[soldier shouting]
[Narrator] It's a country with one
of the smaller populations in Europe,
but Finland has a modern fighting force
twice the size of the British Army
and boasts the strongest artillery in Western Europe.
The whole country is primed to turn into a fortress.
[explosion]
Bridges can be blown to stop invaders.
Roads transformed into runways.
But why?
This is the extraordinary story
of a nation born out of battles between superpowers...
[Expert 1] All 70 warships open up a barrage of fire.
[Narrator] ...of World War II survival
against enormous odds...
[Expert 2] They were facing an overwhelming opponent.
[Expert 3] It must have been absolutely terrifying.
[Narrator] ...and a Cold War crisis that's made Finland
one of the best defended countries in the world.
[Expert 4] An entire city can quite comfortably
survive underground.
♪ ♪
[Narrator] Every country is a prisoner of its geography--
bordered by mountains,
rivers,
seas,
or stone.
And every country must defend these borders from attack...
...on land,
in the air,
and on the high seas.
This series explores the incredible structures,
ingenious weapons,
and brilliant strategies
that have shaped Europe's most battle-hardened countries
over the last thousand years
and played a crucial role
in creating the nations we see today.
♪ ♪
A remote and tranquil wilderness,
a patchwork of magical forests and mirror lakes.
For over 2,000 years, home to Finnish speaking peoples.
Today this land of reindeer and saunas
is home to a sophisticated economy,
and Finns have gained a reputation
as the happiest people on Earth.
But this wonderland is highly vulnerable.
Located in Europe's far north,
sandwiched between east and west,
Finland occupies a strategic position on the Baltic Sea.
To understand how Finland grew in the shadow
of neighboring superpowers,
we need to go back 150 years,
to a time before Finland existed as a nation.
And to a remarkable island stronghold,
site of bloody battles and proudly known to the Finns
as Fortress of Finland.
Andy Torbet is a nautical archaeologist
and former soldier with a passion for military history.
[Andy] Behind me is Helsinki, the capital of Finland,
but ahead of me is a group of small islands,
known as Suomenlinna in Finnish,
and I'm heading there to get a better understanding
of the impact they've had on the history of this nation.
[Narrator] Just 20 minutes' sail from Helsinki,
Suomenlinna is a group of eight interconnected islands.
They have been heavily fortified
with six kilometers of defensive walls
protecting a large naval base of 200 buildings.
♪ ♪
It's bristling with cannon,
housed in star-shaped bastion walls
up to nine meters thick.
[Andy] The outer wall gave the defenders two key advantages.
The first is the cannons themselves would be housed
in these protective little alcoves, rather than being
on top of the wall, where they're vulnerable.
And the second is the shape of the wall.
This zigzag design meant the cannons would sit
and their, their arcs of fire would cross,
so there's no blind spots,
and there's nowhere safe for the enemy to attack.
[Narrator] Whoever controlled Suomenlinna wielded
immense power in the eastern Baltic Sea.
In the 18th century, this was Sweden.
But in the 19th, Suomenlinna
and the Finnish-speaking territories
fell to the Russians,
making up a new province of the Russian Empire
called the Grand Duchy of Finland.
Suomenlinna provided the Russians with vital protection
for their Baltic trade routes
and guarded the gateway to the Duchy's capital, Helsinki.
But for the Grand Duchy of Finland,
being on Russia's western frontier
also made it open to attack by Russia's enemies.
And in 1855,
Russia's enemies were these guys, the British.
It was all due to a fight
1,500 kilometers away in Crimea,
which Britain and her allies
were desperate to keep out of Russian control.
So, to hit the Russians where they least expected it,
the British and French dispatched a huge fleet
to the Baltic to attack Suomenlinna.
[Andy] One morning in 1855, the defenders of the fort awake,
and what they see is 70 warships stationary on the horizon,
frustratingly out of range of the fort's cannons.
And those ships are from the French and the English navies,
and they sit there silent and immobile for days and days,
and it puts the fear of death
into the inhabitants of Helsinki, who flee in terror.
