Friends of Finland

[Permafrost]

Finns achieved the greatest military ass-rape in the history of mankind. Even earlier than that, the hakkapeliitta were among the best horsemen troops who won for the Swedes many a victory.

[Togarma]

I have been Finland several times. Cold weather with nice people. Nature also wery nice. I don't remember it's Finnish name but their smoked salmon fish was awsome. I aslo love their products (pumps, heat exchanger, marine engines etc.) as a mechanical engineer. Wery high quality.

[Marshmallow Fluff]

My friend wanted to say "hello".

[щрбл]

My turn. The Finnish t-shirt I shamelessly bought in Helsinki.

[gültekin]

Heil Linus (founder of Linux kernel)

[Sally the first]

both my parents are half Finnish. I lived in Finland for 8 years I've worked as an English teacher and i LOVED every minute of it. beautiful country people are Friendly however it seemed to me that a lot of Finns wanted to leave Finland so bad, no idea why tho.

[Marshmallow Fluff]

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/tiina-tormanen-wanderer
















Photographer Tiina Törmänen likes to be alone when she shoots … really, really alone. For her most recent series, she drove out into Finland’s frigid wilderness to take stunning self-portraits under the Northern Lights.

She calls the project Wanderer, aptly named given the stark and beautiful loneliness of her photos. Törmänen started the series while working as a hotel chef in Kilpisjärvi, a remote village in northern Finland. At the end of her shift, the photographer would take off on a snowmobile into the Käsivarsi Wilderness Area nearby, often shooting until the wee hours of the morning. She patiently scouted wide-open landscapes for the perfect shot and made long exposures that capture her standing under a display of brilliant and star-packed skies.

“I was so impressed with the loneliness, the air and the silence,” she says. “Out there you feel so small because there is only cold and ice.”

[Marshmallow Fluff]

[Marshmallow Fluff]

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war...age-heavy.html

White Death. The Finnish sniper with 500 Soviet kills in just 100 days



When you think of Finland, the phrase “military powerhouse” isn’t exactly the first thing that pops into your head. Likewise, when you looked at Finnish sniper a slight-framed Finnish farmer who didn’t stand many inches over five feet tall, you also probably didn’t think he was a one man army.

Simo Häyhä, arguably the greatest sniper to ever live, sniped over 542 invading Soviet soldiers in World War II using nothing but a bolt action rifle that had no scope. He also has the distinction of having recorded the highest known number of confirmed kills by any sniper in any major war; with the runner up being Soviet Ivan Sidorenko with 500 in WWII. In addition to his 542 confirmed sniper kills, he also managed another couple hundred kills with a Suomi 9mm machine gun bringing his total for the “Winter War” to just under 800 kills.

The “Winter War” was a conflict between Russia and Finland beginning on November 30, 1939, three months after the start of WWII, with the Soviets invading Finland.



Häyhä’s specialty was his knowledge of the forests, his enduring patience and his impeccable rifle marksmanship. A sniper by trade, he would dress up in all-white camouflage, sneak through the woods with only a day’s worth of food and couple clips of ammunition, and then lie in wait for Soviet soldiers. His first battle-experience came in the hard-fought Kollaa campaign, where a severely outnumbered Finnish force bore the brunt of a large-scale Soviet. Temperatures at this time ranged from -20 to -40 degrees Celsius, and the entire forest was covered with several feet of snow. While this played havoc on the inexperienced and under-equipped invaders. He would come to be known throughout the Soviet Army as “The White Death”, and at one point in the war they even went so far as to try and launch a couple of artillery strikes on locations at which they thought he might be hiding.



He preferred his rifle, which only had an iron site rather than a scope, over Swedish sniper rifles as it allowed him to keep a slightly lower profile over a scoped rifle; the scopes made you raise your head an extra inch or two making a nice target for other snipers. In addition to this, scopes on sniper rifles tended to reflect the sunlight which is how he says he was able to kill so many of the Soviet snipers who were sent to specifically take him out. The really amazing thing about just using the iron sites was that many of his kills were shot at people over 400 yards away.

Häyhä used an M/28-30 with serial number 60974, since it suited his small frame. The rifle is a shorter, Finnish White Guard militia variant of the Mosin–Nagant rifle, known as “Pystykorva” chambered in the Finnish Mosin–Nagant cartridge 7.62×54R. He preferred iron sights over telescopic sights as to present a smaller target for the enemy (a sniper must raise his head higher when using a telescopic sight), to increase accuracy (a telescopic sight’s glass can fog up easily in cold weather), and to aid in concealment (sunlight glare in telescopic sight lenses can reveal a sniper’s position). As well as these tactics, he frequently packed dense mounds of snow in front of his position to conceal himself, provide padding for his rifle and reduce the characteristic puff of snow stirred up by the muzzle blast. He was also known to keep snow in his mouth whilst sniping, to prevent steamy breaths giving away his position in the cold air.

The Soviets’ efforts to kill Häyhä included counter-snipers and artillery strikes, and on March 6, 1940, he was however finally shot in the jaw with an exploding bullet in a pitched battle against a large group of Russian soldiers. Some of his fellow Finish soldiers pulled him from the battle and he survived even though, as they said, “half his head was missing”. He was then in a coma for nine days. He didn’t regain consciousness until March 13th.

It took several years for Häyhä to recuperate from his wound. The bullet had crushed his jaw and blown off his left cheek. Nonetheless, he made a full recovery and became a successful moose hunter and dog breeder after World War II, and hunted with Finnish President Urho Kekkonen.

When asked in 1998 how he had become such a good shooter, Häyhä answered “Practice. When asked if he regretted killing so many people, he said, “I only did my duty, and what I was told to do, as well as I could.” Simo Häyhä spent his last years in Ruokolahti, a small municipality located in southeastern Finland, near the Russian border. Simo Häyhä died in a war veterans nursing home in Hamina in 2002 at the age of 96.



Simo credited his incredible sniping ability to knowledge of the forests, patience, and practice. He typically liked to snipe from a sitting position, normally not used by snipers due to giving a larger profile to be seen from.

[Marshmallow Fluff]

Finnish American Lives


http://www.folkstreams.net/film,35


A portrait of traditional Finnish American culture in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, highlighting the fragile community of memory connecting one with parents and grandparents. A 92-year-old grandfather asked his son and Finnish immigrant daughter-in-law to live on the farm and care for him. The barn will fall any day; the grandchildren are growing restless. This three-generation farm family works, celebrates, reflects and grieves together. FINNISH AMERICAN LIVES explores the meaning of family, ethnic history, aging, and intergenerational bonds. Contrasts between the immigrant elder, his American-born son, and the partially assimilated grandchildren illustrate continuity and change in the "sanua belt" of the Lake Superior Region. The film was completed in 1982.