Soviet air raids on Finnish towns

On 17 January 1940 Soviet bombers appeared once again over Turku, Finland’s largest port, through which supplies from Sweden passed in winter. The same day bombs fell on Hanko, on the seaside town of Koivisto on the Karelian Isthmus and on Lappeenranta on Lake Saimaa. It was one of the days of a particularly heavy wave of raids that swept over southern and central Finland from 12 to 21 January: Helsinki, Tampere, Hämeenlinna, Lahti, Viipuri (Vyborg), Kotka, Oulu and dozens of smaller places. At the same time, north of Lake Ladoga, the Finnish IV Corps was completing a counter-offensive that had cut two Soviet divisions and a tank brigade into isolated pockets. War chronologies sum up these days in a single sentence: the Russians were repulsed in Finland and responded with heavy air attacks.

What happened on 17 January

That sentence needs to be taken apart. 17 January brought no single decisive battle and no single raid that stood out from the rest of the month. It was, however, a day on which two processes under way since the beginning of the year converged. On land the Red Army had gone over to the defensive everywhere except on the Karelian Isthmus, and the Finns were scoring one success after another against its strung-out columns: on 7 January they finished off the 44th Rifle Division on the Raate road, and north of Ladoga an attack had been under way since 6 January which, according to Finnish studies, ended on 16–17 January. In the air, meanwhile, the Soviet air force, which in December had bombed mainly railway junctions and targets near the front, was reaching ever more often deep into the country.

The word “retaliation”, however, is a simplification. The raids were not an improvised response to lost battles but the result of a change in Soviet orders. In December the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, mindful of the outrage abroad caused by the bombing of Helsinki on 30 November, had forbidden the air force to attack towns and the civilian population. But on 1 January 1940 the Red Army command – in which Joseph Stalin, the Chief of the General Staff Boris Shaposhnikov and the People’s Commissar of the Navy Nikolai Kuznetsov sat alongside Voroshilov – ordered the bombers to destroy targets far behind the front systematically: administrative buildings, military installations and industrial plants, bridges and railway junctions, ports and means of transport. In an order of 21 January the command rebuked the 8th Army’s air force for having failed for a long time to attack the enemy’s rear, and ordered it, among other things, to “destroy” the town of Sortavala, the base of the Finnish forces north of Ladoga. The same month in which Semyon Timoshenko took command of the new North-Western Front and prepared a methodical assault on the Mannerheim Line was thus also the month in which the air force was to break Finland’s home front.

Bombs over the towns

The Soviet air force enjoyed an overwhelming superiority over Finland. Some 2,000 aircraft were committed to the war, more as time went on, whereas the Finnish air force began it with just over a hundred combat aircraft, including thirty-odd serviceable Fokker D.XXI fighters. The main burden of the raids fell on fast SB-2 bombers and long-range DB-3s. Many of them took off not from Russia but from bases in Estonia, including the airfields at Haapsalu, Kuressaare and Paldiski, which the Soviet Union had obtained in the autumn under the pact of mutual assistance. From Estonia to Turku was a flight of about half an hour for a bomber.

The wave of raids gathered strength at the beginning of January. On 5 January some forty aircraft bombed Mikkeli, the seat of the headquarters of Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. More than twenty people were killed and dozens of buildings in the town centre were destroyed or damaged. After this raid the headquarters was dispersed among the surrounding villages. On 6 January bombers attacked Kuopio, Lahti and Viipuri.

The peak came in the middle of the month. On 12 January bombs fell on Turku and Vaasa, and on 13 January on Hämeenlinna, Tampere and Lahti, where splinters wrecked the transmitter hall of the radio station and silenced Finland’s main broadcaster for many days. On 13–14 January aircraft again came over Helsinki, although casualties in the capital were few this time, since most of its 250,000 inhabitants had been evacuated in December. On 14 January the ports of the west coast – Pori, Rauma and Uusikaupunki – were also attacked, and on 14 and 15 January Viipuri. On 15 January the target was again Tampere, an important railway junction with the State Aircraft Factory and the Tampella works, which produced armaments, as well as Kajaani. After the raids of 16 and 17 January on Lappeenranta, Koivisto, Hanko and Turku came another series: on 18 January in the port of Kotka a bomb hit the icebreaker Tarmo and killed 39 soldiers; on 20 January the bombers returned over Turku, Tampere, Lahti and Kouvola; and on 21 January, in three waves, they dropped more than a hundred high-explosive and several hundred incendiary bombs on Oulu.