♪ ♪
And the story goes that on the Sunday morning,
the defenders hear a noise, and they strain to hear,
and the sea wind is blowing in this low drone,
and it turns out to be the English sailors singing a hymn.
[singing]
And then the singing stops, and the world goes silent,
and then all 70 warships open up a barrage of fire on the fort.
[explosions]
[Narrator] And the defenders faced a new weapon--rockets.
Because of their light weight, rockets could be fired
in large barrages from small boats at close range.
Packed with incendiary charges, they were devastating.
Fires quickly spread,
destroying many of the buildings in Suomenlinna.
The spectacle was watched in horror
by the inhabitants of Helsinki,
but after two days of constant bombardment...
...the guns fell silent.
[Andy] When the bombardment finally stopped,
the people who hadn't fled in terror from Helsinki
assumed they were next, and for days,
they waited and waited for the inevitable attack.
But the ships did nothing.
And then, as suddenly as they'd arrived,
the French and British warships moored out there
just turned around and sailed away.
Why?
[Narrator] The reason for the retreat
when the fort seemed there for the taking,
has long remained a mystery,
but a rich new source of evidence
could shed light on this event.
[Andy] To really get to the bottom
of the history of this site,
I think you need to go beneath the waves,
and that is where I'm heading now, with the help
of one of Finland's finest underwater archaeologists.
[Minna Koivikko] Hello!
[Andy] How you doing?
[Minna] Welcome on board.
[Andy] Thank you.
[Narrator] Dr. Minna Koivikko
leads a major underwater archaeology project
exploring the seabed around Suomenlinna.
[Andy] So, uh, what's the plan today?
[Minna] Well, the plan today
is to make you meet a specific wreck,
which is a wooden wreck,
and it has been there for quite some time.
♪ ♪
Okay, Andy, I jump first,
and then we will swim to the buoy and go and meet the wreck.
[Andy] Perfect.
♪ ♪
[Narrator] With low visibility,
Andy and Minna have to stay close.
♪ ♪
Eventually, the edge of something.
Hey, Andy!
This is the wreck!
♪ ♪
It's a lot bigger and
the wood is much better preserved
than I would have thought.
[Narrator] The large size and density of the timbers
are typical of a warship.
What would clinch it is the presence of cannons.
Moving through the gloom,
Andy discovers something solid and heavy.
I see here like a big pile of rocks or boulders.
[Narrator] But there are no cannons.
So far, this wreck is producing more questions than answers.
But down here somewhere is the key to what happened
during the Crimean War attack.
[Narrator] After a murky dive, Andy is hoping that Minna
can shed some light on the mystery warship
and the events of the Crimean War.
She has spent years and hundreds of dives
pulling together evidence.
[Minna] Okay, Andy.
[Andy] That...
[Minna] Yes, look at this.
[Andy] ...looks pretty incredible.
[Minna] Yeah.
[Andy] I'll confess, it's much better here
than what I, what I saw today.
[Narrator] This 3D model has been created
by stitching together thousands of images of the wreck.
[Minna] We have the information of the wood,
so that it was harvested in 1780.
The length is over 30 meters.
[Narrator] This points to the ship
being a turuma-type frigate.
Originally built at Suomenlinna by the Swedes,
they were sturdy, heavily armed warships,
specially designed to maneuver
in the shallows and straits of the Baltic.
[Andy] During the dive, I wondered if it'd be a warship,
and I thought we might see some cannons if it was,
but there were none.
[Minna] Yeah, so basically, if this is a turuma-type warship,
it should have 22 cannons, so you are quite right,
the barrels are missing.
[Narrator] And a lack of cannons isn't the only thing
that's puzzling about this wreck.
[Andy] Also, there's this big pile of rocks
in the middle of the, of the wreck
which, again, I wasn't really sure what that was about.
[Minna] This pile of stones,
it's not natural, so this is manmade.
So we think that it was scuttled in this position.
So it was purposely sunk, and these stones
were assisting with, with the scuttling.
[Narrator] But why would the Russian defenders disarm
and then scuttle one of their own warships?
