Red Wings in the Winter War 1939-1940

[Carl-Fredrik Geust]

Mirek, thank you for your interesst in book. First your new questions:
- yes, VVS SF (Air force of the Northern Fleet) is included (and the 14 MBR-2 amphibians of 118 MRAP destroyed by hangar fire 14 January 1940 are mentioned). Also included are the Air components of the Ladoga and the White Sea Flotillas - all these Naval AF units were already dealt with in the old Red Stars Vol.5),
- likewise there is a 10 page section (with 23 photos) describing the units of the mobilized Civil Air Fleet, and Aleksandr Golovanov is naturally mentioned (with portrait),
- but I doubt whether the NKVD Border Guards really had any "own" aircraft in the Karelian border regions - there is no mentioning of such in the recent detailled history of the Soviet Border Guards 1939-1941 (Пограничныйе войска на западном направление в предвоенные годы 1939-1941, Граница 2018)

Concerning the Soviet "learning process" after the Winter War - this process started in the post-mortem conference led by Stalin in Kremlin in April 1940 (the protocols of which have been published in Russian and in Finnish), and had not reached intended results at the German attack in June 1941.

The Russian current opinion which I mentioned in my previous answer was expressed by several prominent Russian historians during a Finnish-Russian Winter War seminar at the Finnish Embassy in Moscow in December 2019, where I gave a lecture about the Finnish Air Force in 1939-1940.

Mirek, I do agree in general with your view, but although the discussions during the reception after the formal seminar were very open-minded, this was in my view not the correct venue for a debate about the meaning of these interesting statements, which the Finns present accepted at face-value.

The main Russian participants included the Head of the Russian National Archive Administration (and several Heads of various local archives) and the former Head of FSB´s Archive.