Sacrificing Men or Machines?

The Soviet Over-sea Invasion of Finland in 1940

By Carl O. Nordling

 

In the shade of World War II, Stalin made an attempt to appropriate Finland. As a first step he deman­ded a base on the coast of Finland and a part of the Karelian Isthmus where the Finnish line of defense was situated. Finland suggested a compromise but refused to give up bases or lines of defense. On 30 November 1939 Stalin attacked, and the so-called "Winter War" ensued, a war that did not proceed as smoothly and successfully as Stalin had expected. It took three months of hard fighting before the Red Army had forced is way through the first line of defense. But about the end of February 1940, the third and last of the lines was still unbroken and Finland was negotiating for British and French aid. If Finland would request allied aid; it could result in a state of war between the Allies and the Soviet Union. That was something that Stalin wanted to avoid at all costs. He would rather postpone his intended annex­ation of Finland than risk a premature war with any of the Great Powers. On the other hand, he must have been anxious to get at least a better starting position than the Kare­lian Isthmus for a future attack on Finland. The Red Army would of course benefit from the longest possible frontier where its numerical superiority could be fully exploited.

   That is to say that the overall situation required a speedy breakthrough that would bring Finland on her knees so that she would accept the frontier of Stalin's liking. And as a matter of fact, the possibility of a circumvention of the Finnish defense lines materialized about the end of February. It did so in the form of a coating of ice on the Gulf of Vyborg seemingly strong enough to bear tanks. It all depended on the contingency that the Finnish Army would neglect the danger and neither break up the ice nor fortify the shore against armored units.

   So it happened that one of the most critical battles of the Winter War was fought on a Soviet beachhead on the western shore of the Gulf of Vyborg. It took place during the final twelve days of the war, beginning on 2 March 1940. It ended on 13 March, when orders for a cease-fire were given in accor­dance with the peace treaty that had been concluded the preceding night.  Since Red Army General D.G. Pavlov had been able to establish this beachhead which cut off the highway between Vyborg and Helsinki, Stalin knew that his forces would be able to open up the highway through Vyborg within a week or two. Thereafter an ad­vance with armored forces along the road to Helsinki would have become possible. Thus Stalin held the winning cards during the peace negotiations in Moscow which went on from 8 to 12 March. Prime Minister Risto Ryti, who represented Finland, had to submit to the terms dictated by his opposite number, Vyat­yeslav Molotov.  The Finnish Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim, had already brought into action all the trained troops that existed. Insufficiently trained schoolboys and over-aged men were now sent to with­stand the Russian elite soldiers on the beachhead. Naturally these boys and veterans sustained heavy casualties.

   This decisive success by Pavlov's forces had been possible because the winter was exceptionally hard (7°C below normal throughout January and Feb­ruary1) so that the Gulf of Vyborg was not only frozen over as usual, but had a coating of ice measuring from 60 cm up to, possibly, 80 cm in thick­ness2 and thus could bear light and medium weight tanks. The over-ice attack was of course a very daring venture, that could just as well have ended in a catastrophe. The Finns still possessed means to defend the shoreline. Let us see what could have been done and what actually was done.

   The obvious defense measure in a situation like this is, of course, breaking up the ice. This was tried by means of power saws--an utterly futile method in the case of large fields of 70 cm thick ice. It did not hinder Pavlov to any appreciable extent. Of course, it is easy to be wise after the event, and we should rather compare the actual defense measures with the alternatives such as they appeared, from day to day, while the operations were still in progress. First, let us see what ships and forts the then Commander of the Naval Forces, Major-General Väinö Valve (1895-1995), had at his disposal.

