telephones. If you remember those cut scenes in movies where you have the people frantically unplugging and plugging in wires. It's that.

That seems super stressful. Yeah. I would hate that job. It's also completely unsecured, unencrypted, and it can very easily be tapped into by the Russians, who have already done that. And they knew that the Russians were listening to them, so they knew they were kind of rolling the dice on those.

So they'd improvise a code on the fly. And it has to be the best code in human history. Panda. Try again. Now, this led the Finns to kind of develop their own language. A lot of Finns spoke Swedish because there was Swedish-speaking Finns. As we talked about in episode one, a lot of cross-pollination there because of colonization. And they used a mixture of Swedish and Finnish slang.

And when that didn't work, they simply used swear words to describe regions, commanders, units. It was just a string of curses. Now imagine you're a Soviet radio man with a commissar peering over your shoulder, trying to write down this message and not trying to piss off your angry political officer. Commad commissar, the 5th Division message is as follows. Shit, piss, fuck, fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits fart turd and twat like uh fuck i think they're cussing each other out true heads will know i just quoted a blink 182 song that's right uh anyway it worked fucking worked great

because like uh and there is something to be said, like, you can learn a language but not know its slang. Because you don't live there. It's true. And, I mean, like, so they had Finnish-speaking Soviet soldiers, but, like, they learned in school or whatever. They don't know all the slang. Also, they don't know this weird mixture of curse words in two different other languages. So it's like, fuck it, this isn't working anymore. Now, all this didn't stop the Russians from fleeing unsupported ground attacks at these defensive works anyway leaving thousands of dead bodies

in the snow behind them in another occasion a soviet tank stopped dead in its tracks now this is an entire soviet armor offensive 30 tanks they just ran out of gas wow just just stopped right there in the kill zone ran out of gas and they And they were just slowly, one by one, picked off by Finnish anti-tank fire. Oh, that sucks. Like, the crew didn't even get out and run because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they abandoned their tank. So they just sat there and died. I think I'd try it. My chances.

No, I definitely would have surrendered. Like, I like my chances with the Finns better than I do with the political officer. You guys seem pretty cool. I heard you guys pretty cool i heard you get swearing over the radio um yeah or at least like imagine how angry those tankers are they're just sitting there and the tank driver is like the tank is like why the fuck aren't we going i don't know sir the tank just isn't running as you look down this says says E on the, like, I'm not telling them I forgot to fuel up. I'll fucking die before I do that. Now the cold had grown so horrifically bad by December that

after a few of these attacks, the Finns were trying another tactic to scare off some of their Soviet enemies, and that was they picked up their frozen corpses and stuck them face down in the snow to try to ward off the attacks. Look what keeps happening!

The awarding was ignored. Waves of Soviet soldiers cleared land mines for the soldiers behind them with some of them linking arms and sprinting through Finnish minefields. The Finns looked down in horror as the Soviet marched to their death singing party songs and cheering. Now, before you think this is a group of soldiers caught up in

some kind of weird revolutionary spirit of taking over Finland for imperialistic purposes, these soldiers were actually forced to do this. Political officers and battalion commanders would order them into no man's land under threat of death. Whereas Singh, it was no certain death, but at least you had a chance of getting your leg blown off or something. But if you stay here, I'm going to shoot you in the head. Now Singh. Yeah. Finnish soldiers were so horrified by this

that many of them did not open fire on the human waves. And so they just watched them get torn apart by mines and get wounded and shit. Wow. And sometimes like when the Soviets made it across, like the few that did, would immediately surrender. And the Finns are like, yeah, yeah, come on over. You guys get treated like shit.

Come on. Yeah. There could be only one. One Soviet soldier said that there was no fear in the ranks. Just like a dull apathy and like an indifference towards impending doom which is somehow more depressing than thinking that these are all scared shitless conscripts like they're all lining up all every single one just accepting they're already dead uh which has

to be the most soviet thing that has ever been said in this podcast yeah uh a captured soviet letter from the suma battlefield lays out things pretty starkly. A soldier who was trying to write home said that they were all starving, having not eaten about two days, they were all infested with lice and freezing, and dozens of people had died from the weather or pneumonia or typhus, dysentery. And then the Finns got their hands in some POWs, and the prisoners painted a pretty grim picture and and there's a pretty good explanation why they surrendered as soon as they could and that's why like uh one of the byproducts of just mass soviet attacks is there was very few mass surrenders because they knew they would probably just get capped yeah it was like they got ambushed and like one person happened to survive or not get shot by a sniper. Like, fuck yeah, I'll surrender. Nobody else is around anymore.

Yeah. But the soldiers' morale was poor and people were deserting in huge numbers. Remember, the Soviet Army is mostly conscripts. 95, 99% conscripts. Officers and soldiers were beginning to refuse to take part in frontal assaults after seeing so many fail. and soldiers were beginning to refuse to take part in frontal assaults after seeing so many fail. This, of course, didn't stop those attacks from happening, but

it did make the NKVD's firing squad work overtime to kill them all. Now, the war is now hardly a month old, and Finland is about to strike back, go on the offensive. Really? Yep. And that is

where we'll pick up next week. For part four. For part four. I'm not going to lie. Part three was pretty sweet. It gets, no, I can't give anything away,

but the offensive that's coming up, it's not the offensive that everybody's thinking of, but we'll get there. I hope skis are involved. Skis are, you know, we talked about briefly, but it can, it can be just assumed that most large-scale movement

in the north of Finland, in the Lake Lagoda area, is mostly ski-borne, because you cannot walk through snow banks who are taller than me. But, yeah. And at this point, the Soviets are finally starting to get their own skis into theater, though they really don't know how to use them that well.

So, yeah, it's all bad. That is part three of our winter war. If you like what we do here and you think that what we do is worth a dollar, you can throw it to us on Patreon. You get bonus content. You get more episodes. You get books. You get stickers.

You get episodes early. You get access to our discord the hell the way to die podcast and it's got a pretty pretty big growing community there um or you could we have merchandise uh if you want one of one of of those shirts sticker cup flag we have all sorts of shit up on teespring lines by donkey's store or you can follow us on twitter at lines underscore by or you can follow nick at nickcast m1 and you can follow me at jcast99 now we are 50 of the way to our patreon goal of two thousand dollars a month at which point nick and i will get lines led by donkey's tattoos uh and that is actually currently being designed by a listener.

Yeah. Oh, I thought we were going to pick. He has a very good idea. Okay, cool. Uh, but that is part three and we will see you next week for part four.

Later.