The evacuation of Hanko

On the evening of 2 December 1941 the last Soviet ships left the harbour of Hanko, the southernmost town in Finland. At 9.30 p.m. the largest convoy of the whole operation put to sea, led by the big transport Iosif Stalin, with 5,589 soldiers crammed aboard, and shortly before midnight the motor torpedo boats carrying the base staff cast off from the quay. Behind them they left demolished batteries, mined roads and a deserted town. That same night the Soviet garrison sailed away from the Estonian island of Osmussaar, at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. So ended the 164-day defence of a base that the Soviet Union had extorted from the Finns eighteen months earlier, and with it the Soviet Union lost its last outposts at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. A few hours later, in the minefields off the Estonian coast, one of the worst maritime disasters of the war in the Baltic unfolded.

War chronologies record under 2–3 December that the last Soviet outposts in Estonia (Osmussaar) and Finland (Hanko) were evacuated to Kronstadt. This is true, but not the whole story. The evacuation of Hanko was not a single operation: it had been under way since 26 October (some Western studies date it from as early as mid-October), and the men were not carried directly to Kronstadt. The convoys sailed first to the island of Gogland in the eastern part of the gulf, from where the soldiers were taken on to Kronstadt and Leningrad until as late as 27 December, across a sea that was already freezing over.

A base on leased land

Hanko had been one of the demands with which Moscow opened negotiations with Finland in October 1939. The Finns refused, and after the Winter War the Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940 leased the Hanko peninsula and the surrounding islands to the USSR for thirty years. The inhabitants were given ten days to leave their homes. Together with the bases in Estonia, the Soviet base was meant to close the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and guard the distant approaches to Leningrad. In practice it became above all a land fortress. According to Russian figures, some 25,300 troops were stationed there in June 1941, among them Colonel Nikolai Simonyak’s 8th Rifle Brigade, coastal artillery including 305 mm and 180 mm railway guns, tanks and a fighter squadron. The base was commanded by Major General (from September Lieutenant General of the coastal service) Sergei Kabanov.

After Finland entered the war in June 1941, the Finns sealed the peninsula off from the landward side along the Harparskog line, fortified in peacetime. The German Barbarossa directive envisaged that the Finns would take Hanko, but Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim never gave the order to storm it. After several failed attacks in early July both sides settled into positional warfare: daily artillery duels, in which, according to Russian figures, between two and six thousand shells a day fell on the base, and bloody fighting for the surrounding skerries. Soviet landing parties seized more than a dozen islands, but an attack on the lighthouse island of Bengtskär on 26 July ended in disaster. In mid-July most of the Finnish 17th Division left for Karelia, and its place was taken by the Swedish-speaking 55th Infantry Regiment, reinforced in August by the Swedish Volunteer Battalion, made up of volunteers from the Kingdom of Sweden.

Both sides also waged a propaganda war. On 7 October Finnish loudspeakers broadcast across the front line an appeal from Mannerheim, who called the defenders “brave” and urged them to surrender, since their situation was hopeless. The reply was an abusive leaflet in the spirit of the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ letter to the Sultan, entitled “The Reply of the Defenders of Hanko to Baron Mannerheim” and dated 10 October. Its text was written by the young poet Mikhail Dudin, and in November it was reprinted by the Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The decision to evacuate

The base lost its purpose as Army Group North advanced through the Baltic states. As early as August Kabanov wrote to fleet headquarters that Hanko was not a naval base but an encircled garrison, and proposed moving its troops to Tallinn. At the end of August, as the Baltic Fleet abandoned Tallinn, the Stavka ordered the evacuation of the Estonian islands and Hanko as well, but after the losses suffered on the way to Kronstadt the fleet lacked the strength to do it. In October the Germans took the Estonian islands, and boats from Hanko managed to rescue only a few hundred defenders from Hiiumaa. Winter was approaching. A frozen sea would open the way for the Finns to attack from every direction, and the ice would cut the garrison off from supplies. On 23 October 1941 the Stavka decided to evacuate Hanko and use its troops in the defence of besieged Leningrad.

