Finland goes to war with the USSR

Early on the morning of 25 June 1941, at about four o’clock, hundreds of Soviet aircraft appeared over Finland. Throughout the day, in waves, they bombed airfields, ports, railway junctions and towns from the Gulf of Finland to Lapland: the Helsinki area with Malmi airfield, Turku, Kotka, Heinola, Lahti, Joensuu, Lappeenranta, Porvoo, Rovaniemi and a dozen or so other places. At the same time Soviet artillery opened fire on the border and from the base at Hanko. In the evening Prime Minister Johan Wilhelm Rangell announced in the Eduskunta, the Finnish parliament, that the Soviet Union had opened hostilities against Finland and that Finland was defending itself with all the military means at its disposal. Parliament unanimously gave the government a vote of confidence. The war that the Finns called the Continuation War (Finnish: jatkosota) had begun.

Many chronologies of the war state that on this day the Soviet Union bombed Helsinki and Finland declared a state of war. Both statements need qualifying. The capital was among the targets and five air-raid alerts were sounded there that day, but the bombs fell mainly on Malmi airfield and the suburbs of Tikkurila and Puistola, while Turku, Kotka, Heinola and Lappeenranta suffered the heaviest damage. Nor did Finland declare war on the USSR in the formal sense. The government merely stated that as a result of the Soviet attack the country found itself in a state of defensive war, and it held to that formula for the next three years.

Three days of ambiguous neutrality

Finland, which had been mobilising its army since 9 June in agreement with Germany, announced on the morning of 22 June, when the Reich attacked the Soviet Union, that it remained neutral. Its territory, however, was already serving the German war. On the evening of 21 June German minelayers hidden in the Finnish skerries laid two large minefields across the Gulf of Finland. During the night German bombers from East Prussia, which had mined the port of Leningrad and the Neva, flew over southern Finland and refuelled at the Finnish airfield of Utti on their way back. On the morning of 22 June Finnish submarines were laying mines off the coast of Soviet-occupied Estonia, and the Finnish navy carried troops to the demilitarised Åland Islands and arrested the staff of the Soviet consulate there. The Finnish historian Mauno Jokipii judged this operation, coordinated with the German invasion, to be a deliberate breach of the Åland convention. In the north, German mountain divisions were entering Petsamo from Norway, and several tens of thousands of soldiers of the Army of Norway were already stationed in Lapland.

The first shots were fired on 22 June itself. At 6.05 a.m. Soviet bombers attacked Finnish ships sailing to the Åland Islands, without causing damage, and the batteries at Hanko shelled the nearby islands. Moscow, however, hesitated to open a new front. That same morning the People’s Commissar of Defence ordered that Finland and Romania were not to be attacked until further notice. The Finns did not return fire, and Finnish and German troops in the north were forbidden to cross the border. In his proclamation of 22 June, however, Hitler said that in the north German soldiers stood “in alliance” with Finnish freedom fighters, and the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels repeated on the radio that Germany was fighting together with Finland. For Helsinki, which was assuring the world of its neutrality, these were awkward words. On 24 June the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told the House of Commons that Finland was neutral.

On the evening of 23 June Vyacheslav Molotov demanded that the Finnish government state clearly its attitude to the German–Soviet war. According to Finnish accounts, the reply could not get through because communications between Moscow and Helsinki had already been cut. On 24 June the Soviet legation in Helsinki began preparing to leave. By then there had been exchanges of fire between patrols on the border, and reconnaissance aircraft of all three sides were circling over the frontier zone.

The air raids of 25 June

On the morning of 25 June the air forces of the Northern Front under General Alexander Novikov, supported by the air arm of the Baltic Fleet, began an operation whose targets, according to Soviet orders, were to be the airfields in Finland on which German aircraft were or could be based. The figures vary from source to source. According to Western and Finnish studies, between about 460 and 487 aircraft took part in the first day’s raids, among them, according to Russian authors, 263 bombers, which attacked 18 or 19 airfields and a dozen or so towns, dropping more than a thousand bombs. The operation lasted until 30 June and covered 39 airfields in all.

Militarily it achieved little. Soviet intelligence was poor and the bombing inaccurate, so many bombs fell on built-up areas, ports and industrial plants. According to historians, German aircraft and units were present at only two of the places attacked at the time of the raids, Rovaniemi and Petsamo, while the heaviest blows fell on the south of the country and on airfields where there were no Germans. In Turku a block of wooden houses burned down, the port area was ablaze, and the medieval castle was damaged; its restoration took until 1961. According to later findings, 13 people were killed there and 29 wounded. In Heinola, where the bombers searched for a non-existent airfield and finally bombed the railway station, a dozen or so houses were destroyed and eight people killed. In Kotka fires engulfed the Enso-Gutzeit works and timber yards. Overall civilian losses were relatively small given the scale of the raids, but the impression they made was enormous. The Finnish war communiqué of 26 June spoke of 23 aircraft shot down. According to later calculations by Finnish researchers, the Soviet air force lost 26 machines that day, including 24 SB-2 bombers, while the Finnish air force lost none. Novikov wrote in his memoirs that 41 enemy aircraft had been destroyed on the first day.

