Mobilisation in Finland

On 9 June 1941 the Finnish General Headquarters of Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim issued the first mobilisation orders. Individual call-up papers went to the reservists of the covering troops – the units that in the event of war were to take up positions on the Soviet border and protect the later stages of mobilisation – and to parts of the anti-aircraft defence and the frontier guard. From 10 June the covering troops began moving into position. On 9 June, too, parliament – or rather its foreign affairs committee – was informed of the mobilisation for the first time. Its members complained that they were learning of matters of such weight after the event.

Popular chronologies speak of a mobilisation undertaken in case of a possible attack by the Soviet aggressor. That is how the authorities in Helsinki presented it at the time, and how most Finns, who a year and a half earlier had lived through the Soviet attack, remembered it. The picture needs to be completed, however. The mobilisation, its timing and the division of tasks had been agreed in secret staff talks with the Germans, who were preparing to attack the Soviet Union, and in the very week the Finnish call-ups began, tens of thousands of German soldiers were already arriving in the ports of the Gulf of Bothnia and on the roads of Lapland.

A peace that settled nothing

The Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940 had taken from Finland the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri (Vyborg), the northern shore of Lake Ladoga and scraps of territory in the north, and had leased the Hanko peninsula for thirty years to the Red Army, which stationed there, according to various estimates, from 25,000 to more than 30,000 troops. Some 420,000 people left the ceded lands. The Finns called the period that followed the “Interim Peace” (Finnish välirauha), and the name was no accident. Most of society regarded the treaty as a wrong to be righted at the first opportunity, and the government treated defence as the state’s first duty, spending nearly half the budget on it.

Moscow did not let Finland forget its presence. In June 1940, as the Red Army was occupying Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Soviet bombers shot down the Finnish airliner Kaleva over the Gulf of Finland. A few days later Molotov demanded for the USSR the concession for the nickel mines at Petsamo or a share in a joint company to work them. The deposits at Kolosjoki, regained by Finland after the Winter War (in December 1939 the Red Army had occupied Petsamo, but the treaty returned it), were held under concession by a Canadian-British company, and in the summer of 1940 the Finns promised 60 per cent of the output to the German concern IG Farben. Germany was counting on the Kolosjoki ore to cover its nickel needs for years to come. Then came demands for the demilitarisation of the Åland Islands and for the transit of Soviet troops by rail to Hanko, while the Soviet embassy in Helsinki backed the pro-communist Finland–USSR Peace and Friendship Society, whose demonstrations turned into riots. Ambassador Ivan Zotov reported to Moscow that Finland ought to be “finished off”.

In January 1941 the nickel dispute turned into a crisis. On 14 January the USSR halted grain deliveries to Finland, on 18 January it recalled Zotov, and on 21 January it demanded that the negotiations be concluded within two days. When Finnish intelligence spotted troop movements on the other side of the border, Mannerheim proposed a partial mobilisation on 23 January. President Risto Ryti and Prime Minister Johan Wilhelm Rangell refused. The crisis passed, but it strengthened the conviction in Helsinki that lasting peace with Moscow was impossible. In April Ryti told the US Minister that Finland would survive only if the Soviet Union were defeated.

From transit to staff talks

The only neighbour that could support Finland was now Germany. Sweden did not commit itself to an alliance, and plans for a defensive union of the two countries were torpedoed in December 1940 by both Moscow and Berlin. Germany, which during the Winter War had loyally kept to its pact with the USSR, changed course in the summer of 1940, when Adolf Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union. In August it agreed to sell arms to Finland, and in September it concluded an agreement with it on the transit of troops to northern Norway. On that basis German transports now travelled through Finnish ports and Lapland. In November, in Berlin, Vyacheslav Molotov demanded the withdrawal of the Germans from Finland and a free hand in the “Finnish question”, but Hitler replied that he did not want a new war in the Baltic.

Directive No. 21 of 18 December 1940 assumed that Finland would take part in the war: it was to cover the German troops brought over from Norway, tie down Soviet forces with an offensive on both sides of Lake Ladoga, and take Hanko. Military contacts began as early as December. In January 1941 Major General Paavo Talvela held talks in Berlin with the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, and with Hermann Göring, and at the turn of January and February the Finnish Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Erik Heinrichs, gave a lecture in Germany on the lessons of the Winter War and had a conversation with Halder about a possible war with the USSR, in which he gave the timetable of Finnish mobilisation. From February the chief of staff of the German army in Norway, Colonel Erich Buschenhagen, toured Lapland, and in May recruitment of Finnish volunteers for a Waffen-SS battalion began.

