OF RIFLES AND RIFLEMEN: THE MIGHTY FINNS

In the 1939-1940 Winter War, the Finns made good use of skis for mobility, white snow smocks for camouflage, and a tradition of marksmanship skills to savage the Russian bear.

Western academics being, in general, rather favorable towards Communism, most Americans have only heard about a single threat to humanity when the world stood on the brink of World War Two; Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party. At the time, however, the Soviet Union was ruled by an equally power-mad, paranoid and blood-thirsty dictator by the name of Joseph Stalin. The body count is so high that no one really knows, but it has been estimated that Stalin’s state-sponsored famines, purges, secret police and gulags killed at least twice as many Russian citizens as the Nazis did during the course of the Second World War.

          On August 23, 1939 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-aggression Pact. Although the Soviets did not publicly acknowledge it until the late 1980’s, secret codicils within the non-aggression pact divided the smaller nations of Eastern Europe up like so many poker chips into “Spheres of Influence” that “belonged” to either the Nazis or the Soviets.

          On September 1^st, 1939, Nazi Germany launched a swift invasion of Poland with its new style of Blitzkrieg warfare that proved highly successful. Sixteen days later all hope of continued resistance was crushed when the Soviet Union rolled across the eastern borders of Poland with 33 more divisions. As per yet another secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Poland was divided along pre-determined boundaries between Germany and Russia. 

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact included secret codicils in which Hitler and Stalin divided up the nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltic like so many poker chips.

          Stalin wasted no time in bringing the rest of his “sphere” under Soviet control. The Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were diplomatically blackmailed into signing “defense pacts” with the Soviet Union. Immediately afterwards, Soviet troops quickly occupied all three countries to “defend” them, and their people, land and resources were absorbed into the Soviet Union.

          Only Finland refused to give in to Soviet demands. This, in itself, took considerable balls. At the time, Finland encompassed 149,000 square miles and had a population of less than four million people, smaller than the city of Leningrad by itself, while the Soviet Union stretched across two continents and occupied 8,649,500 square miles, almost of sixth of the Earth’s land mass, and had a population of 180,000,000. A military contest between the two nations was likened to David and Goliath.

          The Soviets were more than happy to resort to military force when diplomatic arm-twisting failed. In an almost ludicrously transparent false flag operation, Red Army artillery bombarded the Russian border village of Mainila. The Soviets claimed tiny Finland had attacked them and they were forced, in self defense, to immediately launched massive well-prepared invasions at numerous points along the 800 mile long Finnish border. By the end of the 100-day war, the Russian colossus would commit four times the men, guns, tanks and planes that the combined Western Allies mustered for the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. In total, 58 Soviet divisions were committed. Against them, the Finns could muster only ten divisions ill-equipped with modern or heavy weapons.

          In the initial attacks, the Red Army would use more than 2,500 tanks, the most numerous models being the T-26 light infantry tank and the BT fast tanks, but also including behemoths like the multiple-turret T-28 medium and a few of the new heavily armored KV-1 heavy tanks. The Finns possessed only a handful of old WWI-vintage French Renaults and a few recently acquired British Vickers 6-ton light tanks whose weapons had not even been installed at the start of the war. Although the Finnish Defense Forces had adopted the modern Swedish Bofors 37-mm anti-tank gun, less than 50 were in service at the beginning of the war. Lacking any other means, Finnish soldiers had to learn on-the-job to attack Soviet armor in close-range infantry assaults using demolition charges and the ultimate poor man’s anti-tank weapon, the Molotov cocktail.

          In the air, the Red Air Force brought in more than 3,800 aircraft, including some of its best and most modern types such as the Tupolev SB, Ilyushin DB-3, and the stubby but fast and well-armed Polikarpov I-16. Opposing them, the tiny Finnish Air Force could muster a grand total of 114 aircraft of all types, many of which were old and out-dated aircraft, fabric-covered biplanes from the 1920’s like the Bristol Bulldog, Blackburn Ripon, and Fokker C.V. While the Finns had begun to acquire some modern anti-aircraft guns such as the Swedish Bofors 40-mm and Czech Skoda 75-mm guns and their ack-ack gunners would prove to be quite accurate, there were always too few guns available to properly defend even the larger cities let alone the field armies.

          Artillery has traditionally been a Russian military strong suite and the Winter War was no exception. The guns included modern 120-mm heavy mortars and their excellent 76.2-mm field guns and went all the way up to the colossal B-4 203-mm super heavy howitzer capable of hurling a 220-pound shell to a range of ten miles. A Soviet infantry regiment boasted three times the number of supporting artillery pieces as a Finnish regiment and in general enjoyed unlimited ammunition supply. What artillery the Finns could muster was often quite old--fully a third of their entire artillery park consisted of old Tsarist Russian Model 1902 76-mm field guns—and calls for fire were limited by a lack of radio communication gear below the regimental level. Even for the weapons on hand the Finns had only a 21-day supply of artillery shells stockpiled.

          The naval equation was, of course, just as lopsided. The Soviet Baltic Fleet boasted two battleships, a heavy cruiser, nearly 20 destroyers, fifty motor torpedo boats, and 52 submarines, plus assorted smaller ancillary craft. The Finnish Navy had two fairly modern coastal defense ships, five submarines, four gunboats, seven motor torpedo boats, one minelayer and six minesweepers. The Finns also possessed some fortified coastal artillery batteries but only a few had modern fortifications, guns and fire control gear while the vast majority were old-fashioned left-overs from the Tsarist Russian period.
          Red Army troops involved in the Winter War ran the gamut from crack modern mechanized divisions to hastily recalled conscript reservists who had not fired a rifle in three years. Many were ill-prepared and equipped for Arctic winter conditions. The greatest handicap, however, was in leadership. Always paranoid about any potential rivals for his position, one of Joseph Stalin's many purges decimated the highest ranks of the Red Army in 1937. Falling beneath the axe were three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, and 154 of 186 divisional commanders. Soviet Army units at the time also had attached "coequal" political commissar officers who could contradict, over-rule or, in extreme cases, even execute military commanders in the field. 

          The entire watching world expected a rapid, smashing victory like the Blitzkrieg of Poland. Thus everyone, including many Finns, were stunned when, after the first month of heavy combat, the ill-equipped and grossly out-numbered Finnish Defense Forces had essentially fought the gigantic Russian bear to a standstill. Although the Western democracies expressed great admiration and support for the tiny Finnish David attempting to slay the gigantic Russian Goliath, said support consisted almost entirely of politicians spouting words in lieu of weapons, ammunition, or men.

A Finnish word helps to explain their stubborn resistance in the face of overwhelming odds; sisu. The word sisu does not translate directly into English, but can be summed up variously as courage, bravery, or guts. With a nod to John Wayne, I liked to translate it as “True Grit.” As but one example, when the avalanche of Soviet troops first poured towards the thin outpost line of Finnish border troops during the opening of the offensive, some nameless Finnish soldier, with a combination of military gallows humor and a good dose of sisu made a comment that would become something of a catch-phrase about the Winter War. “So many Russians. Where will we bury them all?”

