At noon on January 7, 1940, on the Raate road east of Suomussalmi in eastern Finland, Red Army soldiers began to surrender in droves.

Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo, commander of the Finnish 9th Division, later wrote that starving, frostbitten men climbed one by one out of the darkness of their dugouts. The road held a column with no visible end: tanks, cars, wagons, tractors. East of the village of Haukila, several batteries still stood in position, their barrels pointing west. The forest was full of loose horses that, in their hunger, had stripped the bark and branches from the trees.

He drew up a list of what was taken at Haukila alone: 40 field guns, 29 antitank guns, 27 tanks, 160 trucks, 300 wagons, about 600 horses. One more line on the list read: 32 field kitchens.

He also wrote that the captured medicines and instruments, saddles and field kitchens were exactly what his men needed.

A month earlier, when his troops left Oulu, they had not had a single field kitchen.

I. Field Kitchens from Cattle Cauldrons

On November 30, 1939, Soviet forces crossed the border and invaded Finland. In the north, the Soviet 163rd Rifle Division pushed west into the forests of central Finland, toward Suomussalmi.

What Siilasvuo feared most was that the enemy would swing northwest from Suomussalmi around his flank and make straight for Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia.

At one in the morning on December 7, his chief of staff received a coded telephone order from headquarters: form another brigade around Infantry Regiment 27 at Kemi, with Siilasvuo in personal command, and start loading onto trains that same day. JR 27 was made up of reservists from the province of Lapland. The call did not say where they were going.

The Finnish military historian Juha Saarimaa, writing on the brigade's supply, found that when the troops left Oulu not one field kitchen could be found. Siilasvuo called in Eero Kalaja, a reserve officer serving as assistant to the supply chief, and gave him his first assignment: fill that gap. In civilian life Kalaja was managing director of a company in Oulu. According to a memoir-based work that Saarimaa cites, he gathered the big cauldrons that farms used to cook cattle feed, found sleds, and handed them to small workshops around Oulu, which put them together into working field kitchens. The troops heading for Suomussalmi went with these improvised cookers.

Kitchens were not the only thing missing. Another researcher, Lauri Marttala, concluded that JR 27 was probably the worst-equipped regiment in the Finnish field army: no tents, no field kitchens, no field telephones, no field guns. There were not enough rifles, and some men bought hunting guns. Saarimaa cites contemporary accounts of men skiing at the head of the attack armed only with their own puukko knives; some men received only the trousers of a snowsuit, others only the jacket. Even in January some men still wore rubber boots so small that only one sock fit inside.

The journey went badly too. The first troop train collided with a freight train near the Jaalanka halt, blocking the whole line, and the transports arrived more than a day late. Siilasvuo went ahead to Hyrynsalmi. Evacuation trains full of cattle and people stood in the station yard, and the waiting room was packed with refugees. At daybreak the village was full of old people, women and children who had fled Suomussalmi, and evacuated cattle filled the roads and lanes. An open truck pulled in carrying a mother who had just given birth.

II. Nights Without Fires

At eight in the morning on December 11, JR 27 made its first attack. Siilasvuo wrote that clothes and boots had soaked through during the day and a hard frost came down at night; with the enemy so close, no campfires were allowed; the supply trains could not keep up, and the men were hungry.

Saarimaa pieced together the rations of those days from postwar unit reports. JR 27's 2nd Battalion went two days without food. Only on December 15 did the battalion commander hear that the trains had arrived and that battalions could send half a company at a time to eat. Some units waited six days for their first hot meal. One supply delivery to the 2nd Battalion consisted of two packs of sugar cubes per squad. Lieutenant Toivo Hannila, who commanded a light company, reported after the war that during the fighting there was no hot food; his company got a hot meal only when it set out on a mission and when it came back.