   On the Karelian Isthmus there were two forts, Humaljoki on the mainland and Saaren­pää on the island of Berezovyy (then Koivusaari), that could support the right wing of the Main Defense Line (the so-called ”Mannerheim Line”). If ice were to pre­clude sea traffic, the Saarenpää fort had to be abandoned as soon as the Mannerheim Line was broken or given up, because the fort lacked resour­ces for close combat unless it was to receive reinforcements by sea. Humaljoki, with four heavy guns only, could not endure a siege either. In the Gulf of Vyborg there were two other forts situated on small islands in the middle of the Gulf. The purpose of the innermost fort was to protect the harbor of Vyborg and may be disregarded as insignificant in the present context. The other fort, called Tuppura, on the island of Vikherovoy, was built with the purpose of preventing enemy warships from entering the Gulf. It was originally equipped with four 152 mm guns, two 87 mm guns, two 57 mm guns and two 37 mm guns. For close-quarters fighting the fort had 10 machine guns. During the beginning of the war, two of the heavy guns were removed and 12 machine guns added. The garrison amounted to 800 men, mostly gunners who were not trained in close combat. Many could not even handle a machine gun.

   The western shore of the Gulf of Vyborg was utterly devoid of fortifications, nor was it manned. This was in conformity with the prevailing ideology of the military establishment of the period. A passage concerning the defense of the Karelian Isthmus in the Fin­nish textbook on military geography read3: ”The best shelter for the coast is the coating of ice in winter, which usually forms in the beginning of December and dissolves in the middle of May. Therefore manpower can be removed from the coast, where the ice-covered sea safeguards against landing operations.”  The author of this paragraph seems to have been totally ignorant of King Charle­s X Gustavus’s famous march across the Belts in January-February 1658 as well as of Colonel Yakov Kulnyev’s march across the Åland Sea on 19 March 1809 (which could have resulted in the fall of Stockholm) and of Lieutenant General Michail Barclay de Tolly’s march across the Gulf of Bothnia (be­tween Vaasa and Umeå) on 20-22 March 1809. The Gulf of Vyborg was even better suited for over-sea attack in winter than the above mentioned waters. This Gulf is generally coated by fast ice, which even in mild winters may measure up to 40 cm in thickness4.

   Obviously the western shore of the Gulf of Vyborg represented a weak spot in Finland’s coastal defense system during the season of ice coating. Providently, those who designed the Naval Forces of independent Finland had al­lowed for the possibility that weak spots might occur along the coast for some reason or othe­r. In order to create preparedness for such situations they had carried through the building of two 3,900 ton warships to serve as kinds of movable coastal forts. These ships, Väinämöinen, launched in 1932, and Ilmarinen, 1933, were armed with two 20 mm and four 40 mm AA-guns besid­e their heavy artillery, that consisted of four 254 mm guns and eight 105 mm guns per ship. Both had a crew of 330, a draught of 4.5 m, a beam of 16.9 m and armor-plates 55 mm thick5. They also had advanced devices for fire direction and two powerful searchlights each, all very important equipment’s in the present case. The obvious strategy in case of a Soviet attack should have been to detach one of the ships to the Gulf of Vyborg and the other to the archipelago off Turku. For unknown reasons, this was not done. In December 1939, both ships were stationed near Turku, painted all white. Nevertheless their shadows stood out in bold relief in the sunshine and they became targets of Soviet air attacks. When that happened, the well trained crews got the opportunity to demonstrate their marks­manship by shoot­ing down at least four (possibly more) enem­y planes during the initial period of the war6. In spite of a number of serious efforts to sink the ships, the Soviets did not even succeed to damage them in the least.

   In January 1940, when the severe cold set in with a mean temperature of about -16°C, it became obvious that the coating of ice on the Gulf of Vyborg would reach at least the average thickness of 45 to 70 cm, but possibly a great deal more. This would mean that the anticipated weak spot in the coastal defense would certainly materialize. The occasion for which Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were built was at hand.  If the enemy broke through the main defense line on the Karelian Isthmus, the Finnish army would be forced to fall back on the secondary lines, both of which comprised the Gulf of Vyborg, supposed to function as a natural barrier. As it was in 1940, the Gulf was instead an idea­l field for attacks by armo red units, of which the Red Army had seemingly inexhaustible numbers. In these circumstances one of the armored ships would be badly needed as a complement to the Tuppura fort. Ice measurements, e.g. those taken about Hamina 80 km west of Vyborg on 19 Janu­ary, indicated that the coating of ice in this region was about 40 cm thick7, and an icebreaker would have been needed to make a channel for the warship.