The Finns were also, as a people, completely united together against this Russian aggression of their homeland. Even the fairly large number of Finnish Communist Party members quickly and eagerly answered their nation’s call to colors. The Soviets almost immediately installed and boasted about a Quisling-like puppet government which served only to enrage and further unite Finns of all political stripes. With such a small population to draw from, some 130,000 Finnish women became “Lottas.” The Lotta Svärd was a volunteer auxiliary organization whose members filled important jobs vacated by men called up for military service, served in hospitals, manned the air raid warning system, and performed other military support tasks to free up men for the fighting front.

Across large portions of Finland, the land itself aided the defense; vast expanses of thick conifer forest, muskeg, and an endless maze of rivers and streams connecting nearly 200,000 lakes restricted Soviet motorized and armored forces to the handful of existing and easily ambushed roads. Nearly a third of the terrain lies north of the Arctic Circle so the bitter cold and snowfall also aided the Finns. With a largely rural population and a scant road network, most Finns learned how to cross-country ski at an early age. When the snows came, the Finnish ski troops enjoyed a great advantage in mobility and speed while the Soviet infantry was left to wallow slowly through the deep powder on foot. Under ideal snow conditions, specialty ski troops such as reconnaissance detachments and jaeger light infantry units could cover as much as 60 kilometers in a day. Orienteering, locating a fixed marker via compass and map, had been a popular pre-war sport in Finland, and this skill also proved of great military value. Many Finnish soldiers fought on intimately familiar ground they had literally grown up on.

          In his excellent history of the Winter War, A Frozen Hell, author William R. Trotter points out, “The forest itself dictated a heavy emphasis on individual initiative and small-unit operations, quasi-guerilla style. Marksmanship, mental agility, woodcraft, orienteering, camouflage, and physical conditioning were stressed, and parade-ground niceties were given short shrift.”[i]

          The Finnish military was armed primarily with the same Mosin-Nagant 7.62x54R bolt-action rifles as their Soviet opponents, having captured vast stocks of them when they declared their independence during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. The design of the weapon itself dated back to 1891. The basic rifle was over 48 inches long, with a barrel length just under 29 inches, and an empty weight of about 9 pounds. The bolt action featured a straight bolt handle and the five-shot integral box magazine had a steel well that protruded beneath the stock.

The standard captured Russian weapons were, of course, not good enough for the Finns with their passion for shooting and accuracy. They quickly set about on a program to improve their Mosin-Nagants, culminating with the M39, which soldiered on in Finnish military service for training and reserve use into the 1970s.  Both Finland and the Czech Republic still issue Army sniper rifles built around M91 Mosin Nagant actions.

With little industry to equip an army, the Finns instead made improvements and upgrades to their existing stock of captured Russian Mosin-Nagant M/91 rifles, and the Finnish models are still regarded as the best of the breed.

At the time of the Winter War, the Finns had improved their stocks of basic '91 Mosin-Nagant rifles into the M1927 and the M1928/30 Mosin-Nagant, the latter still respected as the very best of the entire M-N line. The Finns insisted on new and improved sights including an adjustable flat-topped front blade sight which was, on the M1929/30, protected by two heavy metal “ears”, which led to the Finns nicknaming the weapon the “Pystykorva" after a breed of dog with similar erect ears.

Finnish Mosins were also re-barreled with much better grades of steel, some of the barrels being made in Germany until Finland could produce her own. On the m/28 rifles, the heavy, stiff Mosin trigger pieces were polished and fitted with an additional spring to create a crisp take up in the trigger slack. The m/28-30 went a step further and also re-shaped the trigger to create a better pull. An aluminum sleeve around the barrel where it fit into the nosecap of the forestock essentially “floated” the barrel for superior accuracy.

The 7.62x54R round had a rimmed cartridge case like the British .303, so reloading was best accomplished with a 5-shot stripper clip since loading single cartridges without paying close attention could lead to overlapping rims causing jams during feeding. The Finns produced new magazines with “dimples” pressed into the metal, a simple modification that largely prevented interlocking cartridge rims; these magazines were factory marked “HV”, an abbreviation for a Finnish word which essentially translates as “Jam Free.”

During WWII, Finnish 7.62x54R ammunition was manufactured mostly by Sako and the VPT State Cartridge Factory, now better known as Lapua. They used high quality materials and produced the ammunition to tight specifications and it had a fine reputation for accuracy. The refurbished Finnish Mosin-Nagants had to meet an accuracy test-fire standard of no more than 1.3-inch groups at 100 meters before they were approved for service.

The John Moses Browning of Finland, Aimo Johannes Lahti, was a self-taught mechanical genius who was instrumental in up-grading existing military weapons and designing new ones. In total, he designed some fifty weapons ranging from pistols to anti-aircraft guns. These included the M/26 Lahti-Saloranta light machine gun, intended to be the Finnish Browning Automatic Rifle, and the L-35 9-mm automatic pistol, which remained the standard Finnish sidearm until the 1980’s, and the intriguing L-39 20-mm anti-tank rifle. His greatest masterpiece, however, is generally considered to be the famous Model 31 Suomi 9mm submachine gun. This weapon so impressed the Soviets during the Winter War that parts of its design, especially the 71-round drum magazine, were widely copied in creating the Russian PPsH-41 “burp gun.” Finland’s stocks of various old Russian and German-made Maxim water-cooled medium machine guns were being up-graded to Lahti’s Model 32-33 standard, considered the best of the Maxim line. Improvements included metallic-link ammunition belts, a cyclic firing rate boosted to 850 rounds per minute, and a large lid on the barrel’s water cooling jacket so Finnish gunners could simply stuff handfuls of readily available snow into the gun to keep it cool.

 Finnish weapons were all noted for their accuracy, and the average Finnish soldier knew well how to take advantage of that virtue. Hunting and shooting competitions were both popular with the largely rural population. Both the Finnish regular Army as well as the Civil Guard also put great emphasis upon individual marksmanship. In particular, the Finnish Civil Guard or Suojeluskunta (Sk), similar only in certain aspects to the American National Guard concept, devoted a great deal of time and effort to shooting. They built literally hundreds of rifle ranges in small towns around the country, held frequent shooting competitions, and tried to make shooting the national sport. During the 1930’s their focus on sport shooting, i.e. firing the smallest groups at known distances, shifted to emphasize more military-oriented events, which stressed, in addition to accuracy, speed of fire and rapid reloading while shooting at unknown distances. In this Combat Range training, conventional paper bullseyes were replaced with mechanically-controlled man-shaped silhouette targets which dropped when hit. Some ranges grew large enough to support company-sized live-fire exercises, and one range could accommodate regimental-sized live-fires.

 Finland hosted the 1937 World Shooting Championships in Helsinki, with the Finnish rifle team and individual shooters winning the gold.

Beginning in 1897, the International Shooting Sport Federation’s (ISSF) World Shooting Championships were held either annually or bi-annually, except when interrupted by the two World Wars. From 1911 to 1962, the championships included the 300-meter Army Rifle Event, in which all shooters were required to compete with the military-issue rifle of the host nation. At the 1935 Championships in Rome, Italy, the Finnish team came in first place as the medal count winner.

The World Shooting Championships were hosted by Finland in Helsinki in 1937. Finnish President P. E. Svinhufvud, himself an avid shooting competitor, personally led the opening ceremonies for the event on July 30th. Using Civil Guard M/28-30 Mosin-Nagants, the Finnish rifle team walked away with the gold championship cup, led by individual gold medal winner Olavi Elo, who set a new world record in the International Army Matches. Shooting was also the national sport in Switzerland but two years later at the 1939 Swiss Shooting Festival (Schutzenfest) in Lucerne, although the Swiss Service Rifle Team edged out the Finnish team for first place, the Finns captured the Free Rifle event, and the Estonian team captured the medal count.