Behind the lines, people were freezing too. A supply company, later designated the 9th Supply Company, moved into Puolanka in late December. Its war diary records: December 26, clear skies, more than thirty degrees below zero; the next day, around thirty-five below. Buying locally yielded little, and milk and potatoes fell short of what the depot needed. From the 29th, goods came and went in large quantities, but only after dark; in daytime no one was to move around the village without reason. The surrounding villages were full of evacuated families, and almost nothing could be bought from them.

On December 27 the Finns launched their main attack on Hulkonniemi. Siilasvuo wrote that after a day of fighting the men were too exhausted to push on; the field kitchens were brought closer to the front, and that night the snow was their bed. Early the next morning, Finnish observers saw the Soviet 163rd Division begin to withdraw north across the ice of Lake Kiantajärvi. After two days of continuous fighting, the Finnish units were spent, hungry and mixed up. Siilasvuo ordered order restored and the men given a little rest; the field kitchens and the few tents on hand were driven up to the troops. For days afterward, Soviet stragglers hiding in the woods and dugouts were driven out one by one by cold and hunger, their hands and feet already frozen. Finnish units pursuing to the north captured a couple of guns, field kitchens and supply trains along the road.

III. Twenty-Seven Kilometers of Road

While the 163rd Division was in trouble at Suomussalmi, the Soviets brought up the 44th Rifle Division, a unit of the Kiev Special Military District that bore the name of the Civil War hero Shchors. Siilasvuo later called these opponents "unfortunate sons of Ukraine, brought here into the northern forests."

The 44th Division's route was a forest road running west from Vazhenvara (Finnish Vasovaara) on the Soviet-Finnish border, through the village of Raate, to Suomussalmi. The road was narrow, with dense forest on both sides. The historians Olga Dudorova and Pavel Aptekar wrote, on the basis of the archives, that by the last week of 1939 nearly all of the division's men and equipment had crowded onto this narrow stretch, making the marching column a very convenient target.

Trouble had started early. On December 22, Captain Lassila's battalion of JR 27 worked its way around to the Kokkojärvi road junction and destroyed two trucks, a tank and a field kitchen. A later 9th Army report said that on December 23–24 the Finns killed 23 Red Army men and 189 horses on the road, and that along 27 kilometers of road the division had built only two blockhouses.

The division commander, Aleksei Vinogradov, was born in 1899 in the countryside of today's Tver region to a family of poor peasants. He finished village school in 1913 and fought against Kolchak in the Civil War. In 1936 he was still a major; in 1937 he took command of a regiment; in January 1939 he became commander of the 44th Division and was promoted ahead of schedule to kombrig. He had been a division commander for less than a year.

Siilasvuo wrote in his 1940 book that on the evening of December 28 Vinogradov ordered his troops to be ready to attack and, together with the 163rd Division, destroy the Finnish defenders of Suomussalmi; a summary distributed to the troops on New Year's Eve still spoke of preparing the attack. By then the neighboring division's story was already over. The same order required trenches to be dug to full depth. Siilasvuo's judgment was that in the bitter cold the Soviet troops were glad to dig in, to get at least some shelter from the winter wind.

In the first two days of the new year, Lassila's battalion slipped east of Haukila and blocked the road. Captured documents later showed, Siilasvuo wrote, that they had struck straight into Soviet artillery positions, so suddenly that the batteries could not turn their barrels. The 44th Division's combat journal recorded on January 2 that the enemy attacked through the night and felled trees across the road at kilometer 21, and that in two batteries of the 3rd Battalion, 122nd Artillery Regiment, all the horses had been put out of action. Dudorova and Aptekar wrote that on the night of January 2 the Finns cut the road. For the next several days, the journal repeated the same line: the division remained cut off from its supply base.

IV. Calls for Help by Radio

Over the following days, food and fodder kept coming up in the combat journal.

January 3: the horses had been five to seven days without hay, and with the cold their condition was very bad.

