The fighting for Viipuri

At the beginning of March 1940 the Winter War reached the walls of Viipuri (Russian: Vyborg; Swedish: Viborg). Depending on the statistics used, it was the second or fourth largest city in Finland, with more than 70,000 inhabitants at the end of 1939, as well as the capital of Finnish Karelia and the most important port in the east of the country. After the breaching of the Mannerheim Line in February and the collapse of the intermediate position, the Finnish Army of the Isthmus fell back on 28 and 29 February to its last, rear line of defence, which ran through Viipuri. On 1 and 2 March Soviet divisions approached the outskirts of the city, and on 3 March attacks began on the Finnish positions around Viipuri itself and on the islands of Viipuri Bay. Over the next ten days the Red Army crossed the ice of the bay, seized footholds on its western shore and cut the road from Viipuri to Helsinki. The city itself, however, it did not take: when the guns fell silent at 11 a.m. Finnish time on 13 March, the Finns still held its centre and northern part.

The date

War chronologies record that on 3 March the Russians “began their attacks on Viipuri”. The date is a convention. Komandarm 1st Rank Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the North-Western Front, had issued the order to take the city as early as 26 February, and the first clashes in front of the rear line began while the Finns were still withdrawing to it. On 2 March Soviet infantry broke into the positions of the Finnish 3rd Division in the southern suburbs, and out in the bay attacked the islands of Teikarsaari and Uuraansaari. By 3 March fighting was raging along the whole front before the city: the Finns counter-attacked in the south without success and abandoned the islets in front of their positions, while on the bay a battle began that on the night of 3–4 March turned into a great advance across the ice. Russian studies date this last operation of the war, which they call the Vyborg operation, to 4–13 March; some Western ones to 2–13 March.

The rear line and Timoshenko’s plan

The Finnish rear line (Finnish: taka-asema) ran from the western shore of Viipuri Bay through Viipuri, Tammisuo and Tali to the Vuoksi river, and then along it as far as Taipale on Lake Ladoga. Work on fortifying it had begun only during the war and at the end of February it was far from finished. Between Viipuri and the Vuoksi there were trenches and wire entanglements, but hardly any concrete bunkers, and on the rocky islands and shores of the bay the soldiers could not even dig in. On the other hand, the ground around the city, cut up by water and hills, favoured the defenders more than the plains of the central Isthmus.

From 19 February the Army of the Isthmus was commanded by Lieutenant General Erik Heinrichs. Viipuri itself and its surroundings were defended by II Corps under Lieutenant General Harald Öhquist: the 3rd Division stood in the south and in the city, the 5th Division to its east near Tammisuo, and beyond that the newly arrived 23rd Division, made up largely of replacements and weaker than the others. Between Tali and the Vuoksi fought I Corps under Major General Taavetti Laatikainen, and on the Vuoksi and at Taipale III Corps under Major General Paavo Talvela. All the divisions were exhausted after a month of uninterrupted fighting; the battalions were at half strength and the artillery was short of shells.

The weakest spot was the bay itself. Until 18 February its shores had been covered by the navy, and the ice, made exceptionally thick by that winter’s frosts, could bear even tanks. On the orders of General Headquarters the Finns cut and blasted a wide channel in it as an anti-tank obstacle, but in the hard frost it froze over again within a few days. On 28 February the existing coastal sector was turned into the Coastal Group (Finnish: Rannikkoryhmä), to which most of the 4th Division, the fort garrisons and hastily dispatched battalions were subordinated from 1 March. Its commander was Major General Kurt Martti Wallenius, brought in from Lapland. He found chaos on arrival, with no staff, communications or artillery, and on 3 March, after a dispute with Öhquist and having fallen out of favour with Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, he lost his post. That day the group was taken over by the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Karl Lennart Oesch.

Timoshenko intended to take Viipuri both by frontal assault and by encirclement. The 7th Army of Komandarm 2nd Rank Kirill Meretskov was to strike directly at the city with 34th Rifle Corps from the south and 50th Corps from the east, through Tammisuo and Tali. At the same time 10th Rifle Corps and 28th Rifle Corps, formed from reserves, were to cross the ice of the bay to its western shore, cut the road from Viipuri to Hamina and Helsinki and come out in the defenders’ rear. In the east the 13th Army was to force the Vuoksi and outflank III Corps. According to Finnish studies, eight Soviet corps – some twenty divisions in all – attacked the rear line, supported by several tank brigades and by an air force that commanded the skies.

The battle on the ice

On the bay the Russians advanced from island to island. On the evening of 4 March 10th Corps took Uuraansaari with its small town and the old fortress of Trångsund (today Vysotsk), which guarded the port of Viipuri. In the west the divisions of 28th Corps occupied Teikarsaari, and a Finnish counter-attack on 4 March, despite initial success, broke down under the fire of tanks that had come across the ice onto its flank. Columns of infantry, artillery and supply trains moved over the open ice, often by night, under fire from Finnish batteries and raids by the few Finnish aircraft.

On 5 March the first Soviet units reached the mainland on the western shore of the bay, on the Vilaniemi peninsula in the municipality of Säkkijärvi. On 6 March the bridgehead was extended to the neighbouring Häränpäänniemi peninsula, and the 70th Rifle Division of Komdiv Mikhail Kirponos and the 86th Division crossed the ice from the islands to the mainland. A Finnish counter-attack by eight battalions on the night of 6–7 March failed to throw them back. There were no fortifications on the shore, and the defenders were battalions scraped together from various divisions, from Lapland and from replacement depots. According to various studies, the Russians cut the coastal road running west from Viipuri at some point between 6 and 9 March. Tanks and the motorised 173rd Division crossed into the bridgehead, and on 11 March the 7th Army command sent 3rd Cavalry Corps to Koivisto to exploit the success on the western shore.

