Operation Silberfuchs

At three in the morning on 29 June 1941, in thick fog and without air support, two German mountain divisions crossed the Finnish–Soviet border in the far north, east of Petsamo. General Eduard Dietl’s Mountain Corps Norway was to cross some 90 kilometres of Arctic tundra to Murmansk, the Soviet Union’s only ice-free port in the north, and cut it off from the world. It was the first day of the offensive under Operation Silberfuchs (Silver Fox), a joint German–Finnish expedition against Murmansk and the railway that linked it to the rest of the country. Two days later, on 1 July, the second arm of the pincers set off from Salla in central Lapland. Neither reached its objective. On a front where the Germans had counted on a march of a few days, almost nothing changed for the next three years.

Many chronologies of the war state that on 29 June Finnish and German troops launched Operation Arctic Fox. The name needs explaining. “Arctic Fox” is the English rendering of the German code name Polarfuchs, which designated the thrust from Salla towards Kandalaksha, and that began only on 1 July. What began on 29 June was Operation Platinfuchs (Platinum Fox), Dietl’s advance from the Petsamo area straight towards Murmansk. Finnish participation on that first day was modest: a Finnish border guard battalion from Ivalo operated alongside the Germans. Both operations were parts of a single plan, Silberfuchs, which is why 29 June, the first day of the offensive, is taken as the start of the whole.

Nickel, Murmansk and the Silver Fox plan

The far north had interested the Germans since the summer of 1940, long before the decision to invade the USSR. In the Petsamo area, which Finland had recovered after the Moscow Peace of March 1940 and which the Red Army had occupied during the Winter War, lay deposits of nickel, a raw material essential for the production of armour steel. They were the only significant source of the metal within reach of the Reich’s forces. As early as the autumn of 1940 the staff of the German forces in Norway was preparing a plan, code-named Renntier (Reindeer), to seize Petsamo in the event of a new Finnish–Soviet war. When in November 1940, during Molotov’s visit to Berlin, Moscow pressed for a free hand in Finland, Hitler replied that he needed Finnish nickel until the end of the war.

Directive No. 21 of 18 December 1940, the Barbarossa plan, provided for German forces from Norway to secure Petsamo and strike at the Murmansk railway. The order to carry out these tasks went to Colonel General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, Wehrmacht commander-in-chief in Norway and commander of the Army of Norway. His staff, headed by Colonel Erich Buschenhagen, completed a study code-named Silberfuchs on 27 January 1941. In the spring the plan took its final shape. It had three parts. Renntier meant the occupation of Petsamo by Mountain Corps Norway immediately after the outbreak of war. Platinfuchs was that corps’ advance along the Arctic Ocean coast towards Polyarny, the Soviet naval base at the mouth of Kola Bay, and on to Murmansk if the terrain and the situation allowed. Polarfuchs, the main thrust, was to be carried out by General der Kavallerie Hans Feige’s XXXVI Corps: it was to encircle the Soviet strongpoint at Salla, break through to Kandalaksha on the White Sea, cut the Murmansk railway there and advance north along it towards Murmansk. Still further south, Major General Hjalmar Siilasvuo’s Finnish III Corps was to reach the same railway line near Loukhi and Kem via Kiestinki (Kestenga) and Ukhta.

Murmansk was a target not only because of nickel. The Northern Fleet was based there and at nearby Polyarny, and the port, warmed by the last of the Gulf Stream, was open all year round. If Britain were ever to support Russia by sea, it would be by this route. The port was linked to Leningrad and the heart of the country by a single railway line, built during the First World War. Whoever cut it would cut Murmansk off from the rest of the USSR.

At talks in Salzburg on 25 May 1941 General Alfred Jodl told Finnish officers that Falkenhorst would command in the north and in central Finland, and Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim in the south, on the Ladoga front. The Finnish 6th Division was subordinated to XXXVI Corps, and on 15 June Siilasvuo’s entire III Corps passed under German command. In the far north, then, the war against the USSR was from the outset to be a German war, waged from Finnish territory and with the participation of Finnish units. The whole of this front came directly under the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), not the Army High Command, which was running Barbarossa. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, sarcastically called the operation an “expedition”, not really connected either with the main thrust east or with the Finnish plans in the south.

Forces and preparations

Assembling troops in the far north was an undertaking in its own right. Dietl’s corps, that is the 2nd and 3rd Mountain Divisions with their rear services, numbered about 27,500 men according to the American historian Earl Ziemke, author of a monograph on this theatre of war based on German records. Both divisions had been formed in Austria after the Anschluss and many Austrians served in them, and Dietl’s 3rd Division had fought at Narvik a year earlier. They were stationed around Kirkenes, at the very tip of occupied Norway; the last units of the 3rd Division arrived there only on 17 June. Supplies were to come by ship along the Norwegian coast or by lorry along the only road from Narvik, which in June, during the thaw, was impassable.

