The Red Army takes Petsamo

On the evening of 2 December 1939, the third day of the Winter War, Soviet rifle regiments entered Petsamo, a settlement on the Petsamo fjord in Finland’s northernmost corner. The next day they took Luostari with its new airfield. The port of Liinahamari, Finland’s only harbour on the Arctic Ocean and ice-free all year round, was already in Soviet hands. The few Finnish units defending this wilderness blew up what they could, set fire to the villages and fell back south along the Arctic Highway, the only road linking Petsamo with the rest of the country. At this end of the front, in the darkness of the polar night, a few hundred Finns delayed the advance of two Soviet divisions for weeks.

Finland’s corridor to the Arctic Ocean

Petsamo – Pechenga in Russian – was awarded to Finland by the Treaty of Tartu of 14 October 1920, which ended the war with Soviet Russia. It was a long, narrow strip of tundra and forest tundra, covering more than 10,000 square kilometres, which gave Finland access to the Barents Sea and bordered Norway to the west and the USSR to the east. Few people lived there: fishermen, Finnish settlers and the Skolt Sámi, Orthodox fishermen and reindeer herders. In 1931 the Arctic Highway was completed, running across Lapland from the railway station at Rovaniemi to Liinahamari, and in November 1939 the airfield at Luostari was opened.

Petsamo’s most valuable asset, however, lay underground. In the 1920s rich deposits of nickel and copper were discovered there, and in 1934 the Finnish government granted a mining concession to the British company Mond Nickel, owned by the Canadian concern International Nickel. Its Finnish subsidiary, Petsamon Nikkeli, was building a mine, a smelter and a road to the port at Kolosjoki (today Nikel), but in 1939 mining had not yet begun. Nickel was a strategic raw material, essential for the production of armour steel, and Moscow, Berlin and London would soon be competing for the Petsamo deposits.

For the Soviet Union the region mattered for another reason too. The border here ran a few dozen kilometres from Murmansk, the most important Soviet port in the north and the base of the Northern Fleet, and the Finnish part of the Rybachy Peninsula commanded the entrance to the Kola Bay. Moscow feared that in the event of war Britain and France might land troops there.

The forces on both sides

On the Kola Peninsula stood the Soviet 14th Army of Komdiv Valerian Frolov. It had three divisions – the 104th Mountain Rifle Division of Kombrig Vladimir Shcherbakov and the 14th and 52nd Rifle Divisions – totalling, with artillery and support units, about 50,000 men. Most of these forces, however, were meant to defend the coast against a possible Allied landing, and only part of them took part in the fighting against the Finns. The army’s task was to take Petsamo and Liinahamari, cut Finland off from the Arctic Ocean and close the route for any help from the West, and then to push south towards Rovaniemi in support of the 9th Army, which was to cut Finland in two at its narrowest point.

Finland had nothing with which to defend so remote a corner. The main forces of its army stood on the Karelian Isthmus and in Karelia, more than a thousand kilometres to the south. At Petsamo, in the local training centre, two independent companies had been assembled in the autumn during the “extraordinary reserve exercises”, formed mainly from border guards, reservists from Lapland and members of the local Civil Guard, together with an independent battery of four 76 mm field guns dating from 1887, emplaced at Liinahamari. In all it amounted to a few hundred men, later just over nine hundred. Finnish plans assumed from the outset that the villages on the fjord would have to be given up and that the defence would begin only further inland. The units were initially subordinate to the North Finland Group, and from mid-December to the newly formed Lapland Group.

The fall of Petsamo

On the morning of 30 November Soviet troops crossed the border on the Rybachy Peninsula and on the mainland, supported from the sea by ships of the Northern Fleet. By the evening the Red Army had taken the Finnish parts of the Rybachy and Sredny peninsulas. The commander of the Finnish centre at Petsamo, Captain Valdemar Salmelo, ordered the port installations to be destroyed, the villages on the fjord burnt and his men to withdraw to positions inland. The port installations were only partly destroyed, and the Soviet 104th Division advanced more slowly than had been feared. Salmelo concluded that he had acted too hastily and, according to Finnish sources, took his own life the next day. Command passed to Captain Antti Pennanen, a border guard officer, and the Finnish forces at Petsamo became known after him as Detachment Pennanen.

