White Death by Robert Edwards
Amazon uk | usa
As a British citizen I was brought up with the popular blockbuster WWII films and jingoistic historical notion of WWII being a kind of good versus evil battle. The idea is still somewhat preserved now with the Third Reich being the last word in totalitarian regimes, in the West at any rate. Added to this the Eastern Front and the allies vital alliance with Russia is so little remembered in these notions of that war.
But over the last few years especially since moving to Finland that comfortable story about the last world war has more or less unravelled for me. Although I haven’t read Europe at War by Norman Davies you only need to read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor to be confronted by some uncomfortable truths about WWII – that the Soviets did more than anyone else to defeat the Third Reich and that they were quite bad themselves.
Good vs Evil debates always focus on Hitlers holocaust which lowers The Reich below any other regime of the time. But this popular myth of the good guys versus the bad that is preserved in certain countries serve to remind me how everyone tells and retells their memories to fit into more comfortable narratives, and that the potentiality of the future means that few people see the consequences of event as they unfold in real time and only in hindsight do these chains of causalities become obvious. Nicolas Taleb who’s book Black Swan I’m currently reading actually uses one example of a writer who covers WWII first hand. Comparing William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is maybe the classic book on Nazi Germany to his Berlin Diaries where as a foreign correspondent from 1934 onwards he was seeing the events of WWII actually unfold. That it wasn’t very apparent how countries would even side with each other at the time should be remembered, the Nazis and Communists actually kicked off WWII in cooperation.
So the fates of the Central European and Baltic states were often between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea or actually of no choice at all, their fates had in effect defacto been agreed between the Nazis and the Communists already. The White Death tells the story of Finlands’ fight for its independence and very existence in this backdrop. White death is what Finlands’ Propogandists referred to the Winter War while it was being fought with Russia. This book is the second one I’ve read about the Winter War, and is very strong on the background, and personalities of the main players in the run up to the war. It explains clearly how Finland got itself into a war in the first place when they were negotiating with the Kremlin, how the superpowers (and Sweden) of the time played the situation in their own ways, which left Finland with much in the way of sympathy but little material support. It tells clearly how Russia initially botched the invasion before regrouping and succeeding with overwhelming firepower. It also sets up the scene for the Continuation war in which Finland allied itself with Germany and attacked Russia. However the book stops at the end of the Winter war and only lays out out how the future events of Finlands’ alliance with Germany came about.
As great as this book is it is a little less detailed documenting the purely military history of the war, but that I think is it’s aim, not primarily for the amateur military historian but a more mainstream audience. I was a little disappointed it didn’t go on to look at the Continuation War and the resolution of WWII which puts the Winter War at the end of the day in it’s proper context, but that would entail a much longer and less digestable book of course. That Finland had to choose between its independence and its neutrality is clear. That it succeeded at great cost is a story of true heroism, and this book tells it fantasticlally well.
White Death by Robert Edwards
Amazon uk | usa
As a British citizen I was brought up with the popular blockbuster WWII films and jingoistic historical notion of WWII being a kind of good versus evil battle. The idea is still somewhat preserved now with the Third Reich being the last word in totalitarian regimes, in the West at any rate. Added to this the Eastern Front and the allies vital alliance with Russia is so little remembered in these notions of that war.
But over the last few years especially since moving to Finland that comfortable story about the last world war has more or less unravelled for me. Although I haven’t read Europe at War by Norman Davies you only need to read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor to be confronted by some uncomfortable truths about WWII – that the Soviets did more than anyone else to defeat the Third Reich and that they were quite bad themselves.
Good vs Evil debates always focus on Hitlers holocaust which lowers The Reich below any other regime of the time. But this popular myth of the good guys versus the bad that is preserved in certain countries serve to remind me how everyone tells and retells their memories to fit into more comfortable narratives, and that the potentiality of the future means that few people see the consequences of event as they unfold in real time and only in hindsight do these chains of causalities become obvious. Nicolas Taleb who’s book Black Swan I’m currently reading actually uses one example of a writer who covers WWII first hand. Comparing William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is maybe the classic book on Nazi Germany to his Berlin Diaries where as a foreign correspondent from 1934 onwards he was seeing the events of WWII actually unfold. That it wasn’t very apparent how countries would even side with each other at the time should be remembered, the Nazis and Communists actually kicked off WWII in cooperation.
So the fates of the Central European and Baltic states were often between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea or actually of no choice at all, their fates had in effect defacto been agreed between the Nazis and the Communists already. The White Death tells the story of Finlands’ fight for its independence and very existence in this backdrop. White death is what Finlands’ Propogandists referred to the Winter War while it was being fought with Russia. This book is the second one I’ve read about the Winter War, and is very strong on the background, and personalities of the main players in the run up to the war. It explains clearly how Finland got itself into a war in the first place when they were negotiating with the Kremlin, how the superpowers (and Sweden) of the time played the situation in their own ways, which left Finland with much in the way of sympathy but little material support. It tells clearly how Russia initially botched the invasion before regrouping and succeeding with overwhelming firepower. It also sets up the scene for the Continuation war in which Finland allied itself with Germany and attacked Russia. However the book stops at the end of the Winter war and only lays out out how the future events of Finlands’ alliance with Germany came about.
As great as this book is it is a little less detailed documenting the purely military history of the war, but that I think is it’s aim, not primarily for the amateur military historian but a more mainstream audience. I was a little disappointed it didn’t go on to look at the Continuation War and the resolution of WWII which puts the Winter War at the end of the day in it’s proper context, but that would entail a much longer and less digestable book of course. That Finland had to choose between its independence and its neutrality is clear. That it succeeded at great cost is a story of true heroism, and this book tells it fantasticlally well.