After Viipuri, Turku was the most frequently bombed town in Finland. The main targets were the port and the shipyards, where two Finnish coastal defence ships, Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen, lay; they had been moved there after the outbreak of war and were used as floating anti-aircraft batteries. Bombs, however, also fell on residential districts. The most tragic day came on 29 January, when the anti-aircraft defences failed and bombs struck the city centre, killing several dozen people. Over the whole war 52 or 53 people were killed in Turku and more than 150 wounded.

The death tolls in individual towns were not large compared with what was to come in the later years of the war. Finland was a sparsely populated country, most houses were wooden and widely scattered, and the authorities had evacuated the population of the larger towns in good time and built splinter-proof shelters. For the inhabitants, however, it meant daily alarms, nights in cellars and wooden districts burning in frosts of several tens of degrees below zero. On 16 January a temperature of −43°C was recorded on the Karelian Isthmus. In Tampere more than 4,000 people lost their homes during the war.

Fighters, guns and Swedish volunteers

The Finnish defences were modest but more effective than the numbers would suggest. At the beginning of the war Soviet bombers flew in close formations without fighter escort and were easy targets. On 6 January Lieutenant Jorma Sarvanto of No. 24 Squadron caught up with a formation of DB-3s returning from Kuopio and shot down six bombers in four minutes. The remaining two were brought down by his comrade, Lieutenant Per-Erik Sovelius. The feat went round the world’s press and became one of the symbols of the war. The Finnish anti-aircraft artillery, armed mainly with light guns and machine guns, shot down 56 aircraft in January alone, according to Finnish records. Over Tampere on 15 January Staff Sergeant Aarre Siltavuori, who had used up all his ammunition, cut off the tail of a Soviet bomber with the propeller of his Fokker and then, wounded in the chest, made a forced landing on the ice of a lake.

In mid-January the first foreign air unit went into action. The Swedish government, which had officially stayed out of the war, agreed on 14 December to the formation of a volunteer squadron. Its commander was Major Hugo Beckhammar. Some 250 volunteers gathered at Veitsiluoto near Kemi on the Gulf of Bothnia, and the government handed over to them twelve Gloster Gladiator fighters and five Hawker Hart light bombers – roughly a third of the fighters of the Swedish air force. On 9 January the unit took the designation F 19, on 10 January the aircraft arrived, and on 12 January Beckhammar led the first attack on a Soviet field airfield in the north. Cadet Ian Iacobi shot down an I-15 fighter on that occasion. The F 19 aircraft carried Finnish markings. They took over the air defence of northern Finland, including Oulu, Kemi and Tornio, and supported the troops on the Salla front, which allowed the Finns to concentrate their own fighters in the south. By the end of the war F 19 had destroyed, according to Swedish figures, twelve Soviet aircraft, losing six aircraft and three airmen of its own.

The pockets north of Ladoga

The second part of the chronologies’ sentence, “the Russians are repulsed”, refers above all to the forests north of Ladoga. Here the Soviet 56th Rifle Corps of the 8th Army had been advancing since 30 November along two roads: along the lake shore went the 168th Rifle Division of Colonel Andrei Bondarev, and further north, through Uomaa towards Lemetti, the 18th Rifle Division of Kombrig Grigory Kondrashov with the 34th Light Tank Brigade of Kombrig Stepan Kondratyev. The aim was to reach Sortavala and get behind the Mannerheim Line. In mid-December the Finns stopped them at Kitelä and on the Ruhtinaanmäki hill, and held up the neighbouring divisions at Tolvajärvi and on the Kollaa.

The commander of the Finnish IV Corps, Major General Woldemar Hägglund, had been preparing a counter-attack for weeks. His first attempts in December brought no decision, but on 27 December a Finnish detachment cut the 18th Division’s supply road at Uomaa, and in the first days of January it beat off Soviet attempts to clear it. At the end of December Stalin himself ordered the divisions north of Ladoga to go over to the defensive and dig in to await a new offensive. On 6 January Hägglund struck with several battle groups, each about three battalions strong, reinforced with units brought down from the Kollaa. Finnish soldiers marched dozens of kilometres on skis through the snowbound forests and emerged onto the roads where the Soviet columns stood. On 10 January they reached the shore of Ladoga at Koirinoja and cut off the 168th Division from its rear at Pitkäranta. The 18th Division and the tank brigade were cut into a dozen or more pockets along the road from Uomaa to Lemetti.

