Rating: 
Summary: A must read for people interested in the Winter War
Review: A very solid book. As a Finn I actually find this book quite critical of some of the Finnish political and military moves. And criticism is certainly warranted. Some reviewers have found this book to lack the Russian perspective. That may be true but one must also remember that until very recently there has not been any possibility for Russians to write openly about their Winter War experiences. So, whatever their shortcomings might be, the Finnish materials have thus far been far more reliable...written by free people in a country that, partially due to heroics in the Winter War, remained democratic. I also strongly doubt that Finland could have avoided a full scale war with Soviet Union or occupation. After all, the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) made the concessions Stalin required of them, but they were still overrun by Soviets, and then by Germans and then yet again by Soviets. Hardly an ideal result. I give this book 4 stars and withhold the fifth one based on the lack of better maps. Still, this is easily the best book in English about the Winter War.
Rating:
Summary: Footnote in History
Review: As time moves on, fewer and fewer people have any knowledge of a "little war" that took place in the shadows of the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Those who were old enough to remember the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 generally remember it as the struggle of a David vs a Goliath. For awhile David was winning and the empathy and sympathy of the world was starting to pull behind it. Ultimately, however, Goliath prevailed and the attention of the world was quickly directed elsewhere. What really happened in that brief war? Fortunately, William Trotter has put together a well-researched and well-written account of that conflict. There are times in this book that the victories of the underdog Finns can get you really worked up. Unfortunately, history cannot be changed and we know throughout the book that the Finns will eventually lose. Once the dam was burst, the war was quickly ended. The relationship between Finland and Russia has been a stormy one. Many of those who cheered for the Finns in the Winter War were akwardly forced to change their stance when the Finns joined with Nazi Germany in the invasion of Russia a couple of years later. That is, however, a different story. Trotter gives us the Finns as heros in a lost cause. It is a worthwhile story to read.
Rating:
Summary: Footnote in History
Review: As time moves on, fewer and fewer people have any knowledge of a "little war" that took place in the shadows of the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Those who were old enough to remember the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 generally remember it as the struggle of a David vs a Goliath. For awhile David was winning and the empathy and sympathy of the world was starting to pull behind it. Ultimately, however, Goliath prevailed and the attention of the world was quickly directed elsewhere. What really happened in that brief war? Fortunately, William Trotter has put together a well-researched and well-written account of that conflict. There are times in this book that the victories of the underdog Finns can get you really worked up. Unfortunately, history cannot be changed and we know throughout the book that the Finns will eventually lose. Once the dam was burst, the war was quickly ended. The relationship between Finland and Russia has been a stormy one. Many of those who cheered for the Finns in the Winter War were akwardly forced to change their stance when the Finns joined with Nazi Germany in the invasion of Russia a couple of years later. That is, however, a different story. Trotter gives us the Finns as heros in a lost cause. It is a worthwhile story to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Balanced view of Russo-Finnish Winter War
Review: I have read both William R. Trotter's "A Frozen Hell" and Engle & Paananen's "The Winter War: The Soviet Attack on Finland 1939-1940". In addition to these books I am in the process of reading 2 books by Max Jakobson, one of which is specifically on the Winter War, as well as a number of academic journal articles on Finland between 1937-1945.Trotter has done a great job of recounting the Winter War from both the Finnish and Russian political and military perspecives, using available documents. I am an American-Finn who is very proud of my Finnish heritage, yet I was not insulted by Trotter's treatment of the Russian perspective at all - it was very enlightning. I prefer to understand ALL the "why?"s surrounding an event as momentous as the Winter War. It is nice to have some idea what the Russian reasoning and motives were, even if I don't agree with them. Life is rarely black and white as we would like it to be. The short biography of Marshall Mannerheim in the beginning was especially useful. Understanding the man sheds light on his actions and opinions. It also explains a bit of the history of Russian-Finnish relations as well. Improvements: More maps would be very helpful. Also, as a Finnish speaking American I can appreciate Trotter's attempt to make understanding easier for non-finnish speakers, however the occasional reference to places in Finn-glish was a slight annoyance. An example would be "... east of Lake Kuokjärvi" where the word "Lake" is redundant because the name of the place says it is a lake. This is a very picky detail and does not detract from the content. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading "A Frozen Hell". The more balanced and objective view taken by Trotter does not take away from the heroics and Sisu of the Finns. I also appreciated inclusion of a more detailed explanation on the surrounding political climate/situations.
