WI:Better invasion of Soviet Union

Far bigger problem is when the war is over. POW is a temporary state especially for large units, and if your force surrenders the Soviet government will know and conveniently has you right in it's grip during the repatriation process. Unless Finland definitively won to the point they could get non-repatriation in the peace treaty and was motivated to do so, you're doomed to a much longer, miserable torment to death.

I somewhat agree. The Red Army troops could expect the USSR to win the war eventually (it had, after all, a massive edge over tiny Finland) and when that would happen, those Red Army soldiers who surrendered to the Finns would be punished for cowardice. Also, I don't exactly buy the argument that the Red Army soldiers could expect the Finns to treat them well if they surrendered, as suggested by @ObssesedNuker above. These men could personally see the Finns killing their comrades mercilessly at the front, and being raised on Soviet propaganda, they had been told that the bourgeois Finns are led by Whites and Fascists who killed thousands of workers in cold blood during the civil war of 1918. During the war, many horror stories about the Finnish Fascists made their rounds among the increasingly demoralized Soviet troops. This information and such rumours about the attitudes of the "White Finns" would have worked against the notions of surrendering to the enemy. This was, I believe, also one reason why such propaganda about the evil nature of the Finnish Fascists was disseminated in the first place.

The most important reason why there were so few Soviet POWs in the Winter War, I believe, was the nature of the war and its conditions rather than any special patriotism and loyalty among the Red Army. After all, if the number of Soviet POWs in the Winter War was under 6000 in a bit over three months, in the Continuation War the Finns would capture 65 000 Soviet soldiers as prisoners during the first six months of the war. What catastrophe had happened to reduce the loyalty of the Soviet soldiers so much in just under two years to make this possible? I believe there was no true difference in the loyalty or the morale of the Red Army troops, the main difference was that the beginning of the Continuation War was characterized by Finnish victories and continuing Finnish advance in summer conditions. The Finns captured many complete Soviet formations essentially by surprise and could easily outflank and encircle them in comparatively large-scale actions. In the warm summer conditions, it was also easier for the captured Red Army soldiers to stay alive until they reached a Finnish POW camp.

In the Winter War, though, while the Red Army suffered a lot of losses, in the main front of the war on the narrow Karelian Isthmus they were actually slowly advancing, or at least could prevent the Finns from launching successful counterattacks. Here, the Red Army units were packed into a narrow area where they had daily congestion issues on the roads leading to the front. In these conditions, soldiers were always near to other units, their own political commissars and NKVD units in the rear. They were under observation. Most acts of cowardice would get reported up the chain of command. Practically, as the Finns did not advance but merely threw back wave after wave of Red Army attacks, there were no many real chances to surrender to the Finns in significant numbers, especially when the Finns were deliberately trying to hurt the Soviet troops as much as they could to even up the numbers. Necessarily, some Soviets attempting to surrender would have been shot summarily on the front, too, in the heat of battle, though I understand this was less common in the Winter War than in the Continuation War.

North of the Ladoga, where there was more room to fight, the Red Army units advanced to Finland through narrow roads across the wilderness. They had poor cross-country mobility in the everpresent snow and forested terrain, and thus were forced into narrow avenues of advance. As we know, the highly mobile Finnish ski units used the Soviet weaknesses in this terrain to encircle such Soviet columns into "mottis" and start chopping them up bit by bit. These kinds of tactics were necessary as the Finns had a huge disadvantage in numbers (unlike they would have in the early part of the Continuation War) and could not allow the Soviets to bring their greater firepower to bear. The Finns tried to destroy these encircled units as effectively as possible, to avoid their own losses in open battle with them. What the Finns would do then, would be to attack the "mottis" from various directions in essentially guerrilla fashion, at all times of the day, trying to offer as few targets as possible themselves. As these battles continued for days and maybe over a week in temperatures colder than -20 and -30 degrees and as the Soviets were ill-prepared for such conditions in terms of clothes and warm accommodation, having to warm themselves on open fires, their eyebrows getting burned while their backs were freezing, their battle value fell dramatically, as did their ability to surrender to the Finns. You can't really surrender to someone you can't see.

The end result of such battles was that when the "motti" finally fell, there were very, very few Red Army soldiers left alive. Those who had not been shot had succumbed to the cold, having been weakened by hunger as well when the food the units had with them ran out. Photos from the "mottis" show Red Army soldiers frozen solid being stacked up like firewood in the aftermath. Others show draft horses of which parts had been hacked off in desperation, to roast horse meat on open fire to have at least some food. And then even if some Red Army soldiers survived the "motti", they might well be weak enough not to survive the trip to a Finnish POW camp, even for so long as to be registered as POWs.

So, to account for the huge discrepancy in the numbers of Soviet POWs gained by the Finns during the Winter War and the Continuation War, we need to look at the conditions at the front a lot more than at the loyalty and patriotism of the Red Army soldiers.
 
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