The Battle of Tali-Ihantala

At 6.30 a.m. on 25 June 1944 Soviet artillery and aircraft struck the Finnish positions north-east of Viipuri (Vyborg). An hour later the divisions of the Leningrad Front’s 21st Army went over to the attack. Their task was to break through the narrow strip of land between Viipuri Bay and the river Vuoksi, near the villages of Tali and Ihantala, and open the way into the heart of Finland. So began a battle that lasted until 9 July and ended with the Soviet offensive brought to a halt.

War chronologies record that on this day the Battle of Tali-Ihantala began, the largest battle ever fought in the Nordic countries. The opening date follows Finnish historiography: fighting on this sector had been going on since 20 June, but the main attack began on 25 June. The description “the largest battle in the history of the Nordic countries” comes from Finnish historians and is repeated in encyclopaedias and other sources. It refers to the number of soldiers, guns and tanks concentrated in a few dozen square kilometres. It should be understood as a historians’ assessment rather than the precise result of a comparison.

After the fall of Viipuri

The battle was a continuation of the offensive on the Karelian Isthmus, which had begun on 9 June. Within two weeks Marshal Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front had broken through two Finnish defensive lines, and on 20 June, after a brief fight, it took Viipuri. In March 1940, in the last days of the Winter War, the Finns had defended the city long and stubbornly during the fighting for Viipuri. This time it fell almost without a fight. The Finnish army, however, had not been smashed. It withdrew to the third, unfinished VKT defensive line (Viipuri–Kuparsaari–Taipale), which ran from Viipuri along the Saimaa Canal and then along the Vuoksi to Lake Ladoga.

On 21 June the Stavka ordered Govorov to break through this line and reach Imatra, Lappeenranta and Virojoki, and then the river Kymijoki. The ground between Viipuri Bay and the Vuoksi was the only place on the Isthmus where a large mass of armour could pass. The strip between the bay, the canal and the river was about 10 kilometres wide and broken up by small lakes, bogs and hills. The battle itself was fought over an area of about 100 square kilometres, 8–14 kilometres north-east of Viipuri.

The main weight of the attack lay with Lieutenant General Dmitri Gusev (PL)’s 21st Army, reinforced with Guards corps, tank brigades and regiments of heavy breakthrough tanks and self-propelled guns. To its east, towards the Vuoksi, the 23rd Army attacked. On the Finnish side the sector was held by IV Corps, which in the course of the fighting was joined by further units brought in from East Karelia. All the troops on the Isthmus were commanded by Lieutenant General Karl Lennart Oesch.

German help and the Ryti agreement

On 12 June Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim asked Germany for military help. On 16–17 June the first aircraft of Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Kuhlmey’s air battle group (Gefechtsverband Kuhlmey) landed at Finnish airfields. According to figures cited in the literature it comprised several dozen Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers and Fw 190 fighter-bombers, about 70 machines in all. A few days later came the 303rd Assault Gun Brigade, with some thirty StuG III assault guns and assault howitzers, and the 122nd Infantry Division, which was sent to Viipuri Bay. Most important of all, however, were the arms deliveries: Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck anti-tank weapons, which the Finnish infantry received by the thousand.

The help came at a price. On the night of 21/22 June the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, flew into Helsinki. He demanded an undertaking that Finland would not conclude a separate peace without Germany’s consent. In those same days the Finnish government had asked through Stockholm about Soviet terms. Moscow’s reply, however, demanded a declaration of readiness to surrender. Mannerheim judged it to be a demand for unconditional surrender. On 26 June, the second day of the battle, President Risto Ryti sent Hitler a letter with his personal pledge that Finland would fight on alongside Germany. He did not submit it to parliament, which later made it possible to regard it as binding on him alone.

Tali: 25–30 June

On the Tali sector men of the 18th Division and the 3rd Brigade had been holding out since 20 June, under constant artillery fire and air attack. On 25 June the assault by the 30th Guards Rifle Corps and other corps of the 21st Army went in on both sides of Lake Leitimojärvi. According to Finnish studies, the Soviet command’s aim was to reach the Imatra–Lappeenranta line by 28 June. East of the lake the attack was stopped by the Finnish 4th Division. In the west the Guardsmen were held up on the hills defended by the 48th Infantry Regiment, but a Soviet tank regiment broke through to the Portinhoikka crossroads. For several hours the whole Finnish IV Corps was in danger of being encircled.

The Finnish command threw into a counter-attack the reserves of the 18th Division, parts of the 17th and 4th Divisions and, in the afternoon, General Ruben Lagus’s Armoured Division, equipped mainly with StuG III assault guns. By evening the Soviet units west of the lake had been thrown back to their start lines, and the tank regiment that had reached Portinhoikka was almost completely destroyed. Over the following days the Finns, divided into the Björkman and Puroma battle groups (named after their commanders), tried to encircle four Soviet divisions that had broken through east of Leitimojärvi. The two groups came within a kilometre of each other but could not close the pocket around Talinmylly.