Oesch’s Coastal Group, reinforced with the last reserves, nevertheless managed to halt the developing offensive. On 8–10 March the Finns abandoned the last islands, but on the mainland, a few kilometres from the shore, they held a continuous line. On 11 March the Russians broke through it in two places, among them on the little Vilajoki river, and on 12 March Finnish counter-attacks threw them back, on one sector right back onto the ice of the bay. The second Soviet corps, the 10th, failed for a whole week to reach the western shore and only on 11 and 12 March took the villages along the coast. On the day before the war ended, however, the situation on the bay was critical: Finnish headquarters had nothing left with which to stop another wave, and the road west that lay open to the Russians led towards Hamina, Kotka and on to Helsinki.

Before the city and on the canal

The direct assault on Viipuri made much slower progress. The city, bombed from the first day of the war, had been almost entirely burnt out in February, and most of its inhabitants had left earlier. In the ruins the 3rd Division, taken over on 2 March by Colonel Auno Kaila, held out. The 34th Corps of Komdiv Konstantin Pyadyshev attacked its positions for several days without success and suspended its offensive on 9 and 10 March. On 11 March a fresh order to take the city arrived from Moscow. The Soviet 7th Rifle Division then broke into the southern suburbs, as far as the racecourse and the districts of Kangasranta and Ristimäki, and the 95th Division into the Karjala district in the south-east. On the night of 12–13 March both divisions launched one more night assault. The Finns fell back to an auxiliary line on Patterinmäki hill, but the city centre, the northern part of the city and the ruins of the railway station remained in their hands.

East of the city the Finns used a weapon they had long prepared: water. At the beginning of March the locks of the Saimaa Canal, which links Lake Saimaa with Viipuri Bay, were opened, and the water flooded the area of lakes and marshes north of Tammisuo, near Tali and Juustila. Soviet soldiers of 50th Corps waded through the floodwater, in places waist-deep in icy water, and the tanks could not get through. The flood was not an absolute barrier, but it slowed the advance and forced the Russians to shift forces to other sectors. Even so, on 7–9 March Soviet divisions supported by the 13th and 20th Tank Brigades broke through the Finnish defences at Tali and reached Portinhoikka, where they were halted. Under hurricane artillery fire and tank attacks, panic was already breaking out in some Finnish units. The 5th Division at Tammisuo lost some of its strongpoints in the last days, but the line was not broken.

At the eastern end of the front, from the beginning of March the 13th Army attacked with at least six divisions on the Vuoksi at Äyräpää and Vuosalmi, held by the weakened Finnish 2nd and 21st Divisions. On 8–11 March the Russians managed to cross the river and establish a bridgehead about half a kilometre deep on the far bank. At Taipale the Finnish 7th Division, which had repelled the heaviest attacks in February, held most of its positions to the end, although here too in the last days the defence was close to collapse.

A race against time

The fighting at Viipuri ran in parallel with the peace talks. At the end of February the Finnish government had agreed to open negotiations on the basis of the Soviet terms, which covered the whole Karelian Isthmus including Viipuri, while in London and Paris an expedition was still being prepared that was to come to Finland’s aid through Norway and Sweden. For Moscow every day of fighting was a means of pressure, and the Red Army command, in accordance with the wishes of Joseph Stalin, kept repeating the order to take the city. On the Finnish side, losses by Finnish reckoning reached a thousand men a day, the artillery was short of ammunition and there were no reserves left. The commanders on the Isthmus warned that the front would hold for a few days at most. Mannerheim nevertheless ordered the rear line to be held at all costs, because the terms on which the war ended depended on it.

The order was carried out. When at 11 a.m. Finnish time on 13 March – noon Moscow time – the firing stopped along the whole front, the Red Army stood in the suburbs of Viipuri, on the western shore of the bay and beyond the Vuoksi, but nowhere had the Finnish lines been decisively broken. A quarter of an hour before the ceasefire, Soviet artillery opened a violent barrage on the Finnish positions. According to Finnish sources several hundred soldiers were killed or wounded. Russian historians admit that in two weeks of offensive the 7th and 13th Armies advanced between 15 and 35 kilometres in the fighting and failed to take the city whose capture had been the main objective of the operation. According to Russian accounts, at noon on 13 March Finnish soldiers climbed out of their trenches and showed their watches to the Red Army men as a sign that the war was over.

Place in the war

Viipuri was not taken by storm, yet it passed to the Soviet Union under the treaty signed in Moscow on 12 March. Within a few days of the ceasefire the Finnish troops withdrew behind the new border, and almost the entire population left the city and the whole of the ceded Isthmus. For the Finns the loss of Viipuri, more than any other, became the symbol of the injustice of the Moscow peace. Yet the few days’ defence of the city and the bay made it possible to end the war with an army that was still fighting rather than one that had capitulated.

For the Red Army the battle for the bay was the last act of a costly victory. The crossing of the corps over the ice showed that after the February reorganisation under Timoshenko it was capable of bold outflanking operations, but at the same time it failed in two weeks to take a ruined city defended by exhausted divisions. The 70th Division received the Order of Lenin for crossing the bay, and Kirponos, its commander, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. By June 1941 he was in command of the Kyiv Special Military District, and he was killed that September in the encirclement near Kyiv.

Viipuri changed hands twice more. In August 1941, during the Continuation War, Finnish troops recaptured the city and many of its inhabitants returned to their ruined homes. In June 1944 the Red Army took it again in a single day, and the peace of 1947 left Viipuri within the borders of the USSR. Its Finnish inhabitants were evacuated a second time, this time for good.