laststandonzombieisland

Ever got in a fight with a Finn? Well if you never have let me tell you now, save your time and your health. Zero to sixty is how Finnish fury goes in battle and in 1939, the mighty Soviet Red Army found this out first hand. The weapon of choice for the hearty Finnish troopers? The Suomi.

Finland fought for its independence from the corpse of Imperial Russia at the end of World War 1 in 1918. The Russians (even today) have always fostered the notion that being part of their country, willingly or not, is kind of like being in the mob—once you are in you can never really get out. With that in mind, Finnish military planners knew that it was only a matter of time before the Russians indeed came back with an offer they couldn’t refuse so in the early 1920s, the Finnish arsenal at Tikka began work on a prototype small machine gun to give the vastly outnumbered Finn infantry a leg up in a potential invasion.

Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com