He was 34 when the Soviets invaded Finland<\/a>.\u00a0 H\u00e4yh\u00e4 was recalled to service with the Finnish 12th Division.\u00a0 The division held the Kollaa front, north of Lake Ladoga, and was quickly beset by four <\/em>Soviet divisions and a tank brigade.<\/p>\n Kollaa was the Somme of the Winter War.\u00a0 The Soviets would charge; they’d get through the Finnish lines; the Finns would cut them off and kill them, or drive them back. And so it went, back and forth, for three whole months – virtually the entire length of the war.<\/p>\n And one of the reasons was H\u00e4yh\u00e4.<\/p>\n Simo with rifle<\/p><\/div>\n Armed with a Moissin\/Nagant M\/28 – a World War 1-vintage Russian rifle that the Finns had reworked into a much more accurate piece (the Finns, a former Russian province, had retained the Russian-caliber, mostlhy Russian-surplus, weapons after independence)\u00a0– and wearing homemade white camouflage, on his own cross-country skis, H\u00e4yh\u00e4 stalked the forest.\u00a0 Unlike most of history’s snipers, he used only his\u00a0 rifle’s iron sights – he thought scopes forced the sniper to raise their heads too high, dangerously raising their profile.\u00a0 He was thorough about concealment – when he had time to prepare a position, he would compact the snow in front of him to avoid raising a small blizzard with his muzzle blast.\u00a0 He’d also keep snow in his mouth while stalking, to pre-cool his exhalation, avoiding the big clouds of steam that normally accompany heavy exertion in the extreme cold.<\/p>\n Did we mention the extreme cold?\u00a0 The average temperature during the Battle of the Kollaa varied from “freaking cold” to “how the hell do humans live in this” – from -4 to -40, Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n In a three-month period – roughly 100 days – H\u00e4yh\u00e4 had 505 confirmed kills.\u00a0 542 if you count some unconfirmed ones.\u00a0 Some Finnish sources say it was closer to 800.<\/p>\n And he wasn’t just <\/em>a sniper; when the situation called for the Finns to close with with the Soviets, H\u00e4yh\u00e4 would ski into hand-to-hand range with the rest of the troops for the close assault; he was credited with another <\/em>200 kills at point-blank range with his Suomi Model 31 submachine gun.<\/p>\n The Soviets called him “The White Death”.\u00a0 They tried everything to get him; countersnipers (they didn’t last long), concentrated volleys of anti-tank rifle fire (gunnies will know what they are; to a non-gunny, think “really big rifle desigined to penetrate a quarter inch of armor”), and finally rolling artillery barrages.<\/p>\n A week before the war’s end, on March 6 1940, a lucky shot from a Soviet infantryman caught H\u00e4yh\u00e4 in the jaw, wrecking it and blowing of his left cheek.\u00a0 His comrades dragged him to the rear, where he began several years of recuperation.\u00a0 He got one of the very few battlefield promotions ever issued in the Finnish army, from Corporal to Second Lieutenant, in honor of his achievements.<\/p>\n The Soviets suffered 8,000 dead in three months in Kollaa; H\u00e4yh\u00e4 alone accounted for nearly 10% of the total (and at least one of Finland’s other great snipers,Sulo Kolkka, claimed another 400 at the Kollaa; the two men between them accounted for over 12% of the entire death toll).\u00a0 On the list of the world’s greatest snipers<\/a>, he’s not only the top of the list by a considerable margin, but he did it all in 100 days flat.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even John Woo or Quentin Tarantino couldn’t make him a bigger badass.<\/p>\n But Simo H\u00e4yh\u00e4 was no movie action hero; he was a typical workadaddy hugamommy Finnish backwoodsman.\u00a0 He survived the war, and lived until 2002 in rural Finland, hunting moose and breeding dogs.\u00a0 He was bit of a national treasure in Finland.<\/p>\n Asked in the nineties what made him so successful as a sniper, he responded in Finnish “Pyytlikkonyykkeyynnkyypelaapetoonen<\/em>“; “Practice”. [1]<\/p>\n This video tribute tells the story pretty well [2]<\/p>\n![\"Simo](\"http:\/\/www.jornalpequeno.com.br\/Blog\/Linhares\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/simo-hayha-1.jpg\")
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