Volunteers for Finland

On 14 February 1940 the British government announced in the House of Commons that British subjects were free to enlist in the Finnish army. Contrary to what some chronologies state, this was neither a government appeal for volunteers nor state-run recruitment. It was the answer to a parliamentary question: the government granted a general licence to all who wished to go and a separate licence to a private recruiting organisation already operating in London. The decision opened the way to Finland for several thousand Britons who came forward in the following weeks. Not one of them, however, reached the front. In mid-February 1940 volunteers from more than a dozen countries were training in Finnish camps or were still on their way, and the only large foreign formation to go into action in time was the Swedish Volunteer Corps.

The Act of 1870 and the League resolution

The British were bound by the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. It forbade subjects of the Crown to serve in the armed forces of a foreign state at war with a state at peace with Britain, and to induce others to do so. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Law Officers of the Crown had ruled that the Act applied even when war had not been formally declared. On that basis the government had threatened volunteers going to the International Brigades with penalties.

It was this opinion that the left-wing MP Denis Pritt, a well-known defender of Soviet policy, invoked. He asked the Home Secretary whether he was aware that an organisation in London was sending volunteers to Finland and whether he intended to prosecute its members. The written answer, published on 14 February, was given by the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, Osbert Peake. The government had considered the matter in the light of the resolution adopted by the Assembly of the League of Nations on 14 December 1939, which condemned the USSR and called on members to help the Finns. It had concluded that putting obstacles in the way of volunteers would be “inconsistent with the spirit and letter of that resolution”, and that the Act of 1870 allowed exemptions to be granted. Accordingly, “a general licence has been granted to British subjects to enlist in the Finnish forces, and a licence to a recruiting organisation set up in London”. Pritt stood his ground and was expelled from the Labour Party later in 1940 for defending the Soviet attack.

Broader calculations lay behind the formal decision. Since 5 February London and Paris had been preparing to send regular troops to Scandinavia, who were to go to the Finns’ aid via Narvik and the Swedish iron-ore field. The government preferred British soldiers to stay in the ranks of the British Army, but it did not wish to hold back private aid, which kept public sympathy for Finland alive.

Kermit Roosevelt’s British contingent

Recruitment in London was run by the Finnish Aid Bureau, backed by politicians such as the Conservative Leo Amery. The contingent was to be led by Kermit Roosevelt, son of the former President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. The fifty-year-old American had fought in the First World War with the British Army in Mesopotamia and then with the American army in France. In the autumn of 1939, with the backing of his friend the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, he had received a commission as a major in the Middlesex Regiment. At the beginning of March the War Office released him from active service “as an exception” so that he could command the volunteers. On 5 March, after lunch with Churchill, Roosevelt visited the recruiting office, where, as the New York Times reported, he shook hands with Czechs, Austrians, Poles, Irishmen and Americans.

There was no shortage of applicants. According to contemporary reports, some 5,000 men had come forward by 5 March, and according to Finnish studies around 8,500 by the end of the campaign. Most, however, arrived in the last days of the war, since the bureau was fully operational only from the beginning of March and transport through Norway and Sweden was slow. The first group, numbering 227 men according to Finnish figures, reached Finland just after the peace of 13 March. Roosevelt himself most probably never got to Finland. Among the volunteers was the seventeen-year-old Christopher Lee, later a famous actor, who according to his own recollections was issued with a white snow-camouflage jacket and spent about a week on guard duty far from the front.

Swedes at the front at Salla

Far more important was Swedish help, already described in connection with the position of the Nordic states on the war. In mid-February the Swedish Volunteer Corps of General Ernst Linder was completing its training around Kemi and Tornio. On 3 February the first battle group under Lieutenant Colonel Magnus Dyrssen, some 1,500 men, set off on skis from Kemi to Rovaniemi, from where it was taken by rail to Kemijärvi. On the way shortcomings in training and equipment came to light, and more than a hundred men were sent back sick. On the evening of 24 February the two battle groups that were ready set out towards the front at Salla.

