In a war it is not only doing and being, but also appearing. We have already seen recently how Iran pretended to have some fighters parked so that Israel would waste its missiles, but this trick of playing tricks is older than gunpowder. In fact, in World War II the United States even had ‘Ghost Army’ that was dedicated to these tasks. Precisely within the framework of the second war on a planetary scale, this curious story of concealment of infrastructurewhich is run by Finland.
Finland is a Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula, the easternmost of the triad made up of Norway, Sweden and Finland. That makes it have a border with Russia, only at that time it was the USSR. Its situation on the map made it fight three wars in three different positions: the Winter War where it was attacked by the Soviets, the Continuation War in which the USSR attacked taking advantage of the Nazis’ Operation Barbarossa and the Lapland War, in which it fought against Germany after signing its armistice with the USSR.
The photo that illustrates the cover of this piece and that you can see in full immediately after this paragraph was taken by Osvald Hedenström and is preserved in the photographic archive of the Finnish Defense Forces, along with the legend written by the photographer:
“The Finns have camouflaged the 10 km from the border on the Raatteen road with country roads, with fir trees that seem to hang in the air, because right on the border there is an observation tower erected by the Russians. Suomussalmi, Kuivajärvi 1941.06.27”
Flying trees on the Raatteen road. Sa-Kuva
The cheapest camouflage of World War II
That is to say, the legend makes three facts clear: that there was camouflage that covered the 10 kilometers of road from the border, which included rural roads and the main highway, and that the threat was a Soviet observation tower right on the muga. As? With fir trees lying.
The Finnish army was noticeably inferior to the Soviet one, so they took advantage of the terrain, as Colonel Petteri Jouko, a military historian at the Finnish National Defense University, explains for Atlas Obscura: “The Finns did not have the funds to purchase large quantities of artificial camouflage, such as nets, they did use trees, leaves and foliage to confuse the enemy.”
Because Finland is also a country with exuberant nature: the density of its forests is around 75% of the territory according to the FAO, so discovering critical infrastructure for the movement of troops and supplies such as roads or railways was a piece of cake for the Soviets. Obviously this resource of camouflaged roads was only effective for sky-level observationbut not for reconnaissance aircraft.
Trees laid to hide critical infrastructure. Sa-Kuva
This camouflage technique was technically simple but arduous. The Finns cut down the pine trees near the roads and then suspended them with steel cables that they had tied to other trees at the ends, although they also used wooden poles.
The result, as can be seen just above, in another photograph from the Finnish archive, is that it seemed that the trees were flying over the roads, which from a bird’s eye view appeared to be just another leafy forest. Currently, none of these tree structures have survived; the passage of time and the abandonment of these rural roads has condemned them to their disappearance.
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Cover and photographs | SA-kuva (Finnish Defense Forces photo archive)
