Simo Häyhä was a modest, hard-working Finn who found himself caught up in the war between Finland and the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. He had already demonstrated his exceptional shooting talent in hunting and competitions before the war, where he was always aiming for the highest laurels. He proved to his superiors that he was an excellent marksman in the early days of the war, and his form only improved during the war. On his best days, he shot up to thirty enemy soldiers a day, and his final record remains unbeaten to this day. Russian soldiers nicknamed him the White Death. He has 542 confirmed kills. No wonder that after the end of the Second World War, when Finland tilted politically and economically against the Soviet Union, he preferred to hide this figure, since he alone killed almost a battalion of Red Army soldiers.
While the others were still asleep and the night was black outside, he got up from his improvised bed and crept quietly out of the common room. His destination was a long clearing in the woods, beyond which the Russian army was supposed to have positions. His superior gave him vague but clear instructions: “I want you to find him and shoot him. Too many of our own have already fallen.”
This was about a Russian sniper who had been spreading fear and trembling among the Finnish soldiers for a week. Unsuspecting, they suddenly collapsed under enemy fire, which cut like a blade through the silence of the front. The Finnish soldiers took cover, but the problem remained.
Somewhere, beyond the clearing, there was a sniper who had them in his sights. Several volleys of cannon shells had already been fired at him, but apparently in vain. Now all their hopes were pinned on the new arrival, who had arrived on the battlefield as the messiah sent. His excellent marksmanship will perhaps be a match for the Russian sniper.
Still under the cover of the morning night, he set off into the forest. He followed a well-trodden path towards a town a kilometre away, keeping an eye on the sound of the forest. So far, only his breathing and his footsteps were audible in the wintry drizzle. The closer he got to his chosen location, the more he moved in a low-key manner, stretching his head above the horizon of the terrain only if he had to.
There, in the last line of trees, he settled himself among the rocks, still under the cover of the morning twilight. There was no comfort to speak of, but no war had ever offered that. With the sun rising behind him, he would have the advantage.
As day broke, he kept a watchful eye on the enemy’s edge of the clearing, where the Russian sniper was supposed to be. For a good hour there was nothing, he heard only voices, but no movement. Then, suddenly, for a split second, something clicked on the opposite bank. The sight was too unusual to be attributed to a natural phenomenon. He looked blankly at the spot and after only ten seconds he could make out the silhouette of the shooter.
His heartbeat quickened. He looked through the aiming device, mentally calculated the arc the projectile would take, and then held his breath to steady himself. Slowly, he squeezed the index finger on the trigger of the rifle until a loud shot rang out. The silhouette on the opposite side collapsed.
That day, he remained on the battlefield, waiting for a favourable moment. He pulled the trigger four more times and was always successful. He did not return to the camp until dusk, honestly hungry, but also overjoyed. He immediately turned to his superior to report that he had completed his task. A smile spread across both their faces. The superior praised him and then took him in front of the other boys: “Look, this one saved our heads! The sniper who sowed death among us is gone.”
The boys got in a great mood and patted him on the back. None of them – not even him – saw that in the next few months he would become the best sniper in the world.
Dark clouds over Finland
Simo Häyhä was born on 17 December 1905 in the small village of Kiirskinen in the former Karelian Isthmus of Finland. It is a strait 50 to 100 kilometres wide and 150 kilometres long between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga. The area is now part of Russian territory.
He was born as the seventh child and was expected to get to work quickly. The farm was not small: it was 50 hectares of pastures, meadows and woods. Many hopes were pinned on him, but bad luck held the family together. Brother Antti died in the Finnish Civil War in 1918, another brother Juhana was wounded in that war, and a third brother Tuomas died from a sunflower he had picked while building a road.
Death was thus not unknown in the Häyhä family, but rather made life all the more honourable. Simo and his three sisters were left behind, and they helped their parents as best they could. The mother took over the sewing and housework with the girls and, as a very religious woman, gave them a spiritual guide for life, which came in handy for Simo later during the war.
Simo did average grades in school. After completing four years of school, he shoved his bag in a corner and started working on the farm. He never ran out of that, and he also spent his days hunting and skiing. At the age of 17, he joined the local civil defence force, where he first encountered the rifle as a weapon of war rather than as a hunting “tool”.
