<p>In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union was dicks.&nbsp; Russian Premier Josef Stalin thought it would be really fucking hilarious if he all of a sudden sent like two million of his dudes over to nearby Finland to start kicking everyone's asses and seizing whatever land he could get his borsch-covered hands on, while simultaneously kicking puppies and shouting profanities at inanimate objects in a vodka-and-caviar induced roid rage.&nbsp; While this may have been a laugh riot for Stalin and his numbnuts cronies, the Finnish people obviously were a little unhappy with the prospect of having all their cross-country skis, Winter Olympics gold medals and salmon fishing boats captured by a rampaging horde of godless commie bastards, so they decided to open an extra-large can of whoop-ass and give the Russkies the ballsack kicking they were apparently looking for.</p>
<p>Now when you think of Finland, the phrase "military powerhouse" isn't exactly the first thing that pops into your head.&nbsp; Likewise, when you looked at Simo H&auml;yh&auml;, a slight-framed Finnish farmer who didn't stand an inch over five feet tall, you also probably didn't think "total fucking unstoppable badass".&nbsp; Well let's just say that first impressions can be deceiving.</p>
<p>Simo was a member of a Finnish organization roughly equivalent to the&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen_(militia)" target="blank">minutemen</a>&nbsp;of the American Revolution.&nbsp; He had done his state-mandated one-year term in the Finnish Army, reaching the rank of corporal, and was living a peaceful life in a farming village not far from the Russian border, spending his days farming, hunting, and crushing giant logs into sawdust with his bare hands.&nbsp; When the Soviets crossed the border into Finland with the expressed purpose of busting Finnish heads, Simo was called up into service.&nbsp; He went out to the wood shed behind his house, grabbed his old-school Russian-made Mosin-Nagant M28/30 rifle and headed out to take some commies behind a proverbial woodshed of his own.</p>
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<p>H&auml;yh&auml;'s specialty was his knowledge of the forests, his enduring patience and his impeccable rifle marksmanship.&nbsp; A sniper by trade, he would dress up in all-white camouflage, sneak through the woods with only a day's worth of food and couple clips of ammunition, and then lie in wait for any Russian stupid enough to wander into his killzone.&nbsp; His first battle-experience came in the hard-fought Kollaa campaign, where a severely outnumbered Finnish force bore the brunt of a large-scale Russian assault.&nbsp; Temperatures at this time ranged from -20 to -40 degrees Celsius, and the entire forest was covered with several feet of snow.&nbsp; While this played havoc on the inexperienced and under-equipped Russian invaders, the Finns were right at home in it because FINLAND IS FUCKING COLD AS SHIT ALL THE TIME and they're used to it there.&nbsp; Throughout this campaign, H&auml;yh&auml; basically just ran around doling out head-shots like the ice cream man gives out Dove bars on a hot sunny day in the Sahara desert.&nbsp; His personal best was fucking twenty-five kills in a single day.&nbsp; That's like an entire baseball team.</p>
<p>Throughout the Winter War (as it would come to be known), Simo H&auml;yh&auml; ran around being what experienced HALO players would call a "camping fag", and scoring enough kill shots to make fucking RoboCop and the Terminator hide their heads in shame.&nbsp; He would come to be known throughout the Russian Army as "The White Death", and at one point in the war they even went so far as to try and launch a couple of goddamned artillery strikes on locations at which they thought he might be hiding.&nbsp; That's desperation there - like even more desperate than a nymphomaniac babe at a convention for castrated male models.</p>
<p>After hearing about how much ass H&auml;yh&auml; was kicking out on the frozen tundra of eastern Finland with an antiquated bolt-action piece-of-shit rifle, the Finnish High Command decided to give him a special award:&nbsp; a custom-built Sako M2/28-30&nbsp;<em>Sniper Rifle of Headshots +3</em>.&nbsp; He put this to good use, killing the ever-loving shit out of anyone that crossed him.&nbsp; On several occasions the Russians sent their own snipers to take him out, but Simo managed to win those duels every time.&nbsp; You see, H&auml;yh&auml; not only passed out long-range silent death to anyone with a red star on his hat, but he did it without the aid of a telescopic sight.&nbsp; He preferred to use the rifle's regular iron sights because it allowed him to present a smaller target, and because several of the commie snipers he moked out were given away by a glint of light reflecting off the lenses of their scopes.&nbsp; He obviously didn't want to fall to this fate, so he went balls-out and wasted assholes the old-fashioned (and unarguably the more hardcore) way.</p>
<p>Finally, on 2 March 1940, some Soviet bastard got a lucky shot off and popped Simo H&auml;yh&auml; in the jaw with an explosive bullet.&nbsp; H&auml;yh&auml; fell into a coma and was pulled off the field by his comerades.&nbsp; He would finally awake eleven days later, on the same day that the Winter War ended.&nbsp; He would go on to live to the ripe old age of 97.</p>
<p>The Winter War ended as a victory for Finland.&nbsp; The Red Army captured a mere 22,000 square miles of territory and lost close to one million men, more than forty times the number of Finnish casualties.&nbsp; Simo H&auml;yh&auml; received five medals for valour, including the prestigious Kollaa Cross, and was express-promoted from corporal to second lieutenant.&nbsp; Throughout the war, H&auml;yh&auml; raked in a total of 505 confirmed sniper kills (in some sources he is credited with 542).&nbsp; On top of this, he also mowed down two hundred men with a Suomi 9mm submachine gun, bringing his total kill count to over 700 men in under 100 days.</p>
<p>Nobody in history has ever been credited with more confirmed kills than Simo H&auml;yh&auml;.&nbsp; He was an unlikely war hero who used patience, cunning and precision to defend his country, his home, his people and his freedom from communist totalitarian oppression.&nbsp; He was an unstoppable killing machine the likes of which the world has never known before or since.</p>
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<p><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: helvetica;">Links:</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.kevos4.com/Simo_Hayha.htm" target="blank">Brief Biography</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.snipercountry.com/BVT_Reviews/ValkoinenKuolema.asp" target="blank">Snipercountry.com article</a></p>