The Finns called such pockets motti, a word meaning a stack of firewood piled up to be carted away and burned. There were twelve of them north of Ladoga. The largest, the “great motti” at Kitelä, held some 13,000 soldiers of the 168th Division. The encircled units made no attempt to break out but, in accordance with their orders, dug in, buried their tanks as bunkers and waited for relief. They were supplied from the air, and the 168th Division also by a road across the ice of Ladoga. On 17 January the Finns counted thirty Soviet aircraft over Kitelä, dropping supplies or covering the transports. That day the IV Corps offensive came to an end: the Finns had neither the heavy artillery nor enough men to storm the fortified pockets, and they went over to besieging them. From 19 January new Soviet divisions brought up to Pitkäranta tried to break through to the great motti, but were driven back.

The fate of the encircled

The siege of the pockets north of Ladoga lasted until the end of the war. From the end of January the Finns eliminated the smaller motti one by one: on 28 January the Pieni-Kelivaara pocket fell, and West Lemetti, attacked among others by the battalion of Major Matti Aarnio, known as “Motti-Matti”, fell at the beginning of February. In the strongest pocket, East Lemetti, which the Finns called the “generals’ motti” because the headquarters of the 18th Division and the tank brigade were trapped in it, the soldiers ate their horses and waited for air drops, which often landed on the Finnish positions. On 28 February the remnants of the garrison attempted to break out. One column, with the brigade headquarters, was destroyed, and Kondratyev was killed. The other, with Kondrashov, some 1,200 strong, reached the Soviet lines. Kondrashov was arrested in March 1940 and shot in August. The 18th Division, whose colours the Finns captured, was disbanded. The 168th Division held out in the great motti until the end of the war, losing an estimated half of its strength.

In the pockets north of Ladoga the Finns captured more than 130 tanks, several dozen guns, hundreds of lorries and vast quantities of small arms. The victory, however, had a bitter taste. The siege tied down Finnish battalions that were later sorely missed on the Karelian Isthmus, and Finnish losses in the offensive and the fighting for the pockets were high.

Propaganda and the world

The Soviet press made no mention of raids on civilian targets. In January 1940 Pravda assured its readers that not a single civilian target in Finland had been hit, even by accident, and as early as December Vyacheslav Molotov had said that Soviet aircraft were dropping bread to the Finns. Meanwhile, photographs of ruined wooden districts, burning churches and children in shelters went round the press of Europe and America. They confirmed public opinion in the belief that Finland was the victim of the same violence that the world had witnessed at Guernica and, in September 1939, at Wieluń and Warsaw. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the beginning of the war had appealed to the belligerents to spare the civilian population, had already announced a “moral embargo” on the sale of aircraft and aviation equipment to the USSR at the beginning of December. The bombing of towns strengthened the voices in London and Paris calling for help for Finland, although those plans were already entwined with the aim of cutting Germany off from Swedish ore.

Significance

The raids neither broke Finnish resistance nor paralysed the country. Finland had few targets worth strategic bombing, railway tracks were repaired within hours, and the accuracy of the Soviet bombers was poor. According to post-war estimates, the Soviet bombing cost the country about 5 per cent of industrial working time. The Soviet air force suffered heavy losses in the process, and only at the end of February, when it began to escort its bombers with fighters and concentrated on targets in the rear of the front, did it become much more dangerous. In February Viipuri was almost entirely burned down, and on 2 March Tampere suffered the heaviest raid of the war. By the conclusion of peace on 12 March 1940 the Soviet air force had, according to Soviet records, carried out more than 2,000 raids on more than 500 localities. According to Finnish figures, some 950 civilians were killed in them and more than 1,800 wounded.

The pockets north of Ladoga became, alongside Suomussalmi and Raate, the best-known symbol of the Winter War and of the Finnish motti tactic, which was later studied in many armies. They did not, however, change the outcome of the war. In January, while the Finns were celebrating their victories in the forests, Timoshenko was massing artillery and new divisions on the Karelian Isthmus, and on 1 February the Red Army began the offensive that in the middle of the month broke through the Mannerheim Line. At the same time the experience of January deepened the conviction in Berlin that the Red Army had been weakened by the purges. The Finns put the lessons of that winter to use four years later when, in February 1944, during the Continuation War, Helsinki came through far heavier Soviet bombing with relatively light losses among its inhabitants.