          Individual Finnish soldiers and snipers accomplished some impressive feats with their upgraded Mosin-Nagants, most with just the standard open sights. One amazing Finn stands out in particular as one of the greatest snipers of the Second World War. Corporal Simo Haya, using an M/28 Mosin with standard open sights, was credited with over 500 confirmed sniping kills before he was seriously wounded and sent to hospital. He also accounted for around 200 more Russians with a Suomi submachine gun in close range actions.

A Finnish sniper, well camouflaged and protected from the cold, waits patiently for a Russian target.

        It was not just snipers who played a part in the Winter War, but the widespread marksmanship skill of the ordinary infantry riflemen counted for a great deal as well. Especially towards the latter part of the war when Finnish artillery and mortar ammunition was nearly depleted, Soviet infantry assaults were repelled time and again with “nothing more” than accurate small arms fire from rifles and machine guns.

In a battle on frozen Lake Tolvajarvi, three platoons of Finnish infantry under the command of Lieutenant Eero Kivela ambushed an entire Russian battalion by themselves. The Finns had only their rifles; their few Maxim machine guns had been left behind with another platoon in defensive positions. The Russians soldiers were strung out across the pure white expanse of the frozen lake, without any snow camouflage, their brown uniforms making them easily identifiable targets. At first light, Kivela’s men opened fire from their concealed positions. Caught in the open, the Soviets were mown down by the intense, accurate rifle fire. When they managed to retreat to the cover of the woods, they left behind at least 200 dead on the ice.

          Near the town of Jehkila, a lone Finnish automatic rifle team, well camouflaged, held up the advance of an entire Soviet regiment for almost an hour by mowing down every Red Army soldier or squad that attempted to push forward. In the Joutsijarvi sector in late December, a Soviet company commander with the 122^nd Division recounted how his battalion made three separate frontal attacks across a frozen lake in attempt to take a Finnish village. Each time, the Finnish defenders chopped them to pieces with a deadly hail of small arms fire. At the end of the second assault, the officer had only 38 men left standing from his entire company. After the third and final assault, in excess of two-thirds of the entire battalion lay dead on the ice.

     In the fighting on the Kollaa Front, the Soviets attempted a new tactic. Individual soldiers would advance behind an armored shield mounted on skis, pushing it ahead of them as they crawled forward. An admiring Finnish soldier described how a sniper in his unit dealt with one machine gun-armed shield by shooting through the narrow firing slit. “There was an opening in the shield about one half inch high and two and one half inches wide for aiming. I could hardly see it, but obviously the man with the [sniper rifle] saw it better. We heard a shot and the Russian’s helmet rolled on the ground.”

 The Soviet introduction of ski-mounted armored shields for riflemen and machine gunners did not prove successful against Finnish sharpshooters.

          Other Finnish sharpshooters adopted the tactic of crawling silently ahead of their main line of resistance and into No-Man’s Land to take out the men behind the armored shields from the flanks, with shots to exposed legs and buttocks. In the brutal combat defending the Mannerheim Line in the Summa area in mid-February, the Soviets sent forward a large number of these armored sleds. A lone Finnish lieutenant by the name of Kussala, equipped with a scoped sniper rifle, slithered alone out into no-man’s-land and began hunting these sleds. In one morning’s work, he took out fifteen such sleds by picking off the men behind them before he had to retire to Finnish lines when he ran short of ammunition, having to find shelter in an abandoned trench when a Soviet tank crew spotted him and tried to run him over. The next day, Kussala took a volunteer group of infantrymen with him on another such foray into No-Man’s Land. They returned in possession of thirty Russian armored sleds which they put to use bolstering the artillery-battered Finnish fighting positions.

          In the far north, two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, the Port of Petsamo was Finland’s only harbor on the Arctic Sea and the area contained the most productive nickel mines and largest smelter in Europe. Nickel being a vital component in the alloys used to manufacture aircraft motors and submarine Diesel engines, this made the area an important strategic target coveted by Allies and Axis alike. Petsamo was not strongly garrisoned due to its sheer isolation from any other population centers; 250 miles of the newly constructed Arctic Highway was the only tenuous land connection to Roveneimi, the nearest city of any size and the railroad system.

          Thus, Petsamo was rather weakly defended by only a single company of Covering Troops supported by one artillery battery of four ancient 1887-vintage field guns, the 76mm ammunition for which was so old that nearly half the rounds fired proved to be duds. The Soviets attacked from land and sea, pouring in two full infantry divisions supported by combat aircraft from Murmansk and heavy naval gunfire from the fleet. The tiny Finnish garrison was, of course, quickly overwhelmed.

As December temperatures quickly plunged to thirty below zero, the Soviets attempted to advance southwards on the new Arctic Highway, and the Finnish defenders fell back ahead of them with endless delaying tactics and a “scorched earth” policy that left nothing of value to the invaders. This was especially bitter for the Finns, who had painstakingly attempted to build up their Arctic infrastructure over the previous two decades.

The Finnish Army could spare no formations of regular troops from the desperate struggles on the Karelian Isthmus and Lake Ladoga area, so the defenders were mostly Civil Guardsmen and recalled reservists, and their numbers never exceeded much more than battalion strength. But these men were also largely hearty outdoorsmen…farmers, loggers, miners, trappers, fishermen, and hunters…who were intimately familiar with and well acclimatized to the harsh landscape that they called home. The Lapland Fells, a vast stretch of barren, wind-swept treeless tundra, seemed to offer very little in the way of concealment, cover or natural defensive terrain. The Finns were aided by the cloak of darkness offered by the long Arctic nights, their greatly superior mobility on skis, and their sharpshooting.

As Trotter put it, “Only rarely did the Soviet invaders see an opponent; if they did, it was an instant’s hallucination, a flickering blur of motion as a snow-suited guerilla flashed across the grayed-out horizon. But there were sniping parties that contested every kilometer of their advance, composed of Lapland natives who had tracked bear and wolves over this same ground and who could drill a man through the head at 1,000 meter with their first shot.”[i]

 "The Finns were excellent shots."

  While perhaps a bit over-stated, the Finnish riflemen really did take an incredible toll and exhibit superb shooting. During the Second World War, as supporting arms rather than small arms took over the lion’s share of destruction upon the enemy, the usual ratio of casualties ran to 4 wounded for every man killed. In his official after-action reports, Soviet commander General Valerian Forlov said, “The fighters were well prepared, and in some battles we lost more killed than wounded. To correlate the losses, there were 60 killed and 40 wounded per 100 [casualties]. The Finns were excellent shots.”

          In addition to sniping and delaying tactics, small Finnish units, usually of about platoon strength, began to probe and strike deep behind enemy lines, attacking isolated Red Army outposts, ambushing convoys on the Arctic Highway, and blowing up supply dumps and bridges. By the time the war ended, the Soviet 14^th Army’s push southwards from Petsamo had essentially ground to a standstill. The constant raids had forced the greatly superior attacking force to go on the defensive, building a chain of fortified positions every 5-6 miles along the highway and patrolling between these strongpoints with tanks just to keep the only trafficable road open. 

