A Soviet soldier dies after freezing to death on a snow-covered road in Finland, near the Arctic Circle, during the Eastern Front of World War II. The uniforms of the Russian troops at the Battle of Finland were inappropriately thin, even though the winter season was the coldest in European history, at about -43°C (-4°F). In a frigid, snow-covered forest where sunlight lasted only a few hours, exposed bodies frostbitten by raging blizzards and howling winds, piles of corpses froze in minutes, gaining the solidity of a brick wall. Freezing to death means organs slowly shut down until they stop shivering and doze off after hypothermia sets in. The corpse often froze to the solidity of a brick.
While Hitler's Nazi Germans were waiting for the next blow from the invasion of Poland, Stalin's Soviet troops decided to strike a blow for Finland themselves. The Soviet-Finnish War, dubbed the Winter War, began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II. It ended about three and a half months later with the Moscow Peace Treaty on March 13, 1940. Stalin's Soviet Union invaded Finland with its fighter planes and tank corps in the early morning hours of November 30, 1939, and the next day, December 1, established a puppet government in Finland in a remote town. Surprisingly, the Soviet Red Army's campaign was not a blitzkrieg one. Stalin, a fickle dictator, thought he could invade Finland with second-rate troops and equipment. Over a period of about two months of fighting, all Allied forces, Finland, a small country of about 4 million people, bravely confronted the Soviet Union, a superpower of about 180 million people. The Allied forces cheered excitedly at the war as if it had been won on March 31, 1940, at a tragic cost to the Finnish army. Finnish casualties were about 24,923 killed in action, 43,557 wounded in action, and about 1,000 taken prisoner. Soviet casualties were approximately 126,875 killed or missing, 26,4908 wounded, and 5,600 captured.
The Allied forces had no realistic strategy to help the Finnish army. When the Soviet Red Army finally broke out into a full-scale offensive, the Finnish forces were crushed with ruthless efficiency. in February 1940, the Soviet troops resumed their onslaught following the maximum bombardment and broke through the Finnish defenses at the Karelian isthmus. The Finnish army, low on ammunition and on the verge of a crisis, agreed to peace terms in March. However, Hitler's Nazi Germans witnessed the incompetence of the Soviet army during these almost two months in the tragic interlude in the Finnish forest. Underestimating the capabilities of the Soviet army, the Eastern Front invasion of the Soviet Union was disastrous for the Nazi German army. On June 22, 1941, after about 15 months of truce from the Winter War, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, which continued the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.