The task fell to the Baltic Fleet under Vice Admiral Vladimir Tributs. From Gogland to Hanko was more than two hundred nautical miles through waters in which the Germans and Finns had laid thousands of mines since August. The fleet was short of minesweepers, and the whole of Hanko harbour was visible from Finnish positions, so the evacuation could not be concealed. Tributs decided to take the garrison off in instalments: first with smaller groups of ships, and finally in one great convoy. The fleet was also to bring away as much food as possible, which was priceless in starving Leningrad.

The November convoys

The first group, under Vice Admiral Valentin Drozd, with the minelayer Marti and two destroyers, reached Hanko on 2 November and brought 4,231 soldiers back to Leningrad without loss. Each subsequent voyage cost more. On the night of 4–5 November the destroyer Smetlivy sank on mines off the Juminda peninsula, taking with her, according to Russian figures, about 110 sailors and 233 soldiers from Hanko. On 12 November, on the return leg of an unsuccessful run, the hospital ship Andrei Zhdanov went down. On the night of 13–14 November the fourth group lost the destroyers Surovy and Gordy, a minesweeper, a launch and two submarines to mines, and only the minelayer Ural reached Hanko. The captain of Gordy, Yevgeny Efet, went down with his ship.

In the second half of November the fleet changed its tactics. Slow minesweepers and merchant ships sailed on moonless nights along a northern route close to the Finnish coast, where there were fewer mines. There were still losses: on 22 November the minesweeper Menzhinsky and the netlayer Azimut sank on mines with almost six hundred men. But Ural brought out 3,406 soldiers, and later groups some two and a half thousand each. By the end of November about 12,000 men remained at Hanko. They were to leave in a single voyage, since an ever smaller garrison might not be able to beat off an attack. On 30 November the last great convoy arrived at Hanko: two destroyers, six minesweepers and the turbo-electric passenger ship Iosif Stalin, built in the Netherlands for the Leningrad–London line and used by the fleet since the beginning of the war as the military transport VT-521. On 1 December, near the island of Jussarö, a group of slow ships fought a brief skirmish with Finnish and German warships that had come out to look for it.

During the last days the defenders destroyed everything they could not take with them. The coastal artillery fired off its remaining shells at Finnish positions, after which the guns were blown up, including the giant 305 mm railway guns. Weapons, ammunition, food and even coal and fuel oil were loaded onto the ships, small craft were scuttled in the harbour, and on 2 December the aircraft flew off to Kronstadt. Covering detachments stayed in position to the last, while sappers mined the roads behind them.

The loss of the Iosif Stalin

Drozd’s convoy left Hanko at 9.30 p.m. on 2 December. As it entered a German minefield north-west of the island of Naissaar, off Tallinn, mines began to explode in the sweeps, and the convoy commander ordered a change of course – a highly risky manoeuvre in a minefield. At about 1.15 a.m. on 3 December a mine exploded in the paravane of the Iosif Stalin and jammed her rudder, and the ship strayed out of the swept channel. Within a quarter of an hour two more mines exploded against her sides, tearing off her stern and flooding the holds. The ship did not sink but drifted across the minefield, while men, packed a platoon at a time into cabins meant for three passengers, died in the flooded compartments. At about 3.30 a.m. there was a fourth explosion: another mine or, according to some witnesses, a shell from a coastal battery (sources point either to a Finnish battery on the island of Mäkiluoto or to a German battery). It set off the ammunition in one of the holds. Hundreds were killed and panic broke out on deck.