      In heavily forested central Finland near the town of Suomussalmi, the Soviet 9^th Army attacked westward with the intention of cutting the entire country off at its narrow “waist” and some of the most famous and punishing battles of the Winter War were fought there. Surrounded by dense forest and inhospitable Finnish terrain, the first two Soviet divisions to attack, the 163^rd and 44^th Rifle Divisions supported by a tank brigade, were restricted to the only two trafficable routes; the Juntusranta and Raate Roads. The two Russian columns combined had a strength of nearly 50,000 men while at their peak the Finnish defenders numbered only 11,500.

          In a series of raids and battles large and small that lasted a full month, the vastly outnumbered Finnish defenders first halted, then segmented and eventually decimated the 163^rd and 44^th Divisions, whose vehicles, artillery and armor kept them road-bound in two long, thin columns stretching for miles. With what came to be called motti tactics, the Finns began to fragment the Soviet column and then isolate and destroy each pocket. Roughly translated, mottis are Finnish “cords” of wood, stacked in separate piles through the woods, waiting to be cut up into stove lengths. Although the Russians outnumbered the Finns by a factor of four-to-one and possessed an overwhelming superiority in tanks, artillery and aircraft, the Finns were able to use their skis for greatly superior tactical mobility and were able to support their units via hastily constructed “winter roads”, often utilizing frozen lakes and water courses to travel on through the deep woods. Small, fast formations of white-clad Finnish ski troops conducted endless hit-and-run attacks and harassed the flanks of the stretched out 20-mile-long Red Army road-bound column.

          These shock attacks from out of the snowy nights were often conducted by men armed with Suomi submachine guns and grenades, but sharpshooters often accompanied them with the express purpose of targeting Soviet officers. Likewise, during the day, Finnish snipers waited patiently for hours in the cold to get a shot at a Russian officer. Recalling the effectiveness of the Finnish snipers, one Soviet officer wrote, “They were able to get their man at distances of 800 to 1,000 yards. They fired but rarely, and never missed.”

These constant attacks led Russian Commander Vinogradov to believe he faced much larger Finnish forces than actually existed. His 44^th Division was forced to forgot about relieving the 163^rd a mere six air miles away and had to concentrate…futilely, as it turned out…on just saving itself. Desperate to stay alive in nighttime temperatures that could reach as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit, the Russian soldiers huddled around large open bonfires, making easy targets for Finnish rifles reaching out from the edge of the dark forest. Counter-attacks to break through the Finnish roadblocks to regroup the isolated units were bloodily repulsed. In the cold, the radiators of the Russian motor vehicles froze solid and motor oil congealed, disabling their tanks, trucks, and armored cars, and even weapons lubricants thickened to make guns sluggish or inoperable.

Two entire Soviet divisions, the 163rd and 44th, were decimated in the month-long "Motti" battles in the Suomussalmi area.

Beyond their mobility, the Finns issued almost all their troops with white winter camouflage smocks and appropriate warm winter clothing, especially boots. As temperatures fell to -30 and -40 degrees, the Finns brought up and erected their 20-man tents, heated by small wood-burning stoves, hidden in the forests. Their soldiers were able to snatch periods of sleep in relative comfort on browse beds of pine boughs while the Russians were literally freezing to death, sometimes within a half a mile of the snug Finns. When temperatures were at their lowest, Finnish troops were rotated to warming tents every few hours.

          In contrast, the Russian soldier endured incredible hardship just trying to survive the weather, let alone the Finns: “…the Russians huddled around open campfires or dug holes in the snow for shelter. At best, they had an improvised lean-to, a shallow hole covered with branches, or a branch ‘hut’ fashioned at the roadside or in a ditch. The fortunate ones had a fire in a half barrel. Many literally froze to death in their sleep. ..Finnish estimates put Russian losses from the cold as high as their battle casualties.”[i]

          The Finns also equipped their units with their own small, efficient multi-purpose gas stoves that gave off virtually no smoke so that the troops could not only heat bivouac shelters, but provide their own warm meals and hot tea whenever possible, especially before going into action or on long flanking movements. In the Arctic, a hot, nutritious meal is about far more than comfort or morale; it can quite literally be the different between life and death in the cold. A large amount of calories, and especially proteins, carbohydrates and fats, are needed for the human body to simply maintain its core body temperature in the Arctic. Even under ideal conditions, Soviet field rations, which relied upon black bread as the main staple, were often found lacking.

At the same time, Finnish ski troops also deliberately targeted and destroyed as many Russian field kitchens as they could. The large box-shaped bakeries, stove pipes, smoke and steam made these field kitchens readily identifiable targets for Finnish raids, snipers and mortars. When a particular motti contained too many tanks or too much firepower to be subdued by force, the Finns simply surrounded it, destroyed the field kitchens, and let the cold and hunger whittle down the Soviet numbers and resolve.

          The battles raged from December 7^th, 1939 until January 8^th, 1940. In the end, only stragglers of the two decimated Soviet divisions limped back across the border after having sustained as many as 27,500 men killed or missing. The Finns captured alive only 2,100 half-frozen and half-starved survivors wandering the woods. On the Raate Road, where the 44^th Division met its demise, the Finns captured intact vast (for them) stocks of weapons intact, many of which were quickly re-issued to Finnish units. The booty included 43 tanks, 71 artillery pieces, 29 anti-tank guns, some 300 motorized vehicles, 1,170 horses, thousands of rifles and hundreds of machine guns along with large quantities of ammunition, medical supplies and, perhaps most important to the Finns, modern wireless communications gear. Finnish casualties totaled 1,750, including roughly a thousand wounded and 750 killed or missing.

 Alas, as Stalin himself supposedly once said, “Quantity is a kind of quality.” Such was his dictatorial power that he had to answer to no one and he could simply send in more and more Red Army units until, almost literally, there were more Soviet bodies than Finnish bullets to stop them.

Despite victories elsewhere, the war was decided primarily on the strategic Karelian Isthmus which was defended by the fortifications and barriers of the Mannerheim Line. The Soviets pummeled the Finnish defenses with as many as a quarter million artillery shells per day, around the clock, for ten days; hundreds of planes swarmed overhead dropping tons of bombs. After each bombardment thousands of Russian infantrymen supported by hundreds of tanks hurled themselves against the defenders. The Soviets suffered staggering casualties in these terrible frontal assaults. Some Finnish machine gunners were quite literally driven insane from slaughtering hundreds of men day after day.

Each assault, however, killed more and more of the already depleted and shell-shocked Finnish defenders, and no reserves were available. The Soviets, on the other hand, could simply throw fresh units into the attack the following day. One by one, the bunkers and forts were pummeled to ruin by endless artillery fire. Finnish ammunition stocks, especially artillery shells, were rapidly dwindling away. Eventually, after months of brutal fighting and tremendous bloodshed, the sheer weight of numbers ground down the fierce Finns.

On March 12, 1940, through a convoluted series of diplomatic negotiations, the Finns were bitterly forced to sue for peace and surrender large tracts of their territory to the Russians, so that more than 400,000 Finns lost their homes, farms and businesses and became refugees.

          The Soviets officially admitted to having taken nearly 50,000 casualties killed and almost 160,000 wounded as well as the material loss of 1,600 tanks and 872 aircraft. The propaganda of Stalin and Molotov taken into account, actual losses were undoubtedly even greater. Finnish and Western sources estimated the Russian dead to number anywhere from a quarter of a million to 400,000. In 1970, Nikita Khrushchev admitted to the figure of roughly one million total Russian casualties, which would equate to a Russian-to-Finn casualty rate on the order of 40:1.

