smaller force can overwhelm a much larger force. If the encircled enemy unit was too strong, or if attacking it would have entailed an unacceptably high cost, e.g., because of a lack of heavy equipment, the motti was usually left to "stew" until it ran out of food, fuel, supplies, and ammunition and was weakened enough to be eliminated. Some of the larger mottis held out until the end of the war because they were resupplied by air. Being trapped, however, these units were not available for battle operations. The largest motti battles in the Winter War occurred at the Battle of Suomussalmi. Three Finnish regiments enveloped and destroyed two Soviet divisions as well as a tank brigade trapped on a road. Notable pockets In World War II In the winter of 1939–1940, Finnish troops encircled in a series of coordinated assaults approx. 50,000 Red army soldiers in the Battle of Suomussalmi with Soviet casualties exceeding over 30,000, while Finnish casualties stayed relatively low, approx. 1,000 soldiers (estimates vary). Escaping Red army soldiers abandoned hundreds of weapons and vehicles which were later used by the Finnish forces. From June to December 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Almost the entire Soviet Western Front of over 420,000 was encircled and destroyed by the German Army Group Centre in the Battle of Bialystok-Minsk. Later, 310,000 Soviet troops were captured in a pocket at Smolensk when isolated by the Panzer forces of Generals Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth on August 5, 1941. During the Siege of Odessa, German and Romanian forces encircled and captured tens of thousands of Soviet troops. At the end, most of the Soviet Southwestern Front (about 700,000 soldiers) was encircled in the First Battle of Kiev. During the Battle of Moscow, over one million Soviet troops were encircled and destroyed in the opening phase, with 600,000–700,000 of them becoming prisoners, and the rest being killed. In the winter of 1942, 100,000 German Wehrmacht troops were encircled in the Demyansk Pocket in northwestern Russia, but were relieved the following spring. In the winter of 1942, 5,500 German troops were encircled by the Soviets in the Kholm Pocket. In the spring of 1942, 277,000 Soviet troops engaged in an offensive thrust were encircled during the German counterattack in the Second Battle of Kharkov. In November 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, nearly all of the German Sixth Army of over 250,000 men was