[Minna] In the war situation, you want to prevent the enemy
to enter the harbors, so you scuttle ships
to stop the traffic.
[Narrator] Using scuttled ships as blockades
is most effective in shallow water,
exactly what surrounds Suomenlinna.
[Andy] So, in this area, are there any other ships
like this one that have been intentionally sunk?
[Minna] Actually, I need to show you one map.
[Narrator] Minna has plotted the positions
of all known scuttled ships around the islands,
with remarkable results.
[Minna] Our excitement here is the strait leading to Helsinki,
and during the Crimean War, there was two Russian ships
and they were scuttled.
[Narrator] The ships were strategically sunk
exactly where any invading fleet would have to pass
to reach Helsinki.
[Andy] And you think the sinking of these ships
to block off these waterways would have been a factor
in the decision of the, the British and French navies
to turn round and go home, rather than attack Helsinki?
[Minna] Well, I think that definitely had some, some role
in, in the events of war.
[Narrator] By blocking these vital channels,
the Russian Empire had protected its Finnish citizens.
The story of Suomenlinna tells us what a dangerous
geographical location Finland has,
putting it into conflict with one superpower
and making it dependent on the protection of another.
Throughout the 19th century, the Grand Duchy of Finland
remained part of the Russian Empire.
But Russian rule became more repressive
and Finns increasingly agitated to control their own destiny
until one world-shaking event in Russian politics
worked in their favor.
The Russian Revolution presented the Finns
with the chance of self-determination,
an opportunity they readily seized.
And a year later, on the 12th of May 1918,
Russian troops moved out of Suomenlinna.
At last, the flag of an independent Finland
was hoisted over the fortress.
After centuries of struggle,
Finns finally had control of their own country.
But without the protection of a superpower,
would they be able to defend it?
They would soon find out.
The newly constituted USSR
now posed a much greater level of threat.
Its Red Army was the largest armored force
the world had ever seen.
As soon as the mayhem of the Second World War began,
Stalin moved to take Finland back
to provide a vital buffer against the West.
Compared with the well-defended south,
the shared 1,200-kilometer border
could be attacked at almost any point.
♪ ♪
There were few forts, walls, or even fences,
and hardly any troops.
Just endless forest.
Mika Kulju is a historian
whose grandfather was in the small Finnish Army
that would be called on to face the Soviet might.
[Mika] We are on the Raate Road, and behind this flimsy gate,
just a few kilometers away, there lies Russia.
[Narrator] Mika wants to make sense
of the extraordinary series of events that began here,
on the Raate Road, in late 1939,
when thousands of Soviet troops
smashed through this remote border gate.
[Mika] There, on the Finnish border guards' post,
there were only 15 Finnish soldiers,
so they were facing an overwhelming opponent.
[Narrator] In mid-December, the Soviet 44th Division,
numbering 14,000 men with tanks, artillery, and trucks,
thrust into the heart of Finland.
A small, lightly armed Finnish force of 300
rushed to stop it.
Failure could simply mean the end
of Finland's short-lived existence.
The defenders' best hope would rest on exploiting
their natural environment, the impenetrable forest,
the freezing hell of winter,
and guerrilla tactics.
[Mika] Now I'm going to explain the Finnish tactics
at the Raate Road Battle.
Imagine that this branch is the column of the 44th Division.
[Narrator] The Finns knew that the narrow forest road
would force the Soviets to move in a single column,
making them vulnerable.
[Mika] The column is cut into small pieces.
And after that, they are destroyed,
one by one.
[Narrator] Each piece was known as a motti.
But how could the vastly outnumbered Finns
go about chopping up a Red Army column,
let alone destroy it?
[machine gun fire]
[Narrator] As the 14,000 troops of the Soviet 44th Division
moved down the Raate Road into Finland,
just 300 Finnish soldiers were preparing to make a stand
on the west bank of the frozen Kuoman River.
They blew the bridge and waited for the Soviets
to attempt to cross the ice.
[Mika] There's a Maxim machine gun.