Minesweepers and launches, risking the mines themselves, took men off the deck and pulled them out of the icy water until morning, when, overloaded, they made for Gogland. According to Russian tallies they rescued 1,740 people (other figures give 1,810). Rescue groups sent from Gogland failed to reach the wreck, driven back by mines and a storm. The ship’s master, Nikolai Stepanov, stayed aboard to the end. The wreck drifted for several more days towards the Estonian coast, where German vessels took off the survivors and delivered them to a prisoner-of-war camp at Paldiski. The number of victims cannot be established today. Russian studies state that 3,849 of the people aboard the Iosif Stalin were killed or taken prisoner, and that, by various estimates, between one thousand and about three thousand of them fell into captivity. Reports drawn up by brigade headquarters in December gave different, lower figures for those lost. Captain Stepanov, taken prisoner, later worked in the port of Tallinn; according to Russian publications he was shot by the NKVD after the Red Army returned in 1944.

The rest of the convoy reached Gogland on 3 December. A slower group, which had left Hanko earlier, lost the patrol vessel Virsaitis to mines. Before midnight on 2 December the last launches carrying the base staff and a demolition party left the harbour and reached Gogland without loss. In the same hours the garrison of Osmussaar, the last scrap of Estonia in Soviet hands, abandoned its post. The island’s independent artillery battalion and a construction battalion had defended it since the summer, and before leaving they blew up the guns and sank the turrets and the command post. A few days later the Germans landed on the island.

The Finns return to Hanko

On the evening of 2 December Finnish patrols crossed the front line out of curiosity and found the trenches empty. On 3 December it was confirmed that the Russians had gone. A detachment with sappers was sent onto the peninsula, which was full of mines and booby traps. The first to reach Hanko was Captain Anders Grafström’s Swedish volunteer company, which marched all night on foot between the mined roads in fifteen degrees of frost. At 6.25 a.m. on 4 December 1941 its leading element stood in the market square of the ruined town, and at eight o’clock the Swedes hoisted the Finnish flag. A Finnish patrol boat arrived half an hour later, and its men hung a second flag on the church tower. Mannerheim later judged that this honour had rightly belonged to the volunteers from Sweden, and on 15 December he thanked the troops of the Hanko front at a parade at Harparskog.

On 6 December the Eduskunta, the Finnish parliament, voted to reincorporate into the state the territories lost in 1940 and declared the lease agreement void. The inhabitants of Hanko were allowed to return, but clearing the peninsula of mines took a long time, and of the base whose construction the Finns had so feared nothing remained but ruined fortifications.

Balance sheet and place in the war

According to Soviet tallies, in eleven voyages the fleet carried 27,809 people away from Hanko and Osmussaar, of whom 22,822 reached their destination. The remaining 4,987 – almost one in five – died at sea or were taken prisoner. Also evacuated were 26 tanks, several dozen guns, some 110,000 shells and 12,000 tonnes of food, which was priceless in hungry Leningrad. The fleet lost twenty vessels to mines and accidents, including three destroyers, four minesweepers and two large ships, and according to incomplete figures about 650 sailors from their crews were killed. The garrison itself lost 797 killed and 1,476 wounded during the five-month defence, while Finnish and Swedish losses, according to incomplete figures cited in Russian studies, amounted to 486 killed and missing.

Soviet historiography presented the defence of “Gangut” – as the Russians called Hanko after Peter the Great’s victory there in 1714 – as an epic of heroism, and for decades kept silent about the fate of the Iosif Stalin. The soldiers from Hanko were sent to the Leningrad Front: Simonyak’s brigade was expanded into the 136th Rifle Division, which in January 1943 took part in breaking the blockade of the city. For the Finns the Russian departure opened the coastal route to Helsinki and Kotka, until then threatened by the fire of Soviet batteries, and marked the end of the first, offensive phase of the Continuation War: in those same days Mannerheim halted the advance in East Karelia, and on 6 December Britain declared war on Finland. A Soviet base returned to the Finnish coast three years later. The armistice of 1944 gave the USSR not Hanko but the Porkkala peninsula near Helsinki, and its commander was the same Sergei Kabanov.