He was good at shooting, as he had a lot of hunting experience, and won competitions from the start. In his first competition, he scored 93 out of a possible 100 points and, of course, won a gold medal. He was fortunate in his own way to have the experienced and old cats of the Finnish Civil War by his side, who knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff and taught him only the most important things that helped him to get a good shot.
Even then he realised what it meant to load a rifle quickly. His friend entrusted him with an unlimited number of bullets and told him to shoot as many times as possible at a target 150 metres away. He fired 16 times and hit just as many. This was incredible, because the magazine of the M1891 repeating rifle only held five rounds, so he had to be extremely fast – both in firing and in loading the magazine. Between 1925 and 1927, he served 15 months of military service. While he was still in the army, Lauri Kristian Relander became President of Finland and began to negotiate a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Dark clouds began to gather over Finland.
The Miracle Sniper
At the easternmost part of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, lies the Karelian Isthmus. Few territories of comparable size have seen so much bloody conflict. The reason lies in its geographical and strategic value. The Karelian Isthmus has always served as a land bridge between present-day Russia and Scandinavia.
An army that appropriated it could have invaded from Scandinavia to today’s St Petersburg in a matter of hours. Stalin therefore decided that Leningrad must be protected at all costs from any aggression that might be launched by anyone from the neutral territory of Finland.
In August 1939, Stalin and Hitler divided their influence in Eastern Europe. Finland was also included in the area that was to fall under Soviet influence. After the signing of the pact, Stalin demanded that his neighbour hand over some key parts of Finnish territory, including a large part of the Karelian Isthmus.
Finland refused the Soviet proposals and Stalin ordered an attack on 30 November 1939. At 6.50 a.m., four Soviet armies with some 460,000 men and more than 2,000 tanks crossed the 1,200-kilometre-long eastern Finnish border. Stalin’s aim was to occupy Finnish territory by the end of the year, establish a pro-Soviet government and set up a new Democratic Republic of Finland. But he was wrong!
The Russians advanced very quickly, but the greatest threat was posed by their 56th Division, which invaded Finnish territory north and east of Suvilahti and slowly made its way towards Loimola. The capture of this town could have led to the final collapse of the Finnish defences on the Lake Ladoga – Kitelä – Lake Syskjärvi line.
It was on the road to Loimola that Simo had his baptism of fire. The battle was long and fiery, and many of his friends fell. His unit then pulled back towards the Kollaa river, where they were dug in waiting for another enemy attack. Finnish General Carl Gustav Mannerheim was clear: the Russians must be kept on this line at all costs.
Already in the first days of the war, Sim’s superiors recognised his incredible marksmanship and quickly transferred him to the snipers. The Russian sniper who had already killed three platoon commanders was a thorn in their side, and no one knew exactly where he was.
Simo dressed warmly, chose a position he thought would be favourable in the morning gloom and waited motionless. A slight movement in the wrong direction, which outwardly looked like the glint of his optics, sealed the fate of the Russian sniper. Simo aimed in the direction of the glint and took down the opposing sniper with a single shot to the head.
When he returned to camp, everyone was patting him on the back. He proved that it was not beginner’s luck a day later when he was given the task of getting rid of a Russian sniper about 400 metres away, who was constantly firing at Finnish soldiers and who they knew roughly where he might be.
“I didn’t find him for a long time, but then I discovered an unusual formation next to a pile of snow and rocks, which turned out to be him. I took careful aim and killed him with the first shot,” Simo later recalled.
Word of his success soon spread through the Finnish camp, but since every stick has two ends, this meant he became a big thorn in the side of the Russians. They didn’t know who he was, but they knew they were dealing with a very capable opponent, so they showered his positions with artillery fire. It was most critical after he had fired a shell, because an alert enemy could see his position.
“They were trying very hard. They also fired fifty grenades at my position, but fortunately I survived.”
He was aware of his vulnerability, so wherever possible he chose positions in the field that allowed him to be screened left, right and behind his back. Fortunately, there were plenty of rocks in the area, which offered welcome protection from the grenades that sowed death. “A number of grenades exploded not far from me, but fortunately it all ended in scratches.”
His extraordinary marksmanship opened the door to the Special Operations Group. “The fighting in December 1939 lasted almost continuously for days and days. We were exhausted. Nevertheless, our leadership decided to counter-attack, and I was included in that counter-attack. We crawled quietly to the edge of the Russian camp and then opened fire. On the Russian side, there was complete confusion, and everyone who did not retreat fell. We confiscated all the weapons we could lay our hands on.”