The entry for January 5 added that at six the previous evening the 2nd Battalion of the 146th Regiment had abandoned its sector without orders; its commander, Pastukhov, gave as his reason that the men had not eaten for four days. At 7:50 that evening a telegram from Vinogradov read: the division's position is grave, above all there is no food or fodder; the men are exhausted, there are 400 wounded; the horses are dying; there is no gasoline, and ammunition is running out; morale is bad, some commanders are deserting the battlefield; urgent help requested.

The encircled 146th Regiment sent a radio message in clear, the same words over and over: give us help, they are finishing us off.

On January 6, Vinogradov asked army headquarters: without help we cannot bring out the equipment and the wounded; the infantry may be able to break through; what should we do with the equipment? The army commander, Vasily Chuikov, and the member of the military council, Furt, replied: if you cannot break through to us with the equipment, hold on; help has been sent.

At 10:45 that night a directive arrived from the General Staff in Moscow, signed by Shaposhnikov. The Stavka, it said, considered Vinogradov's conduct shameful; not one heavy gun, not even one machine gun, was to be left to the enemy; Chuikov would answer for it personally. The directive also said: send some food up to him.

Dudorova and Aptekar wrote that the division commander and chief of staff had already asked to break out without heavy weapons, which could not be moved for lack of fuel and fodder for the horses; Chuikov decided to seek Moscow's approval. Only late on the evening of January 6 did the Stavka permit the withdrawal. They put it more bluntly elsewhere: the division was starving not only for food but for shells.

V. Tents and Kitchens Brought Forward

On the Finnish side, January 5 was the first day of the main attack. The Finnish troops cutting the road farther east, at the Purasjoki, faced thirty-five degrees of frost that night with no tents. Captain Mankonen's battalion fought all day without tents; the exhausted men were relieved that evening and pulled back to where fires could be lit. Only the next day did the battalion receive its first tents, eight in all.

At Haukila the fighting went on until after midnight before it died down. Siilasvuo wrote that the tents and field kitchens were brought closer, and the troops took turns warming up, eating and resting; the sentries were changed often to prevent frostbite.

At dusk on January 6, Finnish soldiers who had fought their way to the road saw rounded shapes and took them at first for the roofs of dugouts. Only when Finnish artillery set off an ammunition load on the road did the fire reveal what they were: tank turrets, in a ghostly column with no end. That night was again extraordinarily cold; some of the tents had been put up behind the troops.

At noon on the 7th the Soviet troops began to surrender. Prisoners were brought out of the forest and the dugouts, many with frozen hands or feet. Fires were lit along the road, and, Siilasvuo wrote, Finnish soldiers and enemy prisoners warmed themselves at them in peace. The starving captured horses were the first to be taken out of the battle area for fodder and care.

At ten that night Vinogradov, with the head of the division's political department and a small group, reached Vazhenvara on the border.

VI. Two Lists

On each side of the battlefield, someone was writing a list.

Siilasvuo's list recorded what had been taken. The materiel, he wrote, was nearly new, the guns gleaming.

The Soviet list recorded what had been lost. On January 10, Lev Mekhlis, head of the Red Army's Political Directorate, reported to the Main Military Council: 79 guns, 37 tanks, 130 heavy machine guns, 150 light machine guns, up to 150 vehicles, all regimental, battalion and company radios, all the regimental trains; most of the horses killed. Forty percent of the men who came out had no rifles. The list does not mention field kitchens separately. They were presumably counted among the "regimental trains," but that is an inference.

The same report said that 1,057 wounded and frostbitten men had come in on January 8 and 9, most of them frostbitten, mostly lightly. The wounded had not been carried out during the retreat, and Mekhlis assumed that a considerable number had fallen into Finnish hands. Another report by Chuikov and Mekhlis counted 44th Division men in the army's hospitals: 98 wounded, 671 frostbitten, 167 sick. According to Dudorova and Aptekar (as quoted by Smyslov), division headquarters put the division's killed, wounded and missing for January 1–7 at 4,756, about thirty percent of its strength.

The supply company in the rear received its own share of the battle. On January 4 about two hundred captured horses arrived in Puolanka in miserable condition; several could not keep up and had to be slaughtered on the way. Two days later, short of hay, the company slaughtered evacuated cattle that were giving no milk, and made blood pancakes.

