It sounds so easy when written this way :-/
Also if anyone is interested in WW2 sniping the Finnish sniper "white death" might be an interesting starting point.
He went to extreme lengths - and was very successful.
When the Finns started using glass bottles with gasoline and a burning rag as anti tank weapons, they made the joke that these were Molotov cocktails to go with the Molotov bread baskets.
It’s strange how Soviet propaganda (“we’re dropping food!”) lives on in English by way of a Finnish joke from 80 years ago.
Häyhä is believed to have killed over 500 men during the Winter war (inculding 259 killed by sniper rifle), the highest number of sniper kills in any major war.
That is just ... gruesome.
I was confused when I looked at this article, I misread the URI as "gnu.org" (laptop screen too far away, thanks Covid WFH) and started trying to figure out the analogy they were making for a paragraph or two. :)
Yep. But the alternative were worse. Anyone who hasn't been occupied by Stalin era Soviet should be very happy.
As a kid I heard a bunch of stories from my dad who had friends in Finland and also from my friends who had been there.
One was that the Finnish soldiers always carried a backpack on night patrol so they could safely backstab anyone they came up behind in the night and couldn't identify as if it was one of theirs it would end in a blanket or something anyway.
Another was that of Finnish troops not being to careful when they packed the hay they slept in so some of it would fall on the ground.
Only there would also often be a mine there as well.
Oh, and most of the time the Russians stopped to examine the hay there was just hay on the ground but sniper fire from the hillside behind it.
As Wikimedia points out: the Finnish were lucky because of Stalins great purge, but still they should not be messed with.
Oh, another one, from air combat, this one I learned later from a book probably: according to that source the planes the Russians used for the invasion of Finland had landing gear that had to be lowered using a pulley system. Again, according to that source, some Russian planes were lost after the Finnish pilots figured out this and started ambushing them while they approached landing.
Finland ended WW2 as an independent country, the only European one that borders Russia (along with Norway I guess, but the bulk of Finland is far closer to Russia)
The alternative would’ve been substantially worse