According to Trotter’s account, “One Soviet general, looking at a map of the territory Russia had acquired on the Karelian Isthmus, is said to have remarked: ‘We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead.’”

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[i] Allen F. Chew, Beating the Russians in Snow: The Finns and the Russians, 1940, (Military Review, June, 1980), 42.

 

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[i] Ibid, 173.

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[i] William R. Trotter. A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40, (Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 1991), 42.

MUSKET MANIA: The Standard in 1775

(Rifles and Riflemen in the Revolution Part 1)

At the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, the muzzle-loading flintlock smoothbore musket was the state-of-the-art military standard small arm the world over. For the British Army this meant the Brown Bess. The vast majority of Americans would also go to war with the very same musket, or an American-made copy thereof, often referred to as the “Queen’s Arm.”

With the exception of the firing mechanism being up-graded from the flintlock ignition to the percussion cap system, Brown Bess would serve the British Army from 1722 to 1854. In 1775, the Short Land Pattern Musket was the standard, having been first adopted in 1740 to replace the 1722-vintage Long Land Pattern Musket. The Short Land Pattern had a .75-caliber barrel some 42 inches long, giving it an overall length of 56-1/2 inches and an empty weight of 10-1/2 pounds. By the military standards of the era it was considered a good weapon, enjoying a reputation for ruggedness and reliability. Some historians think the name Brown Bess was a soldiers’ corruption of the Dutch or German terms braun buss, meaning “strong gun.”

 Short Land Pattern Brown Bess Musket: A rather large handle for the bayonet.

Although nominally listed as a .75-caliber, according to the Springfield Armory Museum even “Tower-inspected” Brown Bess muskets were approved as “close enough for government work” if the bore gauged anywhere from .72- to .80-caliber. The British Army standard issue musket ball itself was actually .71-inch in diameter, and the French issue .69-caliber musket ball could be used as well. With a 100-grain charge of black powder, the Brown Bess fired a round lead ball weighing over an ounce at a muzzle velocity of perhaps 1,000 feet per second, and generated considerable recoil in the process. If held perfectly horizontal at the regulation five feet above ground level, the ball would fall to earth at roughly 125 yards.

The blackpowder propellant used in firearms of the era “burned dirty”, i.e. it did not completely combust. In addition to propelling the projectile itself, it also produced an acrid cloud of thick gray smoke and left a black residue known as fouling on the inside of the barrel. After firing numerous times, the fouling could built up inside the bore to such a degree that loading a tight-fitting ball from the muzzle became difficult and eventually impossible. Thus, militaries of the day wanted a loose-fitting musket ball so that soldiers could continue to load and fire even if their gun barrel was heavily fouled.

Although this solved one problem, the loose fit of the ball also sacrificed velocity as the gasses of the burning gun powder escaped around it while propelling it down the barrel. More problematic was the fact that as the ill-fitting projectile rattled down the bore it struck at slightly different places each time the gun was fired, resulting in a lack of consistency from shot to shot, destroying accuracy at all but the shortest of ranges. Lacking the stabilizing spin of a rifle ball, the musket ball itself was less accurate and lost its momentum and striking energy rather quickly. Some today may find it surprising that the Brown Bess did not have any sights with which to aim the weapon. The best an infantryman could do to aim the weapon was use the bayonet lug to roughly line up the barrel with the target. Thus, individually, the smoothbore musket was inherently inaccurate.

Just how bad was the accuracy problem? A knowledgeable British officer who fought in the Revolution, then Major George Hanger wrote, “A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards: it may even at 100; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided the antagonist aims at him; as to firing at a man at 200 yards, with a common musket, you may as well just fire at the moon.”

This was not just hyperbole on the part of the always verbose George Hanger; his estimate is quite accurate and was proven right numerous times over the years. In 1792, the British Army conducted a test in which a marksman fired 21 rounds from a Brown Bess at a target 4-feet square at 100 yards range and scored only 12 hits. In 1838, the Royal Engineers at Chatham conducted live-fire tests with standard-issue Brown Bess muskets (updated with a percussion lock) which revealed that “about” three fourths of the musket balls fired at 150 yards at a target 3 feet tall and 11-1/2 feet wide struck the target. At 250 yards, using a target twice as large, not one ball struck home and, “…at 300 yards shot after shot was fired without one hitting the object aimed at, or its whereabouts being ascertained.” In still another test, an expert marksman fired twenty rounds each at targets eighteen feet square at 200 and 300 yards and not a single ball struck home. An American gun writer in the 1950’s fired ten well-aimed shots at a man-shaped target at 100 yards and scored only four hits, two of which were peripheral strikes to the ear and knee.

From the standpoint of the European professional military establishment, however, it was just not that important for an individual soldier to take deliberate aim and shoot to kill an individual enemy soldier. Conventional set-piece battles on the European Continent involved vast armies with thousands of men in tightly packed, easily-controlled ranks. Companies and battalions of infantrymen would fire massed volleys at other closely-formed companies and battalions. Even with muskets simply pointed in the right direction, sheer volume of fire was expected to inflict some casualties amidst the enemy ranks. Volume of fire and speed in reloading was the name of the game. With pre-prepared paper-wrapped powder and ball “cartridges” and loose-fitting balls dropped down a smoothbore barrel, the British regular was expected to deliver four shots per minute, or one every fifteen seconds. The actual accuracy of those shots was a distant afterthought.

Even used in this intended fashion, however, smoothbore muskets produced a great many more misses than hits, and the problem was certainly not restricted solely to the Brown Bess. All European military smoothbore muskets of the era, whether British, French, Dutch, Spanish or German, delivered virtually the same poor performance when it came to accuracy. For instance, a French test involved 720 infantrymen firing at a 3x3 meter target at 100 and 200 meters range; 52 shots hit the 100 meter target and only 18 struck it at 200 meters.

To scientifically “prove” the value of musket volley fire, rather than use man-sized targets military experiments of the period used large cloth targets intended to represent entire formations of enemy troops. The French Army, for instance, used a target six feet tall and fifty yards across to represent an enemy infantry company and a target 8-1/2 feet tall by 50 yards wide to represent a cavalry formation. In one such experiment, at a range of 160 yards two hundred rounds apiece were fired at the French infantry target using British, Prussian and French muskets. The results showed a hit rate of 58%, 56%, and 49% respectively. In 1755, two companies of Prussian Grenadiers fired at a target ten feet tall and 30 feet wide at 150 and 300 yards and scored 46% and 12.5% hits respectively.

Waterloo, 1815: The European way of war.

Of course, such studies counted every single ball that struck anywhere on the length and breadth of the entire cloth. As any wing-shooter knows, however, there’s a helluva lot more air than bird when firing a shotgun at a covey of quail or a flock of ducks. Even with modern shotguns, “flock-shooting” is generally a waste of time; the gunner still needs to single out and aim at a specific bird in the flock rather than “sky-busting” at the flock as a whole.