   One of the icebreakers, the 3,850 h.p. Tarmo, was in fact sent eastwards on 17 January, but not in order to escort any warship. Instead its task was to attack the Soviet troop transporter Kazakhstan and to put on the ice a detachment, that would try to re-conquer the small (and unimpor­tant) island of Sommers in the Gulf of Finland 50 km SE of Kotka. When finally approaching the target on 18 January, Tarmo’s artillery appeared to be out of order and the icebreaker had to return to Kotka without having achieved anything. All the way back enemy airplanes kept bombing it, though in vain. Once in harbor it was hit by two casual bombs from a lone high-flying plane while the ship's crew had its lunch. The breaker became useless and was under repair for the rest of the war8. In any case, the 33 year-old Tarmo was not the right type of icebreaker to es­cort an armored ship to the Gulf of Vyborg, becaus­e it could not make a channel wide enough for such a ship.

   The obvious choice was the 16 year old Jääkarhu 9 with a beam of 18,5 m (1.6 m in excess of the armored ships). Jääkarhu weighed 4,900 tons and its steam en­gine­s developed 7,200 h.p. in con­tinuous operation (9,800 h.p. by temporarily racing the engines5). It was armed with four 102 mm and two 40 mm guns. The C-in-C of the Naval Forces could feel assured that this ice­breaker would get the better of any ice situation that it could possibly meet between the Turku archipelago and the Gulf of Vyborg. The severe cold  (7°C below normal throughout January) had produced a wide belt of fast ice along the coast, sheltering the fair­ways from the pack ice forming on the outer waters. Since Major-General Valve must have known that the 1,600 h.p. Murtaja had broken a channel through ice 47 cm thick10 and the 3,060 h.p. Sampo through 70 cm11, he could expect his Jääkarhu to cope with at least a 100 cm coating of ice.  And, above all, Jääkarhu could make a channel wide enough for one of the armored ships which in its turn would supply effective protection against air attacks for both vessels.

   There was, however, one good reason for not sending the ships to the Gulf of Vyborg in January 1940. If Soviet air reconnaissance confirmed that the Gulf had become a formidable obstacle because its channel was open, Marshal Timoshenko would probably have concentrated more troops against the land parts of the secondary defense lines. Such a reconnaissance might of course have been done only after the main line had broken, and in January it looked like holding out for many weeks yet. When the breakthrough did eventually occur, there would still be a respite before the Red Army reached the eastern coast of the Gulf of Vyborg and could be in a position to start over-ice operations towards the opposite shore.

   The Finnish retreat from the main line was ordered on 15 February and was soon carried out. Already on 22 February two Red Army infantry divisions with some tanks invaded Berezovyy Island over the ice. After a short holding battle, the Saarenpää crew destroyed the heavy guns of the fort and with­drew on skis to the mainland west of Vyborg on 23 February. On 24 February all the islands in front of the Karelian Isthmus were firmly in the hands of the Red Army.

   It must have been obvious to the Finnish headquarters that it would take just a few days more for the enemy to prepare a similar attack across the Gulf of Vyborg. The small fort of Tuppura could not be expected to withstand very much longer than Saarenpää. Here the coating could be expected to reach a thickness of 60 to 70 cm in March, and 60 cm would be enough to bear tanks weighing 20 tons.  But Jääkarhu and Ilmarinen would still be able to reach the seat of operations in time. On 24 February, Jääkarhu was assisting Sweden’s coastal traffic at Öregrund, 320 nautical miles from Vyborg. Assuming it had got orders to steam eastwards immediately, it could have arrived--together with its escort--in the Gulf of Vyborg on 29 February (speed 3 knots, 12 hours allowed for bunker­ing). It would have been necessary temporarily to turn on the leading lights along the fair­way.  Tuppura could be expected to hold on until this date, and the moon was on the wane. With Jääkarhu patrolling every night up and down the Gulf of Vyborg, maintaining a wide channel through the ice, the Red Army divisions deployed to the eastern coast of the Gulf would have found them­selves paralysed. Even if they had managed to take Tuppura, they could hardly have traversed a 20 m wide channel (along the fairway west of Tuppura), at least not with tanks and artillery.