VII. Fifty Minutes at Vazhenvara

On January 10 Mekhlis wrote in his report that he wanted to arrest Vinogradov as a coward who had destroyed his division. The same day, he and Chuikov listed the causes of the defeat, among them: Vinogradov had asked for a plane to fly out, supposedly to report to the military council, which the report treated as cowardice; he had left his main force and reached the border with thirty men; the chief of staff, Volkov, had falsely reported that the abatis at kilometer 23 had been cleared, so a transport with food, fodder and ammunition was sent there, and on January 2 the Finns killed the horses of two batteries at that spot, creating another jam on the road. The report also said that on the afternoon of January 6 Vinogradov had ordered the equipment destroyed, whereas the army military council's order of the previous night had been to bring it out.

At 12:33 that day Chuikov reported to the General Staff that he had decided to disarm Vinogradov and hold him.

On January 11, at Vazhenvara, Vinogradov, his chief of staff Volkov and the head of the political department, Pakhomenko, were tried in the open air before the men of the division. At 9:41 that evening Chuikov reported: the accused pleaded guilty; the speeches of the prosecutor and the public accuser were approved by all present; the trial lasted fifty minutes; the death sentence was carried out at once, publicly, by a platoon of Red Army men. The report went on to say that a commission of the military council was still investigating in detail all the causes of the defeat.

On November 17, 1990, Vinogradov was rehabilitated.

In April 1940 the Communist Party's Central Committee called a meeting of commanders to collect the experience of the war against Finland. Speaking about the 44th Division, Shaposhnikov called the encircled troops "Tolstoyans": instead of clearing an abatis of ten trees in time, they sat and waited until twenty were felled; the encircled troops sat in the forest as if bewitched.

VIII. Kitchens in the Recommendations

On April 19–20, 1940, a subcommission chaired by Andrei Khrulev, head of supply of the Red Army, discussed the lessons for supply. Its recommendations included: 400 grams of rusks in every soldier's emergency reserve; four twelve-liter thermos containers for each company's kitchen; dry alcohol for individual cooking and warming in cold weather; extra salo and vodka in winter. Another item read: use field kitchens on every tactical exercise, so that company commanders learn how to feed their companies.

Epilogue

On March 13, 1940, peace was concluded. The 9th Supply Company's war diary records that the telephone message came and hostilities ended at exactly eleven o'clock. The company went on sending food to the troops who had done the fighting. The next day, the diary says, the mood in the company was very low, and no one felt like talking.

By then the company had moved to Valkola, east of Sotkamo. March 22 was Good Friday. There was a blizzard, and work at the depots was limited to what could not wait. Orders came to hand over the company's car. The diary has one more line: the company received a new field kitchen and tried it out that day. The kitchen had been taken as booty from the Russians.

The diary does not say which unit it had belonged to, or on which road it had been left behind.