According to Russian studies, a Finnish battalion held up two Soviet regiments for two days on the neck of land joining the Sredny peninsula to the mainland. On the evening of 2 December the 58th Regiment of the 52nd Division and the 95th Regiment of the 14th Division took Petsamo, and on 3 December Luostari. The whole 52nd Division began to be shipped by sea from Murmansk to the port of Liinahamari. The Finns, threatened with encirclement, fell back to delaying positions at Lake Maajärvi. On the night of 4–5 December a Soviet company raided the Finnish positions and captured several guns and vehicles, but in a night counter-attack the Finns recovered the guns and captured several machine guns. According to Russian sources the company lost half its strength, and its commander was court-martialled and shot.

Retreat along the Arctic Highway

For the next week the front stood still, as the Soviet command waited for the rest of the 52nd Division to arrive. The advance resumed on 12 December. The Finns fell back along the Arctic Highway, mining it, blocking it with felled trees and ambushing the columns. On 15 December they gave up Salmijärvi and the nickel mines at Kolosjoki without a fight. On 16 and 17 December, at kilometre 95 of the road, they fought a stubborn action against a whole regiment supported by tanks and artillery, and then withdrew to the small Kornettijoki river, where the period of delaying actions came to an end.

Meanwhile the Finnish forces in Lapland received a new commander. In mid-December the Lapland Group was split off from the North Finland Group under Major General Kurt Martti Wallenius, known for his part in the right-wing Lapua Movement, who knew Petsamo from the years when he had run fishing businesses at Liinahamari. His main concern, however, was the Salla and Pelkosenniemi axis, where Soviet divisions threatened to cut Lapland in two. Detachment Pennanen was reinforced, among other things with a reconnaissance detachment, and in time grew to battalion strength.

On 19 December the command of the 14th Army ordered the 104th Division to go over to the defensive. The Soviet vanguards then stood some 110 kilometres from Petsamo, in the area of the Höyhenjärvi lakes. The Finns replied with counter-attacks that threw the enemy back several kilometres. The sources differ on the dates: the American historian Allen Chew writes of a Finnish success on 21 December, while Finnish studies describe a counter-attack at Höyhenjärvi on 25 and 26 December. Silence then fell over the far north and lasted almost two months.

Fighting in the polar night

The terrain favoured the defenders only in part. The country around Petsamo is treeless, windswept tundra, low and exposed, where it was hard to find cover. At the same time, from the end of November the polar night reigned over Petsamo: the sun did not rise for several weeks, and temperatures fell to several tens of degrees below zero. The Finnish soldiers, many of them locals, were used to such conditions and were excellent skiers, so they raided Soviet supply columns and patrols and vanished into the darkness. The Soviet units, tied to the only road, suffered from the frost and had difficulty with supplies.

The last fighting took place towards the end of the war. At the end of February 1940 the 52nd Division moved south again; about a company of Finnish soldiers had to cross into Norwegian territory, and on 7 March a Soviet regiment supported by tanks took the settlement of Nautsi on Lake Inari, some 150 kilometres from Petsamo. According to Russian studies, the 52nd Division was the only Soviet formation to penetrate so deep into Finnish territory in this war. But it went no further. In the context of the war as a whole Petsamo was a secondary front, yet a handful of Finns, several times weaker than the enemy, prevented him from reaching deep into Lapland.

Place in the war

The peace signed in Moscow on 12 March 1940 brought a surprise: the Soviet Union, which took the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri (Vyborg) from Finland, gave Petsamo back, keeping only the Finnish parts of the Rybachy and Sredny peninsulas. According to some historians, Stalin did not want to provoke Britain, whose concern held the nickel concession, or Germany, which was keenly interested in the metal. During the fifteen months of fragile peace, Liinahamari became the only route by which Finland, cut off from the West by the war in the Baltic and the German occupation of Norway, could trade with the world; thousands of lorries travelled the Arctic Highway. At the same time a dispute flared up over Petsamo’s nickel: Moscow demanded the concession for itself, while Germany sought supplies for its armaments industry. This dispute was one of the factors that pushed Finland towards Germany.

During the Continuation War German troops were stationed at Petsamo, attacking Murmansk from there, and ore from Kolosjoki was shipped to the Reich. In December 1943 the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, flew in to inspect the mine, then regarded as one of the most important sources of nickel for German industry. Under the Moscow Armistice of 19 September 1944 Finland had to cede the whole of Petsamo to the USSR. In October 1944 the Red Army drove the Germans out in the Petsamo–Kirkenes offensive. The retreating Germans blew up the power station and part of the smelter. The Skolt Sámi, evacuated during the war, never returned to their homeland and settled in the Finnish municipality of Inari. The peace treaty signed in Paris in 1947 confirmed the region’s annexation by the USSR, and Finland lost for ever the access to the Arctic Ocean it had gained in 1920.