   The Soviet attack against Tuppura began on 2 March. The Finnish ships had not arrived; they were not even under way. Jääkarhu was assisting traffic between Pori and the Åland Sea; the armored ships lay, still frozen in, at the same spot where they had been ever since December. Admittedly, this state of affairs could have been justified as a daring stra­ta­gem. The C-in-C of the Naval Forces could simply have decided to sacrifice Tuppura to the Soviets thereby enticing them into trans­ferring troops and war equipment across the Gulf. Only then would he let the ships arrive to cut the enemy’s lines of supply and retreat. Finnish reserves could then have beaten the now isolated Soviet divisions. The benefits from such a move could have been booty and a hard blow to the Red Army. This in its turn could have contributed to the peace negotiations, which the Finnish Government were then seeking. On the other hand, the stratagem would have caused heavier casualties to the Finnish Army than if the ships had appeared earlier. It would also have exposed the vulnerable Jääkarhu to well placed Soviet artillery. The icebreaker would hardly have been able to penetrate more than a few nautical miles into the Gulf even in the middle of the night.

Perhaps 2 March would have been, from an old-fashioned tactical point of view, the right time to order the ships to sail for Vyborg. If they had done that, they would have arrived in the Gulf on 7 March when two Red Army divisions had establi­shed, as expected, a firm beachhead on the western coast of the Gulf of Vyborg. These troops had cut off the main road between Vyborg and Helsinki. A third division was already under way to reinforce the first two. The Finnish effective reserves did not suffice to counter-check the beach­head, and half-trained recruits and other second-rate troops were therefore also detached against the top-level Russian soldiers of those divisions. Naturally, the daily rates of Finnish casualties multiplied. They were almost six times as high during the last 12 days of war than during the preceding 92 days12.

   Obviously, as soon as the enemy began building up his beachhead on 4 and 5 March, Fin­nish resistance was in danger of breaking down. It was estimated to last for a couple of weeks at the most13. Now, at any rate, the presence of the war­ship and the ice­breaker became absolutely indispensable. It was certainly very late, but perhaps not too late, to order the ships to sail for Vyborg on 5 March. It depended on how the tactical situation would develop until 10 March. All the highest in command knew that the Finnish Government had decided to make peace, and that negotiations would start soon. A display of military pow­er could be expected to play a part in these negotiations. Major-General Valve, how­ever, permitted noth­ing whatever to change his attitude of immobility.

   During the last two months of the Winter War all the big, still undamaged, icebreakers, Jääkarhu, Voima, and Sisu, were operating west of Turku only. About a fifth of their days of activity was used to escort traffic along the coast of Sweden14. The remaining icebreaker activity was used for the purpose of maintaining Finland’s fo­reig­n trade, especially imports from Sweden. What actually was achieved was 11,500 tons of goods imported during February, equaling about 5 percent of the normal monthly quantity15.  During these escort crossings the icebreakers had to protect them­selves and their retinues with 40 mm and 102 mm guns5, manned, at a guess, by rather untrained gunners. At least one of the icebreakers could certainly have been released for other duties. Three ice­breakers procuring imported goods at a rate of 400 tons per day was a waste of coal and oil, to say nothing of manpower, etc. Jääkarhu, for example, burned about 70 tons of (imported) oil in 24 hours when active16. The railway route around the Gulf of Bothnia had a capacity of 1,300 tons per day17.