This came in handy, because the pre-war Prime Minister had advocated cutting spending on the Finnish army. It was therefore not unusual for some Finnish soldiers even to carry civilian weapons, because there were not enough of them to go around.
Simo, as a sniper, worked mostly alone, only sometimes in pairs. It is believed that a pair is more efficient and able to work for a longer period of time. One is the shooter, the other is the observer. Simo always chose the same soldier as the observer and kept his identity hidden (protected) until 2001.
“At the beginning of February 1940, the observer and I discovered a new area of enemy bunkers. We cautiously crept into their vicinity, so that we were only about 150 metres away. We stayed there until the evening, during which time we killed 19 Russian soldiers. We were not even discovered,” Simo said in an interview.
Such sniper attacks forced the Russians to build walls of snow in front of the bunkers to block the view, or to dig gun trenches so that they could move safely between the bunkers while bent over.
Simo would go out into the field in the morning darkness and return in the evening. When he arrived at the camp, he was always asked how many he had shot. Personally, he never bothered to count the number of victims accurately. He was no stranger to such attention from his comrades, because he was, after all, essentially a “humble peasant”. Even later, for many years after the war, he never wanted to give an exact figure.
But he certainly remembered 21 December 1939, when he killed 25 enemy soldiers. By the time he reached this record, he had already had more than a hundred confirmed kills. Given that only about a third of his kills were confirmed, the actual figure was probably much higher.
His successes soon reached the ears of the highest military officials at the front. For the 200 confirmed kills, he received a fake pocket watch and the Front General presented him with a beautifully wrapped pair of gloves, probably knitted by his wife.
In December 1939, the Russian advance was halted. The Finns were comfortable in their environment and knew how to exploit its advantages. The few connecting roads were a nightmare for the Russians, as they were the perfect target for Finnish partisan warfare: hit and run.
The Russians may have had the advantage in terms of material and mass of troops, but the Finns were masters of the sudden flank attack. So it did not help the Russians that they could fire 35 000 shells a day, while the Finns could only “afford” a thousand grenades. Stalin was very hurt that his plan had failed, so he ordered cannon shells to cut through the Finnish defensive front. It was a miracle that the defending ranks held out under such conditions.
Sima was given a specially designed rifle, the Finnish Sako, for his sniper successes. It was donated by the Swedish businessman and great friend of Finland, Eugen Johansson, as a prize for the “best marksman of the Corps”. In February 1940, Simo had 259 confirmed kills.
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Meeting with destiny
The so-called Winter War, as the Russo-Finnish War is called today, ended on 13 March 1940. As if fate wanted to play a trick on Simo, who had escaped death many times before, he had a meaningful encounter with a lady with a scythe a week before the end of the war.
Despite the heavy losses suffered by his 34th Infantry Regiment, he was ordered to join the units that were to counter-attack on 6 March to hold back the Red Army’s 128th Division. The risk to the Finnish forces was extremely high, as their artillery was running out of grenades. But the Russians were also determined to repel the invaders at all costs.
Simo recalled in later interviews how the Russian soldiers came in waves. After the fallen, new and new soldiers appeared, following the fate of their predecessors. He and his comrades often wondered whether they actually had such strong morale or whether behind them were political commissars and tanks who shot in cold blood anyone who turned around.
Simo recalls that he had already killed about 40 enemy soldiers that day. Despite a strong effort, the Russians managed to break through the front line, but then the explosion happened right next to his head. “I heard a crash and knew instantly that I had been hit. A tunnel appeared in front of my eyes, moving closer and further away,” he later wrote in a letter to a friend.
“I woke up some time later when my friend rolled me over to a better position for medical care. I felt that my mouth was full of bone fragments and that warm blood was oozing from my mouth. The bullet pierced my upper lip and lodged in my left cheekbone. They put me on a sledge and dragged me to the back. I was still conscious for about three hundred metres before I fell unconscious. I didn’t wake up until a week later in a military hospital.”
The explosive shell dislocated his entire left upper jaw. The injury was so severe that at first they thought he was dead. His relative, Esio Friari, later said that he had already been dragged to a pile of bodies. It was only fortunate that someone noticed his slight movement and, instead of being taken to the cemetery, he was taken to a military hospital and from there to Helsinki.
