Praxis: On the importance of being able to read a map and correctly call in coordinates.

My insomniac reading last night was to finish Trotter's Frozen Hell about The Finn's Winter War with the Soviet Union. Here's an anecdote that stuck out as illustrating a point that I've been harping on since militia FTXs in the 90s: the ability to read a map.

The massive (Soviet) assault launched on February 28 largely fell on empty trenches. Here and there, however, the Finns manned delaying positions that cost Timoshenko dearly. In front of one such position, the massive artillery bombardment was not followed up by the expected infantry attack. Instead, all during the afternoon the Finns heard a single Russian voice, out in no-man's-land, screaming over and over again, "Stalin! Stalin!" It was a lone wounded man, hopelessly caught in barbed wire. The Finns decided that if the enemy sent a patrol out for him, they would not fire. But the hours crawled by and there was an eerie lack of movement in front of the delaying position. At regular intervals the man on the wire continued throw his head back and scream at the gray heavy sky: "Stalin! . . . . Stalin!" Finally, the Finns put him out of his misery with a burst of Maxim fire.

Before withdrawing, the delaying force sent out a patrol to see what the strange lack of enemy movement signified. The patrol soon came upon the assembly area for the ground attack that had never been launched. Inside a two-acre killing ground, they counted 400 corpses, stacked on top of another. The Russian bombardment had fallen one kilometer short. The heaviest weapons in the Red arsenal had been used, including the twelve-inch railroad pieces firing from just over the border and several of the monstrous sixteen-inch shore batteries in the outer belt of Kronstadt defenses, and it had all landed here. The Finnish patrol eventually came upon the enemy's forward artillery observer -- dead, in a sitting position, a map across his knees and the telephone receiver, whose wire ended in midair, still clutched in his fist. He had been trying to report the shortfall of rounds at the moment of his death. The entire battalion, it was learned from documents, had just been graduated from the Leningrad non-commissioned officer's academy; they had died clean shaven, wearing neat new uniforms and brand new flannel underwear.

Obviously, someone at the academy flunked map reading.