Sources and editorial boundaries 1. Siilasvuo's account: Hj. Siilasvuo, Suomussalmen taistelut (Helsinki: Otava, 1940), public domain, full text from Project Lönnrot no. 2035: https://asiasanasto.fi/kirjat/2035-siilasvuo-hjalmar-suomussalmen-taistelut . Used for: his fear of a flanking move toward Oulu; the coded telephone order received by his chief of staff, Major Into Ahonen, at 01:00 on December 7, JR 27 as a regiment of Lapland reservists, destination not given, Kalaja as "weapons and trains officer"; the collision near Jaalanka and the delay of more than a day; the evacuation trains, refugees, cattle and the mother who had just given birth at Hyrynsalmi; the first attack at 08:00 on December 11 and that night's wet clothes, frost, ban on fires and hunger; Lassila's battalion destroying two trucks, a tank and a field kitchen at the Kokkojärvi junction on December 22; the Hulkonniemi attack of December 27, kitchens brought forward, "the snow was their bed"; exhausted, hungry troops, kitchens and the few tents driven up, frostbitten stragglers emerging from the woods; "a couple of guns, field kitchens and trains" captured on the Kylänmäki road; the 44th Division's order of December 28, the full-depth trench requirement, the New Year's Eve summary and his judgment about digging in; Lassila's battalion blocking the road and striking the artillery positions (from captured documents); the night of January 5 at the Purasjoki at 35 below without tents, Mankonen's battalion relieved and receiving eight tents the next day; fighting at Haukila until after midnight, tents and kitchens brought forward, rotation for warmth, food and rest, frequent change of sentries; turrets mistaken for dugout roofs at dusk on January 6, the ammunition load set off by Finnish artillery, some tents up that night; the surrender at noon on January 7, frostbitten prisoners, roadside fires, captured horses taken out first; the column, guns pointing west, horses that had stripped bark, nearly new materiel; "kalliita lääkeaineita ja instrumentteja, satuloita ja kenttäkeittiöitä"; the Haukila booty list (40 field guns, 29 antitank guns, 27 tanks, 160 trucks, 300 wagons, 32 field kitchens, about 600 horses); "unfortunate sons of Ukraine." 2. Finnish supply research: Juha Saarimaa, "Siilasvuon joukkojen huollon järjestelyt Suomussalmella 1939–1940," lecture to the Finnish Society of Military History (Suomen Sotahistoriallinen Seura), December 14, 2011: https://www.sshs.fi/content/uploads/2023/02/Siilasvuon_joukkojen_huollon_jarjestelyt_Suomussalmella_1939_1940.pdf . Used for: no field kitchens on leaving Oulu and Kalaja's improvised kitchens from cattle-feed cauldrons and sleds (Saarimaa cites Raimo Seppälä, Kenraali ja pahat linnut: Hj. Siilasvuo 1892–1947, Helsinki: Otava, 1984, p. 49; publication details checked in the Finnish library catalog Finna; the book itself not read, and the text says it is a memoir-based work cited by Saarimaa); Kalaja as managing director of Oulu Osakeyhtiö; men armed only with their own puukko, partial snowsuits, rubber boots with room for one sock; the 2nd Battalion's two days without food and half-companies sent to eat from December 15; up to six days' wait for the first hot meal; two packs of sugar cubes per squad (citing Sorri 1979); Lt. Toivo Hannila's report of August 23, 1940; Finnish observers seeing the 163rd withdraw across the ice early on December 28. JR 27's equipment: Lauri Marttala, "JR 27 Kainuun taisteluissa" (lecture slides): https://www.sshs.fi/content/uploads/2023/02/Lauri_Marttala_JR_27_Kainuun_taisteluissa.pdf . 3. Finnish supply company war diary: 9. Talouskomppanian sotapäiväkirja Suomussalmen ja Kuhmon rintamalta (original P 3536, covering 2.T-Tal.K December 8–20, 1939, and 22.Tal.K/9.Tal.K December 21, 1939–April 16, 1940), transcribed from the original by Matti Halonen in 2015, published by the Kuhmo Winter War Museum: https://www.talvisotakuhmossa.fi/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2025/12/6.-9.