St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

Dictators fear rebellion. Stalin was too afraid of an uprising led by independent-thinking, experienced soldiers, so, to the greatest extent he could, he ensured that his troops could not develop strategic thinking skills or gain confidence in their own ability as leaders (Taylor, 2017). The direct translation of the Finnish word motti refers to chopping wood. Antti Juutilainen describes the motti in the military sense as ‘the ability to create conditions in which the enemy can be encircled and subjugated by rapid movement and is annihilated in battles characterised by the calculated and economical use of scarce resources’ (Raftsjø, 2018). In practice, a motti entailed blocking one of Finland’s winding roads with felled trees, separating the long Soviet convoys into more manageable chunks, with each chunk being referred to as a motti. Following this, there would be a series of intermittent raids by small units. Finnish soldiers would emerge from the treeline to destroy supplies or inflict casualties until the motti was small enough for a direct attack (McKay & McKlay, 2017). These situations would often devolve into a battle of attrition – the Finnish would cut off food supplies and conduct raids round the clock until the target could be dealt with. The motti tactic exemplifies every aspect of Finnish guerilla warfare: the resourcefulness and sisu of the Finnish forces that allowed them to make full use of the terrain and home advantage, coupled with the lack of Soviet preparation or inspiring leadership made the creation of mottis a consistently effective strategy. This tactic resulted in several one-sided conflicts with staggering statistics. In the Battle of Suomussalmi there were 750 Finnish casualties to 27,000 Soviet casualties (McKay & McKlay, 2017). Whilst the technological advantage the USSR had over the Finnish seems obvious – the Soviet Union was an industrial superpower and had placed focus on armament manufacturing from the mid-1930s due to Stalin’s paranoia regarding the Nazi threat – it was even more extreme than one might imagine as Finnish technology was less advanced and in lower supply than most of Western Europe. The Soviets had state-of-the-art military tech while Finnish equipment was several decades old. They did not even have one functioning anti-tank gun; they only had Boys anti-tank rifles donated by the British later on in the war (Butler, Gibbs, Gywer, Ehrman, & Howard, 1976 ). The fuel and ammunition they had would only last a few weeks. The Soviets had thousands of aircraft, the Finnish had around a hundred, with only a dozen being modern fighter

planes and the rest slow, outdated biplanes (Trotter, 2013). However, this disparity in munitions and vehicles had a by-product – the Finnish had to be very careful, and the Soviets didn’t. Every shell, every bullet counted for the Finnish. Artillery and batteries were positioned in a manner calculated down to the last inch, adjusted for the best angle in every situation – in the familiar terrain, these adjustments were often accurate and effective. But more importantly than that, the man operating the gun had to be perfectly skilled. To conserve ammunition, there was a constant requirement to never waste a single shot. Finnish soldiers turned out to be excellent marksmen, often as a result of having hunted in the very forests in which they were now fighting. This made them highly-skilled infantrymen, especially snipers. The skills learnt in hunting, the hours spent concealed in trees, waiting for the right moment to fire, were not wasted in this war. Author and historian William Trotter states that in aerial conflict, there was one kill per 54 rounds of cannon fire, and one low altitude kill per 300 rounds of automatic shooting. He describes this as ‘remarkable shooting’, with 800 Soviet aircraft lost in the conflict – a number considerably higher than the number of aircraft with which the Finnish began the war (Trotter, 2013). The Finnish were at a disadvantage when it came to equipment except they did have winter equipment and warm uniforms, which the Soviets were severely lacking. The pinpoint accuracy of Finnish sharpshooters helped to conserve the limited resources. This motivation to be accurate and conservative in the use of machinery was something that the Soviets lacked. Their hubris when it came to details, resulting from their huge reserves of munitions, put them at a clear disadvantage. a result of having hunted in the very forests in which they were now fighting ’ ‘ Finnish soldiers turned out to be excellent marksmen, often as

40