That was the most important weapon
that Finnish Army did have.
[Narrator] A tried and tested weapon
from the First World War, the Finnish Army tweaked it
to increase the firing rate
and adapted the water-filled cooling jacket to run on snow.
But the Finns had just a dozen Maxims
to stop a division of Soviet troops.
[Mika] When the 44th Division's first parts
came from that direction,
it was stopped by massive machine gun fire.
[Narrator] Concentrated fire shocked the Red Army
to a standstill.
Now, the Finns began to wear the Soviet troops down.
[gunshot]
[Mika] One of the most important equipment,
this kind of white overcoat.
Very simple but very good camouflage.
[Narrator] By contrast, the Red Army soldiers,
who came from the southern Soviet Union,
wore dark uniforms--
easy targets for crack Finnish snipers.
[gunshot]
Whilst temperatures plummeted to minus 40,
the Finns moved ghostlike,
hitting hard and melting back into the forest.
[Mika] I can tell you that most of the Finnish soldiers,
they were excellent skiers.
[Narrator] After two weeks of fierce fighting,
Finnish reinforcements, including Mika's grandfather,
arrived and launched a surprise attack,
severing the Soviet column
and creating the first motti,
trapping several thousand Red Army soldiers.
The Finns came at them through the forest.
[Mika] And when the Finnish troops took over these foxholes,
like this one here,
so they placed machine guns on those holes.
[gunfire]
[Narrator] The tightly packed Red Army soldiers
made easy targets.
[gunfire]
[Mika] It was a massacre.
It is said that every bullet did hit the target on that road.
[Narrator] The Finnish Army,
although still with only half the numbers
of the Soviet column, now attacked it in several places,
creating five motti sections,
each known by name to the Finnish troops.
[Mika] Haukila, Tyynelä,
Mattila, Likoharju, Raate.
[Narrator] Each was systematically destroyed.
In just over a week,
nearly 5,000 Red Army soldiers had been killed,
a whole division destroyed.
The Raate Road was littered with their frozen corpses,
lying amongst Soviet heavy weaponry.
There were even musical instruments,
brought for a planned victory parade
through Helsinki on Stalin's birthday.
Humiliated and demoralized,
the Soviet Army fled on foot through the forest,
back across the border.
[Mika] And on the 10th of January 1940,
it was a historical day for Finland
because Finnish soldier was once again standing on the border.
[Narrator] Heroic victories, like that at Raate Road,
transformed the Finns' self-confidence
and sense of pride into an ethos
that became known as the spirit of the Winter War.
Despite Finland's battlefield successes,
it proved impossible to completely defeat the Red Army,
so, to buy time, Finland negotiated a peace,
ceding some eastern territories,
and sought a new alliance with another superpower--Germany.
With growing self-belief,
Finland saw this as an opportunity
to regain its lost lands from the Soviets.
But to attack, it needed offensive hardware.
Where was it going to get that?
[Narrator] At a secret location north of Helsinki,
military historian Alexandra Churchill
has come to investigate how Finland got hold of tanks
to fight the Red Army.
♪ ♪
[Alexandra] Wow!
I'm gonna touch it first,
that's the first thing I'm gonna do.
So, this is a Russian T-26 tank,
and it looks like it's just rolled off the battlefield.
♪ ♪
[Narrator] At the outbreak of the Second World War,
the Soviet T-26 was by far
the most heavily produced tank in the world.
[Alexandra] The Soviets produced like 10,000 of these
before the Second World War.
Finland is never gonna have that capability.
They don't have the population, the money, the infrastructure,
anything to get anywhere near that.
[Narrator] It was a problem that required
a little lateral thinking.
[Alexandra] So, stealing them is the best-case scenario.
And stealing them undamaged, as well, is perfect.
[Narrator] In the aftermath of battles such as Raate Road,
the Finns recovered hundreds of trucks, field guns,
and dozens of T-26 tanks left by the fleeing Red Army.
It was just what they needed for the next stage of the war.
