Winter Warriors

“So I’m told, I haven’t seen it for myself.” The Signals sergeant swore under his breath, quietly vowing to get word of what had happened out to the front line units. They would take a due and dispassionate revenge for the crime.

Rockingham left the bunker as carefully as he’d entered it. Next thing was to get to the aid post that the survivors of the medical unit had set up and exchange a few rude jokes with the wounded. All part of keeping unit morale up. While he was doing it, he could find out how long General Rodgers was going to be out of action for. Then back to the radio bunker to start coordinating with the units that were cut off. Telling them to hang on, stand fast and wait to be relieved in place was one thing. He had to make sure they could see they were getting the support they needed to do it.

Hedgehog, The Regina Rifle Regiment, Kola Front

“Major Gillespie? A word please.” Lieutenant Colonel Haversham had got the orders a minute or so earlier.

“Sir?”

“Divisional headquarters are back on the net. Their general orders to all units are to hold in place; we’re not to try and break out. Instead, we will fight our ground where we are. The rest of the division will come and fight their way through to relieve us.”

“Makes sense Sir. I’ve been reading up on what happened to Russian units that got cut off like this. It wasn’t being cut off that chewed them up, it was their own efforts to break out. They weakened themselves so much that when the Finns finally moved to liquidate the pockets, there wasn’t much the Russians could do to stop them. So we’re to stay put?”

“That’s right. Rocky’s arranging for air and artillery support and says we’ll get supply drops if we need them.”

“Rockingham’s arranging it? I thought he was 6th Division when it finally arrives?”

“He is. I guess General Rodgers is out of it and Rocky has taken over in his place. There’s bad rumors coming out of Division. Apparently the headquarters units got chewed up. Including the RCAMC detachment.”

“Damn.”

“Anyway go spread the word, everybody to dig in deep. Make sure the front line is continuous. The Finns are masters at slipping through any holes that we leave and we don’t want them in our back areas. Above all, nobody and I mean nobody leaves the perimeter until we get relieved. And if we’ve got artillery and air coming in, we’ll be calling it in almost on our own heads. The deeper we dig in the better. Last thing we want is casualties from our own supporting fire.”

“Especially if the Yanks are delivering it. You know what their pilots are like. Over-enthusiastic.”

That, Haversham thought, was putting it politely. The Canadian troops had a saying about the Yank fighter-bomber pilots, they were unerringly accurate. Every bomb they dropped hit the ground. Somewhere. Then, he had a strange sensation, as if his own thoughts had been turned into reality. A whistling noise.

“INBOUND!” The shouting was all over the perimeter, Haversham glanced around to see figures diving for cover. That was probably a good idea and he copied it. The explosions followed a split second after he made it to the ground. They were mortars, 82s? Perhaps 50s? They were light cracks, not the heavy thuds of the medium mortars. The ripple of explosions lasted for barely minute and then the scene was silent again.

“Fire back, Sir?” Gillespie picked himself out of the snow. All over the hedgehog, the troops were doing the same. Miraculously despite the number of explosions, nobody seemed to have been hurt. The tiny charge on the German 50mm mortar had combined with the thick snow to produce a lot of barks and no bites. Haversham knew they wouldn’t be that lucky again.

“No. Waste of ammunition. Those were 50mm mortars, the crews will have moved long before we can put fire down on them. That’s what they’re trying to goad us into doing. Plus get a measure of what we’ve got in here. See if we can get support from the outside. We need to hoard what we have in here with us. Goes for food as well as ammunition. Gillespie, get an inventory made of what supplies we have here and what we need urgently.” Haversham sprinted over to the radio section. It was time to fight a war the Yank way. Hole up, form a defensive perimeter around their radio operator and let him fight them with the divisional artillery. It wasn’t soldiering the way his father or grandfather would have understood, making sure a kid could eat his can of beans undisturbed while he blasted the enemy with somebody else’s artillery but it was the low-cost way of fighting a war. Low cost in terms of Canadian lives anyway. That was what was important.

“Get in touch with headquarters. Tell them we’re coming under fire. If there’s support available, we could use it on the perimeter.” It was time, Haversham thought, to start educating the Finnish Army on the facts of life. One of the earliest lessons would be that there were consequences for actions. That lesson could be applied on a lot of levels.

Finnish 12th Infantry Division, Kola Front

Lieutenant Martti Ihrasaari wasn’t particularly happy at this point. Having been detached and sent on this infiltration mission had allowed him to get out from under the crushing dead weight of the divisional and regimental commands for a while. When the Canadian division had collapsed, the rest of the division had moved up as well. Now he was back under their command. He’d got a cursory ‘well done’ for his roadblock that had this battalion bottled up along the road but now he was just back to being a small cog in a big machine. One that didn’t necessarily have his interests at heart.

What had just happened was a good example. That quick flurry of mortar fire had been supposed to wake the Canadians up and make them fire off their counter-battery salvoes, wasting their ammunition and revealing their position. The crews of the little Model 36 mortars had gone as soon as they’d finished their fire mission of course. That was the one good thing about those mortars. It was a good tactic in theory, but it had no regard for the people who were left and who couldn’t move away. The really annoying point was that it hadn’t worked. The Canadian position was still silent.

Then Ihrasaari heard a threatening roar, one that came from overhead and grew closer all the time. He knew instantly what it was. Artillery and not the pipsqueak little 50mm mortars either. This was the big stuff, Canadian 5.5 inch guns or Ami 155s. He felt his stomach clench and his body try to drive itself deeper into the snow. There was one good thing about this. Artillery came down at an angle and the shells would bury themselves in the snow before exploding so much of their force was directed down into the ground. The little mortar shells came straight down and their explosions were much more effective -for their size. That didn’t change the fact that their size was tiny compared with the big inbounds.

Ihrasaari was wrong. The shells didn’t explode deep in the ground. They burst in the air above the Finnish positions around the Canadian hedgehog. Their fragments lashed down at the troops in their dug-outs and foxholes. The first two patterns of shells were bad enough, but the third was sheer hell. Those shells didn’t explode in the air; they hit the ground and went off with a curious muffled explosion. The burst pattern was strange as well. The cloud of smoke was greater than he’d expected and had curious white tendrils that leapt out of it.

Perhaps tentacles was a better word, Ihrasaari thought, they reminded him of the octopus he had seen once at an aquarium.

Ihrasaari saw the white smoke cloud rolling towards him. A smoke-screen? Were the Canadians trying to break out of their fortifications already? He knew that’s what the divisional commanders wanted; the besieged troops to exhaust themselves in break-out attempts but this was very early for that. When the smoke engulfed him, Ihrasaari felt the heat creasing his skin. It caught him in the throat and caused him to erupt in an explosive fit of coughing. He saw his men were surrounded by a snowstorm of small, white particles that floated down upon them. Then, he realized what the rounds were and the idea filled him with instant terror. These were white phosphorus rounds, incendiaries, anti-personnel. The men who had been hit by the little snowstorm were screaming in pain and terror. Their clothes sizzled and burned as the flakes landed. They tried brushing them off but the effort only made things worse. When their hands touched the stuff the little flakes caused a horrible burn, increasing in intensity as it burrowed into their flesh.

He tried to run over to his men. Some were rolling in the snow, trying to put out the fires that were eating into them. He knew it was no good, that the white phosphorus was dissolving into the fatty tissues of their bodies where it would prevent the wounds healing. As he thought that, he heard another roar overhead. Another series of the airbursts flailed the ground with fragments. His suspicions had been right. This wasn’t going to be like fighting