There were two or three thousand Russians and a few Finns, all frozen in a fighting attitude. Some [of the dead] were locked together, their bayonets within each others’ bodies, some were frozen with their arms crooked, holding the hand grenades they were throwing. . . . Fear was registered in their faces. Their bodies were like statues of men throwing all of their muscles and strength into some work, but their faces recorded something between bewilderment and horror.”

Finally, in the latter part of January 1940, the weight of Soviet power began to tell. The Finns were losing a thousand men a day, an unsustainable casualty rate for a nation of four million. On the morning of February 1 an artillery barrage swept across the Karelian Isthmus, the key front in the Winter War. Six days later, the Russian guns were still firing. On the seventh day, three Soviet divisions attacked. Behind the soldiers came the tanks—150—and above the tanks flew squadron after squadron of Soviet planes. Machine-gun fire crackled. Entire Soviet battalions fell dead in the snow, but half an hour later a fresh battalion would emerge from the tree line, pick up the rifles of the dead, and charge into the machine guns again. This would continue until the guns ran out of ammunition or a lucky shot from an eighteen-year-old Soviet recruit killed the machine gunner. Facing defeat, the Finns turned to Britain and France for assistance—and the British, eager to seize the Swedish iron ore fields adjacent to Finland, and the French, eager to relocate the German offensive from France to Scandinavia, promised Helsinki twenty-five thousand troops and then fifty thousand troops. Strategically, the decision made little sense at the time, and in the long light of history, it makes even less.

Writing about the February 5 meeting, where the Allied Supreme Council decided to send troops to Finland, J. R. M. Butler, author of the official British history of the Second World War, could barely hide his exasperation. “An air of unreality pervaded the proceedings . . . as shown in the readiness to lock up troops in Finland that were so urgently needed elsewhere, in the underestimation of the administrative difficulties of such a campaign, in the slight regard paid to the danger of Soviet hostility, in the miscalculation of German efficiency and resources and . . . in the wishful thinking which discounted the determination of the neutral governments [Sweden and Norway] to maintain their neutrality.”

In the midst of the Finnish crisis, Washington made a surprise announcement: At the end of February Sumner Welles, a prominent State Department official, would visit Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London “for the purpose of advising the President and the Secretary of State as to the present conditions in Europe.” This bland announcement in the February 10, 1940, edition of the New York Times failed to do justice to the brief given to Welles, a well-born, discreetly ambitious New Yorker. Welles’s assignment was to assess the prospect of ending the war peacefully before serious fighting in Scandinavia or France made a negotiated settlement impossible. Welles also carried several subsidiary briefs, including instructions to counter Hitler’s influence on Mussolini. The Duce had kept Italy out of the war the previous September, but he had ten battleships, two aircraft carriers, and more than seventy divisions, and whenever he came within Hitler’s orbit, his desire to use them increased noticeably.

In Congress, where isolationist feeling was intense, the Welles mission aroused deep suspicion. Senator Hiram Johnson of California reminded his Senate colleagues that on the eve of the Great War Woodrow Wilson had sent Colonel Edward House to Europe on a similar mission, and three years later American boys were dying on French fields. The president is trying to “entangle us in Europe’s quarrels,” Johnson warned. Similar accusations were made by Representative Roy Woodruff of Michigan, Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, and several other prominent senators and congressmen.

London was also unenthusiastic about the Welles mission. The phony war was making it harder and harder to impose curfews, rationing, and evacuations on a public less and less enthusiastic about a war whose purpose remained obscure. Polling in February showed that a stubborn quarter of the British public continued to favor a negotiated settlement with Germany in one form or another. In a letter to Roosevelt, Prime Minister Chamberlain cautioned that an Allied public excited by Welles’s “sensational intervention” might force London and Paris into a patched-up peace settlement “that apparently righted the wrongs done in recent months,” but “sooner or later . . . [would] result in a renewed attack on the rights and liberties of the weaker European States.” A few weeks later Chamberlain again cautioned the president about the Welles mission, this time evoking Finland.