-Talouskomppanian-sotapaivakirja-Suomussalmen-ja-Kuhmon-rintamalta.pdf . Entries used: arrival at Puolanka December 25; December 26 clear, "over −30"; December 27 around −35; December 28 poor local purchasing, milk and potatoes short; December 29 goods moved only in darkness, no unnecessary daytime movement, evacuated families in surrounding villages; January 4 about 200 captured horses in miserable condition, several slaughtered on the way; January 6 evacuated cattle slaughtered for lack of hay, blood pancakes; January 21 move to Valkola, 7 km along the Sotkamo–Kuhmo road; March 13 telephone message and end of hostilities "at exactly 11.00," food deliveries continuing; March 14 low mood; March 22 (Good Friday) blizzard, car handed over, captured field kitchen received and tried out. The diary does not say where the kitchen came from. 4. Soviet documents, quoted through published secondary works (originals not seen): (a) the 44th Rifle Division combat journal entries for January 2–6, Vinogradov's telegram of 19:50 on January 5, the 146th Regiment's clear-text message, and the January 6 exchange between Vinogradov and Chuikov and Furt, from O. A. Dudorova, "Neizvestnye stranitsy 'Zimnei voiny'," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 1991, no. 9, pp. 12–23, as quoted in Oleg Smyslov, Rasstreliat' pered stroem… (Moscow: Veche, 2013; series "Antologiia predatel'stva"; ISBN 978-5-9533-6579-6), chapter 9; (b) Shaposhnikov's directive no. 0965 of January 6, 1940, 22:45 (RGVA f. 37977, op. 1, d. 233, l. 104); Mekhlis's report no. 3/13 of January 10 (RGVA f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1386, l. 119–120); Chuikov and Mekhlis's report no. 0109 of January 10 (same file, l. 127–132); Chuikov's report of 12:33 on January 10 (l. 120); the report of 21:41 on January 11 on the trial and execution (l. 124); Vinogradov's service card and rehabilitation on November 17, 1990, all as quoted by Smyslov; (c) Dudorova and Aptekar on the crowded narrow road, the road cut on the night of January 2, "not only food hunger but shell hunger," the request to break out without heavy weapons and Chuikov's referral to Moscow, the Stavka's permission late on January 6, Vinogradov's arrival at Vazhenvara on the evening of January 7, and division headquarters' figure of 4,756 lost on January 1–7 (about 30 percent), from their article "Predannye i zabytye" as quoted by Smyslov (not read in the original); Vinogradov's promotions and the division's Shchors name from Dudorova as quoted by Smyslov; "Kiev Special Military District" from the service card; (d) Shaposhnikov's speech at the Central Committee meeting of commanders, April 14–17, 1940 ("Tolstoyans," ten trees and twenty, "as if bewitched"), as quoted by Smyslov from Tainy i uroki zimnei voiny. 1939–1940 (St. Petersburg: Poligon, 2000) (not read; page not checked). Dudorova's VIZh 1991 no. 9 article could not be obtained and was not checked directly. 5. (An earlier draft used two passages from Voroshilov's report to the Central Committee plenum of March 28, 1940: biscuits instead of rusks, and the extra sugar, salo and vodka raising the ration from 3,717 to 4,449 calories. The report is published in excerpt in Tainy i uroki zimnei voiny. 1939–1940 (St. Petersburg: Poligon, 2000), pp. 426–427, 431–432, 435, 447–448; archive RGASPI f. 74, op. 2, d. 121, l. 1–35 (per the catalog records of the Yeltsin Presidential Library, prlib.ru/item/1321223, and docs.historyrussia.org/nodes/104056). Neither passage could be checked in that book or in the scan, only in an online transcription, so both have been removed from the text.) 6. Protocol of the Khrulev subcommission, April 19–20, 1940 (RGVA f. 4, op. 14, d. 2737, l. 58–70), document no. 39 in "Zimniaia voina": rabota nad oshibkami (aprel'–mai 1940 g.) (St. Petersburg: Letnii sad, 2004) (page not checked). Used for: 400 g rusk emergency reserve; four 12-liter thermos containers per company; dry alcohol; winter salo and vodka supplement; field kitchens on every tactical exercise to train company commanders in feeding their companies. 