Years after the Finnish Winter War against the Soviet Union in WW II, Väinö Linna wrote a different book of the war, 'Tuntematon sotilas' (The Unknown Soldier), that was published in 1955: no longer heroic patriotic stories, but a realistic view that aggravated many.
In the book a Soviet machine gun fires at a Finnish ambulance and sets it afire. When the screaming men are pulled out of the burning van, the gun kills them all.


In reality the director of the film had censored the part himself already in advance: in the film the ambulance is not shot by a ground based Soviet machine gun, but by a Soviet airplane: From air the ambulance would have looked like any ordinary van on a forest road.
This all happened in the times of Finlandization (Finlandisierung): With a large military power as a neighbor, truth has little value.
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