The Battle of Tolvajärvi

On 12 December 1939, by the frozen lakes of Tolvajärvi and Hirvasjärvi in Ladoga Karelia, a few dozen kilometres from the Soviet border, Finnish units attacked the Soviet 139th Rifle Division, which had been pushing deep into Finland since the start of the war. After a day-long battle the Russians began to fall back, and over the next twelve days the Finns drove them more than 30 kilometres east, beyond the village of Ägläjärvi, as far as the Aittojoki river. They were led by Colonel Paavo Talvela and Lieutenant Colonel Aaro Pajari. It was the Finnish army’s first great offensive victory in the war that the Soviet Union had begun on 30 November. In a country that for two weeks had heard of nothing but retreats and bombing, the news from Tolvajärvi was received with relief and enthusiasm.

The date and the “tactical defeats” of 11 December

War chronologies record under 11 December 1939 that the Russians “suffered several tactical defeats at the hands of the Finnish army”. This vague sentence captures well what was happening in those days along the whole front from Ladoga to Lapland. On the night of 10–11 December at Tolvajärvi the Finns beat off a Soviet attempt to outflank their positions. On 11 December the Finnish 27th Infantry Regiment of Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s force cut the Raate road, which linked the Soviet 163rd Division, which had taken Suomussalmi, with its rear. On the Karelian Isthmus the attacks on the Mannerheim Line had for a week brought the Red Army no success at all. The most important and best known of these victories, however, was the Battle of Tolvajärvi, whose main, decisive day was 12 December.

The threat from Suojärvi

North of Lake Ladoga the Soviet 8th Army of Komdiv Ivan Khabarov struck on 30 November with much larger forces than the Finnish command had expected. It had been assumed that in the trackless forests of Ladoga Karelia the enemy would be unable to deploy more than one division. Instead several Soviet divisions set off at once along narrow forest roads: some along the shore of Ladoga towards Pitkäranta, others towards the small Kollaa river, and others still further north, towards Ilomantsi. The most dangerous thrust was that of the 139th Rifle Division of Kombrig Nikolai Belyaev. According to Finnish and Russian studies, with its supporting units it numbered some ten to twenty thousand men, about 60 guns and several dozen tanks. On 2 December its units took Suojärvi (Russian Suoyarvi), a railway junction near the border, and set off westwards along the road towards the neck of land between lakes Tolvajärvi and Hirvasjärvi. Beyond it lay Värtsilä, where the roads branched. From there the 139th Division could come out in the rear of the Finnish IV Corps fighting by Ladoga, and even cut the railway leading to the Karelian Isthmus.

This axis was to be defended by a few independent battalions, made up largely of inexperienced reservists. They fell back before the Soviet tanks and artillery, and in places panic broke out. The commander of IV Corps, General Juho Heiskanen, was dismissed on 4 December. His successor, General Woldemar Hägglund, had trouble enough by Ladoga itself.

Talvela and Pajari

The news of the fall of Suojärvi stirred Colonel Paavo Talvela, one of the most energetic officers in the Finnish army. Born in 1897, he had trained in Germany during the First World War as one of the Finnish Jägers, fought on the White side in the Civil War of 1918, and taken part in the volunteer expeditions to East Karelia. Talvela went to Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim and demanded to be sent to the front to stop the enemy. He wanted to take with him Lieutenant Colonel Aaro Pajari, a contemporary and a veteran of the Civil War, whom he knew to be a brave and able commander. On 5 December Mannerheim ordered the formation of Group Talvela, with the task of defeating the Soviet forces advancing towards Korpiselkä and Ilomantsi. On 7 December Talvela arrived in the combat area and set up his command post at Värtsilä.

The group was not large. On the Tolvajärvi axis Detachment Pajari was formed, its core being the 16th Infantry Regiment, transferred to the area and made up of reservists from around Tampere, together with the independent battalions that had been falling back until then. On the Ilomantsi axis a grouping under Colonel Per Olof Ekholm held the line. According to Western studies based on the work of the American historian Allen Chew, the Finns at Tolvajärvi had some 4,000 men and about 30 guns – several times fewer than the enemy. But they had what the Russians lacked: knowledge of the terrain, skis, and commanders who could restore the will to fight to units demoralised by retreat.

The “sausage war”

On 8 December the vanguards of the 139th Division reached Tolvajärvi. The Finns were defending the western shore of the lake, and fighting was going on in the neck of land between the lakes. Talvela planned a counter-attack for 11 December, but on the night of 10–11 December two Soviet battalions worked round the Finnish positions and came out on the road from Tolvajärvi to Värtsilä, where the Finnish headquarters, artillery and supply trains stood. Pajari hastily gathered about a hundred men – cooks, signallers and soldiers from the supply trains – and personally led them in a night counter-attack. According to Finnish tradition, the starving Red Army men who stumbled on the Finnish field kitchens stopped to eat, and there the Finns took them by surprise. The skirmish was later dubbed makkarasota, the “sausage war”. By morning the Russians had been routed and thrown back. According to Finnish figures, 20 Finns and about 180 Russians were killed. A similar outflanking attempt from the south was also beaten off.