The decisive step came at the end of May. On 25 May a group of Finnish staff officers led by Heinrichs met the Chief of the OKW Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, in Salzburg, and he outlined to them the northern part of the plan of attack on the USSR. The Germans intended to strike from Petsamo towards Murmansk and from Salla towards Kandalaksha, to cut the Murmansk railway. The next day, at army headquarters, Halder went much further: he expected the Finns to field a strong strike group ready to attack on either the eastern or the western side of Lake Ladoga to link up with the German Army Group North. Heinrichs repeated that he had no authority to enter into any commitments, but mobilisation dates, communications with Finnish General Headquarters at Mikkeli and cooperation at sea were discussed.

On 30 May in Helsinki, Ryti, the Foreign Minister Rolf Witting, the Defence Minister General Rudolf Walden, Mannerheim, Heinrichs, Talvela and the Minister in Berlin, Toivo Kivimäki, accepted the results of the talks, on conditions: a guarantee of Finland’s independence, the borders from before the Winter War or better, continued grain deliveries, and that Finnish troops would not cross the border unless the USSR attacked. A second round of talks, with Colonel Buschenhagen and Colonel Eberhard Kinzel of the OKH, was held in Helsinki on 3–6 June. It was agreed that the area north of Oulu would be taken over by the Germans, to whom the Finns would subordinate two of their divisions there; that the Luftwaffe would be given the use of the airfields at Helsinki and Kemijärvi, and later also at Kemi and Rovaniemi; and that on the south-eastern border Finland would concentrate about six divisions for an offensive on both sides of Lake Ladoga. On 5 June Kinzel cabled Berlin that the Finns were ready to cooperate. On 6 June in Kiel it was agreed that once war broke out the Kriegsmarine and the Finnish navy would together mine the Gulf of Finland. It was also settled that Finnish mobilisation would begin around 15 June. The Germans did not tell the Finns the date of the attack itself.

The Finnish participants in these talks later stressed that they had been hypothetical and that Finland had committed itself to nothing. After the war Mannerheim wrote in his memoirs that genuine negotiations could be spoken of only from Buschenhagen’s visit in June, and then only on condition that Finland was attacked. Some of the arrangements were never put in writing. Decisions were taken by a narrow circle of politicians and soldiers around Ryti and Mannerheim, without the knowledge of most of the government and parliament.

9 June: the first call-ups

As previously agreed, the mobilisation went ahead in stages. The first step, on 9 June, concerned the covering troops, who were to absorb any first blow and gain time for calling up the rest of the army. Reservists were summoned individually, without public announcement, and the whole operation was presented as an exercise. The Finnish army had the experience of the autumn of 1939 behind it, when during the talks in Moscow it had mobilised under the name of “extraordinary reserve exercises” and was therefore standing on the border when the Red Army crossed it without a declaration of war on 30 November. This time, however, the haste was driven not by Soviet demands but by the German timetable.

The mobilisation did not proceed without hesitation. On 13 June the TASS agency published a communiqué in which Moscow insisted that rumours of an imminent war with Germany were fabrications. Since Berlin had not yet replied to the Finnish conditions of 30 May, Ryti and Mannerheim halted further steps. General Waldemar Erfurth, appointed on 11 June as German liaison officer at Finnish General Headquarters, reported to the OKW on 14 June that the Finns would not complete their mobilisation until their conditions had been accepted. That same day, however, the second stage began, covering the troops in the north of the country who were to fight under German command. On 15 June Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel sent word that Germany accepted the Finnish conditions. The same day Mannerheim placed General Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s Finnish III Corps under the German army in Lapland.

The Germans in Lapland

Meanwhile German troops were flowing through Finland, officially still under the transit agreement. On 7 June SS Battle Group Nord, numbering 8,000–9,000 men by Finnish count, set off southwards along the Arctic Highway from Kirkenes in occupied Norway; its column took ten hours to pass through Lapland. From 8 June transports carrying the 169th Infantry Division arrived from Stettin and Oslo at the ports of the Gulf of Bothnia, above all Oulu, and the division was taken on by rail to Rovaniemi. By mid-June, according to Finnish figures, some 40,000 German soldiers had gathered in the Rovaniemi area. On 15 June the headquarters of Army Norway moved there; its commander, Colonel General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, arrived a week later. Until 18 June the Germans were not allowed to move east of the Arctic Highway, so as not to betray their intentions; then they set off towards the border near Salla.

