The shooting down of the Kaleva

On 14 June 1940, a few minutes after two in the afternoon, two Soviet bombers shot down a Finnish airliner over the Gulf of Finland, near the lighthouse on the Estonian islet of Keri. The three-engined Junkers Ju 52 named Kaleva, registration OH-ALL, belonging to the airline Aero O/Y – today’s Finnair – was on a scheduled flight from Tallinn to Helsinki. All nine people on board were killed, among them an American diplomatic courier and two French couriers carrying several dozen kilograms of diplomatic mail. Finland and the USSR were not at war at the time. The shooting down was the first shot of the Soviet blockade of the Baltic states, which began that same day, and a harbinger of what was to happen in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the following week.

Accounts of this event usually speak of a total blockade of the Baltic states by the Soviet Baltic Fleet, of Soviet troops standing ready to organise communist coups, and of an aircraft carrying three bags of diplomatic mail from the United States legations in Tallinn, Riga and Helsinki. This agrees with the findings of historians, with one clarification: the American courier was a member of the legation staff in Helsinki and was carrying mail from the posts in Tallinn and Riga to Finland. Helsinki was his destination.

The blockade

The Baltic states already had Soviet garrisons on their territory, admitted in the autumn of 1939 under mutual assistance pacts. Estonia signed hers on 28 September, and on 18 October the Red Army occupied the designated bases. In the spring of 1940, after the Moscow Peace that ended the war with Finland, and at the very moment when the Wehrmacht was smashing the Western armies, Moscow decided that the time had come to finish the Baltic business. On 25 May Vyacheslav Molotov accused Lithuania of abducting Soviet soldiers, and in June an alleged military conspiracy of the three Baltic states was added to the charges.

On 9 June the People’s Commissar for Defence, Semyon Timoshenko, and the Chief of the General Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, signed Directive No. 02622. The Baltic Fleet and the Leningrad Military District were to be ready by 12 June to seize the warships and merchant vessels of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, close the Gulf of Riga, blockade the coasts of Estonia and Latvia, prepare landings at Tallinn and Paldiski, and prevent the evacuation of the governments, armed forces and property of these states. One of its points ordered that Estonian and Latvian aircraft be prevented from flying to Finland and Sweden. On 10 June the fleet commander, Admiral Vladimir Tributs, was placed under the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Kirill Meretskov. On 12 June the blockade order was issued, and on 14 June, according to documents in the Soviet naval archive, the blockade came into force. According to Estonian and Russian studies, some 120 warships and auxiliary vessels took part, together with more than 200 aircraft, including a brigade of DB-3 and SB bombers. Submarines took up their assigned positions in the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Riga.

The last flight

That day Kaleva flew its usual morning service from Stockholm via Turku and Helsinki to Tallinn. In the afternoon it was to return by the same route. The captain was Aero’s chief pilot, Bo von Willebrand; the co-pilot and radio operator was Tauno Launis. At Tallinn airport seven passengers boarded: the American diplomatic courier Henry W. Antheil Jr., younger brother of the composer George Antheil; two couriers of the French legation, the mathematician Frédéric Marty and Paul Longuet; two German businessmen, Rudolf Cöllen and Friedrich-Wilhelm Offermann; a Swede, Max Hettinger; and a Finnish-born Estonian citizen, Gunvor Maria Luts. According to Finnish and German studies, the couriers were carrying a total of 227 kilograms of diplomatic mail, most of it French.

Flight 1631 took off at about 1.55 p.m. local time. The route to Helsinki was just over a hundred kilometres and was to take about half an hour. A few minutes after take-off two Soviet long-range bombers closed on the aircraft – according to most sources, DB-3 torpedo bombers of the Baltic Fleet’s 1st Mine-Torpedo Aviation Regiment. The report of the commander of a Soviet submarine that witnessed the incident mentions SB bombers. The aircraft came very close, to about 50 metres, as witnesses on Keri confirmed. One of the bombers fired warning bursts, but Kaleva held its course. The gunner of the second opened fire with a machine gun. Hit in the port engine, the airliner caught fire, banked onto its left wing and at about 2.05–2.06 p.m. plunged into the sea a few kilometres north-east of Keri. No one survived, and the bodies of the victims were never found.

The submarine and the fishing boats

The crash was seen by fishermen in three Estonian boats, who immediately made for the spot and began fishing out wreckage, luggage and mailbags floating in a slick of oil. After about forty minutes the Soviet submarine Shch-301, commanded by Captain-Lieutenant Grigory Goldberg, surfaced beside them. Sailors with weapons in hand searched the boats and took everything the fishermen had found, and then recovered the rest from the water. According to Goldberg’s report, about 100 kilograms of diplomatic mail, two gold decorations and money in nine currencies, from Finnish marks to Soviet roubles, were taken on board. The fishermen nevertheless managed to smuggle some of their finds back to Tallinn and hand them over to the police. The haul was transferred to the patrol vessel Sneg, which took it to Kronstadt.