Their new T-26s were soon ready to fight the USSR
for Finland's lost territories, complete with new paint job,
including a surprising symbol.
[Alexandra] This is an original swastika.
So, before the Nazis came along,
slightly rearranged it, put it all over their flags,
and ruined it forevermore, for everyone,
the swastika was from the Indian subcontinent,
and it was a symbol of good luck,
and the Finns have actually just used it
in the spirit it was intended,
and that's why it's on this tank.
[Narrator] But there is something else about this tank
that is particularly unusual in a military machine
that is nearly 100 years old.
[Alexandra] So, if you are an eagle-eyed history nerd,
you will have noticed that the tank tracks,
from when we've been poking about, are dirty,
which means it moves!
Olie, we're gonna go for a ride. Ready?
[Olie] Ready.
[Narrator] For Alex, it's a chance to get
a first-hand experience of the strengths and weaknesses
of a tank that was so important in Finland's history.
And to guide her, Olie and Tommy,
both veteran tank officers with the Finnish Army.
[engine revs]
It's very loud in here; I'm just gonna shout!
It's a lot smoother ride than I thought it would be.
We ran over that tree and I didn't even feel it.
[Narrator] Highly maneuverable,
the T-26 could push through trees 30 centimeters thick
and climb gradients of 40 degrees.
♪ ♪
So, that's the joyride part of the afternoon over.
And now this is more like it would have been in battle,
so we've shut the hatches.
Sounding like a massive drama queen
but one thing I've noticed is the fumes from the petrol.
I'm starting to get a headache.
We heard a story that there were a lot of Russians
jumping out of the tanks and running away.
And I don't blame them, because I think
if smoke started coming in here
or fire came in here, or anything,
I wouldn't care what was outside.
I would just not want to be shut
in this tiny, little tin box anymore.
[Narrator] The Finnish Army managed to steal enough T-26s
to put together a whole armored brigade,
and in the summer of 1941,
T-26s led the Finnish charge
to reclaim its eastern territories,
and beyond, into the Soviet Union itself.
Despite these successes,
the Finns' few dozen stolen T-26s were still
massively outnumbered by the Soviets,
who had thousands, and with limited anti-tank guns,
the Finns desperately needed to find the T-26's Achilles' heel.
[Alexandra] And it's that, that's the engine intake.
It sucks air into the tank to cool the engine.
But it also, for all the complaining I've done
about the fumes inside,
it spun clean air around for the crew.
So, the Finns start to think,
"Well, what if we can make that thing suck in something
other than lovely, clean fresh air?"
But for that, they needed a special kind of weapon.
[Narrator] What they came up with was so ingeniously simple
that it's still widely in use today.
With dry humor,
they christened their invention the Molotov cocktail,
a sarcastic response
to Soviet Foreign Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov
for his claim about the bombing of Finnish cities.
[Alexandra] The Soviet foreign secretary had the audacity
to say they weren't bombing them,
they were actually dropping food,
which was a big fat lie,
so they named it after him to say,
"Here you go, Mr. Molotov. Have a cocktail in return."
This a mock-up of what one looked like.
You've got the flammable liquid,
you've also got potassium chlorate,
which is really irritating to come into contact with,
and it also has a load of pine sap,
and what that does, when it burns,
is create a lot of annoying smoke,
which is even more annoying in a confined space, like a T-26.
So, unsurprisingly, no one's gonna let me play
with a Molotov cocktail.
We have a professional for that. His name is Konsta.
[Narrator] First, a windproof storm match
on the side of the bottle is lit.
♪ ♪
[Alexandra] Yeah, I wouldn't want to be
inside that tank at all.
Never mind the fire but the smoke as well,
and if you imagine the hatch is down and you can't get out.
I think we've established today
that being inside a tank is not comfortable anyway,
but having one of those suddenly sprung on you, no thanks.
[Narrator] Half a million Molotov cocktails
were mass-produced by the Finns.
This simple weapon would help destroy
around 400 Soviet tanks.
Finland's ingenuity and determination
had turned the tables on the Soviets.
But as the Second World War progressed,
things changed.