7. People and other details: Siilasvuo (born March 18, 1892, Helsinki; died January 11, 1947, Oulu), Wikidata Q442464; Vinogradov (February 12, 1899–January 11, 1940), Wikidata Q4111718 and the service card quoted by Smyslov; Vazhenvara, Wikidata Q112130167. The date of the border crossing and the 163rd Division's direction of advance follow Smyslov, chapter 9. 8. Boundaries: (1) Kalaja's rank is reserve second lieutenant (vänrikki) in Saarimaa and reserve lieutenant (luutnantti) in Siilasvuo's 1940 book; the text says only "reserve officer." (2) The cattle-cauldron kitchens are known only from Saarimaa citing Seppälä's 1984 memoir-based work; no independent account has been found. (3) Kitchen count: only Siilasvuo's 32 at Haukila is used; a figure of 47 for the whole road, attributed online to the official Talvisodan historia 3 (Sotatieteen laitos; Porvoo: WSOY, 1978), could not be checked in the book and is not used. (4) The date of the 146th Regiment's clear-text message is January 6 in the journal as quoted (where the regiment is misprinted "14 sp" and the message is signed by the regimental commander, Ivlev) and January 5 in Dudorova and Aptekar; the text gives no date. (5) Soviet losses: the text uses only the division headquarters figure of 4,756 for January 1–7 given by Dudorova and Aptekar, as quoted by Smyslov; their original was not read. (6) The charges against Vinogradov come from the accusers' own reports and are reported, not judged; Main Military Council order no. 01227 of January 19 is known only by its archival catalog title, and its text is not used. (7) No reliable evidence was found that the Finns deliberately targeted Soviet field kitchens, and the text makes no such claim. (8) Sources differ on the exact hour Vinogradov ordered the breakout, and the text gives none; the accusers' report that he ordered the equipment destroyed between 14:00 and 16:00 on January 6 is given as their statement. (9) That the cold made Soviet troops glad to dig in is Siilasvuo's judgment and is marked as such; that the kitchens were counted among the "regimental trains" is this article's inference and is marked as such. (10) The supply company diary is used in Halonen's transcription; the original has not been seen. 9. Key original wording: Siilasvuo "kalliita lääkeaineita ja instrumentteja, satuloita ja kenttäkeittiöitä, jotka tulivat meille hyvään tarpeeseen"; "Kenttäkeittiöt noudettiin lähemmäksi etulinjaa. Talvinen hanki oli yösijana."; "Onnettomia Ukrainan poikia, jotka oli tuotu tänne Pohjolan metsiin." Saarimaa: "Niitä ei nimittäin Siilasvuon joukoilta Oulusta lähdettäessä löytynyt ainuttakaan"; "keräsi Oulussa karjakeittiöiden patoja sekä rekiä." Marttala: "Ei telttoja, kenttäkeittiöitä, kenttäpuhelimia tai kenttätykkejä." Supply company diary: "Puhelinsanoma vihollisuuksien lopettamisesta saatiin ja ne lopetettiin tasan klo 11.00."; "Saimme komppaniaan uuden kenttäkeittiön, jota kokeiltiin päivän aikana. Kenttäkeittiö oli saatu sotasaaliina ”ryssiltä”." ("ryssä" was a derogatory Finnish term for Russians; rendered here as "the Russians.") 44th Division journal: "Положение конского состава, находившегося в течение 5—7 суток без фуража (сена), плюс холода, в очень скверном положении"; "Свой отход комбат Пастухов мотивирует тем, что в течение четырех суток люди не ели." Vinogradov: "Положение дивизии тяжелое, особенно продфуража нет, люди обессилены, раненых 400 человек, лошади дохнут, бензина нет… Настроение людей плохое, часть командиров дезертирует с поля боя, прошу срочной помощи." 146th Regiment: "Дайте помощь, нас добивают." Shaposhnikov: "Продовольствие ему подбросьте." Mekhlis: "Виноградова хочу арестовать, как труса, погубившего дивизию." Trial report: "Суд тянулся пятьдесят минут." Shaposhnikov: "толстовцы"; "как 'зачарованные', сидели в лесу." Khrulev subcommission: "При всех выходах на тактические учения применять походные кухни для привития командиру роты навыков в питании роты." Translations are the author's. 10. Rights: Siilasvuo's 1940 book is in the public domain; Soviet official documents are state papers; research articles, the war-diary transcription and web pages are used for facts and brief quotation only; the narrative is original.