The Lapland War begins

On the night of 14–15 September 1944 German warships with troops on board approached the island of Suursaari – the Russian Gogland – in the middle of the Gulf of Finland. A German officer demanded that the Finnish garrison surrender the island. When the Finns refused, the landing began, and at 12.55 a.m. Finnish gunners opened fire on their former allies. That same day the deadline by which German troops were to leave Finland expired. This day is regarded as the start of the Lapland War, the last of Finland’s three wars during the Second World War. In March 1945 the Finnish government officially declared that a state of war with Germany had existed since 15 September 1944. Neither side ever made a formal declaration of war.

The German Twentieth Mountain Army had begun its retreat under the long-prepared Birke plan as early as the beginning of September, after Finland had ceased fire and broken off relations with the Reich – on 4 September, according to Finnish accounts. 15 September marks something else: the end of the ultimatum and the first armed clash between Finns and Germans.

The Germans in Lapland

German troops had been stationed in northern Finland since June 1941. From there Operation Silver Fox (Silberfuchs) had set out to capture Murmansk and cut the Murmansk railway, but it had bogged down in the tundra. For the next three years the front in the far north barely moved. Above all, the Germans guarded the nickel mines in the Petsamo area, nickel being indispensable to the armaments industry. The forces in Lapland, from 1942 the Twentieth Mountain Army, numbered some 214,000 soldiers in the autumn of 1944, including SS units, together with tens of thousands of horses and mules. Their rear services, depots, hospitals and airfields were scattered across the whole of northern and central Finland, as far as Oulu on the Gulf of Bothnia.

The German high command had reckoned with Finland leaving the war since mid-1943. It was then that work began on extending the roads from northern Norway into Lapland, largely by prisoners of war, among whom the death rate was high. On 9 April 1944 the retreat plan was given the name Birke (“Birch”). It provided for the withdrawal of the troops to a prepared line in northern Lapland covering Petsamo, and for the gradual destruction of roads and bridges behind them. On 23 June 1944 the army’s commander, Colonel General Eduard Dietl, who was popular among the Finns, was killed in an air crash. He was succeeded by Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, an Austrian with experience of anti-partisan warfare in the Balkans.

A retreat by tacit agreement

When on 2 September Finland notified the Reich that it was breaking off relations and demanded the withdrawal of German troops by 15 September, Adolf Hitler at first ordered the seizure of Finnish merchant ships. The Finns responded by suspending sailings to Germany, which threatened the shipment of German equipment, so the order was quickly rescinded and Finnish ships began helping with the evacuation. Both sides wanted to avoid fighting. The Finns did not want their north turned into a battlefield; the Germans needed time to get their men and supplies out.

The Germans withdrew from southern and central Finland on time. They could not leave Lapland in a few days, and the Finnish general staff had known this from the start. On 11 September talks began in Rovaniemi between Lieutenant Colonel Usko Haahti, the envoy of Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, President and Commander-in-Chief, and the chief of staff of the Twentieth Mountain Army, General Hermann Hölter. According to Finnish accounts, it was agreed that the Finns would give the Germans 26 locomotives and 700 wagons, that the Germans would surrender Oulu and the line of the Oulujoki river without a fight by 15 September, and that thereafter they would keep the Finns informed of the timetable of their retreat. Finnish units moved into the evacuated areas on the heels of the German rearguards. On 14 September they entered Oulu, where the Germans had left more than a hundred wagons of supplies and a harbour full of goods.

In Finland this unofficial arrangement later came to be called the “autumn manoeuvres”. The Germans blew up bridges and roads behind them, which the Finns could not prevent. The Soviet side watched the retreat closely and soon noticed that there was no real fighting.

The landing on Suursaari

In the Gulf of Finland the Germans acted differently. Suursaari, together with the minefields, barred the way for the Soviet Baltic Fleet from Kronstadt into the Baltic. For the Kriegsmarine its loss meant that this route would be opened, and for the German troops in Estonia a threat from the sea. The plan to seize the island, called Tanne Ost (“Fir East”), had been prepared in the summer together with Birke. A parallel plan to seize the Åland Islands (Tanne West) was dropped, partly because of warnings from Sweden. Hitler gave the order to carry out Tanne Ost after the Finnish decision of 2 September.

On 14 September the first wave, some 1,400 soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine, was embarked at Tallinn. According to German intelligence, the Finns were expected to hand over the island without a fight. Around midnight a German minesweeper entered the harbour on the east coast and called on the garrison to surrender. When the commander of the Finnish coastal artillery regiment refused, the Germans began landing troops. At 12.55 a.m. on 15 September the first shots were fired.