 One British officer later wrote, “The inutility of the old musket was shown in a battle during the Kaffir war, where the British discharged 80,000 cartridges, and the loss of the enemy was 25 men struck.” A Prussian artillery colonel named Schlimmbach conducted exhaustive statistical studies of every battle in the Napoleonic Wars and concluded that, on average, a man’s own body weight in lead had to be fired for every casualty inflicted by musket fire. French General Gassendi concluded that at least three thousand musket cartridges had to be fired for every enemy casualty inflicted while German General von Decker put the minimum number at ten thousand cartridges. In 1770 the French General Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, wrote that only 0.2% of all small arms fire on the battlefield hit the target.

Despite early American military use of the rifle as well as prior adoption of percussion-fired muskets and rifles, at the time of the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War the vast majority of US Army infantrymen were still issued flintlock smoothbore muskets. A young Ulysses S. Grant, serving in that conflict, concluded of this weapon, “At the distance of a few hundred yards a man might fire at you all day without your finding it out.”

Calibers were large, ranging from .60-caliber Prussian weapons to the .75-caliber Brown Bess, so when a musket ball did manage to hit a man at close range the effect was brutal.  “They inflicted horrible wounds. They smashed the bones; they tore out entire muscles from arms or legs; they stopped a running or charging man immediately. There was a little ridge or seam along the circumference of the ball which, while it ridged and scratched the bore of the musket, caused ragged wounds in the body wherever it got home.”

This inaccuracy was all well and fine up through the Napoleonic War-era because the musket’s fire effect was seen as secondary; its main role was as a mounting platform for the bayonet. Great battles were expected to be won, in the end, with the bayonet charge and cold steel. Major General John Burgoyne said, “The onset of bayonets in the hands of the valiant is irresistible.” The British Army regular was particularly well-trained and enjoyed a fierce reputation for his skill with the bayonet. Many an enemy line was broken by the British bayonet, as Kipling put it, “…pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown Bess.”

 "Pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown Bess."

Fondness for the bayonet was hardly restricted to Great Britain. Much ado is made of the fact that the Prussian drill master Baron von Steuben added the phrase “Take aim” to American Continental Army drill, but he too greatly preferred and stressed the bayonet. Napoleon said, “The bayonet has always been the weapon of the brave and the chief tool of victory.” Russian General Alexander Suvorov was famous for his quote, “The bullet is a fool; the bayonet is the whole man.” Frederick the Great’s testament about the “superiority of fire” was meant to apply only to the artillery; infantry charged with l’arme blanch.

Strange as it may seem, despite all this emphasis on cold steel, the bayonet actually inflicted very few casualties on the battlefield. Studying what type of wounds soldiers were treated for at the Invalides of Paris in 1762, French historian André Corvisier discovered that statistically 68.8% of men were wounded by small arms fire, 13.4% by artillery, 14.7% by cavalry sabers, and only 2.4% by the bayonet. Dominique Jean Larrey, a French surgeon with Napoleon’s Grand Armée, conducted his own studies in 1807 and also found only 2% of men were wounded by the bayonet. Even in one particular battle between French and Russian forces that involved bayonet charges and considerable hand-to-hand combat, Larrey noted that 119 men were wounded by musket balls but only 5 from bayoneting.

The bayonet did not win battles by physically inflicting casualties; it won them by psychologically breaking the enemy’s resistance. One more than one occasion American militia and riflemen simply broke and ran rather than stand to take a British or Hessian bayonet charge.

So this was the state of military affairs in 1775 and helps to explain the significance of the accuracy and range of the rifle, which had three or even four times the effective range of the smoothbore musket. At a range where the musket-armed soldier had less than a 50/50 chance of hitting a man, the rifleman could choose which eye to shoot. In the hands of a marksman, a weapon like the American Long Rifle stood a much greater chance of hitting a target the size of a man at 300 yards than the musket did at 100.

Yet the smoothbore musket would soldier on in professional armies until the mid 1800s. Despite its accuracy, the rifle did not often fare well in conventional warfare of the period, for a variety of reasons we’ll examine later.   

Marines With Guns?

After the Fort Hood shooting, in which 13 soldiers were killed and 30 were injured, I heard some gun-banning idiots saying "See, even highly-armed military facilities aren't secure against nut jobs with guns. We need to ban guns." Of course most of these slack-jawed milksops have probably never been anywhere near an Army post. If they had, they'd know that military bases are largely "gun-free zones" just like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook Elementary, etc... At least one high ranking military official would like to see that changed.

According to an article at The Truth About Guns (TTAG): "The decision to disarm military bases—DOD Directive 5210.56—was a political one implemented during Bush the Elder’s administration and allowed to continue to present day[.]" (Bush 1 was a pencil-neck who was definitely no friend of the Second Amendment.) The way it stands now, except for a few military policemen and soldiers on live-fire shooting ranges (or in actual combat), our servicemen and women are disarmed while on duty.

After seeing the Ft. Hood massacre, U.S. Navy Yard shootings, and an on-base murder-suicide, the head of the least PC branch of our services is calling for a change to that policy. The Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Jim Amos, outlined his plan to his senior officers in September. According to MilitaryTimes.com: "It calls for a variety of new initiatives, including the installation of security cameras in each barracks, the incorporation of more staff noncommissioned officers and officers on duty, and the arming of all officers on duty and staff NCOs on duty at all times[.]"

Given the skinny anti-gun wussy who is the commander-in-chief, I doubt such changes will come to fruition. As long as we have a national policy where American Devil Dogs can be killed from a lack of shooting back, that remains completely unacceptable.

THE 7.62X51mm NATO; TURNING COVER INTO CONCEALMENT SINCE 1953

We’ve already discussed other attributes of the 7.62x51mm ball round before, such as long-range performance and terminal stopping power. Today we’ll focus entirely on penetration of the humble ball round.

  

The standard military 7.62 NATO ball round here in the ‘States is the M80, which launches a 147-grain projectile consisting of a soft lead core wrapped in a gliding copper jacket at a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second. Although still standard military issue, this is the Old School Original Recipe T65-type .308 load of 1953 vintage. Some of our NATO allies improved upon the recipe a bit. Belgium’s FN Herstal began feeding the FAL rifle and the MAG58 machine gun with their SS77 ball round and later many of the countries which adopted the CETME/HK G3 and the MG3 machine gun used the 146-grain “NATO Reference” ball load.

The SS77 fires a 144-grain FMJBT bullet at 2,750 fps. The significance of the “BT” is that the bullet is Boat-Tailed, which gives it a better aerodynamic shape and ballistic coefficient. This translates into increased accuracy, especially at longer ranges, and the more streamlined SS77 keeps much of its stabilization during the velocity transition from supersonic to subsonic, somewhere out there around 900 meters, depending on how far above Sea Level you are.

Interesting to know, if you’re a gun nut, but we are getting out there to real sniper ranges and beyond the realm of the humble battle rifle and designated marksmen types. For me and my FALs, 600 meters is our effective range.

Any decent NATO ball round will do the job here. Some of the really good foreign-made surplus ammunition includes the German DAG (145-grain/2,785fps), Portuguese (143-grain/2,740 fps) and South African (143-grain/2785 fps) ball. Also noted their very high quality and consistency are the Lithuanian (146-grain FMJBT) and Malaysian (147-grain FMJ) manufactured surplus ball and at one time Australian equivalent of the M80 was readily available.

At any rate, the M80 ball round can, according to the military, penetrate a quarter inch of sheet steel at 300 yards, pierce an old steel pot helmet at 400 yards and, at 620 meters, penetrate a 3.45mm standard NATO steel plate.