Rating:
Summary: "At least you will tell them that we fought bravely"
Review: I wouldn't describe it as 'well-balanced'. It's clearly the kind of thing to make a Finnish person's heart swell with pride, and is slanted greatly towards the side of the Finns; we learn very little about the Russians circa 1939/1940, although presumably all the Russian sources had to toe the party line (we learn a bit about Tsarist Russia, however, as many of the Finnish seniors officers have been trained by the Russian imperial army!). And of course it is very hard to feel sympathy towards a nation which we felt ambivalent about at the time, which would swiftly become our greatest ally, and swiftly thereafter our greatest enemy again. William Trotter seems to be something of a Fin-o-phile, and there is a photograph in the book of him standing by a wrecked bunker on the Mannerheim Line, in 1964.
Nonetheless this is a cracking read, fast-paced as well. As with Julian Jackon's 'The Fall of France' - which deals in similar depth with an almost exactly converse situation, which took place only a few months later - Trotter cuts to the chase quite rapidly, and gives a good sense of the personalities involved and the issues at stake. Finland is tall and thin, but its only worthwhile terrain is in the south, which is easiest to defend. Carl Gustav Mannerheim - a man so hard, they named an anti-tank rifle after him - is painted as a rock-solid figure of a kind which could be controversial in peacetime (he had no truck with revolutionary politics), but who was invaluable when the chips were down. There are no Soviet personalities, but that seems fitting for a political system that was supposed to be personality-free.
And the chips were very much down. The Soviet Union's army dwarfed that of Finland, indeed the total armed strength it committed to the attack was a quarter the size of Finland's entire population. After pretending that the Finns had attacked Leningrad, the Soviets poured over the border in great force, with overwhelming armour and artillery, and won. But it took them three months to cross roughly a hundred miles of Finland, and a quarter of a million dead. Even then, Finland was not conquered. Trotter's book devotes a few pages to the unfortunate 'Continuation War', which saw Finland fight against the Russians on the side of the Nazis, after which they flip-flopped and kicked the Nazis out, losing everything they had gained (Finland's borders today are those it retained in 1940).
Several elements of the fighting have entered legend; the 'Molotov cocktails' used against ponderous Russian tanks, the ski assaults, the Wild West wagon train-esque 'mottis', the 'sisu', the mental image of great numbers of Russian infantrymen struggling through snow. It was essentially a huge learning experience for the Russian army, and although they continued they continued their 'human wave' attacks against the later Nazi invasion, they had better tanks and knew how to use them. Although the Finns lacked anti-tank weapons, the Russians lacked tank nous, and paid heavily.
At 265 rapid pages the book shoots along and has the distinction of being the most modern of the two 'Winter War' books out there (confusingly, 'A Frozen Hell' is called 'The Winter War' in Europe). It makes excellent bedtime reading, because there's nothing more relaxing that reading about people who are much worse off than yourself; the Winter War was truly a desperate affair, and I feel slightly embarassed for the utterly cynical way that Britian and France vaccilated about sending equipment and ammunition, and Sweden's - probably wise - unwillingless to allow transit of supplies across its territories.
Rating:
Summary: Account of a time when big nations exploited smaller ones
Review: In the later years of the 1930's, it was clear that another world war was about to happen. With the changes in the power of weaponry, it was also clear that the level of destruction in the next world war would dwarf that of the first. Given all of this, the leaders of what would most likely be the major belligerents were willing to sacrifice smaller nations in order to preserve their own backyards.
After Poland was so easily and quickly defeated and Britain and France adopted their sitzkrieg policies on the western border of Germany, Stalin knew that it was only a matter of time until there was a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. With his western border as secure as he could make it, the next point of perceived vulnerability was the northern border with Finland, in particular the segment on the Karelian isthmus. Leningrad was only a few miles from the border and had Germany attacked in that area, it would not have taken long for them to reach the city and surround it. In the words of one historian, the dispute between Finland and the Soviet Union was a matter of "Finnish rights versus Soviet security." Trotter does an excellent job of explaining this historical context for the Soviet attack on Finland.
There probably has never been another case in history where the power discrepancy between nations at war has been so great. There have been some colonial wars where the disparity between weaponry was large, but the attacking troops were always numerically inferior and a great distance from home. There has also most likely never been another instance where the numbers of combat deaths were so unequal. To my knowledge, the Soviet Union has never given an accurate accounting of how many they lost in the winter war, but the ratio of Soviet to Finnish deaths is no doubt in excess of one hundred to one.