The landing was only partly successful. The Finns pinned the Germans down in beachheads on the east and north coasts, and towards morning Finnish torpedo boats attacked the support ships and sank the motor minesweeper R-29. During the fighting, according to Finnish figures, 36 Soviet aircraft appeared over the island and attacked the German vessels. Under this pressure the Germans abandoned plans to send further waves and withdrew their ships to Tallinn, leaving the men on the island cut off. According to Finnish figures, 1,231 Germans were taken prisoner, including 175 wounded, and 153 were killed. The Finns lost 36 killed, 67 wounded and 8 missing.

That same day a Finnish battery on the island of Utö, at the entrance to the Turku archipelago, stopped German net-layers that were trying to put out into the Baltic and which the Finns had orders to intern. The next day the cruiser Prinz Eugen appeared off Utö with five destroyers and threatened to open fire from beyond the range of the Finnish guns. To avoid bloodshed, the Finns let the German ships through. Even earlier, on 14 September, the Germans had begun laying mines in Finnish shipping lanes, warning the Finns in advance. After the fighting for Suursaari Finland withdrew its ships from the evacuation of German equipment, although the retreat of the land forces in Lapland continued according to the agreed timetable. The last German convoy left the Finnish port of Kemi on 21 September.

For the Finns the fight for Suursaari had one further significance. At a time when armistice talks were under way, it showed Moscow that Finland was prepared to take up arms against the Germans.

From collusion to combat

Moscow had no intention of tolerating the “autumn manoeuvres” for long. The armistice signed on 19 September obliged Finland to disarm the German troops and hand them over to the USSR as prisoners, and at the same time to demobilise its army to peacetime strength within two and a half months. The Finns thus had to wage a campaign against an experienced army while sending most of their own soldiers home. Compliance with these terms was supervised by the Allied Control Commission, whose first Soviet members arrived in Helsinki on 22 September.

On 27 September command of the forces sent north – III Corps, with three infantry divisions and the Armoured Division – was taken over by Lieutenant General Hjalmar Siilasvuo, the hero of the Battle of Suomussalmi in the Winter War. He immediately broke off all contact with the German staff. On 28 September the first clash on land took place near Pudasjärvi: the Finnish vanguard called on the German rearguard to surrender and then opened fire. The next day the Germans blew up the bridge over the Olhava river, killing among others the commander of a Finnish company that was trying to clear it of mines. On 29 September representatives of the Control Commission demanded detailed plans of attack at headquarters in Mikkeli, and on 30 September the Finnish government received a letter demanding the start of real operations, under threat of the occupation of the country.

The heaviest fighting began on 1 October with the landing of Finnish troops at the port of Tornio on the Gulf of Bothnia, on the border with Sweden. After the clashes in the Tornio valley Rendulic issued orders to destroy everything that might be of use to the enemy. In mid-October German engineers blew up the government buildings in Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, and the resulting fire consumed most of the town. The scorched-earth retreat destroyed, according to Finnish estimates, some 40–46 per cent of the buildings in Lapland, hundreds of bridges and thousands of kilometres of roads. The civilian population, about 100,000 people, had been evacuated beforehand to the south of the country and to Sweden. Clearing the region of mines took decades.

In November the Twentieth Mountain Army withdrew to a fortified line in north-western Lapland and in Norway, on the Lyngen fjord. In the north-east, in the Petsamo area, it had been attacked in October by the troops of the Soviet Karelian Front under General of the Army Kirill Meretskov. The Finnish army was demobilised at the end of 1944, and the last battles were fought mostly by the youngest conscripts, which in Finland was bitterly called the “children’s crusade”. The last German soldiers left Finland on 27 April 1945. A Finnish patrol then planted a flag on the Three-Country Cairn, where Finland, Sweden and Norway meet.

Significance

According to Finnish figures, the Lapland War cost the Finns 774 killed, 262 missing and about 2,900 wounded, and the Germans about a thousand killed and two thousand wounded. Some 1,300 German prisoners were handed over to the Soviet Union in accordance with the armistice. Militarily it was a secondary campaign: the Germans succeeded in extracting most of an army of more than 200,000 men from Lapland together with its equipment, which the American historian Earl F. Ziemke considered a retreat without precedent in Arctic winter conditions.

Politically, however, it meant a great deal to Finland. By fighting its former ally the country fulfilled the most difficult condition of the armistice and deprived Moscow of a pretext for bringing the Red Army onto its territory. The price was the destruction of the north, whose reconstruction lasted into the 1950s, and the bitterness of parting from an army alongside which the Finns had fought for three years. At the same time, on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, the Red Army was opening the Baltic offensive, as a result of which the Germans lost Tallinn, the port from which the Suursaari landing had set out.