Simo Häyhä

Simo Häyhä was born on 17 December 1905 in Kiiskinen, a hamlet in the municipality of Rautjärvi in the then province of Viipuri, close to the Russian border. He was the seventh of eight children of Juho and Katriina Häyhä, Lutheran farmers who owned the Mattila farm. He went to school in the village of Miettilä and helped on the farm, where hunting and fishing were part of daily life.

At seventeen he joined the Civil Guard (Suojeluskunta), a volunteer militia that had emerged around the Finnish Civil War of 1918, and he excelled in shooting competitions in Viipuri province. From 1925 he did his military service with Bicycle Battalion 2 at Raivola, attended the non-commissioned officer school and served with Bicycle Battalion 1 at Terijoki. He only received sniper training in 1938, at Utti.

In the Winter War Häyhä served in the 6th Company of Infantry Regiment 34 under Lieutenant Aarne Juutilainen in the Battle of Kollaa, north of Lake Ladoga. In temperatures between −20 and −40 °C he worked in white camouflage. He preferred his rifle's iron sights to a telescopic sight: he did not have to raise his head as high, no glass misted up in the cold and no lens reflection gave away his position.

He used a Finnish variant of the Mosin-Nagant rifle (M/28-30) and, as a group leader, the Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun. Division commander Antero Svensson awarded him an honorary rifle on 17 February 1940 for 219 confirmed rifle kills. Army chaplain Antti Rantamaa recorded a total of 259 rifle kills in his diary on 7 March 1940; Häyhä himself estimated in his memoir that he had shot about 500 Soviet soldiers.

Finland had been independent of Russia since 1917. In the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union placed Finland in the Soviet sphere of influence. When Finland rejected territorial demands, the Soviet Union attacked on 30 November 1939; the Winter War lasted until the Moscow Peace of 13 March 1940.

The Finnish army was much smaller and less well equipped than the Red Army, but knew the terrain and the winter conditions. At Kollaa a Finnish force held out for months; 'Kollaa holds' became a well-known slogan. Propaganda on both sides used hero stories and nicknames, and the winter of 1939–1940 was one of the coldest ever recorded in Finland.

Militarily, the use of snipers such as Häyhä showed how small, well-trained units could delay a much larger attacker. For Finnish morale he became a symbol of resistance. The Moscow Peace, however, cost Finland large parts of Karelia, including the area of his family farm, and more than 400,000 inhabitants had to leave their homes.

After his death interest in Häyhä grew, also because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Finland's accession to NATO. He became a figure in military history writing, metal music and manga. His totals and the nickname 'White Death' are often repeated without the uncertainties of the sources; the name may have been invented by Finnish propaganda, and Soviet prisoners also used 'white death' for the severe frost.

On 6 March 1940 Häyhä was severely wounded when a bullet shattered his lower left jaw; at first he was taken for dead. Recovery took years and his face remained scarred. On 28 August 1940 Marshal Mannerheim promoted him directly from corporal to second lieutenant; a nomination for the Mannerheim Cross was not granted for administrative reasons.

Because his farm lay in ceded territory, he started again as a farmer and hunter in Ruokolahti. He never married, avoided large groups and sometimes received hate mail and death threats. He died on 1 April 2002, aged 96, in a veterans' home in Hamina. Since 1983 a museum in Rautjärvi has been dedicated to the Battle of Kollaa and to him; his memoir, written in 1940, was rediscovered in 2017.