Finnish sniper who killed over 500 Soviet soldiers - Simo Häyhä

Simo Häyhä was born on the 17th of December 1905 in the village of Rautjärvi in southern Finland near the border with Russia. He was the seventh of eight children in a Lutheran family of farmers.
Simo himself was a farmer and enjoyed several different hobbies, including snow-skiing, hunting and shooting, prior to his military service.

At the age of 17, Häyhä joined the Finnish voluntary militia Civil Guard. He was successful in local shooting competitions and his home was full of trophies for marksmanship. He was not keen to hog the spotlight, and accordingly in group photos from his youth he usually stood at the back, until his later successes forced him to take center stage.

In 1925, at the age of 19, Simo began his 15-month compulsory military service. However, he did not receive formal sniper training until 1938. Around this time Europe was on the brink of significant turmoil as widespread fear, political upheaval, and a sense of imminent conflict deeply unsettled the continent.

The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. They were fulfilling a promise they had made five months earlier to protect Poland’s borders. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east.
Germany and the Soviet Union then moved to take control of the spheres of influence outlined in the secret protocol. They amended the protocol so that Lithuania and the city of Vilnius fell within the Soviet sphere, and they also adjusted the boundary they had set in Poland. On 29 September 1939, they partitioned Poland between them. Germany occupied western and most of central Poland and it proceeded to annex the western provinces to the Reich. The Soviet Union occupied and annexed the rest of Poland.



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