Finnish army anti-tank guns in the Winter War

The unsuccesful Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-40, known in Finnish as the Winter War, is one of the more famous conflicts in military history. An especially iconic image of the war that encapsulates the popular notion of the desperate Finnish underdog is Finnish soldiers trying to stop enemy armor with improvised anti-tank weapons. After all, by all accounts the Molotov cocktail got its name in Finland during the war, and stuffing cloth down the neck of a bottle of flammable alcohol was one of the most effective anti-tank measures available to Finnish infantry units; the other methods, like jamming a log into an enemy tank's running gear, were if anything more suicidal.

Why was the Finnish army so ill-prepared for the Soviet armored threat? The core reason is what I talked about in my thesis: Finnish officers wrongly believed that armored forces couldn't operate in Finnish terrain. But even after this belief was dispelled, the army still failed to acquire anything like sufficient quantities of anti-tank weapons. I explain why in my latest peer-reviewed article, which is also my first publication in English, in Tekniikan Waiheita, available online here.

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Also, just to celebrate this article, here's a Warlord Games 28mm model of the 37 PstK 36 that the Finnish army failed to procure in proper numbers.

I took the advice of the Warlord Finnish paint set, and painted the uniforms in Medium Sea Grey, with Chocolate Brown accessories. You may notice I've taken an ahistorical liberty by giving the gunner a Statuesque Miniatures head, complete with a later Finnish armored brigade beret. We still wore second world war-esque greys when I was (very briefly) in the military, and I thought they looked very smart with the black beret! These days it's all camo all the time. The gun is in Luftwaffe Camo Green, which is somewhat darker than it should be, but I like it.

Since I mostly intend to use this model in Warhammer 40,000, as a Rachkoi-pattern lascannon, I've also omitted the third crewmember. Where are they, you may ask?

Fraternizing with the enemy at a Blood Bowl game!