Word: finnish
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Dispatches did not mention any special snow equipment, such as motored sledges, on the Russian side. But the Reds did employ their famed parachute troops. At Petsamo, this technique apparently worked well at first. Later the parachutists were surrounded where they landed and shot up. On the isthmus, Finnish sharpshooters picked off all the first few men who floated down and the Reds quickly abandoned this tactic...
...verily their George Washington. After serving in the Russian Army for nearly 30 years (he was a lieutenant colonel in the Russo-Japanese War, later commanded the 6th Russian Cavalry as Lieutenant General in World War I), he went home in 1917 to command the armies which won Finnish independence (with German help) from the Bolsheviki. After his White Guards had run the Red Guards out of Finland, the Baron shot up 2,000 Bolsheviks left behind, in one of the century's bloodiest terrors...
...crack one, being mostly submarines, gunboats, motor torpedo boats, but Russia's clumsy battleships draw too much water to go close to shore. Chief disadvantage of the Finns is in the air, whence plenty of hell will rain on them before they win or lose. One young Finnish fighter pilot was credited in the first two days with shooting down single handed six Red bombers. Finland was said to have lost only two planes in the first four days. But even blunderers must prevail when the air odds are 36 to one (the odds of roulette, without any zeros...
...Finns were suddenly pictured as dreaming "dreams of aggression." The Finnish Government became "marionettes chained to the hounds and incendiaries of war," a "gang of hired bandits of capitalism," "bestial murderers mad with their savage dreams of a Greater Finland up to the Urals...
More specific if scarcely more credible was the Soviet radio's description of the start of hostilities. Finnish soldiers, the radio reported, "invaded" the Soviet Union three times on the night of Nov. 29-30. After the third attempt the Red Army lost its patience and at 8 a.m. the war was on (see p. 23). It was notable that the war was 16 hours old before any Soviet newspaper or radio got around to giving communiques...