Finn Simo Häyhä is known to be one of the deadliest elite shooters. His face was disfigured in combat.
June 23, 2021 – 6:57 p.m.
“I did what I was ordered in the best way that I knew”. This was the sniper’s phrase Simo Häyhä when asked how he felt after taking down more than 700 Soviets during the Winter War.
Simo Häyhä was born in the village of Rautjärvi, Finland, on December 17, 1905. “Haya was the second youngest child in a family of eight. He studied grammar at school and soon began helping his parents on the family farm. His hobbies have always included skiing, shooting, hunting, and playing Pesapallo, the Finnish version of baseball, ”detailed in the book. Finland at War: The Winter War 1939-40.
Häyhä entered at the age of 17 years on the Finnish Civil Guard, a body that came from the old White Guard that had fought in the country’s civil war against the so-called Red Guard.
“He was an expert marksman. He won competitions getting it right six times in a minute to a small target located 150 meters away ”, add the authors of the book.
Between 1925 and 1927, at the age of 20, he went to the compulsory military service of his country in the Cycling Battalion. Subsequently, he was promoted to corporal after completing the NCO course. Just a few months later, he passed the tests to become a sniper. However, he ended up retiring to the family farm to have a quiet life, this ended when the Winter War began.
Winter war
The Winter War broke out when the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30, 1939, three months after the start of World War II. “The Finnish resistance was fierce and the Soviet performance, despite its overwhelming numerical majority, was appalling. Many of the Soviet units initially deployed were from Central Asia […] Y they were neither trained nor equipped for winter warfare “, notes the popular historian Martin H. Folly in his free Atlas of World War II.
In addition, the Red Army encountered the lethal rifle of the “White Death” who, along with his fellow Finns, knew that his country had winter as a potential ally. “The unprepared soviet army to fight in the winter was partly due to highly optimistic estimates about the duration of the campaign, “he explains. Chris Bellamy (Professor of Science and Military Doctrine).
The nickname of the “White Death”, not only meant that the sniper annihilated any Russian who stood in front of the barrel of his rifle, but because he used to go to battle dressed as a real ghost, with a white coat, a mask of the same color that covered almost the entire face, and matching gloves.
As explained in “The Redwood Stumper 2010: The Newsletter of the Redwood Gun Club,” the sniper hated shooting with a telescopic sight for two reasons. The first was that the sunlight reflecting off the glass I could reveal where he was. The second, that the lenses used to break due to the cold. For all this, he used the rifle’s metal sights.
Some historians claim that he had a total of 505 accredited casualties with his sniper rifle. Others like Robert A. Sadowski raise this death toll to 542. To all these corpses we must add others 200 victims (not confirmed) by the submachine gun he used at short distances. What is totally testable is that he managed to annihilate all these Soviets in a total of 100 days. (I)