   The 1940 winter was, as noted, an extraordinarily severe one, and already in January it was obvious that the Gulf of Vyborg would not serve as an obstacle to troops and tanks. The Red Army crossed lakes that had been considered natural moats.  In January the emergence of a weak spot in the coastal defense calling for complementary fortification could there­fore already be foreseen. It was of course the duty of the C-in-C of the Naval Forces to track down such weak spots and to attend to them. A convoy sailing along the southern coast of Finland would have been safe from enemy mines and torpedoes because of the fast ice that coated the whole fairway from Åland to Vyborg. Jääkarhu's chances to elude damage from bombing attacks would have been improved during such a journey, thanks to the demonstrably good marks­men in charge of the AA-guns on the armored ships. She would have been in grave danger only when within reach of Soviet artillery and even then only in daylight.

   Since a convoy such as outlined above did not appear, the Finnish Army had to oppose the beach­head with deficient manpower and inferior armament, resulting in extremely heavy losses during these last days of the war. The Quartermaster-General, Aksel Airo, had anticipated this on 28 February, when he had presented a report on the situation in the presence of Field Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim and others. He said among other things18: ”The line [is] not bad, but [an eventual] breakthrough by Vyborg or across the Gulf of Vyborg spells disaster. Next line already [means] mobile war and there we are done for, because of [enemy] air force and armor.”  And Mannerheim, in a letter to Prime Minister Édouard Daladier on 7 March, stressed that Finland’s situation was difficult, due to ”shortage of manpower and modern weapons, especially long-range artillery”19.

   At the same time two warships equipped with long-range (30 km) artillery lay idle in the waters off Turku, defending nothing but themselves. All their 254-mm ammunition was still unused, but the gunners had, from injudicious zeal, wasted away no less than 1,334 rounds of the 105-mm ammunition on AA combat, mis­siles worthy of weightier targets. On 1 March Ilmarinen had only 1,500 rounds left. Prompt replenishment was impossible, sinc­e the supply of 105-mm fuses depended entirely on imports20. While Finland was fighting for its exis­tence, and most people exerted themselves to the utmost, Major-General Valve managed to withhold the nation’s a most sophisticated, efficient and expensive weapon. Moreover, these ships had been procured explicitly to serve as a movable defense against cross-shore invasion21.  Valve, who was promoted Lieutenant General in 1941, can be charged on two more counts. First, although the then Minister of Defense, Juho Niukkanen, described the armored ships as some­thing that ”we must guard as the apple of our eye”22, no look-alike decoys had been built, not even during the months when war threatened in 1939 or thereafter. Wooden decoys could certainly have been produced for a pittance compared to the cost of the ”apples”. The absence of decoys granted the enemy the benefit of knowing the exact position of both the armored ships through­out the war. Secondly, without making sure where additional artillery was most needed on the eve of war, Valve had ordered the spare 152-mm guns in his arsenal to be set up in the coastal forts. It soon became evident that the shortage of such guns was much severer on the Karelian Isthmus, but at that time it was too late to move them23.

   It remains an open question why Major-General Valve withheld the ships that could have spared so many lives in the crucial battle around the Gulf of Vyborg. It is certain, however, that he did not share Niukkanen’s estimate of the value of the armored ships. To Valve they were not ”apples of the eye” that should be saved at all costs. Knowing quite well that the ships lacked armor at the bottom and that their speed of 15 knots was insufficient for open sea operations, he took the risk of sending both ships on an insignificant diversion across the Gulf of Finland in the beginning of the so-called ”Con­ti­nu­ation War” in 1941. He also risked the icebreakers Jääkarahu and Tarmo, on the same convoy, together with some smaller craft. What is more, the convoy was not preceded by mine­sweepers despite trouble with the paravane­s24.  None too surprising, Ilma­rinen struck a mine and--more surprisingly--sank with more than half its crew within seven minutes. (What was wrong with the watertight bulkheads?)  The objective was, at best, to lure the Soviets into moving some troops away from the southern part of Hiiumaa island, so as to facilitate an early Ge­r­man capture of the island. The Soviet possession of Hiiumaa was no threat to Finland.

   This happened on 13 September 1941, when the sea was open and exposed to Soviet minelayers and submarines. Even cruisers could suddenly have appeared. In the Gulf of Vyborg in March 1940 such dangers were absent, because of the ice. Besides, risking one icebreaker and one armoured ship would have sufficed for a decisive intervention in 1940. As regards the diversion in 1941, any group of old tubs with thick smoke would have done the job just as well.