There are a wide variety of factors affecting bullet penetration but the most crucial is the angle of impact. A projectile striking at a flat angle of 90-degrees has the best penetration. As the angle becomes sharper, the penetration becomes less and the probability of a ricochet greater, hence the use of sloped armor on tanks since WWII.

As a quirk of ballistics, modern high-velocity small arms rounds actually deliver much less penetration at closer ranges than at longer ranges. In fact, the 5.56x45mm round performs best at 200 meters and the 7.62x51mm ball achieves maximum penetration at 600 meters! The 5.56x45mm round striking cover at close range is particularly affected due to the small but very fast projectile destabilizing almost instantaneously; the poorest penetration actually occurs inside of 25 meters range. Even with the SS109/M855 62-grain “green tip” projectile, combat in Iraq showed that, “5.56 mm bullets were regularly defeated by the sandwich effect of sheet metal and plastic door linings.” Automobiles being such a common media in urban terrain, this is a decided disadvantage.

The 7.62 NATO and to some extent even the 7.62x39mm AK round offer better penetration of common urban media, to include cars. The old 1993 FM 90-10 offered the following data concerning the penetration of a single round of 5.56mm and 7.62mm ball at 200 meters.

The data shows penetration values nearly double those of the 5.56mm for the 7.62mm but doesn’t really tell us all that much. It confirms that dirt/sand is, as Bert Gummer says, “The best bullet-stopper there is.” and that a single layer of sandbags will stop an individual shot from even a 7.62x51mm round. The 7.62 will penetrate up to 50 inches, or just over four feet, of stacked pine boards, but this information would only seem particularly relevant if you were having a firefight in a lumber yard.

          The new MOUT manual lists the penetration of a single round of 7.62x51mm ball round through various media at different, more common, urban ranges. Note that the greatest penetration of sandbag-type material is achieved at the longest range and that the new manual lists only 41 inches of penetration in pine boards as opposed to the old manual’s 50 inches.

In terms of cover, the manual specifically lists the following as being able to stop a 5.56mm round fired at less than 50 meters.

1.     One thickness of well-packed sandbags.

2.     A 2-inch concrete wall (non-reinforced).

3.     A 55-gallon drum filled with water or sand.

4.     A small ammunition can filled with sand.

5.     A cinder block filled with sand (block will probably shatter).

6.     A plate glass windowpane at a 45-degree angle (glass fragments may be thrown behind the glass).

7.     A brick veneer.

8.     A car body (5.56mm rounds penetrate but may not always exit).

As for the 7.62mm NATO ball it noted: “Barriers that offer protection against 5.56mm rounds are also effective against 7.62mm rounds with some exceptions. The 7.62mm round can penetrate a windowpane at a 45-degree obliquity, a hollow cinder block, or both sides of a car body. It can also easily penetrate wooden frame buildings.”

“Internal walls, partitions, plaster, floors, ceilings, common office furniture, home appliances, and bedding can be easily penetrated by both 7.62mm and caliber .50 [no shit, Sherlock] rounds.”

 

The following illustrations come from an experiment conducted by an Australian Army infantry officer. Building construction materials were engaged at various ranges, with one hundred rounds of 5.56x45mm ammunition linked four rounds of F1 (SS109) ball to one tracer fired from an M249 SAW and one hundred rounds of 7.62x51mm ammunition linked four rounds of F4 (M80) ball to one tracer fired from an M240B machine gun. Considering that the SS109 5.56mm achieves maximum penetration at 200 meters, the results of the hundred rounds fired against stacked bricks is particularly illustrative. At the same range, a solid block of non-reinforced concrete was engaged by each weapon, and the results viewed side by side are equally revealing.

Since all this information just shows penetration under ideal conditions, i.e. a perfect 90-degree angle on the bullet strike, perhaps more enlightening are the tests from the Jarheads’ technical training video Concealment Does Not Equal Cover.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center, at the Marine Corps’ Project Metropolis, conducted a more recent series of tests with current weapons against various commonly found wall/building materials, to include sheetrock, plywood, brick and cinder block. The ammo for the 5.56mm weapons consisted of M855 (SS109) 62-grain penetrator core ammunition; the 7.62x39mm AKM and 7.62x51mm weapons used standard FMJ (M43 and M80) ball rounds. All weapons were fired in 3-round bursts at the average urban engagement range of 19 meters, first at a 90-degree flat angle to the wall and then at a 45-degree angle.

I was a little surprised that the AKM did as well as it did and that the SAW didn’t do better. All the 7.62x39mm and 7.62x51mm weapons penetrated all media at all angles. The M16A2 failed to penetrate a single layer brick wall at 45-degree angle and also failed to penetrate a single layer cinder block wall at any angle. The M249 SAW with the same ammunition penetrated the brick and cinder block walls at a 90-degree angle but failed to do so at a 45-degree angle.

Target	90-degree angle	45-degree angle
Sheetrock	Yes	Yes
Plywood	Yes	Yes
Brick	Yes	Yes
Cinder Block	Yes	Yes

7.62x39mm Burst (AKM)

Target	90-degree angle	45-degree angle
Sheetrock	Yes	Yes
Plywood	Yes	Yes
Brick	Yes	No
Cinder Block	No	No

5.56x45mm Burst (M16A2)

Target	90-degree angle	45-degree angle
Sheetrock	Yes	Yes
Plywood	Yes	Yes
Brick	Yes	No
Cinder Block	Yes	No

5.56x45mm Burst (M249 SAW)

Target	90-degree angle	45-degree angle
Sheetrock	Yes	Yes
Plywood	Yes	Yes
Brick	Yes	Yes
Cinder Block	Yes	Yes

7.62x51mm Burst (M240B GPMG)

I’ve posted this before but I see that the old link doesn’t work anymore. Here’s a new link to the video over at Live Leak.

Watching this video should send a shiver down your spine. The military is always (supposedly) training to fight “the next war”. This meant that back when I was a Cold Warrior, MOUT training sites closely resembled the towns and villages of Western Europe, as we expected to conventionally fight “the next war” against massed mechanized Warsaw Pact armies pouring out of the Fulda Gap. Of course, we wound up fighting the next war in the open deserts of Iraq instead, but that’s beside the point.

Going by where the never-ending Global War on Terror has actually been fought since 2002, one might reasonably expect a modern military MOUT training site to resemble the architecture and lay-out of cities like Mogadishu, Baghdad, Fallujah or Kabul. Sarajevo or Grozny might also be possible candidates.

Instead, Project Metropolis doesn’t look like any city on foreign soil. With its red brick school, steepled white church on the corner, porched duplexes, green lawns, fire hydrants and stop signs, its looks a helluva lot more like Mainstreet, USA rather than anyplace in the Middle East or Southwest Asia. If the US military is training for the next expected war, then watching a conventional combined arms assault of heavily armed Marines supported by armor, helicopters and Harriers blasting their way down Mainstreet, USA should set off a couple of little alarm bells in the back of the American citizen’s mind.

So far you may be thinking this all falls under the “interesting, but so what?” category, but all this information has been put to good use militarily for decades. I’ve seen US Army WWII documents recommending the use of the commonly available .30-06 162-grain Armor Piercing round in the M1 Garand and Browning Automatic Rifle for combat in European forests specifically for shooting through trees used for cover by the Germans. GIs and Marines armed with the 7.62x51mm M14 in Vietnam commented on its ability to shoot through jungle foliage and tree trunks, as did ANZAC troopers armed with the L1A1 version of the FAL.