The Soviet Union started to gain the upper hand
over Germany.
Finland's deal with the devil
began to look like a very bad one.
Now, to survive, it had to use all its political know-how.
It sent the Nazis packing and finally agreed to give up
some eastern territories to Moscow in exchange for peace.
Those agreed borders remain to this day.
Finland had survived the war more or less intact.
But then, the world changed again.
[explosion]
Finland faced a new threat
the like of which the world had never seen.
[Narrator] For over 70 years, Finland has lived
in the shadows of opposing nuclear superpowers.
Arthur Williams, a broadcaster of military history
and former British marine commando,
is here to discover how it ensures its survival.
[Arthur] I became a soldier
after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and before Putin became the threat that he is today,
and so we never really considered the realities
of living with nuclear Armageddon.
But I think for the Finnish population,
a relatively small population,
it would have been very different.
They're geographically in a very vulnerable place,
sandwiched between superpowers,
and so, I'll be fascinated to see just how
they could defend themselves if the balloon went up.
[Narrator] Visitors to the elegant streets of Helsinki
might be surprised to learn that it sits on top
of one of the world's largest fortresses.
Arthur has a rendezvous beneath the streets,
18 meters underground at one of the largest,
most sophisticated defensive structures in the world.
[Arthur] Hi, Jari.
[Jari Markkanen] Hi.
[Arthur] Good to meet you.
[Jari] Good to meet you, nice to meet you, sir.
[Arthur] Yeah. This is pretty impressive!
[Jari] Welcome to Hakaniemi.
This is Hakaniemi Civil Defense Shelter.
[Narrator] Jari Markkanen is amongst those responsible
for keeping this civil defense shelter ready
for an attack on Helsinki,
whether conventional, nuclear, chemical, or biological.
[Jari] We have here pressure-proof doors.
Its main purpose is to protect people inside the shelter
from the blast wave of outside explosion.
[Arthur] Heavy duty, right? And these are all like steel?
[Jari] Solid steel.
[Arthur] So this door here can withstand a nuclear explosion?
[Jari] Yeah.
[Narrator] To resist the pressure wave
from a nuclear explosion,
the steel doors are up to 30 centimeters thick.
But on its own, that's not enough.
[Arthur] And there's two doors as well.
There's one back here as well.
[Jari] Yeah. These inner doors are supposed to be gas tight.
[Narrator] Seals in the inner doors
will keep radioactive and poisonous gases out.
The whole complex can accommodate 6,000 people.
And this bunker is just one of 52 public shelters in Helsinki.
Along with thousands of private shelters,
there's enough space for 900,000 people,
the whole population of the city, plus visitors.
[Arthur] We see these yellow squares
all the way along here, Jari.
What are these for?
[Jari] We have 180 squares to be this kind of dry toilet.
In case we don't have running water,
we have to use dry toilets.
[Arthur] Gosh, so this is just a massive toilet block?
It's pretty basic, isn't it?
[Jari] Yeah.
[Arthur] And this is the sleeping accommodation here?
[Jari] Yeah, we have put examples.
So, we have sleeping places for 2,000 people.
[Narrator] People will sleep in shifts,
with a changeover every eight hours.
Finland's preparations might seem excessive,
but for about a decade after the war,
it was forbidden, by treaty with Moscow,
from having an army big enough to defend itself,
meaning its population could be held to ransom
by either nuclear superpower.
Finland's extraordinary response
was to build shelters for everyone,
a practice continued to the present day.
But during peacetime, the shelter provides
a very different sort of public service.
[Arthur] A perfectly useable gym in there.
Some sort of hockey pitch or something.
There's another one.
This place is vast, it just keeps going and going and going,
and like, you forget that we're 18 meters underground here.
It's a really surreal place to spend time.
This place is a leisure center for all intents and purposes,
but it's not, because in 72 hours, everything you see
gets packed away and replaced with thousands of bunk beds.
It turns into an air raid shelter/nuclear bunker.
[Narrator] Some bunkers are twice the size of this one,
and during peacetime are used
for everything you can think of...
