Simo Häyhä makes Rambo look like a little girl

Image via Wikipedia

The story of Simo Hayha is one that can only really be described as epic bravery on a whole new level. This story of a simple Finnish farmer turned Rambo killing machine is something quite out of the ordinary.

 

The Year is 1939, and the flames of the Second World War are just beginning to ignite. The Soviets (rather foolishly) decide that Finland would be a good and easy country to march into and invade, so they throw 2 millions soldiers into the fray. No problems so far right? Wrong. If they’d known that Simo wasn’t best pleased with this, they might have just reconsidered.

 

After completing just one mandatory year in military training, the tiny 5”3 farmer decided to take matters into his own hands. He grabbed his trusty Mosin-Nagant rifle the “Pystykorva”, packed some food, took up a white camo suit and left for the woods.   He also only used Iron Sights on his rifle rather than the more accurate telescopic sights used in real sniper rifles, to make himself a smaller target, something that Russian snipers hadn’t quite figured especially when the sun reflected off their scopes all day long. That and he packed snow into his mouth so as to hide his breathing. Yup, snow into mouth. It was there that under six feet of snow, and  20-40 degrees below zero that Simo would set himself up for the Russians. Everyday he’d go out with just enough food for a day, and a few clips of ammo and along with his knowledge of the woods, go hunt commies.

 

(iron sight on the left, scope on the right)

 

Soon the Russians were beginning to hear rumours of dozens of their men being shot out in the open yet nobody knew who or what it was. It was here on that Simo Hayha became known as “The White Death”. The were so scared of Simo that they mounted entire missions just to kill this one man. They sent taskforces to hunt him down and guess what, he killed them all. Then they sent out specialist teams of counter snipers (Snipers trained to take out other snipers) and guess what, yes he took all of them out too. In fact over the course of 100 days, Simo has 502 confirmed kills with his trusty rifle (a further 40 unconfirmed) and with his SMG, another 150 or so, taking his kill count to a Halo-esque 705 kills in total.

 

After sending taskforces and counter sniping teams, the Russians ran out of ideas and used up their artillery to just carpet bomb the area. Yes you read it just fine, carpet bomb this one man. In fact they got the location right and poor Simo got hit by a cloud of shrapnel which tore his coat up, but guess what, he was just fine and totally unfazed. Lets see Chuck Norris do that.

 

On March 6th 1940, a Russian infantry got lucky and shot Simo in the jaw with an explosive bullet blowing “half his head off” according to eye witnesses. He fell unconscious and into a coma and was taken away back HQ to presumably be sent to the morgue. But nope, miraculously 11 days later he awoke from his coma on the exact same day the the Winter War in Finland ended. In fact he lived till he was 93 years young.

 

The Russians lost half the taskforce they sent over to Finland, more than 40 times that of Finnish casualties and Simo was awarded 5 medals for valour including the Kollaa Cross (the Medal of Honour equivalent). He has also been largely credited for having the most kills in Sniper history. Now why an awesome film hasn’t been made of this I don’t know. Makes Enemy at the Gate’s Vassili Zaitsev look rather insignificant doesn’t it.

 

Hats off to the great Simo Hayha, arguably the greatest unknown sniper of all time.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Simo hayha,sniper,warfare,world war 2,epic