Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Finland

My interest for knowledge would, if possible to express in physical form, probably look something like the model of time-space that a funny guy in a hood carries around in the DC universe. I can't find any pattern in what I'm interested in. I like parts of history, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, biology, sociopolitics, computer science... yeah, but on the other hand I really hate other areas within the same fields.

What brings about this poinless confession? I sought distraction from a very long time on a train, and found a book on the Soviet invasion of Finland. I'd really like to learn strategics and warfare; real large-scale combat, and I've already studied the Finnish Civil War and have a better overview of WWII than the first, so I thought, why not look intellectual on the train.

Well, the Finnish fought most of that invasion in the scale numbers of roughly 1:10, had severe lack of ammunition most of the time, and equipment that barely passed as cool in WWI. They did however have the wheather on their side, if by that I mean that Finnish people survive -38C and Soviets do not. Specifically since the Soviets for some reason forgot to bring proper coats, even if this was in the middle of December and Global Warming was still hiding in the bushes. They also forgot that most of Finland consists of forests and lakes, which implies that bringing dozens of heavy tanks that completely destroy the small roads and make retreat utterly impossible might not be the best idea. As if that wasn't enough, they also decided that one officer should have no say in where the other officer was, resulting in that they often blocked said small roads for each other with said tanks. Left was for the Finnish army to ski in, hide behind the trees and grant frozen, starving and locked down Russians warming gifts in the form of bullets and morlotov coctails.

Said should be that Soviet learned the lesson for the next war, handing Hitler and his nazis about the same treatment when that time came. Which was only fair, since Hitler swore in his non-agression pact with Stalin to not sell Finland weapons, but then used the ships he sent to fuel Stalin's submarines to ship weapons to Sweden. As if he had no idea what Sweden would do with them.

All the political bullshitting confused me, since I hadn't read such in-depth stuff about WWII before. But I think I have the general pictue: Finland is awesome.

3 comments:

Kat said...

Maybe you should look up what is in swedish called "fortsättningskriget"...

Sara said...

History-geeking, yaaay! ^_^

Yeonni said...

Haha ^^

Maybe I should point out, if someone really doesn't know it, but you should, that Soviet won anyway. They'd have to fevrently shoot themselves in the head a thousand times over to loose, considering the size of the countries.

Otherwise, yaaaay.