The purpose of the raids remains a matter of dispute. The Soviet side presented them as a pre-emptive strike against the bases of German aircraft that were already operating against the USSR from Finnish territory, and in later Soviet historiography the raid itself was passed over in silence or called “alleged”. Finnish politicians and historians point out that in Turku, for example, the targets reconnoitred in advance included the power station, the port and the docks as well as the airfield, and they consider that the towns themselves were the targets. Western historians generally judge the operation to have been militarily ineffective and a serious political mistake that gave the Finnish leaders what they needed: the chance to enter the war as the victim of aggression.

Rangell’s statement

A sitting of parliament had been called for 25 June in advance. According to the memoirs of Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the prime minister was to have made a statement there on Finland’s neutrality in the German–Soviet war. After the raids Rangell informed the deputies that since that morning Finland had been the target of an attack by the USSR, which had opened hostilities against it, and that the country had therefore “taken up its defence with all the military means at its disposal”. The Eduskunta adopted the statement without a dissenting vote. In the evening Rangell repeated on the radio that Finland was once again at war with the Soviet Union. That same day in Sweden the government agreed to the passage of a German division from Norway to Finland, justifying the exception precisely by the situation of its Finnish neighbour.

The British historian David Kirby observes that the formula of a defensive war was intended above all for Finnish public opinion. Abroad, Finland was in any case regarded as a country that had taken Germany’s side. For the Finns themselves, who remembered the recent Soviet bombing of the Winter War, the raids of 25 June were nonetheless confirmation that the enemy had once again attacked their country. The mobilisation, the talks with the Germans and the German troops in Lapland remained unknown or obscure to most of society.

Ryti’s speech

On 26 June President Risto Ryti made a radio speech in which he called the new war Finland’s second war of defence. He said that the peace-loving Finnish nation had once again become the target of a brutal attack by its age-old enemy, but that this time it had at its side the armed forces of the Reich under the command of “the brilliant leader, Reich Chancellor Hitler”. He assured his listeners that the Finns felt no hatred towards the peoples of the Soviet Union, who had suffered much, but that they need not grieve that Molotov and his comrades were falling victim to their own “jackal policy”. Ryti also claimed that in Berlin in November 1940 Molotov had sought German consent to destroy Finland and that Adolf Hitler had prevented it. This version came from Hitler’s proclamation of 22 June. According to the German record of the Berlin talks, Molotov did not ask outright for consent to a war or an annexation, but demanded the withdrawal of the Germans from Finland and a free hand in the “Finnish question”, comparing its settlement to that of Bessarabia. Ryti’s words about Hitler were held against him after the war.

Finland concluded no formal alliance with the Reich. It did not join the Tripartite Pact, and its leaders spoke of the Germans as “brothers-in-arms” and of themselves as a “co-belligerent” waging a separate war against the USSR for its own ends. For Hitler the distinction was of no importance. The peace treaty of 1947 called Finland an ally of Hitlerite Germany, and in a survey conducted in 2008 by the daily Helsingin Sanomat, 16 of 28 Finnish historians answered that Finland had been an ally of the Third Reich, six said it had not, and six took no position.

The Continuation War

The name the Finns adopted said everything about how they understood the new war: as a continuation of the Winter War, cut short by the imposed Moscow Peace, and as an opportunity to right the wrong of March 1940. Society, which a year and a half earlier had united in defence of the country, supported it almost unanimously, from the right to the Social Democrats, and the press of both camps wrote of a struggle against Bolshevism. In Soviet and Russian historiography the fighting against Finland in 1941–1944 is not a separate war but part of the Great Patriotic War, and in Soviet times people spoke of the “Finnish fascist invaders”.

The government and General Headquarters gave assurances that Finland was fighting only to recover what it had lost. Some leaders and right-wing circles, such as the Academic Karelia Society, nevertheless dreamed of a Greater Finland that would include Soviet East Karelia, which the Finns had never ruled. The troops did not go over to the offensive at once. Until midnight on 28 June Finnish units were not allowed to cross the border, and Mannerheim waited for the Germans to advance in the Baltic states. At Hanko, where more than 25,000 Soviet troops were stationed, the Finns sealed off the peninsula from the landward side, beginning a six-month siege of the base.

Its place in the war

On 25 June 1941 Finland, the only parliamentary democracy to fight on the side of the Reich, entered the war in the East. Its participation meant that the German–Soviet war extended along the whole belt from the Black Sea to the Barents Sea. On 29 June German and Finnish troops launched an offensive in the far north towards Murmansk and the Murmansk railway, and on 10 July the Army of Karelia began its offensive north of Lake Ladoga. Mannerheim then issued an order of the day recalling his oath of 1918 not to sheathe his sword until East Karelia was free. At the end of August the Finns recaptured Viipuri (Vyborg); at the beginning of September they reached the old frontier on the Karelian Isthmus and halted there, but east of Lake Ladoga they took Petrozavodsk and stood on the Svir, closing the ring of the blockade around Leningrad from the north.

For Finland the war meant a break with the West. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with it on 1 August and declared war on it on 6 December 1941. The United States maintained relations until 1944. From 1942 the front settled into positional warfare. In June 1944 the Red Army broke through the Finnish defences on the Karelian Isthmus and took Viipuri, and on 19 September 1944 Finland signed an armistice in Moscow that restored the 1940 frontier, ceded Petsamo to the USSR and, in place of Hanko, leased to it the Porkkala peninsula near Helsinki. The Continuation War cost Finland more than 60,000 dead and missing. After the war Ryti, Rangell and six other politicians were convicted in the war-responsibility trials, and the question of whether Finland was drawn into the war in June 1941 or chose it of its own accord still divides its historians.