The deadliest sniper in history, Simo Häyhä (also known as White Death). He is reported as having killed 505 men.

Since this particular circle-jerk about Häyhä gets posted around reddit about every week, I'll quote /u/Elm11 from /r/askhistorians.

What common historical misconception do you find most irritating?

In short, basically everything to do with this and the garbage it tends to inspire. The Finns were all superhuman snowy death snipers. The Finns were literally Gallia from Valkyrie Chronicles. Simo Häyhä was some kind of unbelievable killing machine who scythed down battalions of Soviet troops.

Unfortunately, outside of /r/Askhistorians, the above sorts of snippets and claims comprise most of Reddit's exposure to the Winter War, and represent the extent of its understanding. Pictures like the above, or of this truly appalling piece of garbage about Simo Häyhä, are easily consumable and sound exciting, while understanding the realities of the Winter War and contextualizing it actually require a modicum of time and effort. Reddit loves tasty little morsels of information, and as the age old saying first quipped by Charlemagne himself goes, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

Of course, the curious distortions of the Winter War, and the appalling perceptions we see of it date back further than false numbers on Wikipedia and made-up tales about Finnish troops. Indeed, the story of the English language historiography of the Winter War is a truly fascinating topic which I take a lot of interest in. From western journalists producing glowing - and often woefully embellished - accounts of the conflict while it was still raging (for consumption in the English speaking world) and their pro-communist contemporaries like London's A.S Hooper, through to exhaustive and professional studies like Allen F Chew's 'The White Death,' the Winter War has undergone a historiographical transformation over time.

Tragically, a by-product of this transformation, due in large part to the far-from-exhaustive academic English-language coverage of the conflict, is that there remains an abundance of truly appalling English-language sources. Many of these would ultimately give rise to some of the absurd online distortions we see today.

I'm hoping to work alongside /u/Holokyn-kolokyn to create a /r/badhistory write-up concerning the above-linked article on Simo Häyhä, which is astoundingly wrong, and also extremely heavily upvoted. I've also been sitting on a small write-up on Winter War historiography for a little while, which I might trot out some time!

/r/pics Thread Link - i.imgur.com