Lessons Learned

Like camp followers out for booty or vultures for remains, men whose profession is fighting, or telling others how to fight, combed the aftermath of the Russo-Finnish struggle last week for military discoveries, lessons, curiosities.

Lesson No. 1, available as soon as the real story of Summa could be told, was that the modern concrete blockhouse, even though it be 30 ft. long and 20 ft. wide, sunk 30 ft. into the earth, its walls 6 ft. thick and impervious to heaviest shell fire, is not invulnerable. It must somehow be anchored. When repeated high-explosive blasts have blown the earth off its top and away from its footings, further blasts may get under and rock the blockhouse bodily, tilt it out of alignment so that its guns within--carefully adjusted to cover precisely plotted areas of fire--can no longer be trained where they are needed.

This was the lesson of the Summa Sector. With a prolonged rain of as many as 300,000 heavy shells daily, the Russian artillery, standing hub to hub, tilted enough forts of the Mannerheim Line to make possible a tank-&-infantry break through. Finns in the forts were jarred but safe until their own guns became useless.

Application of this lesson to the Western Front seemed to be more threatening to Germany than to the Allies. The Siegfried Position, hastily constructed, is composed of pillboxes and individual blockhouses, deeply buried but connected only by trenches, not by anchoring footings as is the Maginot Line.* On paper, the Allies sooner than the Germans could blast a way out of the Maginot-Siegfried stalemate, though the cost in men would probably remain about where Generalissimo Gamelin has put it: 500,000 men.

Lesson No. 2 from Finland was the cumbersomeness in rough country of divisions which are over-mechanized and equipped as occupying troops instead of for sheer attack and holding. The elaborate Russian caravans which sought to penetrate Finland's forested southeast corner and central "waist" bogged down of their own weight and complexity on narrow roads. Under the circumstances, the superior mobility of the ten-man Finnish ski patrols actually gave them superiority in effective numbers over the hordes of stalled Russians, a superiority not unlike that of a small wolf pack over a herd of caribou.

Other lessons:

> Intensive air bombing of supply lines and the enemy's home front is highly effective even against people as calm and well organized as the Finns. If port facilities and factories are not put out of commission, their functioning is greatly reduced by air-raid interruptions. Though torn-up tracks may soon be relaid, troop trains are harassed, train schedules disrupted by repeated threats from above.

> Final maneuver in the cracking of Finland's defense was a simple one for any commander with superior numbers of troops: extension of the front. When the Russian generals finally won their opening they deployed their forces westward over the ice in front of Viipuri. By repeated attacks, now here, now there, along the coast line, they finally obtained footholds which the Finns, strung out in small groups, could not dislodge. These grips were points at which strength could soon have been built up to encircle Viipuri, and to start a drive on Helsinki. But again, this maneuver could not have succeeded without a preponderance of reserves for the attackers. War's basic factors--mass man and fire power--decided the issue in the end.

* Suggestion is that isolated forts could be kept in place by frontal anchoring sheaths extending deep into the ground. Chances are that continuation of heavy fire could dig to any depth.

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