   Is it possible that Major-General Valve withheld the armored ships because he regarded them as the only means to defend demilitarised Åland? Could it be that he anticipated the day when the ice was to break up and the Red Fleet would try to occupy this important group of islands? Admittedly, in January no one knew how long the war would last. There was yet the possibility that Finland would still be fighting after the break-up of the ice in April or May. But on 21 February the Finnish Foreign Minister had approached his colleague in Sweden requesting him to mediate peace25.  After that date it was obvious that the war would not last to the latter part of April, the earliest date when the Soviets might be able to attack Åland. Consideration for Åland cannot be pleaded as an excuse for detaining the ships after 21 Feb­ruary.

   Is it then conceivable that Valve in 1940 acted only on orders from superior authority? Since neither the President nor the Minister of Defence could give orders directly to the C-in-C of the Naval Forces, only Field-Marshal Mannerheim remains. If he had given any such order, it would most certainly have been mentioned, if not in his own memoirs, at least in some of the books by Stig Jäger­skiöld, Lieutenant General Hugo Österman, Lieutenant General Harald Öhquist and General Erik Heinrichs. All thes­e authors de­scribe the critical situation in the Gulf of Vyborg in detail, but none of them men­tions even the name of Väinö Valve in this connection. It seems that Mannerheim and the generals in command on the Karelian Isthmus front (Öhquist and Heinrichs) did not communicate with Valve at all during the last weeks of the Winter War. Reasonably they were all too busy with the operations of the hard-pressed land forces to think of resources far away at sea.

    Just one writer of Winter War memoirs, na­mely Juho Niuk­kanen, the then Minister of Defense, mentions the armored ships. He declares that these vessels ”could not, during the Winter War, take part in the combat activity otherwise than protecting Turku, the Stockholm connection and themselves against Russian aircraft”26. Mr. Niukkanen was a farmer and probably knew nothing about the Navy and things marine. (He apparently did not realise that the Stockholm connection could not be protected by amassing AA-guns at the end of the route.) Either he regarded the ships as so precious that they should not leave their tolerably safe harbor on any account, or else he had been told by some supposedly competent person that the ships ”could not” fulfil their intended purpose under the circumstances. The only authorities that could have informed the Minister of Defense on this point were Major-General Valve and his immediate subordinates speaking on his behalf.

   Much later, Commodore Kalervo Kijanen in a comprehensive work on the Finnish Navy27 presented a faint excuse for the detaining of the ships. Two reasons are given: 1) that the thickness of the ice was between 80 and 100 cm and the propellers (with their supporting gear) of the armored ships were too weak to be used in such conditions; 2) that the detachment of an armored ship to the east would have meant ”severing the sea connections” (meriyhteyksien katkeamista), which was an undesirable risk at such a critical stage of the war. A more recent, semi-official history of the Winter War28 offers yet another excuse: 3) that ”it was difficult to release Jääkarhu”  [from its current duties]. Astonishingly, the risk of losing the ships is not mentioned at all among the reasons for their being detained. Even more amazing are the reasons given. We have noted already that Jääkarhu could easily have been dispensed with in the Turku­-Stockholm traffic. Its detachment was simply a question of priority.

