Hammer & Sickle

"The only real fact to realize," said Finland's Minister to Stockholm Eljas Erkko, "is that war in Finland is still going on." All Europe's statesmen and all her journalists might be negotiating and writing about peace (see p.19) but in the heap of bricks that was Viipuri. along the Vuoksi where at least the surface of the ice was beginning to be spongy, above Lake Laatokka where the Finns say they came on a freezing, black-clad Russian holding up his arms and crying: "Don't shoot me! I'm a Russian capitalist": far north in Petsamo where the snow is still six feet deep--wherever the little country was being pressed by the big, there Finns were still taking more blood than they gave. But by week's end, the lesson of a bitter, irrevocable arithmetic--170,000,000 Russians, 3,800,000 Finns--was almost taught.

Finns still held Viipuri. Day after day the Russian hammer pounded, but the Finns did not give much though Russian sources reported that Soviet troops had captured the northern and eastern parts of the ancient port, and seemed slowly to be forging a steel ring around the deserted city.

Cities are an obstacle of great strength to advancing infantry. In a place like Viipuri, a focus, where concentration can be met with concentration, the overwhelming superiority in Russian numbers makes little immediate difference. Hammer meets steel.

But where the superiority quickly tells, and where it told last week in the newest sector of fighting, is on an extended front, along which heavy Russian forces can strike, one dawn at one point, the next 50 miles to the west, now here, now there, unexpectedly. Along such a front the Finns must scatter thinly, and be continually vigilant. The new sector: the northwest shore of Viipuri Bay and along the Gulf of Finland, on a front of 60 miles --halfway to Helsinki. Across the ice of the bay a great Russian sickle swept again & again. It hit some stumps and some stones, but it cut down a lot of grass.

The Russians would march all night northward out across the ice. Some rode in tanks, some in huge sledges driven by airplane motors. As dawn broke they would strike at the unfortified coast, gripping at small coastal islands, making a landing and trying to establish a foothold on shore, hitting occasionally for towns like Kotka. Hamina, Virolahti.

Proud Finnish communiques early in the week told how these attacks were met. Artillery blasted quarry holes in the ice before the advancing columns, bombers crushed them from above, chasers peppered them from behind. Finnish aviation caught and slaughtered huge concentrations on the ice and on the islands. Tanks were said to have been captured, packed ice floes capsized.

But still the hordes came on, and at week's end even the Finns had to admit the Russians had several footholds on the coastal front. Obvious aim was to penetrate inland and cut the vital lines of communication from Helsinki to Viipuri, then sweep around behind the Finns' last-ditch defenses in the Mannerheim Line. Many a Finn was constrained to admit that a moderately honorable peace would be preferable to gradual strangulation by Joseph Stalin's Molasseskrieg.

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