When the aircraft failed to land in Helsinki, the Finns sent out a Brewster fighter to search for it, flown by Ilmari Juutilainen, later Finland’s highest-scoring ace. He saw only an oil slick, pieces of plywood from the cabin interior and a submarine which, on sighting him, struck its ensign and manned its gun. According to Estonian accounts, the submarine opened fire on him during his last pass. Juutilainen circled three times and turned back.

Silence

Finnish radio intelligence intercepted and decrypted a signal in which Goldberg reported to the staff in Kronstadt that Soviet bombers had shot down an airliner and that he had collected what had floated to the surface. The Finnish authorities thus knew almost at once what had happened. Even so, the government of Prime Minister Risto Ryti, with the knowledge of Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, lodged no protest in Moscow and did not even ask for an explanation. Three months after a war that had cost it Karelia and Viipuri (Vyborg), with a new border that was hard to defend and an economy on the verge of exhaustion, Finland judged that it could not afford a conflict with its neighbour. The commission investigating the crash gave as its cause an explosion triggered by “some external factor not belonging to the aircraft”. Censorship ended the discussion in the press. The widows of the Finnish airmen learned the truth from Aero’s director but were not allowed to speak of it. Estonia, which two days later received an ultimatum itself, also kept silent.

The Soviet Union never admitted to the shooting down. When the Germans asked about it during the period of Finnish–Soviet peace, the Russians, as the German minister in Helsinki, Wipert von Blücher, reported, stubbornly denied it. The only Soviet account was given years later by the aviation general Pyotr Khokhlov, who in 1940 was the navigator of the lead bomber. In memoirs published in 1988 he described how the crew signalled to the pilot of the “Junkers” to turn back to Tallinn, and how the passengers supposedly shook their fists and pistols at the airmen. He shifted the event, however, to 23 June, when Estonia had already been occupied, and claimed that the aircraft bore no identification markings and that spy documents had been found in the wreckage. The Estonian fishermen had seen a Finnish flag on its rudder.

Why

The motives for the shooting down are still not clear. Most often the diplomatic mail is cited: Moscow is supposed to have wanted to seize or stop documents that the French and Americans were taking out of the Baltic. Some Estonian researchers believe that Antheil’s bags contained information about Soviet plans for the Baltic states, passed to the American diplomat that morning by the Estonian General Staff. There have also been theories that Joseph Stalin wanted to prevent the escape of President Konstantin Päts or the removal of Estonia’s gold. None of them is supported by documentary evidence. Finnish historians point out that the mail would have been easier to seize at Tallinn airport than to fish out of the sea, and that the submarine reached the spot only after three-quarters of an hour and had not been lying in wait for the aircraft, but was patrolling its assigned sector. The airmen are moreover said to have been reprimanded by their superiors for their clumsy handling of the affair. On this interpretation Kaleva fell victim to the blockade order: a patrol saw an aircraft flying from Estonia to Finland – exactly the direction the directive had ordered to be closed – and reacted as Soviet aviation had reacted during the Winter War. Whether it was an order or excessive zeal, shooting down a civilian aircraft in peacetime was a flagrant breach of international law.

The victims and their memory

Henry W. Antheil Jr. was 27 and worked as a clerk at the United States legation in Helsinki, having earlier also served as a cipher clerk and courier at the mission in the USSR. The next day the Associated Press reported that an aircraft carrying an American courier had exploded on its way to Helsinki. The news was lost in the flood of reports on the fall of Paris. Antheil is now regarded as one of the first American casualties of the Second World War. In 2007 his name was inscribed on the State Department’s memorial plaque. The wreck of Kaleva lies at a depth of 71–76 metres; after years of fruitless searching, it was found by Estonian underwater robots on 5 June 2024. Since 1993 a memorial to the crew and passengers, erected by Finnair, has stood on Keri.

Place in the war

The shooting down of Kaleva was the first armed act of an operation that within a week deprived three states of their independence. Before midnight on 14 June Molotov handed an ultimatum to Lithuania; on 15 June the Red Army entered Lithuania; on 16 June Latvia and Estonia received ultimatums; and on 17 June Soviet troops marched into both countries. The naval and air blockade meant that no one could escape from them or take documents out. Air services between Estonia and Finland ceased within a few days.

For Finland the Kaleva affair was a lesson in what peace meant with a neighbour that a few months earlier had been bombing its cities. Keeping silent about the shooting down was part of the same policy of concessions which, in the period between the Winter War and the Continuation War, pushed Helsinki towards Germany. Only when war with the USSR broke out again in June 1941 did the Finnish government describe publicly what had happened. After the war the peace treaty signed in Paris in 1947 released the Soviet Union from responsibility, and the subject did not return to the Finnish press until almost half a century later. The submarine Shch-301 was sunk by mines in August 1941, a few kilometres from where Kaleva lies.