   The assertion that the coating of ice along the fairway should have been more than 80 cm thick is not confirmed by the measurements which have survived and which were taken at various points along the fairway between Hangö and Hamina. Not a single one of the measurements taken right up to 15 March 1940 shows a thick­ness exceeding 60 cm29. Concerning the iceworthiness of the armored ships, most ships of a comparable displacement (3,900 tons) have no difficulties in following an icebreaker through a broken channel. What is more, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen were most obviously built for passage through ice, well armored (at least against ice) as they were and with their stems sloping like that of an icebreaker. What is more, Ilmarinen had steel propellers, provided expressly to cope with the ice conditions in the Baltic. Regrettably, both Väinämöinen ’s propellers were made of bronze, which meant a certain risk of damage under trying ice conditions, at least when moving in top gear. But a speed of 3.3 knots required a power of only 54 h.p. (40 rev./min.) as against 3,200 h.p. (181 rev./min.) for the cruising speed of 14.4 knots30. The voyage in question required the ship to follow Jääkaarhu whose cruising speed through thick ice was about three knots. With the application of only a few percent of maximum power, even the bronze propellers were likely to endure the stress from the ice fragments.  Even if the propellers had been too weak, the armored ship could of course have reached the Gulf towed by a tugboat or by another icebreaker. Both the 1,500 h.p. Apu. and the 1,600 h.p. Murtaja seem to have been available at the time31. The reference to ”80 to 100 cm ice” and ”weak propellers” is nothing but a dishonest subterfuge. And when Commodore Kijanen (in 1940 a submarine commander) cites such a wage concept as ”severing the sea connections”, he is just pulling the wool over the eyes of his readers. Obviously, it was not ”the sea connections” that mattered at that critical stage of the war, but the co-ordination of all land and naval forces for the defense of the crucial Vyborg front.

   What neither Kijanen nor anyone else has pleaded in Valve's defense is the high risk of failure because of Soviet air supremacy. The present writer regards this risk as the only pertinent objection against the detaching of the ships to Vyborg. However, the Soviet bombers did not operate when the sky was clouded over and their reconnaissance was not too attentive. Even with a clear sky it could easily have taken the Soviet Air Force a couple of days to discover the operation. Last but not least, for a bomber in those days it was no easy matter to score a hit on such small objects as ships, especially on gunned ones of course. The chance that a seaborne expedition would fail was hardly as great as the chance that the front manned with second-rate soldiers would break in a week or two.

   The next time when more artillery was needed in the Gulf of Vyborg was in June 1944. The Red Army had managed to repeat the 90 days advance of the Winter War in ten days. Again the fort of Tuppura fell and the western shore was threatened. And again Väinämöinen, still afloat, was conspicuous by its absence. Needless to say, it could have reached the theatre of operations in less than a day by means of its own propellers and without any icebreaker assistance. This time, however, the land forces luckily managed to prevent the establishment of an enemy beachhead.

   The idea that equipment rather than human beings should be spared is appropriate to the dictator of a populous nation. Such a potentate may dispense with his cannon fodder in order to save other more valuable necessities. Such principles may have been a dogma in the Imperial Russian Army, whose martial spirit Mannerheim had imbibed and in which he developed his military proficiency during 28 years of service. In a democracy, the nation to be defended equals all its citizens. All other things should be regarded as more or less expendable in comparison, even terri­tory. This humane and democratic principle was not always followed by the Finnish side in the Winter War. Says one of the then commanders  on the Karelian Isthmus32: ”We have consistently sacrificed troops--and land only when there were no troops left”. One of his colleagues is more frank about who was to blame for this fault33: ”The Supreme Commander [Mannerheim] was very unwilling to give up territory, and he wanted that even minor positions be recaptured with­out paying much heed to losses”. To defend totally unfortified  positions against superior Russian forces with tanks was bound to produce heavy losses among the defenders.  Says a recent commentator34: “Because a number of the Finnish units deployed on the Bay of Vyborg were unsuitable for the battles of special nature conducted in the area due to their training and inexperience, panic reactions followed.”    The suggestion that Ilmarinen and Jääkarhu could have intervened does not mean that their loss was certain, only that they would have been at risk. But when the lives of thousands of young men could have been saved, even costly ships should have been deemed dispensable, and they should have been ventured in an attempt to save Finnish soldiers. If the ships had survived, so much the better. If not, these two ships would at least have escaped the lot that eventually befell Väinämöinen and Jääkarhu: as ”reparations” they became part of the armed forces of a cruel and menacing dictat­or­ship.