From 14 June German minelayers and motor torpedo boats put into Finnish ports and the hidden inlets of the skerries on the south coast, some of them under the guise of an official visit. That same day Britain, alarmed by the German presence, stopped shipping to Petsamo, Finland’s only port with access to the ocean. The mobilisation and the concentration of German troops could not escape Soviet intelligence, but Moscow did not react firmly. Since the spring it had softened its line towards Helsinki: it had sent the conciliatory Pavel Orlov (PL) as ambassador in place of Zotov, stopped objecting to Finnish-Swedish rapprochement and toned down its radio propaganda, yet it gave way on none of the disputed issues, neither nickel nor grain.

General mobilisation

On 17 June, two days later than had been assumed in the talks with the Germans, Defence Minister Walden ordered “extraordinary exercises” throughout the country. Call-up papers were delivered from 18 June, and a week later the mobilised army was ready for battle. According to various calculations, between 470,000 and more than 500,000 soldiers were under arms in fourteen divisions and three brigades. Counting the rear services, anti-aircraft defence and auxiliary formations, a considerable share of the adult men of a country of fewer than 4 million inhabitants put on uniform. On 17 June, according to some sources, Finnish General Headquarters learned that Germany would attack on 22 June. The German chief of staff gave Heinrichs formal notification on 21 June. On 18 June the yellow Eastern Front markings used on Luftwaffe aircraft began to be painted on Finnish air force planes, and from 19 June the Germans could refuel at Utti airfield in the Kymi valley. On 20 June the government ordered the evacuation of about 45,000 inhabitants of the border zone.

The army that Mannerheim now commanded was much stronger than in 1939. After the Winter War it had received weapons from Germany, Sweden, Italy and the United States; it had more artillery; and the air force numbered about 550 aircraft, roughly half of them combat machines. On the other side of the border stood the three armies of Lieutenant General Markian Popov’s Soviet Northern Front: the 23rd Army on the Karelian Isthmus, the 7th Army in Karelia by Lake Ladoga and the 14th Army on the sector from Murmansk to Salla. Finnish intelligence overestimated their strength, and the Soviet plans for a new war with Finland, prepared since the autumn of 1940, receded into the background once war with Germany became a reality.

Defensive or offensive?

The official version held that Finland was mobilising in defence against a possible attack and would remain neutral as long as no one attacked it. That is also what the public was told, and most of the reservists called up sincerely believed they were going to defend the borders against the Russians, who had attacked them once before. The Finnish condition of 30 May that operations should not be launched from Finnish territory before a Soviet attack was not a fiction: Helsinki was anxious to be seen as a victim, not a co-aggressor, and this proviso was of enormous importance for the country’s internal unity.

Finnish historians, however, have long challenged the picture of a country swept helplessly along by the current of great-power politics (the so-called driftwood theory). Mauno Jokipii showed in a study of 1987 that Finland’s entry into the war at Germany’s side was deliberately prepared by a narrow circle of political and military leaders, and Olli Vehviläinen stresses that Ryti and Mannerheim planned joint operations with the Germans under cover of an ambiguous neutrality, without formal agreements. Most historians also hold that, in the position in which Finland found itself – hemmed in between the Reich and the USSR – there was little real alternative. The mobilisation of 9 June was thus neither a mere precaution nor a declaration of war: Finland was putting its army on the border on a date set by someone else’s offensive, hoping to regain its lost lands without appearing as the aggressor.

Place in the war

On the night of 21–22 June German minelayers hidden in the Finnish skerries closed the Gulf of Finland, and German aircraft that had been mining the waters off Leningrad flew back through Finnish airspace and refuelled at Utti. On the morning of 22 June, as Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Finnish troops landed on the demilitarised Åland Islands, and Finnish submarines laid mines off the coast of Estonia. Helsinki declared its neutrality, while Hitler, in his proclamation of 22 June, spoke of German soldiers fighting “in alliance” with Finnish “freedom fighters”. Soviet aircraft and the batteries at Hanko opened fire that same day, and on 25 June the Soviet air force carried out massive raids on Finnish airfields and towns. In the evening Rangell’s government informed parliament that Finland was at war with the Soviet Union.

The army mobilised in June went over to the offensive at the turn of June and July – in Karelia by Lake Ladoga on 10 July – and at the end of August it recaptured Viipuri. It did not stop at the 1939 border: it occupied Soviet East Karelia and halted on the Svir river, while on the Karelian Isthmus its positions closed the ring around Leningrad from the north for three years. Finland never joined the Tripartite Pact and called itself a “co-belligerent” rather than an ally of the Reich, but for Moscow – and from December 1941 also for London, which declared war on it – it was an Axis country. The war that began with the call-ups of the covering troops on 9 June ended for Finland with the Moscow Armistice in September 1944, the loss of the lands regained in 1941 and of Petsamo, and, after the war, the trial of its leaders, among them Ryti and Rangell, accused of dragging the country into the war.