Warm hands, strong people!
Today’s tour is through a thread about Simo Häyhä, the deadliest sniper in history. As a Finnish soldier he is credited with killing hundreds of soviets during the successful defense of Finland from soviet invasion. Many of those he killed were looking to kill him specifically, and one managed to shoot him in the face. He survived, though.
The thread is mostly people coming to talk about how much of a badass he is. (“Note to self: don’t invade Finland.”) Mentioning that he recovered and became a moose hunter, Slack-a-gogo jokes, “With his skills a moose seems like to easy of a target. I would think he would have started hunting something a bit more challenging like squirrels. Or bees.”
Things get even more awesome when mittens come into the picture, with this great comment by KathrynT:
Oh oh oh oh I have a fun story about Simo Häyhä! I have no sources for this; it was an anecdote told to me by Nancy Bush, who is one of the world’s greatest living authorities on the textiles of the Baltic states and Scandinavia, during a two-day workshop about mittens and gloves.
One of the reasons Häyhä was so successful, believe it or not, was because of his mitten ensemble. They consisted of three layers: the bottom layer was an incredibly finely knitted tight-fitting glove made of handspun yarn, finer than commercial woolen knits could be found at that time. The second layer was a fingerless mitt that stopped short of the base of his fingers, while covering his wrist and the first joint of his thumb. The outer layer was made of heavy, thick wool, in a technique unique to scandinavia called nålbinding, which was looped rather than knitted. This nålbinded mitten, in addition to being virtually impervious to cold, also had a split in it for his trigger finger, so he could fire his rifle without taking them off.
The underglove was fine enough that he could reload his rifle without taking THAT off, drastically reducing the amount of time that his hands had to be exposed to the cold. And if he did have to do maintenance on his rifle that required the underglove to come off, he could put the wrist-covering mitt back on; because that covered the pulse point in his wrist, it kept his blood warmer longer and kept feeling in his fingers.
The Russians, by contrast, had thick, bulky gloves or mittens in a single layer. The gloves had to be taken off to reload, which caused a lot of wasted time due to numb fingers. And the mittens had to be taken off even to FIRE the gun! Numb, frostbitten hands were the cause of many poor shots and lost ammunition, or even parts of the rifle if field maintenance had to be done.
so. Hoorah for mittens! Warm hands, strong people! Not taking away from the fact that Simo Häyhä was an enormous badass and an utter hero, mind you, because he totally was. (#)
I’ve got a little bit of a love of good tools, things that are well designed in just the right way, and this is a kind of wonderful little anecdote of something just working.
Unfortunately, the rest of the thread is a little crazy, with a few commentors uncomfortable with heaping such great praise on someone who killed so many people, while others try to convince them that yes, Häyhä is a hero. After all that weird bad blood I think the best way to end this tour is with this little story by Faze:
Simo Häyhä entered Hell today. His face was set. His fists were clenched. He fully expected to be tortured for eternity by the souls of the 800 Russians he’d sent to Hell with his rifle in World War II. But when he walked through the fiery gates of Hades, there was no one there to meet him except one shriveled old devil, who stood there absent-mindedly rubbing a handful of lava into his crotch.
“Where is everybody?” Häyhä asked the devil.
“Everybody who?”
“The 800 Russians I killed. Murdered, I mean. That’s why I’m here, of course. I didn’t think it was murder until that trap door opened under my feet, and I began to sense some serious climate change. Now I realize that taking a human life under any circumstances is wrong, and I suppose I’ll now have to pay the price. Those 800 Russians probably can’t wait to start torturing me for eternity.”
“Huh? Those guys? The 800 Russians? They left here a long time ago. They forgave you for killing them, and now they’re up in heaven, where they pled to God to spare you and bring you up to heaven.”
“Gee that’s swell. I musta got those guys all wrong. I expected that when I got down here, they’d by angry and want to — hey, what’s that noise?”
“Noise?”
“That rumbling sound. The ground… it’s shaking… as if some great and terrible force was coming toward me… a mob or army of some kind… I thought you said those guys went to heaven. Tell me, what is that awful roar?”
The noise was like thunder now. The ground quaked underfoot. The dust was rising around them, and the Finn was filled with terror. He grabbed the old devil by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me,” he said, “what is it? What is that noise?”
The devil cocked his head. “Sounds to me… ” he said, calmly closing one eye while fixing the ex-sniper with the other, “like moose.” (#)