On 28 June Oesch ordered a withdrawal to the shorter Vakkila–Ihantalajärvi–Kokkoselkä–Noskuanselkä line, still within the VKT position. The withdrawal coincided with a new Soviet attack. Finnish studies regard 29 June as the hardest day of the battle: the line was restored only after bloody fighting. On 30 June the Finns abandoned the village of Tali.

Ihantala: 1–9 July

The heaviest fighting came on 1 and 2 July. According to Finnish figures the army was then losing about 800 men a day. The 6th Division, transferred from East Karelia, went into the line at Ihantala, while the German assault guns and the Finnish Armoured Division patched one breach after another. The infantry used anti-tank weapons at close range. According to Finnish accounts, 25 Soviet tanks were destroyed in this way in a single afternoon.

Artillery played the decisive role. The Finnish command concentrated roughly half the country’s field artillery on this sector. Its effectiveness rested on a fire-control method developed by the General of Artillery Vilho Petter Nenonen. It allowed an observer to designate a target without knowing where the individual batteries were, and the officers at the fire-direction centre to calculate firing data for many batteries at once. According to Finnish studies up to 21 batteries, some 250 guns, could fire on a single target simultaneously. The Finnish artillery fired more than 122,000 shells during the battle, and Soviet concentrations were broken up by fire while still in their assembly areas. Finnish historians regard this concentration of fire as the greatest in the history of the Finnish army. According to the same sources, Soviet artillery fired a similar number of shells during this period, which some researchers attribute to supply problems.

Signals intelligence was also important. On 2 July the Finns intercepted an order revealing that the 63rd Guards Rifle Division and the 30th Guards Tank Brigade would attack at four o’clock the next morning. On 3 July, a few minutes before that hour, the assembly area was attacked, according to Finnish studies, by about 80 Finnish and German bombers, and 250 guns fired several thousand shells. The attack nevertheless went in that morning, supported by hundreds of aircraft, but by evening the Finns had restored their lines. Kuhlmey’s battle group attacked Soviet columns and crossings throughout, and Finnish and German bombers carried out raids, to which the stronger Soviet air force responded.

On 6 July the Soviet troops scored one more local success, but the next day they were thrown back. From 7 July the weight of the Soviet attacks shifted towards the Vuoksi. On 9 July the fighting at Ihantala died down. The front stabilised a few kilometres from where the attack had begun on 25 June.

Losses

Casualty figures vary according to the source. The Finnish army reported that 8,561 of its soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in the battle. The Finnish historian Ohto Manninen, on the basis of the 21st Army’s daily and ten-day reports, put Soviet losses at about 18,000–22,000 killed and wounded. This does not include the losses of the 23rd Army, which attacked closer to the Vuoksi. Wartime Finnish sources credited the defenders with destroying about 600 Soviet tanks in this battle. Modern researchers consider these figures exaggerated.

Vuosalmi, Viipuri Bay and a change of plans

Having failed to break through at Ihantala, the Leningrad Front tried to outflank the Finnish positions from both sides. From 4 July the Soviet 59th Army occupied the islands in Viipuri Bay, but an attempt to cross to the northern shore of the bay was beaten off, among others by the German 122nd Infantry Division. On the same day the 23rd Army began fighting for a crossing of the Vuoksi at Vuosalmi. The bridgehead, won on 9 July, could not be expanded, and attacks continued there until 20 July. North of Lake Ladoga, in the Battle of Ilomantsi at the turn of July and August, the Finns encircled two Soviet divisions, although most of their men managed to withdraw.

At the same time Moscow’s priorities were changing. On 22 June, three days before the start of the battle, the Red Army had launched Operation Bagration in Belarus, which quickly led to the destruction of Army Group Centre. Around 10–12 July the Stavka ordered the Leningrad Front to go over to the defensive on the Isthmus, and some of its forces, especially armour, were sent to the Baltic front at Narva. Historians differ in their assessment of this decision. Soviet historiography presented it as the result of having achieved limited objectives. Finnish researchers point to Stavka directives that envisaged an advance far beyond the 1940 border, and regard the halting of the offensive as the result of the Finnish defence. Some Western historians combine the two explanations: Stalin, in view of the cost of the fighting in Finland and the successes in Belarus, decided that the race to East Prussia and the Vistula was more important.

Place in the war

The Battle of Tali-Ihantala did not win the war for Finland, but it changed the terms on which it ended. Halting the offensive allowed the government in Helsinki to enter peace talks as the government of an army that had not been broken. On 1 August Ryti resigned, and on 4 August parliament elected Mannerheim president. The new president held that Ryti’s personal pledge to Hitler did not bind him. On 4 September Finland ceased fire, the Red Army a day later, and on 19 September an armistice was signed in Moscow. Finland again lost Viipuri and Karelia, ceded the Petsamo area and had to expel the German troops from the country, which led to the Lapland War. It did, however, avoid the occupation suffered by the other states allied to the Reich.

In Finnish collective memory Tali and Ihantala became a symbol of the defence of independence, comparable to the fighting of the winter of 1939–1940. In 2007 a Finnish feature film, Tali-Ihantala 1944, was made about them. In Russian historiography the battle long remained in the shadows, as a fragment of the Vyborg operation, whose main objectives were deemed to have been achieved with the capture of Vyborg.