Engle Eloise, Paananen Lauri. The Winter War. The Soviet Attack on Finland, 1939-1940

Stackpole Books, 1973.Were you to travel from the Arctic Ocean to the city of Leningrad, along the Russo-Finnish border in the year 1939, you would have had a complex journey. The frontier itself separating the two countries was little more than a wide swath cut through the forests, or a line snaking around lakes and rivers. Dotted along the way were groups of border guards at various crossroads or other areas that seemed important for surveillance. On the Russian side, there had been large troop concentrations of late; railroads and highways had snuggled cozily against Finland's eastern border.
These border guards did not like each other, operating as they did under full view of one another's activities. They were described by a foreign correspondent as being "like angry bulls on neighboring farms, separated only by a barbed-wire fence." This in itself was not an uncommon factor; political geography has often produced border squabbles, particularly when opposing political views are involved. But this border was too close to Leningrad for Soviet security. Or so the Russians claimed.
It was here in the late autumn of 1939 that the so-called Winter War began. The Russians did not plan on Finnish resistance to a take-over of their country. Nikita Khrushchev said, in his memoirs, "All we had to do was raise our voice a little bit and the Finns would obey. If that didn't work, we could fire one shot and the Finns would put up their hands and surrender. Or so we thought."1
The former Soviet premier continues: "The Finns turned out to be good warriors. We soon realized we had bitten off more than we could chew."2 For 105 days in 193940 one of the toughest campaigns of the early World War II era was fought.