The Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 was world news at the time, as Finland and its poorly-armed 3 million people stood off the 105 millions of the mighty Soviet Union for more than three months, inflicting numerous defeats on the powerful Soviet army. In doing so, the Finns gained the admiration of the world for their ruggedness and determination. The fact that the Soviet military proved so incompetent in winter weather, despite Russian history and climate and Stalinist propaganda, was also astonishing to the world.

In the end, Goliath prevailed, but only after Stalin sacked numerous commanders, his men suffered many defeats, and Soviet commanders sent in reinforcements and changed operational arts and tactics. The peace the Soviets extracted from the Finns was not as harsh as expected, and Finland was able to rebound and attempt to regain its lost land as an ally of Hitler in 1941, a policy that led to folly and tragedy, and is not the subject of this book.

However, the subject of "White Death" is riveting, as is the writing. Mr. Edwards has produced many contemporary accounts of the fighting and politics of the war, from both sides, including a large number of human-interest nuggets. One hilarious example is the Soviet use of highly inaccurate propaganda leaflets to tell the Finns how they were being "enslaved" by their own government. The Finns did not even put these fliers to the usual use of frontline soldiers -- the paper quality was far below that of Finland's native paper industry.

A sadder nugget comes from how the Soviet Union marked the morning the war ended by engaging in vicious and violent barrages of shellfire of Finnish positions, solely to inflict as much suffering as possible before the cease-fire.

He also covers the foreign response to Finland's plight, which ranged from Italy supporting the Finns to the League of Nations' last outburst, expelling the Soviet Union. It also notes the cynicism of the British and French, who planned to use the concept of supporting the Finns to actually occupy neutral Sweden and Norway's iron mines and transportation routes, to discomfit the German economy. The Soviets learned from the war, and fought better against the German invaders of 1941 and thereafter, particularly in winter weather.

Very little has been written recently about the Russo-Finland War, and most accounts are from the Finnish point of view (Mannerheim's memoirs are detailed, but a trudge), and the only Soviet accounts were weighted down by propaganda (hailing or blaming Stalin and the Mannerheim Line, in that order). 75 years later, the Russo-Finland War is forgotten by nearly all save the Finns, which is tragic, given the horrors it caused. All that seems left of that war in the public memory is the term "Molotov Cocktails" for gasoline-filled bottles used as bombs, which may actually date back to the previous Spanish Civil War.

Mr. Edwards' writing style is fluid and literate, his research formidable, and the book is a valuable addition to any World War II library. Highly recommended.

The title would lead you to think that this book is about the Winter War, but in fact most of the book is about reactions to that war in western Europe, primarily the UK and France, but to some degree also Germany and Italy. The war is described, but only superficially. The final chapter ("Outcomes") is the same way. It only tangentially refers to the territorial concessions made by Finland and hardly says anything about its effects on Finnish politics. The continuation war is referred to in a couple of asides, but that's it. There is a map of the territorial concessions, but this is buried in an appendix containing the text of the peace treaty! And so on.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this; a book on the effect of the Winter War on European politics prior to the invasion of France has a certain value. Those seeking a book on the winter war, however, will inevitably feel cheated by this book, given that it is marketed as a book on the Winter War.

So as a book on the Winter War, this book is very poor. However, that it barely covers the war is not its only failing, or even its worst failing. As another reviewer has mentioned, the prose in this book is atrocious, and in places nearly unreadable. Interestingly, the quality of the prose in the sections dealing with politics are much the worst, while the brief sections dealing directly with the war are quite readable. The discussion of the various negotiations, which make up the bulk of the book, fall in between these extremes.

The problems with the prose are several. The most obvious is the lack of focus. Sentences are chopped up by overuse of too-long inserted asides, which are often inserted in the worst possible places. A less obvious, but much more serious, problem is that in many cases the grammatical subject of a sentence must be inferred. And, finally, the author tends to use terms like "but", "even so", and so on to imply contradiction where none is to be found. The end result is bewildering, confusing, and finally made me downright angry. Which is why I am writing this review.

Here is a typical example illustrating some of the problems with the prose, lifted from pages 50-51. This is the start of a paragraph:

"But the Soviet intentions were at cross-purposes with the very fundaments of British policy. An implicit part of the price they had to pay for an Eastern bulwark against the nazists would be free disposal over the territories earlier controlled by the man who, coincidentally, had also been the last Grand Duke of Finland, Nicolai II."

The first sentence is fine. The second, however, is just a tangled mess. Who has to pay this price? And what territory is referred to? And who has free disposal of it, and in what way? The rest of the paragraph does nothing to elucidate this (it discusses other issues), and this reader is left tearing out his hair in frustration.

We are still not finished with the problems of this book, however, because far and away its worst feature is the appalling quality of its discussion of politics. The author is clearly not very well versed in European politics, and so much of the discussion is wrong, paradoxical, and confusing. This compounds the already severe problems with the prose, as it can be difficult at the best of times to infer a very indirectly indicated sentence subject, but when the sentence is downright wrong it becomes much more difficult to know what is meant. (One can still know that it is wrong, since there is no interpretation that makes it correct.) Similarly, the disruptive effect of an inserted aside is strengthened considerably when this aside is obviously wrong.

One example of Edwards's interestingly different take on politics is his quote of a commander Bowers (no first name given), who claims that while the dictators (Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini) are in some ways a threat, they possess no dangerious ideology which can threaten western democracies. The real danger is communism. Edwards thinks it "difficult to disagree with this". It's as if he's never heard of fascism, is unaware that the dictators had already taken over two important European democracies (Italy and Germany), that there were sympathetic fascist movements in pretty much all European democracies, and that within a few years of the time he writes about tens of millions of lives will have been expended in war to overthrow these harmless dictators.

Similarly, on the next page he blames the European left for thinking that antifascism had to mean sympathy with communism, and exonerates conservatives from all blame in this. Which is odd, given that the total failure of conservatives and leftist non-communists to stand up to facism is of course the root cause of this thinking.

And so on, and so forth, for 270 pages, before the relieved reader can finally finish and throw this book into the trash where it belongs, and go onto Amazon to buy another book on this subject, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be worse than this book.

Son is in love with this book!

The subject matter is thrilling to say the least. How Finland took on the Great Russian Red Army in 1939 and fought them to a halt. Take a glance at a map to see how 'impossible' that was.
Perhaps that is why I am so very disappointed with this book, for it would seem an author could hardly go wrong with such a story to tell. This author's sentence structure though is so 'choppy', so filled with punctuation and brackets and more brackets that you find yourself loosing the direction he was trying to take you in. Many times I find myself reading a sentence and even a paragraph over and over again to try and make some sense of it, but failing miserably. Very frustrating.
Some of this could be me of course; I did after all receive low marks in my English exams at school - so many years ago now. Still, I read two or three books a week, and have done for the past 50 years, so I am not illiterate. Of course it does not help that I have just finished the book `A Life in Secrets' by Sarah Helm that is truly brilliant in style as well as content.
Meanwhile I struggle on with `White Death', frustrated and disappointed, but determined to get my monies worth. And the search goes on to find a worthy book on this subject.