This book describes those events in great detail and in their historical context. The author describes the combat situations, which is significant, but the best parts of the book deal with the actions of the rest of the world. This was a clear and blatant example of great power aggression and there was a great deal of rhetoric about coming to the aid of the "gallant Finns." However, most of it was just talk and the best line about that in the book is how many anti-communists could utter the line, "Finland is the country I almost died for." Of course, they never got within several hundred miles of the place. It is a point of historical irony that the country that gave some of the strongest support to Finland was fascist Italy.
Without a doubt, the most historically significant segment of the book deals with the cynical and duplicitous plan concocted by Britain and France to "come to the aid of Finland." The plan was to send troops to aid the Finns, but to send them the only "safe" way, which was through the neutral countries of Norway and Sweden. Of course, the real purpose of these actions would be to take over the iron ore regions of these countries, keeping the ore out of the hands of the Germans. Very few of the troops would have ever set foot on Finnish soil and those who did most likely would have never fired a shot in anger. Germany would have been forced to respond, turning all of Scandinavia into a battleground. Once again, Britain and France were more than willing to sacrifice other, smaller countries in order to further their own aims and keep the war from their back yards.
I very much enjoyed the book, although the major message is no doubt that spoken by a statesman in a moment of brutal candor, "Nations do not have morals, only interests."
Rating:
Summary: A Little Known (In the US) War
Review: It seems like there's a common lesson to be learned in most countries going to war for the first time in a long time. The British got theirs at Dunkirk, the Americans at Kasserine Pass. The qualities that make up a good peace time officer aren't the ones that are needed when the Army goes to War. The Russians got their lesson in Finland. They learned that you don't purge all the competant officers for political reasons and then expect the yes-men to do well. Finland had a pathetic little army: not a single anti-tank gun, only about a dozen modern fighter planes, their field radios weighed 300 pounds and didn't work well in winter, stocks of machine gun and artillery ammunition were very low, all in all, in no condition to wage war against the largest army in the world. On November 30, 1939 Russia started the war. About a quarter of a million Russian soldiers died, and about 25,000 Finns. It's an almost ignored (in the US) part of World War II.
Rating:
Summary: Thumbs up
Review: Overall Mr. Trotter's book "A Frozen Hell" is a very good and objective read. The only thing it suffers from is the fact that when he was writing it (1991 and earlier), Mr. Trotter had little access to Soviet sources and was thus almost exclusively restricted to the Finnish side of the story. That in itself is not so bad, but he has apparently gotten the Soviet casualties wrong, making the Finns seem like supermen who killed ten Soviets for evey man they lost.
As the book has no real bibliography aside from some vague "notes on the sources" (275) which list no Soviet sources whatsoever except for Khushchev's memoirs (the credibility of which Trotter himself brings into question), we are left to guess at what kind of sources were actually used. On page 263, the author states that the casualties published by the USSR after the war were not "seriously believed" by anyone (48,745 KIA 159,000 WIA). With the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s, these numbers have indeed been discredited, but the true figures fall short of Trotter's 270,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. In reality the Red Army lost 126,875 in killed and 264,908 in wounded. 48,243 Finns were killed in the war. This means that the ratio of Soviet to Finnish deaths was about 3 to 1, not 10 to 1 one as Trotter claims.
On the first page of Chapter 3, the author makes the bold statement that the "Red Army was of unknown quantity... to its own commanders," which is plainly ridiculous. At other points he gives very vague figures such as "1,000 dead" in places where no one could have counted, plainly relying only on descriptions by veterans and no official accounts of any kind.
These flaws do not detract from the overall quality of the book, however, and I heartily recommend "A Frozen Hell" to anyone interested in the Winter War of 1939-1940.
