They stubbornly continue to face the hail of bullets, not paying attention to comrades falling to the ground next to them. Many Russian soldiers would behave like zombies in the battle for the city of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian armed forces report. It is now suspected that the Russian military uses drugs that make them feel invulnerable.
This approach would not really be new. In previous wars, armies have repeatedly and specifically used chemicals to stimulate their soldiers. Particularly sensational is the story of a Finn who, pumped full of crystal meth, fought alone through the wilderness for days during World War II and eventually even survived: Aimo Koivunen.
In 1944, Koivunen and his comrades fought on the side of the Central Powers against the Soviet Union. At that time, quite a few soldiers used drugs. The stimulant Pervitin, a methamphetamine similar to today’s crystal meth, was developed in Germany just before the outbreak of war and distributed in large quantities to soldiers of the Third Reich and their allies. The drug even received nicknames, such as “Panzerschokolade”, “Stuka-Tablets”, “Hermann-Göring-Pilles” or “Fliegermarzipan”.
Pervitin took away the hunger, fatigue and fear of the soldiers in seemingly hopeless situations. Aimo Koivunen’s infantry unit also received Pervitin at the time. Only it was used differently than planned, as Koivunen wrote in his memoirs 34 years later.
In March 1944, Koivunen, then 27 years old, was on a three-day mission behind enemy lines when his unit encountered a Russian patrol around 10:00 am and was forced to flee.
Initially, Koivunen was able to keep up with the rest of his team. “After a while, however, I began to falter and felt weak,” the soldier wrote in the magazine in 1978. “But since the Soviet soldiers behind us were still firing, my comrades demanded that I hurry.”
Koivunen remembered carrying all of his unit’s Pervitin with him. In the cold and during the frantic escape, however, he failed to fish a single methamphetamine tablet out of the package. Instead, several pills fell into his hand – all of which the young soldier put in his mouth.
What followed was probably the first methamphetamine overdose ever documented. Or also: a drug trip par excellence. “After a short while I felt like a new person,” Koivunen wrote. He quickly caught up with his team and even overtook the other soldiers – until the pills began to take full effect.
Koivunen hallucinated and, according to his comrades, was unresponsive on several occasions. To ensure the safety of the squad and Koivunen, they took his ammunition from him. Then, as he himself reported, he experienced a series of blackouts, moments he has no recollection of.
When he regained consciousness, he was alone, unarmed and disoriented. Using a map, he discovered that he had moved more than 100 kilometers from his last known position in one day.
In his article, Koivunen said that the next few days were marked by hallucinations and that he kept moving almost constantly on his skis – without knowing exactly which direction to go. The drug continued to work once he was convinced to talk to friends from his homeland.
Another time he spent most of the night driving to a lit hut on the horizon, which turned out to be North Star. Or he thought he was fighting a wolf-like creature. “After a short time, I realized that the creature was really just a branch of a tree,” Koivunen wrote.
The drug drove him to fight for his own survival – in the middle of the snowy landscape of the Russian-Finnish border area.
One of the most bizarre situations during his odyssey occurred when Koivunen saw a camp full of soldiers in the distance. At first he thought they were Germans and therefore Finland’s allies. He approached the camp on his skis at a brisk pace – only to discover that it was full of Russian soldiers.
Too late to return, Koivunen sped through the Soviet camp at full speed. “I surprised them, they didn’t know what to do,” Koivunen wrote. The Russian soldiers pursued him, but could not follow him.
As the day wore on, Koivunen kept riding until he came to an abandoned cabin. There he built a fire to warm himself. But when he did so in the middle of the hut, he lit a fire. Reportedly, the Finn later reported, he fell asleep anyway and only moved when the flames got closer. He eventually woke up and escaped the fire – without knowing exactly how.
Koivunen drove on in search of a new home. He came across an abandoned Nazi soldier camp that had been mined by the Germans. A land mine tore off part of his left foot and a second explosion threw him into a ditch.
There he still managed to bandage his wound on his foot with a cloth and part of his shirt. A week later, however, Koivunen was found by a Finnish patrol and taken to the Salla field hospital.
During his odyssey he subsisted on plants and a jay, which he ate raw because he had no wood for a fire. When Koivunen arrived at the field hospital, he weighed just 100 pounds—and even though it had been 13 days since his Pervitin overdose, his heart was still beating more than 200 times a minute. In those 13 days he had covered about 400 kilometers on skis.
Koivunen survived the war and later started a family. He wrote down his memories of the war journey for the first time as part of a competition organized by the magazine “Kansa Taisteli”.
Koivunen’s son recalls that his father’s story came second to him at the time.
Source: Blick
I am Ross William, a passionate and experienced news writer with more than four years of experience in the writing industry. I have been working as an author for 24 Instant News Reporters covering the Trending section. With a keen eye for detail, I am able to find stories that capture people’s interest and help them stay informed.
