Page 184 - The Chief Culprit

e Winter War: Finland y 145

Red Army to annihilate somebody, it would sustain whatever losses it took to accomplish
the order. erefore, the three states surrendered without firing a single shot. ey under-
stood that resistance was futile. Meanwhile, Stalin issued an ultimatum to the leadership
of Romania: give up Bessarabia. Remembering the experience of Finland, the Romanian
government did not even organize lengthy talks: it handed over Bessarabia, and on top of it
Northern Bukovina.
e Red Army conducted in Finland a unique and unparalleled operation. e Red
Army performed in a fashion unrivaled and unrepeated by any army in history, but for some
reason Hitler concluded that it had performed poorly. German generals were watching won-
ders unfold before their eyes, but did not understand the significance of what they were
seeing. German generals were unable to appreciate what they observed. us, the people
surrounding and counseling Hitler made strange deductions concerning Stalin’s readiness for
war. Goebbels’s diary from those days is full of remarks of this sort: “November 11, 1939: e
Russian army presents no value. e army is poorly commanded, and it is even more poorly
armed. . . . December 4, 1939: e Russian Army is of little value. . . . January 23, 1940:
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e military strength of Moscow is almost insignificant.” Goebbels wrote down not only
his own opinion, but also Hitler’s: “He once again notes the catastrophic state of the Russian
army. It can hardly be used for military action.” 14
For the Red Army, the war in Finland was a vaccine against hubris, boastful disposi-
tions, and underestimating the enemy. e war in Finland taught the Red Army a lot: in
1941 near Moscow and in 1942 near Stalingrad, German troops met the Red Army, which
by then knew how to fight in the winter. e German army, however, was not at all taught by
the war in Finland. is war played a dirty trick on Hitler. He did not understand this war,
did not correctly assess its hardships, and therefore made disastrous miscalculations. He sud-
denly decided that the Red Army was not ready for war and was unfit for any kind of action.
Hitler turned out to be wrong. No conclusion about the strength of the Soviets follows out of
the fact that the Red Army did not reach Helsinki. On the contrary, it follows that the Red
Army was capable of reaching Berlin.
Many German generals realized that the Red Army, according to the results of the fight-
ing in Finland, was assessed incorrectly. During the Battle of Stalingrad, Goering had publicly
declared that the war the Soviet Union had launched against Finland was “perhaps one of the
biggest cover-ups in world history.” Goering believed that Stalin deliberately “sent to Finland
a few divisions, equipped with obsolete weaponry, in order to hide the creation by the Soviet
Union of an unprecedented war machine.” In closed circles, Hitler himself admitted the
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mistake. is occurred on April 12, 1942. Hitler said the following: “ e entire war with
Finland in 1940, just as the Russian advance into Poland with obsolete tanks and weapons
and poorly clothed soldiers, was nothing other than a grandiose disinformation campaign,
because Russia at that time controlled arms which made it, in comparison with Germany and
Japan, a world power.” He also said, on June 22, 1942: “Back home in Russia, they created an
extremely powerful military industry . . . and the more we find out what goes on in Russia,
the more we rejoice that we delivered the decisive blow in time. e Red Army’s weaponry is
the best proof that they succeeded in reaching extremely high achievements.” 16