A still shot from the old US Army training film Infantry Weapons and their Effects. This is the moment of impact of a 150-grain FMJ .30-06 ball round hitting a bucket of water after penetrating an oak tree approximately 12 inches thick. Range: 100 yards. Performance of the 7.62 M80 ball is almost equivalent.

The Rhodesian Security Forces during the Bush Wars of the 1970’s really put the penetrative power of the “7.62 long” as they called it to good use with their Drake or Cover Shooting. This excellent article by “Ian Rhodes” which appeared in the Small Wars Journal is the best explanation of the tactic I’ve ever encountered and well worth the read.

An excerpt explains: “FAL 7.62 long rounds have the power to punch through the tree trunks generally found in the African savanna and jesse bush. AK47s using 7.62 short, on the other hand, generally did not. This fact was used to great effect by the Rhodesians. When firing into an area that included trees, rocks or ant hills etc, a single round down the left hand side of a solid object was good practice (not forgetting most opponents are right handed), then double tap the base of the tree and continue to the right, squeezing off single (or double) rounds in fairly close proximity. (In a conventional situation, moving from left to right takes out the trigger man before the machine gun loader or second.) Smallish rocks, strange “lumps” or “bundles of rags” were to be killed. In fact, anything out of place was to be dealt with—the “rocks” may be heads, hands, or a pattern on a camouflage uniform etc. The soldier then moved his aim to the next area of cover and repeated the process.”

The Rhodesians were tactically the finest light infantry the West has produced since perhaps the days of Daniel Morgan and there is a great deal to be learned from their common-sense approach. Consider that even when reserve policemen and farm guards are included under the overall umbrella of “Security Forces”, they still maintained an 8-to-1 kill ratio against an enemy who enjoyed staggering numerical odds and the latest Soviet and Red Chinese military gear. Well-trained crack units like the battalions of the Rhodesian Light Infantry Regiment achieved kill ratios on the order of 35-to-1 and sometimes as high as 50-to1. If shooting through cover worked for them I’m more than glad to do the same.

Beyond Africa, for a decade or more after the regular line infantry switched over to 5.56x45mm assault rifles, European nations which fielded elite mountain troops retained 7.62x51mm battle rifles for their special use. In mountain warfare, the long-range capabilities and wind-bucking abilities of the heavier caliber comes into its own.

Long after the rest of their army had switched over to the 5.56mm Steyr AUG, Austria’s Jagdkommando Special Forces retained their StG58 FAL-type rifles. In the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe, the Jagdkommando were trained to stay behind and operate behind the Soviet front lines. Under such circumstances, the Austrian mountain troops could sit back at 500 meters or so and engage Soviet support elements and security troops from beyond the effective range of return fire from their 7.62x39mm Kalashnikovs. Additionally, the 7.62 NATO’s heavier bullets and superior penetration were expected to prove more effective at disabling and destroying light wheeled vehicles and trucks, particularly with fire directed specifically against the engine blocks.

In urban areas the penetration of the 7.62 was also appreciated, as noted by a former British soldier.

“In places like Northern Ireland, if fired upon from a building’s window, fire was normally not returned at the window, but at the walls either side of the window. At likely places a firer would move to for cover. The SLR’s 7.62mm rounds could punch holes through brick walls. Many a surprised dead sniper (could he speak, that is) would testify to that fact.”

         On a whim, I decided to personally do a little informal testing of my own one day. I used some old British-style Figure 11 “Charging Commie” silhouette targets I printed out poster-sized, glued to heavy duty cardboard backers. There should have been more holes in these targets than there are, but I was playing with a Gat trigger device on the Century Franken-FAL StG58 that day. I'm pretty certain that rapid but aimed semi-automatic fire would have produced a lot more actual holes.

 Optics good, optics your friend. The photo was taken at approximately 75 meters, but the targets are hard to discern even at relatively short range.

 Where's Commie?

 Two of the targets were deliberately placed so that I would have to shoot through cover to hit them. One went behind some fairly serious cover; a mature Douglas fir with a trunk about 18 inches thick near the butt end had fallen over in a recent wind storm and I put the target fully behind it except for the head and shoulders. Engaging the target from 300 meters with an FAL shooting 145-grain Port FMJ, all rounds that hit the tree trunk penetrated fully with plenty of power left over to penetrate the target. One round blew out a sizeable chunk of wood that left a hole about two inches by inch in size through the Charging Commie as well.

 

 This wind-downed Doug fir looks like good cover, just over a foot and a half thick. This particular Figure 11 target was printed to be 18 inches across the shoulders for reference. At 300 meters, three 7.62x51mm FMJ rounds hit the log and all three fully penetrated it and the target.

The first picture didn't turn out, so this was a second Fig 11 perforated while behind the same cover with the same ammunition. Here the "exit wounds" in the tree are readily apparent.

A second Figure 11 was placed behind a large, flat rock that did not actually stand up high enough to provide true cover. More importantly, about 15 meters in front of the target was a sizeable standing Doug fir. From my firing position 300 meters away, the Figure 11 could not be seen except for a few patches of white color through the green boughs of the tree. Once more, the 7.62x51mm rounds made it through the boughs and limbs to hit the target. Two rounds hit low, striking the sloped surface of the flat rock in front of the target, and these produced a half a dozen long thin rock chips which themselves had enough velocity to slice through the cardboard. Even if these would not have been lethal against a human target, they no doubt would have made for a helluva distraction involving pain and blood flow.

Target #2 taken from 25 yards. The actual firing position was further to the left and required shooting directly through the tree boughs at what little was visible of the target.

          Red circles indicate bullet strikes while blue circles indicate rock chip "shrapnel wounds" from two low shots hitting the stone in front of the target (indicated by blue arrows).

          I actually considered the ability to shoot through fairly thick foliage the more important performance. British small arms expert Tony Williams explained why this is an important consideration: “Due to its small size, a 5.56 mm bullet can also be more easily deflected in flight on its way to a target. Thick vegetation, wooden posts and even soldiers’ web equipment have all caused 5.56 mm rounds to ricochet or bounce-off harmlessly, depending on the angle of attack. This tendency increases with distance and is again attributable to the rapid loss of energy at longer ranges.”

          Just for shits and giggles, I tried a "Rhodesian Cover Shoot" on the way home. A wolfy lodgepole pine with a bole roughly a foot thick alongside the abandoned logging road I was hiking became cover for a skinny Charging Commie. At an “ambush range” of less than 15 meters, I simply gave the tree trunk a double-tap from the FAL square in the middle of the trunk. The results in the photo pretty much speak for themselves.

Fig 11 Charging Commie before; he hides behind this lodgepole pine for cover.

Figure 11 Charging Commie after a 7.62x51mm ball double-tap to the opposite side of the tree trunk.

This penetration is something easily overlooked. No real hunter would ever shoot at game through foliage. In training, military MILES lasers, paintballs, Airsoft pellets and even Simmunition cannot support this type of shooting. In fact, I recall an NCO I knew whose solution to any tactical problem was, “Pop smoke, because MILES can’t shoot through smoke.”

Penetration is something you have to just keep in the back of your mind, and an occasional experiment like mine serves as a good reminder. Either that or you can tie a string around your finger.