...including underground skate parks, car parks,
and an Olympic-size swimming pool.
♪ ♪
Even this must be able to be drained and dismantled
with 72 hours' notice, in order that it can be repurposed
as a civil defense shelter.
[Arthur] It is mind-blowing to see, and quite scary,
to see that the Finnish have gone to such effort
to make so many preparations for nuclear war.
You know, an entire city
can quite comfortably survive underground.
Coming from a different country, you can't help but think,
"Well, what have we done?"
And I don't know whether we've really done anything,
certainly nothing that we've practiced for,
and that's the civilian population.
I wonder what the military have been doing.
♪ ♪
[Narrator] Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022,
Finland's position seems as vulnerable as ever.
So, how ready is it to resist an invasion by a modern army?
Ever since independence, every male in Finland
has to do national military service.
Many women volunteer, too.
Today, the country can call up a massive well-trained army
of 280,000 to fight at a moment's notice.
Extraordinary for a population
of just five and a half million.
But how about ordinary Finns?
Arthur is on his way to meet one of many
who is preparing for the worst.
Matias is a leader
in the voluntary National Defense Association of Finland.
[Arthur] Hi, Matias.
[Matias] Hello.
[Arthur] So, Matias, I'm a former military guy.
I'm fascinated to learn more about the Finnish military.
You're in uniform at the moment, but is this not your day job?
[Matias] No, I'm an active reservist,
so I work my 9-to-5 job as a civilian.
[Arthur] What do you do every day, Matias, outside of--
[Matias] I'm a sky lift driver, operator.
[Arthur] So, what sort of training
will you be doing, Matias?
[Matias] This weekend we're doing urban combat, CQB,
close quarter combat training.
♪ ♪
From the learnings from Ukraine, all the big battles are going
to be fought in the cities or suburbs of the cities,
and it's, it's important type of combat
everybody should know how to fight.
[Narrator] Even for hardened soldiers,
urban combat is about as challenging as it gets,
and these ordinary Finns are using their spare time
to learn one of its most risky maneuvers--
dynamic entrance to a building.
[Arthur] Talk me through the dynamic entrance.
I know that you work in small teams.
What's, what happens?
[Matias] So basically, the group of three,
the fire team, stack up at the doorway first,
and then the point man takes the difficult corner.
The second man takes the easy corner,
and the third guy is kind of roamer.
He comes in and helps if they need help.
[Arthur] So, I guess the idea then is that you kind of
get into the room as quickly as you can
and spread out as quickly as you can
to cover all of the corners.
[Matias] Yeah, basically.
[Arthur] And it's a dangerous form of fighting, right?
[Matias] It is an extremely dangerous form of fighting.
The doorway is, is the kill zone, basically.
[Arthur] Yeah.
[Matias] First priority is to get out of that doorway.
[Arthur] Yeah, yeah, sure.
[explosion]
[Narrator] Images from Ukraine leave no doubt how brutal
urban warfare really is.
But despite that, the number of Finnish civilians
training for it doubled this year to 50,000.
[Arthur] What types of people do you see
coming through the training?
[Matias] Well, we get construction workers
to dentists or doctors or CEO of the company.
But when we put on the gear, we are, we are same, basically,
and train the same things, and we have women and men
in, in the courses.
[Arthur] Personally, why do you feel motivated
to defend Finland?
[Matias] When I train, I train for my family,
I train for my loved ones,
so I can do my job in the military, if needs be,
as good as I can, so my loved ones and my family
stays healthy and in good shape.
[Arthur] That's a powerful answer, I like it.
[Narrator] After decades of neutrality,
the invasion of Ukraine prompted Finland
to finally join NATO,
adding its combined armies to Finland's protection.
Finland's complex history,
its 1,200-kilometer border with Russia,
and its resourcefulness,
ingenuity, and self-sacrifice
have all contributed to making it
one of the best defended countries in the world.
But there is one other thing that Finns have,
and it may be the most important of all--
an undefeatable determination to survive.
♪ ♪