The main forces of XXXVI Corps were brought in by sea in two operations code-named Blaufuchs 1 and Blaufuchs 2. Between 5 and 14 June ships carried the 169th Infantry Division, some 20,000 men, together with the corps headquarters and corps troops, another 10,600, from Stettin and Oslo to the Finnish port of Oulu. From there they travelled by rail to Rovaniemi. Officially the aim was to relieve the garrisons in northern Norway, and the corps could not turn east towards the Soviet border before 18 June. From northern Norway, SS-Kampfgruppe Nord, some 8,000 strong, marched to Rovaniemi along the Arctic Highway; in June it was renamed the SS Division Nord. It had been formed in the spring from regiments of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, a formation that had until then performed guard and police duties. Its officers had had almost no combat training, its artillery had fired only once, and the march from Norway was so badly organised that it cost the divisional commander and his operations officer their posts. On 23 June the new commander reported that he could not take responsibility for sending these men into battle. The whole of XXXVI Corps, without the Finns assigned to it, numbered about 40,600 men.

Some 68,000 German soldiers were thus assembled in northern Finland, supported by a few dozen aircraft of the Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 5 from bases in Norway and Finland. More than twice as many German soldiers, about 150,000, remained in Norway. Adolf Hitler feared a British landing on the Norwegian coast and would not allow the garrisons there to be weakened. How many troops Dietl received was therefore determined by what could be spared from Norway, not by what the task required.

Facing them was the Soviet 14th Army of Lieutenant General Valerian Frolov, part of Lieutenant General Markian Popov’s Northern Front. On the Murmansk axis the 14th and 52nd Rifle Divisions held the line, supported by NKVD border guards and the ships of Admiral Arseniy Golovko’s Northern Fleet. At Salla, on land taken from Finland in 1940, stood the 122nd Rifle Division with tanks, and further units were in reserve, including the 104th Rifle Division and the 1st Tank Division. After fifteen months of Soviet presence the border at Salla was well fortified. South of Salla, facing Siilasvuo’s Finns, stood the 54th Rifle Division of the 7th Army.

22 June: Reindeer takes Petsamo

When on 22 June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Mountain Corps Norway carried out Operation Renntier without a fight. The 2nd Mountain Division occupied the area of Liinahamari and Petsamo, and the 3rd Mountain Division took up position to the south of it, around Luostari. Finland was at that point still formally neutral, although two German divisions already stood on its soil and two more were just entering it. That same day Falkenhorst’s staff set the dates for the offensive: Mountain Corps Norway on 29 June, the Finnish III Corps on 1 July at 2 a.m., and XXXVI Corps on 1 July at 4 p.m. Staggering the dates was meant to allow the few available aircraft to be concentrated over each sector in turn.

From 23 June German aircraft bombed Murmansk and Salla, and Soviet aircraft responded with raids on Petsamo, Rovaniemi and Kemijärvi. On 24 June the Finnish government agreed that German aircraft could take off from Finnish airfields for flights over the USSR, and that units of the Army of Norway could carry out reconnaissance across the border in the north. From the morning of 25 June Soviet aircraft bombed Malmi airfield near Helsinki, Turku and other Finnish towns and airfields, and that evening the government told parliament that Finland was at war. As early as 16 June the German liaison officer at Finnish headquarters, General Waldemar Erfurth, had reported that the Finns wanted to begin their offensive a few days after the start of Silberfuchs, so as to give their own public and parliament the impression that they had been drawn into the war by the course of events. The preparations, however, including the mobilisation and the reception of German divisions in the north, had been going on for weeks. On that same 25 June Sweden agreed to let the German 163rd Infantry Division pass through its territory from Norway to Finland.

29 June: roads that did not exist

Dietl’s plan was simple. The 2nd Mountain Division was to advance along the coast through Titovka and Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa towards Polyarny at the mouth of Kola Bay, and the 3rd Mountain Division south-east through Motovka towards Murmansk. One battalion was to seal off the isthmus leading to the Rybachy Peninsula, where Soviet batteries commanded the entrance to the Petsamo fjord. A few dozen kilometres to the south, the Finnish Ivalo Battalion was to stage a feint attack on the Lutto river to tie down Soviet forces there. According to accounts cited in German literature, Dietl announced that he would be in Murmansk in three days.

The offensive began at three in the morning on 29 June. The air force could not help, because the coast was shrouded in fog. In the first hours things went well: after three hours the 3rd Division was already crossing the Titovka river, and the 2nd Division was reporting progress. Before noon, however, it turned out that the roads marked on the German maps between the Titovka valley and Motovka, and on to Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa, did not exist at all. According to some accounts, the lines that German cartographers had taken for roads were in fact telegraph lines and the winter migration routes of the Sámi. The corps command concluded that it could not supply two divisions advancing along parallel routes through trackless tundra. That same day it halted the 3rd Division and ordered its main forces to turn back to the road and follow behind the 2nd Division. From then on the offensive was to proceed along a single route, towards the bridge over the Litsa river.

