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It would suck to get typecast and not get to use the diversity of wares.Many of his kills were by machine gun but I'm not mad at him for that...
That's hilarious... And true.It would suck to get typecast and not get to use the diversity of wares.
AND, somewhere along this line of history, SAKO is born.When I was at school between the age of 13 and 18, I used to go visit a friend in Finland. His father had been a gunner in the Talvisota - Winter War. After giving the Sovs a solid a$$-whupping at Suomussalmi, Stalin's hordes finally wised up and realised that the only thing that was going to beat the Finns was wave after wave of human targets, and bombing of the capital, Helsinki. The Red Army losses were almost uncountable, and even today we really don't know what they were in total.
These figures go some way to helping the confusion -
During the four months of fighting, the Soviet Army suffered massive losses. One Red Army General, looking at a map of the territory just conquered, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead." The official Soviet figure, issued just after the war, listed 48,745 dead and 150,863 wounded.
But - according to Nikita Krushchev, 1.5 million men were sent to Finland and one million of them were killed, while 1,000 aircraft, 2,300 tanks and armored cars and an enormous amount of other war materials were lost.
Finland's losses were limited to 25,904 dead or missing and 43,557 wounded.
In 1990, professor Mikhail Semiryaga used the Red ArmyCasualty Notifications to publish a book in which he gave exact figures: 53,522 dead, 16,208 missing, 163,772 wounded and 12,064 frostbitten. Meanwhile, professor N. I. Baryshikov estimated 53,500 dead, a figure close to that of Semiryaga. In 1999, the Finnish historian Ohto Manninen estimated Red Army casualties to have been 84,994 dead or prisoners, 186,584 wounded or disabled, 51,892 sick and 9,614 frostbitten. The Russian historian Grigoriy Krivoshayev calculated 126,875 dead and 264,908 wounded. In 1999, the professor of the Petrozavodsk State University Yurii Kilin calculated 63,990 dead, 207,538 wounded and frostbites, making total casualties 271,528, and furthermore 58,390 men were tagged as sick.
In other words, we'll never know.
Given that the Soviet Union back then was about as secretive an organisation as could be imagined, the admitted figures are enough. But probably around twice those numbers would be more realistic. Note the awful disparity of numbers of wounded between the Finns, with their state-of-the-art military medical facilities, and the Russians, with virtually none at all.
Kiisti's dad mentioned walking five miles along a road almost edged on both sides with dead Russians. Given the lack of personal ID of the average Red Army soldier, there must have been many thousands of mothers and wives and sisters in homes 'back in the USSR' where they wondered where Ivan was. And never knowing for the rest of their lives that he was rotting in a swamp somewhere in Karelia.
Sure, the Russians beat the Finns into surrendering to prevent total destruction, but the Finns were not really beaten into anything. Their victory was that Finland still lives, free and democratic, and ARMED, and the Soviet Army has gone to hell in a handcart, along with the complete rotten system that engendered it in the fust place.
Nikita Krushchev, who had been a party leader during the war, remembered later on: "In our war against the Finns we could choose the location of the war and the date of its start. In number we were superior to the enemy, we had enough time to get ready for the operation. But on these most favourable terms we could only win through huge difficulties and incredibly great losses. In fact this victory was a moral defeat. Our people certainly never got knowledge of it because we never told them the truth."
So today, if you have a Finnish Mosin-Nagant, shoot it in good health, with the almost certain knowledge that it has been used in white-hot anger, shooting at an invader of a country that would not give in.
1921. To arm the Civil Guard - that's what the SA of SAKO stands for.AND, somewhere along this line of history, SAKO is born.