The British ultimatum to Finland

On 22 November 1941 a letter from Winston Churchill reached Joseph Stalin in which the British prime minister for the first time gave his Soviet ally an unequivocal commitment on Finland. He wrote that he would rather see the Finns persuaded to stop fighting than put them “in the dock” together with the Axis powers, but he added that if they did not stop within the next two weeks, and Stalin still wished it, Britain would certainly declare war on them. The next day Stalin replied that if Finland did not leave the war within this short period, he regarded a British declaration as “advisable and necessary”. Thus was taken the decision that two weeks later placed London and Helsinki, two capitals long on friendly terms, on opposite sides of the front.

Many chronologies record under 22 November that Britain presented Finland with an ultimatum: end the war with the Soviet Union or find itself at war with the Allies. This needs qualifying. On that day the Finns received no document at all. The British government delivered its formal note through the United States only on 28 November, and it threatened war with Britain, not with all the Allies. The United States never declared war on Finland, and the Soviet Union had been fighting it since June in any case. The 22nd of November was, rather, the day on which the road to the ultimatum was mapped out. That same morning the American minister in Helsinki heard from the Finnish foreign minister, Rolf Witting, that Finland’s accession to the Anti-Comintern Pact was “possible”.

From neutrality to hostility

When on 25 June 1941 Finland entered the war against the USSR, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had only the day before described it in the House of Commons as a neutral country. Relations deteriorated quickly, however. After the signing of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement on 12 July, Britain was the ally of the state with which the Finns were at war. Under German pressure Helsinki closed its legation in London at the end of July and demanded the departure of the British minister. On 30 July aircraft from British carriers attacked the port of Petsamo (Operation EF), and on 1 August the two countries broke off diplomatic relations. The next day London declared Finland to be territory under enemy occupation, which meant a blockade of its seaborne trade. From then on British interests in Helsinki were represented by the American legation.

Since the summer Moscow had been pressing Britain to go further and formally declare war on Finland, Romania and Hungary. At the beginning of September Churchill was ready to recommend this to the Cabinet. The British, however, first tried another approach. On 22 September the Norwegian minister in Helsinki delivered a memorandum on behalf of the British government: as long as Finland, “in alliance with Germany”, was waging an offensive war on the territory of Britain’s ally, London had to regard it as a member of the Axis, and if the Finns continued to advance into “purely Russian” territory, Britain would treat them as an open enemy, not only during the war but also at the peace table. The condition for an improvement in relations was an end to the war and a withdrawal behind the 1939 frontier. The Finns replied on 6 October that since 30 November 1939 they had been waging an uninterrupted defensive war, and that the troops standing beyond the old frontier were occupying areas from which the USSR had been preparing a new attack.

American warnings

At the same time pressure came from the United States, with which Finland maintained normal relations and whose sympathy it valued most of all. As early as 18 August the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, told the Finnish minister, Hjalmar Procopé, that the USSR would be ready to discuss a new peace with territorial concessions to Finland. Helsinki did not respond. After the return from Moscow of the Harriman mission, which had agreed supplies for the USSR, Washington came to regard the Finnish offensive deep into Soviet Karelia as a threat to its own policy. On 27 October the American minister, Arthur Schoenfeld, handed President Risto Ryti a memorandum: if Finland wished to keep the friendship of the United States, it must halt offensive operations on Soviet territory and in principle withdraw its troops, and any attack from Finnish territory on American supplies bound for the USSR’s northern ports would provoke an immediate crisis. Ryti retorted emphatically that Finland was the vassal neither of the United States nor of Britain nor of Germany. On 3 November the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, repeated these demands publicly at a press conference.

The Finnish reply of 11 November brought no concessions. The government asked whether a withdrawal to the 1939 frontier would also mean the withdrawal of the Russians from their base at Hanko and from the Finnish part of the Rybachy Peninsula, and argued that it was fighting for security, not for conquest. Schoenfeld judged in a dispatch that the Finns refused to accept that their war was part of the great war against Germany. According to Finnish historians, as early as 5 November Ryti had privately asked Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim to limit operations, and in the far north General Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s Finnish III Corps halted its advance on the Murmansk railway. In East Karelia, however, the Finnish offensive went on. On 18 November the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs issued a statement rejecting the claim that Finland was fighting a defensive war.

Churchill’s and Stalin’s letters

Finland’s fate was finally sealed by the correspondence between the two leaders. In a letter sent on 4 November Churchill argued to Stalin that a declaration of war on Finland, Hungary and Romania would be a mere formality, since the British blockade already applied to them. Finland, he wrote, had many friends in the United States, while Hungary and Romania had been dominated by Hitler and might yet change sides. He added that the Dominions too, with the exception of Australia, were reluctant. Stalin’s reply of 8 November was one of the sharpest letters in their correspondence. He called the situation “intolerable”: a Soviet request, made in confidence, had found its way into the press, and the British government was nonetheless turning it down. He asked whether the aim was to show the world that there was a rift between the USSR and Britain. At the same time he demanded an agreement on war aims and on the post-war order.