   In retrospect, it is obvious that the sinking of a ship like Ilmarinen by bombing was no easy matter indeed. When the Soviet Air Force intended to sink Väinämöinen in July 1944, Colonel General S.F. Zhavoronkov and his staff prepared for the action during a number of days and gathered 131 aircraft for the task. On 16 July 1944 the carefully elaborated plan was carried out. By means of numerous attacks from various directions the 131 airplanes finally succeeded in sinking Väinämöinen--as they believed. It turned out that target was in reality the 46 year old German AA-ship, Niobe.35 But already in February 1940 it was obvious from the Tarmo expedition, mentioned above, that it was no easy matter to hit even an unescorted icebreaker from the air.

   It is possible, perhaps even likely, that a suggestion by Valve to rush the two ships as a relief expedition would not have met with Mannerheim’s approval. But both Öhquist and Österman at least tried to change Mannerheim’s disregard of casualties, and Österman even resigned over the issue. Väinö Valve, who could have done so much to save manpower and relieve the worst distress, did nothing and tried nothing. He never wrote a book about his activities during the Winter War (nor any other), but he is responsible for the loss of thou­sands of Finnish lives during the last weeks of the Winter War and also for Finland’s weak negotiating position in Moscow on 12 March 1940.

   The above analysis of what was done and neglected on the Finnish side leads us to the conclusion that General Pavlov’s operation was indeed a very daring one. The Finnish armed forces had resources to thwart it. Stalin had reason to be grateful—not so much to General Pavlov—but to Major-General Valve for the establishment of a safe beachhead inside the Finnish defense line.

 

 

Notes:

1. Reported by the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

2. Reported by the Merentutkimuslaitos (Institute for nautical research in Finland).

3. Lyytinen, A.E. et al., Koivisto ja Viipurinlahti. Helsinki 1958, p. 19.

4. Fischerström, Staffan, Isbrytare. Falkenberg 1997, p. 233.

5. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, II, Helsinki 1968, Appendix 1.

6. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, Helsinki 1968, p. 290-93.

7. Merentutkimuslaitoksen julkaisu N:o 188. Helsinki 1959.

8. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, pp. 282-86.

9. Laurell, Seppo, Höyrymurtajien aika, Jyväskylä 1992, pp. 140-51.

10. Laurell, Seppo, p. 44.

11. Hufvudstadsbladet 18 March 1926. Helsingfors.

12. Talvisodan historia I-IV. Helsinki 1977-79, p. 406.

13. Heinrichs, Erik, Mannerheimgestalten, II. Helsingfors 1959, p. 177.

14. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, Helsinki 1968, p. 278.

15. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, Appendix 18.

16.  Laurell, Seppo, p. 151.

17. Björklund, Eric, Kvarkentrafiken. Danderyd 1991, p. 22.

18. Jägerskiöld, Stig, Fältmarskalken. Helsingfors 1975, p.143.

19. Jägerskiöld, Stig, p. 160.

20.  Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, p. 303.

21.  Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, p. 156.

22. Niukkanen, Juho, Försvarsminister under vinterkriget. Stockholm 1951, p. 166.

23. Niukkanen, Juho, p. 166.

24. Heinämies, Vilho, Sju minuter på havet. Stockholm 1946, p. 31

25. Mannerheim, G., Minnen, II. Helsingfors 1952, p. 225.

26. Niukkanen, Juho, p. 166.

27. Suomen laivasto 1918-1968, I, p. 293-94.

28. Talvisodan historia I-IV, p. 141.

29. Merentutkimuslaitoksen julkaisu N:o 188, p. 56-57.

30. Niklander, Tauno, Meidän Panssarilaivamme. Jyväskylä 1996, p. 147-49.

31. Laurell, Seppo, pp. 259-61.

32. Öhquist, Harald, Vinterkriget 1939-40 ur min synvinkel. Helsingfors 1949, p. 335.

33. Österman, Hugo, Frihet och försvar. Helsingfors 1967, p. 219.                                         

34. Laaksonen, Lasse, Todellisuus ja harhat. Helsinki 1999, p. 388.

35. Finland i krig 1944-1945,  Esbo 2001.

 

Back to World War II