12 December: Tolvajärvi

The night fighting delayed the Finnish counter-attack by a day. On the morning of 12 December the Finns struck from three directions. In the north Jaakko Malkamäki’s battalion was to cross frozen Lake Hirvasjärvi and come out in the enemy’s rear. Instead it ran into two Soviet battalions that were just preparing their own attack on the Finnish flank. The two attacks blocked each other; Malkamäki had to withdraw, but the Russians did not attack. In the south Finnish companies attacked the island of Kotisaari across the ice. The main blow was struck by Pajari himself, attacking across the neck of land between the lakes.

The attack went in after 9 a.m. and soon stalled under fire a few hundred metres from a large wooden tourist hotel, which housed the headquarters of a Soviet regiment. Pajari committed his reserves. In the afternoon the Finns took the hill with the hotel, inside which lay the dead officers of the Soviet staff, and with it the documents. The renewed attack on Kotisaari threatened the Soviet supply road. Belyaev, whose division had lost about a thousand killed that day according to Finnish estimates, ordered a retreat. The Finns lost about a hundred killed. According to the Finnish history of the war, they captured, among other things, the equipment of two artillery batteries, between ten and twenty tanks and several dozen machine guns.

The pursuit to Ägläjärvi

After the night the Finns resumed their attack, and the 139th Division began to fall back eastwards. The Soviet command pulled it out of the fighting and threw the fresh 75th Rifle Division against the Finns. Belyaev was relieved of command. On 13 December Khabarov too was removed from command of the 8th Army and replaced by Komandarm Grigory Shtern. The new division, however, did not stop the Finnish pursuit. On 14 December the Finns took the crossing at Ristisalmi, and Talvela sent all his reserves to Detachment Pajari. The heaviest fighting was for the village of Ägläjärvi, which the Finns reached on 18 December. They took it after several days of costly frontal attacks on 20–22 December. On 23 and 24 December the Finnish vanguards reached the Aittojoki river, some 30 kilometres east of Tolvajärvi. There Mannerheim halted the offensive and ordered his troops to go over to the defensive. The front on the Aittojoki held until the end of the war.

During the fighting Talvela was promoted to Major General and Pajari to Colonel.

Losses

According to figures of the Soviet 8th Army cited in Finnish studies, the 139th Division lost 761 killed, 1,715 wounded and 1,076 missing between 6 and 15 December, and the 75th Division 747 killed, 957 wounded and 1,234 missing between 15 and 23 December. Together that amounts to some 6,500 men put out of action. Allen Chew wrote of about 4,000 Russians killed, and of 580 prisoners, 59 tanks and 220 machine guns that the Finns captured or destroyed on the way from Tolvajärvi to the Aittojoki. These figures vary depending on the source and on the period they cover.

Finnish losses were high: according to Chew, 630 killed and 1,320 wounded. The historian noted that, relative to the size of the units involved, they were among the heaviest losses the Finnish army suffered in the whole war. The frontal attacks on fortified positions at Tolvajärvi and Ägläjärvi contributed to them in particular.

Significance

Militarily, the victory at Tolvajärvi removed the danger that the Red Army would pass through Ladoga Karelia into the rear of the defenders of the Karelian Isthmus. The Finnish command could breathe again: the left wing of the front by Ladoga was secure, and the victory also relieved the defenders of Ilomantsi, where the Russians made no further progress. The psychological effect was even more important. General Erik Heinrichs, later Chief of the General Staff and Mannerheim’s biographer, wrote that the arrival of Talvela and Pajari “turned depression and fatigue around” and was proof of what strong will can achieve in war. The first offensive victory showed Finnish soldiers that the Red Army could be beaten in attack too, not merely held in the trenches. News of it went round the Western press and, together with the reports from Suomussalmi that were soon to follow, created the image of a Finnish David defeating a Soviet Goliath.

For the Soviet command the defeat at Tolvajärvi was the first of many blows that fell on its divisions in the forests of Karelia and central Finland in the weeks that followed. Sent along narrow roads, tied to their heavy equipment and columns of supply wagons, unprepared for fighting in the forest and on skis, Soviet formations ran into ambushes and were cut into pieces and destroyed. A similar fate soon befell the 163rd and 44th Divisions at Suomussalmi and on the Raate road, and the divisions encircled by Ladoga. The victory did not, however, change the outcome of the war: that was decided by the February offensive on the Karelian Isthmus. Under the Moscow peace of March 1940 the whole of Ladoga Karelia, with Tolvajärvi and Ägläjärvi, passed to the Soviet Union.

Talvela and Pajari became national heroes. In the Continuation War, which Finland entered alongside Germany in June 1941, Talvela commanded a corps in East Karelia and later served as liaison officer of the Finnish high command at German headquarters. Pajari commanded a division on the Karelian Isthmus and was twice awarded the Mannerheim Cross, the second time for the landing at Tornio in 1944, during the fighting against the Germans in Lapland. In 1941 the Finns recovered Tolvajärvi, only to lose it again in 1944. Today the battlefield lies in Russia’s Republic of Karelia.