Despite the Red Army’s daunting preponderance of force, despite the utter hopelessness of prolonged resistance, the Finns stopped the Russian steamroller in its tracks, inflicted staggering losses, won a couple of spectacular victories, and stirred the passionate admiration of the Western Democracies. Despite this, the war’s ultimate outcome was never really in doubt. But for 105 stirring days, as Winston Churchill expressed so eloquently: ‘Only Finland, superb, nay, sublime in the jaws of peril… shows what free men can do. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army… Everyone can now see how Communism rots the soul of a nation, how it makes [that nation] abject and hungry in peace and proves it base and abominable in war.’