The Deadliest Marksman’s Cold, Brave Stand

Eighty years ago this winter, a freezing Finnish farm boy took aim at the unstoppable Red Army — and became the greatest sharpshooter the world has ever seen.

Photos courtesy of Finnish Military Archives | Story edited by Brendan Spiegel

The war was nearly over on March 6, 1940. The enemy, propagandized as an unstoppable fighting machine, was indeed overwhelming the army of the country they’d invaded. Six days later, the aggressors would finally force an armistice, and soon grab control of much of the land they’d coveted. It had taken longer than the two weeks they’d anticipated, but conditions were harsh, the defenders far more resolute than expected. For more than three months, battlefields roared with motoring tanks, gunfire and artillery explosions, obliterating the natural beauty of the countryside. Through it all, one warrior emerged as perhaps the finest killer in military history, on a mission to serve his besieged nation by picking off foreign attackers — many, many of them — one by one with a sniper rifle.

On that afternoon in March, however, Simo Häyhä of Finland was out of his element. Instead of scheming in a snowbank behind his sniper rifle, camouflaged in white, hundreds of feet from a target, he was part of a squadron in counterattack mode against Russian soldiers, who were at times just a few yards away — and possibly too scared to go home without a victory. After the Russians had been pushed back for a time, they reemerged with a furious charge. A shot rang out, and suddenly Häyhä was on the ground, bleeding profusely from his face, the grisly victim of an exploding bullet that had been banned by most nations. According to one account of the battle, while unconscious, with his left upper jaw blown away completely and his left lower jaw cut in two, Häyhä was placed in a pile of bodies killed in action. Later, a fellow soldier, looking for Häyhä on orders from his commanding officer, noticed a leg twitching among the grim grouping. So began Häyhä’s 14-month-long recovery from the wound that, even after 26 surgeries, would leave his face disfigured for life.

The Russian troops had snuffed Häyhä out of the Winter War, which had begun on November 30, 1939, but not before he had compiled, by some accounts, a kill count in excess of 500 by sniper rifle, more than anyone in recorded history.