Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous R

wife and the pilot.

In 1938 the six-member commission finally drew the border between the two warring countries. Paraguay received the bulk of the Chaco; Bolivia got a chunk of the western section near its oil fields and a slice providing it with a small port on the Paraguay River with access to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a deal both sides could have worked out years before the war.

The Chaco is still wildly depopulated, amazingly worth­less, and filled with flies. Both countries are still landlocked nanopowers.

NINE. THE WINTER WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND FINLAND: 1939

Hubris is the theme of many ancient Greek plays and also some foolish modern plays for power.

It’s hard to think of Josef Stalin as a tragic figure from a Greek drama, unless plays have been unearthed featuring a paranoid, murderous thug with a shag mustache. Although the Soviet dictator caused tragedy wherever he and his army went, he himself was not tragic. Nevertheless, in failing to understand or even entertain the idea that the Finns might put up some resistance to being invaded, Stalin showed a Siberian-sized amount of hubris.

And that is exactly what Stalin did when he decided to invade Finland in late 1939, in a fit of logic, to extend the Soviet borders at the expense of the Finns and prepare his country’s defenses for the inevitable German invasion. Ex­pecting a short winter romp in the snow, the Russians made no preparations for a prolonged campaign featuring actual fighting by a breathing enemy. The Soviets poured wave after wave of undertrained and ill-equipped troops into the dark, cold Finnish winter. They suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in modern warfare. All the while, Stalin’s real enemy, Adolf Hitler, watched in glee as little Finland pounded the fabled Red Army.

THE PLAYERS

Josef Stalin — evil Rex Soviet leader who signed a nonaggression pact with the equally evil Adolf Hitler, all the while fearing that — could it be true? — Hitler would stab him in the back and actually invade.

Skinny — Adopted the motivational program for his generals that those who finished in first place got to keep their jobs, those in second place got an all-expense paid trip to a Siberian gulag, and the third place winners got taken out behind Ukraine and shot.

Props — Equal Opportunity Killer.

Pros — Bested the Nazis in the mother-of-all-evildoer death matches.

Cons — Just about everything else.

Field Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim — known as “Тhe Кnight of Еurope,” the aristocratic general was the supreme commander of the Finnish armed forces. For years he beat the drum for a stronger military to protect against the inevitable rambling of the Soviet Bear, but his Finnish leaders ignored him. In frustration, he resigned in 1939 but before it took effect the Soviets attacked, and he was named to lead the defense.

Skinny — His first language was Swedish, but then he spent thirty-five years in the Russian army, admiring the tsars. When he returned to Finland in 1918, he needed a translator to talk to his Finnish troops.

Props — Was so famous in Finland that the country’s main line of defense against the Soviets was named for him.

Pros — Fought the Communists when they were called Bolsheviks and fought them when they were called Soviets. He even fought them as Hitler’s ally. But he still couldn’t bring back the tsar.

Cons — Never really felt comfortable with the whole democracy thing.

THE GENERAL SITUATION

In 1939 the world had dissolved into a very dangerous place. Hitler had swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia without much opposition. Poland was next. He was concerned, how­ever, with how the Soviets would react to this little foray. Hitler’s people and Stalin’s people had a chat, then a talk, and finally a meeting. The result was the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. It was reported to the world in late August without a hint of irony that a treaty between two of the most aggressive countries in history contained the word nonaggression.

Publicly, the treaty was all about trade and other good stuff. Privately, Hitler got Stalin to agree not to object to his planned takeover of Poland. Even better, they divvied up Poland and the small countries between them like they were M&Ms. Hitler got the blues and greens while Stalin got to turn the others into reds. In particular, the treaty gave Fin­land to Stalin.

With the treaty signed, Hitler green-lighted the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and when the British and French raced to Poland’s rescue with a firestorm of angry words about Adolf, World War II was on. Adolf swore up and down that he would never, ever consider invading Russia, but Stalin, to his credit, still had doubts about Hit­ler’s character. Stalin decided to beef up the defenses of Len­ingrad and the navy bases surrounding the eastern end of the Baltic Sea, just in case Mr. Hitler turned out not to be who he said he was. A quick check of the map, however, revealed to Stalin that the Finns actually owned most of the land ap­proaching Leningrad.

Finland has a complicated history. It was part of the pow­erful Swedish Kingdom from the end of the fourteenth cen­tury until 1809 when it was traded to the Russian Empire. By the late nineteenth century, the tsars treated the Finns harshly and dominated all Finnish institutions. But the Finns waited and when the tsar fell in 1917, the Finns declared their independence. On December 31, 1917, Lenin formally recognized the newly independent state of Finland.

But the wave of Communist agitation that erupted throughout Europe had also infiltrated Finland. A civil war erupted between the pro-Soviet Reds and the Finnish bour­geoisie led by Mannerheim. To defeat the pro-Soviet Com­munist forces, the Finns called in help from Germany. With their assistance and troops, the Finns defeated the Reds. But the country now had a decidedly pro-Germany tinge, and the Soviets gazed at their lost Finnish territory with longing and a bit of murderous revenge.

In the 1920s Josef Stalin inherited the not-yet-totally-fail­ing Soviet state following Lenin’s demise. He vowed to retake Finland. Perhaps most important, the vital Russian city of Leningrad stood a mere twenty miles from the Finnish border. Leningrad sits on the Karelian Isthmus, a chunk of land only about forty miles wide situated between the Gulf of Finland on the west and Lake Ladoga in the east. It was not paranoia to assume that a Soviet enemy might launch an attack from Finland down the Isthmus, and quickly over­whelm the city and its important military bases. To prevent such an attack, Stalin prudently wanted to grab a chunk of the Finnish border as a buffer zone.

Along with the other Scandinavian countries, Finland had a white-knuckle grasp on a tenuous neutrality among the flying bar stools of Europe. In 1938 Stalin asked the Finns to promise they would not ally with Germany and to kindly attach some of their territory to Russia. At least he asked. The Finns declined. Stalin, unable to believe any country could actually resist attacking and conquering their neigh­bors, and not willing to contemplate someone