The use of explosive projectiles, such as the one that caused Simo’s nasty wound, had been banned since 1868. This is the so-called St Petersburg Declaration, which prohibited the “military and naval” use of explosive or incendiary projectiles weighing less than 400 grams. The Russian commander probably decided to use them because it was necessary to break through the Finnish defence line at literally any cost.
Sim’s jaw was rebuilt with a 10 cm section of bone taken from his pelvis (hip). The wound was so severe that he was unable to chew or speak for four months. He drank through a straw and ate only thick liquid soups. By the time he was released from hospital in May 1941, he had undergone 26 operations.
Life after the war
The armistice between the Soviet Union and Finland was signed on 12 March. The Soviet Union was the victor of the war, despite the fierce Finnish resistance, and Finland was the moral victor in the eyes of the Western world. But no sooner was the one war over than the two countries were preparing for a new war in the light of European events.
In early 1940, Finland sought an alliance with Sweden, but was opposed by both the Soviet Union and Germany. In the end, Finland ended up in Germany’s embrace (Germany occupied Denmark and Norway) and the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic States.
Simo was slowly recovering from his injury and all he wanted was to get out of the war. He wanted peace and a normal life. He saw his survival as a gift and he wanted to make the most of his second life.
Nevertheless, he could not completely avoid the war that was engulfing Europe. He was unfit to fight, but was therefore assigned to a team to select suitable horses and vehicles for military use.
Finland fought until the end of April 1945, when, after signing an armistice with the Soviet Union (September 1944), it had to expel all German troops from its territory. The terms of the 1947 peace treaty and, in particular, the onerous war indemnities made it economically and politically dependent on the Soviet Union. An Allied Control Commission was set up to monitor the “politically correct” behaviour of the Finns, which reported to the Party and Stalin.
The Winter War was being erased from the collective memory, and war veterans were not given the respect they deserved. Soviet overlords abounded, so they did not dare to talk openly about the war with each other.
After the war, Simo stayed for a short time on his brother’s farm and wanted no attention – not when he alone had killed almost a battalion of Red Army soldiers. He could not return to his home farm, which had fallen to the Soviet Union after the demarcation. In return, the Finnish authorities offered him some land in the village of Utula in the neighbouring municipality. He was not the only one to leave the area. There were around 430 000 refugees who fled Karelia.
In Utula, he had to spit in his hands to cultivate a wild area. He was a long-suffering man, never married, and in his spare time, if he had any, he hunted and bred hunting dogs. He was so good at the latter that even Finnish President Urho Kekkonen borrowed one of his four-legged dogs to hunt moose.
Living modestly, he saved some money to buy an apartment in the rural town of Ruokolahti, where he had a beautiful view of the idyllic Lake Saimaa. In 1999, his health began to fail and he was moved to a veterans’ home in Hamina in southern Finland.
The secret of Sim’s success
It would be a mistake to think that if you are a good shot, you will also be a good sniper. A sniper is much more than just a marksman, he has to have good control of his thoughts, he has to be independent, a great observer and a chameleon in adapting to both the conditions on the battlefield and the environment he is going into. Add to this an extraordinary self-discipline and the determination to carry out the task successfully and success is assured.
Simo did not always succeed, but he did not give in to discouragement, but tried to carry out the task in a slightly different way – until it was successfully completed. Perhaps his advantage was also that he was by nature a quieter person, so the long lonely hours in the woods did not cause him any problems. He arrived at the desired spot in the early hours of the morning. He was picking his way through the corners, peeping into the field of vision only when necessary to keep as low a profile as possible. He had a hearty breakfast before setting off, and always had a piece of toast and a sugar cube with him.
Being the first to the desired spot gave him an advantage over his opponent, while at the same time “blending in” with his surroundings. He was familiar with the sounds of his surroundings and the configuration of the terrain. He often poured snow in front of him so that the explosion of the shot would not blow the snow in front of him and give away his location. He disguised his rifle in white gauze and himself in a white camouflage suit.
He always carried enough ammunition, 50 to 60 rounds of ammunition and a few hand grenades in case the Russians got too close. After a few weeks, the Russians realised that the Finns had a top sniper, so they put a bounty on his head. In their publications they called him Belaja smert – White Death.
