HELSINGIN SANOMAT international

CNN would have got great footage from the Winter War

By Ilkka Malmberg
Photomontage: Marienka Pakaslahti / HS

What a delight the Winter War would have been for CNN. Shame, really, that it wasn't around in those days. People all over the world would have been able to follow on their TV screens the struggle of plucky little Finland against an overwhelming aggressor.
The Raate Road - TV-pictures to die for.
The Raate Road - TV-pictures to die for.
   Or what do you think, Hannu Vanhanen, speaking as an expert who has lectured on war coverage in photo-journalism?
   Vanhanen shakes his head for an instant, initially fazed by the nature of the question. "You mean if the CNN we know today had been reporting the Winter War then, as it happened?"
   Yep. That's the idea.
   After pondering the concept for a moment or two, Vanhanen admits that the Winter War would have been a real dream of a location for CNN. A nice clear set-up to start with: David takes on Goliath. "And extreme conditions, a lot of snow. Snow is good, nice and exotic."
   Vanhanen also draws attention to the fact that Finland is unknown, and therefore immediately interesting. The snow-filled landscape is nice and sharp, strong outlines (if it's not snowing), which is good for the visual expression side of things. Not unlike the sand-dunes of Desert Storm in the Gulf. You get good picture material out of it.
   The Winter War lasted 105 days. During this time the rest of the world was pretty quiet on the war front, and international attention was focused on how Finland was getting along. But is 105 days - fifteen whole weeks - too long a time-frame? Would people follow it, or would they start to lose interest? Oh not again, always those same war pictures from Finland...
    "I see your point, but then again the Winter War had such a great beginning and that effective closing climax. And in the middle there were plenty of good interesting highspots, those motti battles and all that."
   Vanhanen is starting to warm to his task. "Yes, there is a complete dramaturgical arch in there!"
   He believes that the Winter War would have been optimally dimensioned for the purposes of television. In actual fact what happened during the conflict 60 years ago was that most of the time the foreign correspondents sat in the Press Room at Hotel Kämp (see earlier story on this). They seldom received permission to go up to the front. Would CNN and the others force their way up to the lines to get action shots from the snowy trenches?
    "I don't know about that. CNN usually has a reporter who does stand-ups on location and things go off behind him as he speaks. Like they did in Baghdad from the roof of that hotel."
   Ah, so in our case they'd be up on the roof of Kämp during the Helsinki bombings? You could angle it to get a neat shot of the Cathedral in the background.
    "Possibly, yes. CNN's idea is that the transmission is live. You can suddenly get to see most anything if it happens while they are on air."
   But Vanhanen does not believe that TV channels like CNN would send their reporters and film crews out into harm's way. The dangerous takes are often made by local staff, for instance the camera is given to the troops in position. Or else they use technology, which is pretty sophisticated these days. Robots and suchlike, small transmitters.
   "This is precisely CNN's role: what it selects from the material it gets and how it interprets it. It becomes the truth about the war."
   Vanhanen wishes to stress that nowadays the aim is to be able to cover both sides of the front. To get the Soviet viewpoint, too. In this instance the Russians might have invited in the CNN camera crews to witness the innocent victims and the carnage caused "by the Finnish artillery" at the celebrated Mainila Incident that sparked off the war. It is interesting to speculate how the world would have reacted to the disinformation.
   Vanhanen agrees that the best footage CNN could possibly have got out of the Winter War would have been the Raate Road.1 The camera pans slowly, lovingly, over an apparently endless column: destroyed vehicles and tanks, the corpses of horses by the roadside, lifeless bodies. And all in the middle of a chilly snow & pines & frozen lakes wilderness. That tracking shot would have been run and run a dozen times. The stuff of TV-legend.
   And the Karelian refugees heading west would have made for good interview material. There might have been one or two language problems, but we can gloss over them.
   So, which of the famous stills from the Winter War would Hannu Vanhanen most like to see in CNN newsreel form?
    "Perhaps the one where the mother and child have jumped from a train into a snowdrift. They are both looking up into the sky at the bombers overhead. Now if THAT picture started to move!"

1Raate Road

The following description of the grisly but apparently photogenic Raate Road incident is taken from a short account of the Winter War written by Robert K. Maddock Jr., which can be found from the web at: http://www.kaiku.com/winterwar.html
   "One of the most famous early battles of the Winter War occurred at Suomussalmi during December, 1939. The Russian 44th Division advanced along the Raate Road from the south and the 163rd Russian Division advanced from Juntusranta from the North. They were supposed to link up at Suomussalmi and then head west across Finland to Oulu and cut the country in half. Russian troop strength totalled 48,000 men, 335 cannon, 100 tanks, and 50 armored cars. The Finnish defenders, reinforced from a few thousand, now numbered 17,000 with 11 cannon under the command of Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo; his only hope was to defeat the Russians in detail. And he did.
   To slow down the 163rd in the north, Finnish ski troops made wide circling flanking movements of 20 to 30 miles under cover of the long night and caught the rear and middle parts of the column by surprise. They found Soviet soldiers huddled around fires in -40°C weather easy prey to sub-machine gun fire and grenades. Almost any wound was fatal. As the 44th approached Suomussalmi down the Raate Road, they had to pass between Kuomasjärvi and Kuivasjärvi on a narrow isthmus. 350 Finns in hand-to-hand combat closed the isthmus. Trees were now felled across the road in front and behind with the 44th Division strung out along the road. The 163rd only six miles north engaged in desperate struggles to push the Finns west, but were stopped. Much of this fighting was hand-to-hand. After four days, both the 163rd and 44th were stopped dead in their tracks. Now Russians of the 163rd Division, after throwing their weapons away, made an attempt to escape back over the border. Two Finnish machine gun platoons and a guerrilla company helped them back to Russia.
   The 44th fared even worse. Trees blocked the roads, which prevented movement. The frozen lakes around them were death-traps. Any attack across the lakes was met with machine-gun fire. The Russian dead were permitted to lie frozen in the snow over the lakes until the thaw, when their bodies sank to the bottom. Several attacks by the Finns further demoralized the Russians. Orders from the commanding general did not permit a fighting retreat. The 44th was out of food, freezing, and had nowhere to go except to sit and be slaughtered at will. Of the 44,000, only 5,000 made it back. The Finns captured intact 85 tanks, 437 trucks, 20 tractors, 10 motorcycles, 1,620 horses, 92 artillery pieces, 78 anti-tank guns, and 13 anti-aircraft guns plus thousands of rifles, machine guns, and a horde of ammunition. This was later used against the Russians in Karelia."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.12.1999