For Churchill, who in those days was preparing a great offensive in Libya and needed good relations with Moscow, Finland was a price he could afford to pay. In the letter that reached Stalin on 22 November he proposed sending Eden to Moscow to discuss the whole conduct of the war and the post-war order, and on Finland he set a two-week deadline. In his reply of 23 November Stalin accepted the proposal of a visit by Eden and agreed that Hungary and Romania “could wait”, but on Finland he was firm. Without a British declaration, he wrote, the impression would arise that Hitler’s accomplices could commit their “foul deeds” with impunity. He also congratulated the British on the successful opening of the offensive in Libya.

The Anti-Comintern Pact

Meanwhile the Finnish leadership took a step that London and Washington saw as final proof of which side it was on. On 25 November 1941 a ceremony was held in Berlin to extend for five years the Anti-Comintern Pact, concluded by Germany and Japan in 1936. The host was Joachim von Ribbentrop, and those who then acceded to the pact were Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Denmark, Slovakia, Croatia and the Chinese government of Wang Jingwei. Witting signed on Finland’s behalf. Finnish politicians insisted that this merely confirmed the country’s anti-communist line and did not mean joining the Axis. The American chargé d’affaires in Stockholm reported that the Germans had extracted Finland’s consent by threatening to halt contracted grain deliveries, on which the country’s food supply depended. Hitler congratulated Ryti by telegram, and Ryti replied with wishes of good fortune for the “heroic German nation”.

The ultimatum

On 27 November the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, informed Welles that his government had decided to declare war on Finland and asked that the United States, as the protecting power for British interests, deliver a secret note to the Finns. On 28 November at 3.15 p.m. Schoenfeld handed it over at the Finnish Foreign Ministry. In it the British government recalled its warning of 22 September and stated that Finland was still conducting offensive operations on Soviet territory “in the closest collaboration with Germany”, and that its claims that its war was not part of the general European war were unacceptable. If by 3 December Finland did not cease hostilities and withdraw from all active participation in the fighting, Britain would have “no alternative” but to declare a state of war between the two countries. The next day the Americans passed on word that London was extending the deadline to 5 December. The note arrived during a joint meeting of the government and the high command and, according to the legation’s information, caused hesitation, especially on the part of Ryti, Mannerheim and the minister Väinö Tanner. The finance minister, Mauno Pekkala, believed that the reply would be decided by the country’s food situation. On the same day Hull declared publicly that every step taken by the Finnish government confirmed that it was co-operating fully with Hitler.

On 29 November Churchill sent Mannerheim a personal letter. He recalled their earlier conversations and correspondence about the First World War and wrote that he was “deeply grieved” at what was coming: in a few days Britain, out of loyalty to its Russian ally, would be forced to declare war on Finland. He argued that the Finnish troops had already advanced far enough to ensure the country’s security and could simply halt without making any declaration, for which the harsh winter provided a good pretext. He assured Mannerheim that the Allies would defeat the Nazis, and warned that Finland’s friends in England would be pained to see it in the dock alongside a defeated Germany. Mannerheim replied on 2 December, courteously but in the negative: he could not halt operations before his troops had reached positions which, in his view, would give the country the security it needed.

The Finnish government’s official reply, dated 4 December, repeated that Finland was waging a defensive war, had no aims other than the security of the nation and was close to achieving its strategic objectives: recovering the territory lost under the Moscow Peace Treaty and “neutralising” the areas from which the enemy had been preparing its destruction. The government wrote that it found it hard to understand what in its conduct could induce Britain to go to war. Unofficially, the Finnish minister in Stockholm assured the Americans that the war would be over in a few weeks and would not threaten British and American interests in the far north. He admitted, however, that Helsinki’s attitude was dictated to a large extent by Berlin, and that the hostility of distant Britain was for them a lesser evil than the hostility of nearby Germany.

Place in the war

The reply did not meet the conditions. On the evening of 5 December Hull gave instructions for the final British note to be passed to the Finns, and on 6 December 1941, Finland’s Independence Day, Britain announced that a state of war between the two countries would exist from one minute past midnight Greenwich time on 7 December. In those same days the British Dominions declared war on Finland, and Britain also declared war on Hungary and Romania. Paradoxically, the Finns were just then concluding their offensive: at the beginning of December they took Medvezhyegorsk and Povenets on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, after which Mannerheim halted the advance, and on 6 December parliament voted to reincorporate into the state the territories lost in 1940. East of Lake Ladoga, however, Finnish troops remained on the Svir, and on the Karelian Isthmus they continued to close from the north the ring of the blockade of Leningrad.

The Anglo-Finnish war remained in practice a war on paper. Apart from the July raid on Petsamo, the two countries never fought each other directly, and Mannerheim sent the British volunteers serving in the Finnish army home through Sweden. The declaration did, however, have political consequences. It satisfied the Soviet demand that Britain take an unequivocal stand at the USSR’s side, and it preceded Eden’s visit to Moscow in December 1941, during which Stalin demanded recognition of the frontiers of June 1941, including those with Finland. Finland formally became an enemy state of the Allies. It had to reckon with this in 1944, when in Moscow it signed with the USSR and Britain the armistice ending the Continuation War, and in 1947, when the peace treaty signed in Paris described it as an ally of Hitlerite Germany. The United States, despite all Hull’s warnings, maintained relations with Helsinki until June 1944 and never declared war on Finland.