“I have never felt anything for the enemy. I aimed at the centre of the target, pulled the trigger and reloaded immediately afterwards. I didn’t choose, I didn’t care whether he was an officer or a common soldier,” said Simo. Once he lay down in a suitable place, he remained there for hours, motionless or making only the necessary movements. “The unwary Russian sniper started to move. He calculated that he was far enough away for his movement to go unnoticed. I fired from a distance of about 450 metres and hit him.”
Simo was using a Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle, model 28, made by the Finnish manufacturer Sako, which he knew intimately. This was particularly useful in winter conditions, because the materials behave differently in the cold than they did in the warm. He always cleaned the rifle thoroughly before starting a task and again after finishing it. He did not want to leave anything to chance. Snow and soil liked to get into the mechanism, so he had to be extra careful. “My rifle never jammed. It was good and reliable.”
He hit most of his opponents at a distance of between 100 and 150 metres, and it is telling that he did not use a scope. It was too cumbersome for him, he said later, and might even have been treacherous. “If I had had a scope, my head would have been even more exposed. Besides, optics were still poor at that time and in those winter conditions.”
His father, who was a keen hunter, had already taught him precision shooting, which was also based on determining the distance to the target. Simo eventually became so good at predicting the distance that he was only off by a step or two at 150 metres. He always aimed at the centre of the target and shot as quickly as possible, knowing that his hand was still for only a short time. If he sighted too long, his eye would tire, and he could not, of course, achieve the desired accuracy with his blurred vision. A possible miss could mean that he would give away his position.
Films often show snipers aiming for the head. Simo explained that the head is too small a target, and usually too flickering, for a reliable hit, so he preferred to aim at the opponent’s torso.
A sniper’s shot must be 100%. If the sniper misses, he can give away his position. It is interesting to compare the performance of a normal infantry soldier with that of a sniper. Suppose that both shoot at a 40 x 50 cm target from a distance of 400 metres under favourable conditions. A sniper who does not use optics will hit the target at that distance at about 8%. In practice, this would mean that one shot in 20 would hit the target. The average infantry rifleman will only hit the target at about 0.8 per cent, which means that he will shoot 120 times before hitting the target.
If the distance is reduced to 100 metres, the chance of hitting rises to 75 per cent for a sniper and 14 per cent for a conventional soldier. In other words: a sniper will hit the target three times in four shots fired, while the average soldier will have to shoot 23 times.
From this we can conclude that one trained sniper is equivalent to ten average marksmen at 400 metres and five at 100 metres.
The best sniper in the world
Good preparation and a prudent and professional performance in the field ensured success. Simo had already set a record of 23 opponents killed in a day before Christmas, and 25 by Christmas. In his last days, before he was wounded, he even set a record of 40 Russian soldiers.
Only he knows how many he killed, but he never liked to talk about it. Nevertheless, today he has 542 officially certified kills, which confirms that he is the best sniper in the world. He is followed in second place by Ivan Sidarenko, who has “only” 500 confirmed killings.
Some people did not approve of his actions during the Winter War, and he has received hatred and even death threats. Quiet and more withdrawn, he rarely gave interviews. In December 2001, a year before his death, he was asked whether he felt any regret for killing so many people. “The war was not pleasant. I did what I was told, as much as I could. Finland would not exist if everyone else had not done the same.”
The injuries he sustained in the war left distinctive scars on his face and he avoided large groups of people. Kalevi Ikonen, a friend of Häyhä’s, said, “Simo talked more to animals in the forest than to other people.” Given that he had a total of 26 jaw surgeries, yet never spoke as he did before the injury, it is not hard to understand why he refused to communicate with others more than was strictly necessary.
Simo received numerous decorations for his work, and was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant, a promotion unprecedented in Finnish history.
He died in 2002, aged 96.
His experience, knowledge and approach to combat were put to good use in the Finnish army after the war in training new snipers. To this day, sniper candidates learn about him, not only in Finland, but all over the world. The Finnish 34th Fighter (Jaeger) Battalion is the bearer of his legacy.
The Soviet Union won the Winter War. They gained about ten percent of Finnish territory, or about 22,000 square kilometres, losing one and a half million of their (Russian) soldiers. A Russian general later remarked that the land they had conquered was “… just big enough to bury our dead on”.
