On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland across a front of more than 800 miles, deploying 450,000 troops, 6,000 tanks, and 3,800 aircraft against a Finnish Army of approximately 300,000 men with almost no armor and an air force of 130 obsolete planes.
The Soviets expected the campaign to last two weeks. It lasted three and a half months, and it cost the Red Army somewhere between 125,000 and 170,000 dead — with others estimating total Soviet losses at over 300,000 killed, wounded, or captured. A significant though unquantifiable portion of those casualties were attributable to Finnish snipers who had grown up hunting in the same forests they now defended.
The most effective of those snipers was a 34-year-old farmer from Kollaa, a region of southeastern Finland near the Soviet border, named Simo Häyhä.
The Method
Häyhä had been hunting in the forests of Karelia since childhood. He shot accurately — competition records from the 1930s document it — but so did many Finnish riflemen. What made Häyhä exceptional was not natural talent alone but a series of tactical decisions that, taken together, made him extraordinarily difficult to kill.
He dressed entirely in white. He moved before dawn to dig himself into a snow bank or position himself within heavy cover, and then he did not move until dusk. He packed compacted snow into his mouth while in position — human breath in extreme cold creates a small but visible column of vapor that a skilled observer can detect through a scope. The packed snow chilled his exhaled breath below the point of visible condensation.
He refused a telescopic sight on his rifle. The standard Soviet argument for a scope — greater range, greater precision at distance — he found outweighed by the scope's vulnerability to glare. A mirrorlike lens in Karelian winter sunlight could be spotted hundreds of meters away by a skilled eye. He worked with his finger-length iron sights and placed himself close enough to make them sufficient. He preferred engagement ranges of 300 to 400 meters when possible.
The Numbers
Between the outbreak of the Winter War on November 30, 1939 and March 6, 1940, Finnish military records credited Häyhä with 505 confirmed sniper kills. Some Finnish historians believe the actual total was higher — the confirmation standard required by Finnish command was rigorous. His kills also include approximately 200 additional close-combat engagements with a Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun.
The Soviet Red Army assigned counter-sniper teams specifically to find and kill him. Counter-battery artillery was used to destroy his suspected positions. An entire division was reportedly tasked with counter-sniper operations in his sector of the Kollaa front.
None of it worked.
The Shot That Ended It
On March 6, 1940, with nine days left in the Winter War, a Soviet sniper's explosive bullet — a round designed to fragment on impact — struck Häyhä in the lower left jaw. It tore away a large portion of his face.
His comrades carried him off the battlefield. They were not certain he was alive. He regained consciousness on March 13, 1940 — the day the Moscow Peace Treaty was signed, ending the Winter War.
He was promoted to Second Lieutenant — an almost unheard-of battlefield promotion for a private — by Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim himself. His face required extensive surgery. He recovered.
He survived until 2002. He was 96 years old. When a journalist asked him near the end of his life whether he regretted what he had done during the Winter War, he said: "I did what I was told to do, as well as I could. There's nothing to regret."
He had, it is worth noting, spent the decades after the war hunting moose.
Sources & Further Reading
Finnish Defence Forces historical records; Petri Sarjanen, "White Death: The Story of Simo Häyhä" (Docendo, 2017); David L. Robbins, military history research files.