Rating: 
Summary: Propagandish
Review: This well balanced book chronicles the events leading up to and including the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-40. Like many I have often heard references to the gallent stand the Finns made against the massive Soviet efforts to conquer them. The scarcity of materials available in print often restricted any further interest. Upon viewing the amazing Finnish movie "The Winter War" I became once again interested in learning more about this topic. This book does the subject much justice. While the author's sympathies are certainly with the Finns, he does not allow this to bias his opinion toward the actions of Stalin and the Soviets in general. There are few more inspiring examples of a small nation fighting heroically against a big nation. The determined stand the Finns made on the Mannerheim Line for 70 days surely rivals that of the Spartans at Thermopolaye 480 BC. The author shows us that only the Finnish army was capable of such a feat at that moment in history. Uniquely adapted to their frozen environment, the Finnish soldier was flexible, heroic, and a deadly fighter. Trotter believes that in their own country, fighting on the defense, the Finnish army was probably the best there was at that time. The army prided itself on a no-nonesense approach toward war, and had been schooled for years in making the most of their meager resources in a limited economy. The Soviets in contrast were a newly created force from the days of the Revolution in Russia. While lavishly equipped, the army was untried in a conventional war. The Stalinst purges all through the 1930s had empitied the competent officer class, leaving the army under the leadership of party thugs and incompetents. The contrast between the heavy, crude doctrines of the Soviets as opposed to the light, nimble Finns is striking. The reader will find numerous examples of Finnish platoons and companies decimating entire Russian battalions and regiments. When it comes to the blow by blow account of the actual campaign Trotter engages the reader with an exciting and detailed narrative. Again, while his passion is certainly with the embattled Finns, praise is also given to the often suicidal bravery of the Russian soldiers who were thrown away by the thousands in mass attacks against fixed positions. In the end the Finns must submit to the enivitable as the Soviets finally get their act together and begin to apply concerted pressure all along the front. The Mannerheim line holds out for 70 days, but must fall eventually to coordinated, massive Soviet assaults. Finland is forced to accept Stalin's peace, requiring the loss of extensive border territories near Leningrad and elsewhere. Had the Finns not fought they might have gott'en more modest pre-war demands, but there was no assurance that this would have been all that Stalin wanted. By fighting Finland showed the world that a nation of 3 million could stand up to over 170 million Russians! The sacrefice of nearly 70,000 men enabled the Finns to retain their indepedence, even if compromised. Russian losses will probably never been known but must easily exceed 250,000. Trotter discusses the subsequent alliance with Nazi Germany which was controversial for the Finns. Readers will find this an excellent and exciting work on a little known aspect of the Second World War. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: White Death in Finland
Review: This well balanced book chronicles the events leading up to and including the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-40. Like many I have often heard references to the gallent stand the Finns made against the massive Soviet efforts to conquer them. The scarcity of materials available in print often restricted any further interest. Upon viewing the amazing Finnish movie "The Winter War" I became once again interested in learning more about this topic. This book does the subject much justice. While the author's sympathies are certainly with the Finns, he does not allow this to bias his opinion toward the actions of Stalin and the Soviets in general. There are few more inspiring examples of a small nation fighting heroically against a big nation. The determined stand the Finns made on the Mannerheim Line for 70 days surely rivals that of the Spartans at Thermopolaye 480 BC. The author shows us that only the Finnish army was capable of such a feat at that moment in history. Uniquely adapted to their frozen environment, the Finnish soldier was flexible, heroic, and a deadly fighter. Trotter believes that in their own country, fighting on the defense, the Finnish army was probably the best there was at that time. The army prided itself on a no-nonesense approach toward war, and had been schooled for years in making the most of their meager resources in a limited economy. The Soviets in contrast were a newly created force from the days of the Revolution in Russia. While lavishly equipped, the army was untried in a conventional war. The Stalinst purges all through the 1930s had empitied the competent officer class, leaving the army under the leadership of party thugs and incompetents. The contrast between the heavy, crude doctrines of the Soviets as opposed to the light, nimble Finns is striking. The reader will find numerous examples of Finnish platoons and companies decimating entire Russian battalions and regiments. When it comes to the blow by blow account of the actual campaign Trotter engages the reader with an exciting and detailed narrative. Again, while his passion is certainly with the embattled Finns, praise is also given to the often suicidal bravery of the Russian soldiers who were thrown away by the thousands in mass attacks against fixed positions. In the end the Finns must submit to the enivitable as the Soviets finally get their act together and begin to apply concerted pressure all along the front. The Mannerheim line holds out for 70 days, but must fall eventually to coordinated, massive Soviet assaults. Finland is forced to accept Stalin's peace, requiring the loss of extensive border territories near Leningrad and elsewhere. Had the Finns not fought they might have gott'en more modest pre-war demands, but there was no assurance that this would have been all that Stalin wanted. By fighting Finland showed the world that a nation of 3 million could stand up to over 170 million Russians! The sacrefice of nearly 70,000 men enabled the Finns to retain their indepedence, even if compromised. Russian losses will probably never been known but must easily exceed 250,000. Trotter discusses the subsequent alliance with Nazi Germany which was controversial for the Finns. Readers will find this an excellent and exciting work on a little known aspect of the Second World War. Highly recommended.
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