The terrain was exceptionally difficult. East of Petsamo stretched bare, rocky tundra, pitted with hollows, with hundreds of lakes, boulders and fields of scree. Even mountain troops covered no more than a kilometre an hour across it. Ammunition and food were carried on the backs of men and mules. It was the season of the midnight sun (PL): the sun did not set, and the boundary between day and night ceased to exist. It wore out the soldiers on both sides.

On 30 June one battalion of the 2nd Division took the settlement of Titovka, but the other two were stuck in heavy fighting at the neck of the Rybachy Peninsula, where the Russians were landing reinforcements from the sea under the cover of destroyer fire. On 1 July the first German battalion reached the western bank of the Litsa. There two regiments digging in beyond the river awaited the Germans. The Germans had expected mediocre troops, but, according to Ziemke, they found well-led soldiers who fought skilfully and with determination. The Russians had the upper hand in the air, because the few Luftwaffe aircraft had to shuttle between Dietl’s sector and Salla. The first three days showed everything that was to decide the fate of the operation: bad maps, poor reconnaissance, trackless terrain and an enemy stronger than expected.

1 July: Polarfuchs and the battle for Salla

Two days later the second arm of the pincers set off – the actual “Arctic Fox” (Polarfuchs). At 2 a.m. on 1 July the Finnish 6th Division crossed the border south of Salla in order to outflank the Soviet positions and get into their rear. At 4 p.m., after a ten-minute dive-bomber attack, the German 169th Infantry Division and the SS Division Nord advanced on Salla. The day was hot, the temperature above 30 degrees, swarms of mosquitoes hung over the forests, and artillery fire started forest fires that wreathed the battlefield in smoke.

The 169th Division’s frontal attack on the border fortifications broke down a few hundred metres from the border. The SS Division Nord did not withstand its first contact with the enemy: on the night of 1–2 July its men fell back in disorder past the corps headquarters, and the divisional staff knew the whereabouts of only two of its six battalions. On the morning of 4 July, after a false alarm about Soviet tanks, the withdrawal turned into panic; some vehicles were stopped only several dozen kilometres behind the front, and one SS man tried to persuade the commandant at Kemijärvi to blow up the bridge. Falkenhorst, with heavy irony, “congratulated” the divisional commander on the conduct of his men. To shore up the front at Salla a regiment had to be brought in from the 163rd Division, which was just then travelling through Sweden and was intended for Mannerheim. Halder remarked acidly that this proved how questionable the whole Murmansk expedition was.

Salla was taken after a week. On 6 July a German regiment broke into the settlement but was driven out. On the night of 7–8 July the 122nd Rifle Division withdrew east, leaving much of its artillery behind, and on 8 July the Germans entered Salla. The encirclement failed: most of the Soviet division escaped and manned the next defensive line at Kairala, between the lakes. The Finnish III Corps, advancing through the forests further south, was meanwhile making faster progress than the Germans.

Its place in the war

On the Litsa, Dietl’s offensive effectively came to an end. The bridgehead won on 6 July had to be abandoned after Soviet landings in Litsa Bay, a second attack in mid-July also stalled, and on 17 July Dietl reported that he could not accomplish his task with the forces at his disposal. A last attempt, made on 8 September with reinforcements from Norway, including an SS regiment untrained for Arctic warfare, broke down, and around 21 September the offensive was called off. According to Ziemke, the corps lost more than 10,000 killed, wounded and missing in this campaign and advanced roughly 25 kilometres. In the south, XXXVI Corps took Kairala and Alakurtti in August but was halted at the old Soviet border fortifications, far from Kandalaksha. Siilasvuo’s Finns took Kiestinki on 7 August and came within a few dozen kilometres of the railway, but on 17 November, under pressure from the United States, they broke off the offensive. The Murmansk railway was never cut, and the front in Lapland froze for three years.

The failure of this apparently secondary expedition had consequences far beyond the Arctic. Murmansk, together with Arkhangelsk, became the main destination port of the Allied Arctic convoys, which from August 1941 carried first British aid to the USSR and then deliveries under the American Lend-Lease programme. According to frequently cited estimates, roughly a quarter of all Western aid to the USSR arrived by the northern route. For Finland the operation was the first practical expression of its new brotherhood-in-arms with Germany: its troops in the north fought under German command, and on its soil stood a German headquarters from which Dietl’s Twentieth Mountain Army grew in 1942. That bond had to be broken in 1944. After the armistice with the USSR the Finns had to drive the Germans out of Lapland themselves in the Lapland War, and in October 1944 the Red Army, in the Petsamo–Kirkenes operation, broke through the front on the Litsa, took Petsamo with its nickel mines and entered northern Norway. Finland lost Petsamo, where the whole expedition had begun, for ever.