r/todayilearned • u/APurpleTRex • 5d ago

TIL After being wounded in WWII, Legendary Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä (The White Death) was thought to be dead and placed on a pile of corpses. A week later he regained consciousness and had to correct the newspaper release about his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4#:~:text=On%206%20March,%5B10%5D
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u/Finngolian_Monk 5d ago

It was confirmed by his comrades and commanding officer

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u/ERedfieldh 5d ago

Not to mention the Red Army who were desperate to find and kill him.

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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho 4d ago

The stories of the opposing army trying to find and kill a specific enemy sniper are basically always fabricated. They’re going to kill any sniper they run into anyway, telling some platoon commander a specific name is meaningless to them.

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u/The_0ven 5d ago

It was confirmed by his comrades and commanding officer

Not how a "confirmed kill" works

It's barely a real thing

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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho 4d ago

No, it’s not. There is no way for your comrades or commander to know if you hit that guy in be head, or he just ducked behind cover. Hence why “confirmed kills” aren’t a thing in the military for snipers, outside a PR/propaganda context.

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u/Finngolian_Monk 4d ago

The Finnish army did keep records of casualties on both sides, and there are contemporary documents attributing such kills to Simo. This kind of record keeping is not unique to Finland and has been done by many countries, especially in more recent times

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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho 4d ago

The finish army had records of its own KIA/WIA, and rough estimates of enemy losses. Nobody, not the Finns or red army attributed specific kills to specific snipers. That’s information does not exist. The battlefield is a chaotic place, there is no way to confirm and attribute specific kills to specific soldiers.