Bookshelf II

I finished "The Winter War" by Robert Edwards last week and had not intended to post anything on it. But, now with the stunning Russian thrust into Georgia still underway, Edwards' recounting of the 1939-40 winter war between the USSR and tiny Finland suddenly seems a lot more relevant.
"The Winter War" is not a great book. A hundred pages in and no one had even thrown a snowball in anger, much less fired a live round. Edwards spends a third of the book detailing the political machinations that led up to the Soviet invasion. And when he does finally get around to the shooting, he takes a more distant view of the military action. Rarely does he take his readers to the front lines. He is more content to look at the "big picture," the pronouncements of various generals, the overall strategic picture.
What trench-level reporting he does is mostly concerned with the Russians and how their human waves of ill-prepared, badly equipped soldiers were slaughtered by the Finns.
We'll never know how many Russians were killed in this absurdly one-sided war, but whole divisions of the vaunted Red Army were decimated by the Finnish defenders who took advantage of the rugged terrain, their interior lines of communication and the incredibly brutal weather to hold out for many weeks longer than anyone thought possible.
The Russian bear got his nose torn up pretty badly in 1939.
The good old days.