The relief of the Finnish units at Lake Märkäjärvi had been planned for 29 February, but it was brought forward to 26 February because a great Soviet offensive had been under way on the Karelian Isthmus since the beginning of the month. On 28 February the Swedes took over the whole position, and Linder, appointed by Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, assumed command of the entire northern Finnish sector. The five experienced Finnish battalions and two batteries thus freed went south. According to Swedish figures the corps numbered 8,260 accepted volunteers (more than 12,000 had applied), and together with Norwegians and Danes over 9,000 men. It lost 33 killed, among them Lieutenant Colonel Dyrssen on 1 March, about 50 wounded and more than 130 cases of frostbite. The Swedish squadron F 19, which had been defending the skies over Lapland since mid-January, and Swedish anti-aircraft batteries protected the railway from Tornio to Oulu, along which supplies flowed from Sweden.

Hungarians, Americans, Estonians

Volunteers from more distant countries travelled for weeks, and for a long time the Finns did not know what to do with them. The dispute over whom to accept was settled only on 22 January by Mannerheim: the army was to take almost anyone fit to fight. The Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner, stipulated, however, in a confidential letter to the Finnish envoy in Berlin, that German applicants should be accepted only if they were known not to be Nazis. Foreigners were gathered in a camp at Lapua in Ostrobothnia, where from 8 January the Sisu Detachment was being formed under Captain Bertil Nordlund. On 20 February it numbered 212 men. A separate volunteer office at headquarters, headed by General Oscar Enckell (PL), was set up only at the beginning of March.

The largest group from outside Scandinavia were the Hungarians. The government of Pál Teleki, with the knowledge of the Regent, Miklós Horthy, did not officially support Finland, but it quietly sent arms and equipment and from 16 December permitted unofficial recruitment. According to Hungarian and Finnish figures some 25,000 men applied and about 350 were accepted. After nearly a month’s training, the battalion of Lieutenant Imre Kémeri Nagy (PL), 346 strong, set off on a roundabout journey through Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Britain, Norway and Sweden. Germany refused transit through the Reich and occupied Poland, so the volunteers travelled unarmed, officially as “tourists going to a ski camp”. They reached Finland on 2 March. The Hungarians felt bound to the Finns by a sense of linguistic kinship, and according to Hungarian accounts the Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi donated his prize to Finland.

From the United States came mainly Americans of Finnish descent. American law prohibited recruitment for foreign armies but could not stop those who went on their own initiative. As early as 9 December, 54 men and 5 women sailed from New York, reaching Tornio on Christmas Eve. Some of them fought as a guerrilla unit in Karelia by Lake Ladoga. Further volunteers, including some 250 Finns from Canada, were gathered into a unit which on 22 February was named the Finnish American Legion. One of its companies was to take over a sector of the front on 13 March, the day the fighting stopped. Across the Atlantic, however, civilian aid played the greatest part: the fund of the former President Herbert Hoover raised millions of dollars for Finnish refugees.

The Estonians were in a particularly difficult position. Since the autumn of 1939 their country, bound by a pact with the USSR, had had to host Soviet bases, from which aircraft bombing Finland also took off. The government in Tallinn declared neutrality, but between 400 and 1,000 Estonians, according to various estimates, made their way to Finland illegally, often across the ice of the Gulf of Finland. The first were Ingrian Finns living in eastern Estonia. One of them, Johannes Valtonen, killed on 9 February 1940, is regarded as the first citizen of Estonia to die in the Second World War. Several hundred Ingrians and Karelians who had earlier fled the USSR were grouped in the Finnish 5th Guerrilla Battalion (Sissipataljoona 5), which fought at the front. From other countries came about a thousand Danes, 725 Norwegians, about 50 Belgians and a handful of Italians (the government in Rome refused passports to thousands of would-be volunteers). Some hundred Greeks did not manage to leave in time. According to Finnish statistics, some 11,700 foreigners had been accepted into the Finnish army by 13 March, but only the Swedes and a small group of American Finns had any real fighting value.

Aircraft and arms

More important than the volunteers were deliveries of equipment. Britain sold the Finns 20 Gloster Gladiator fighters and donated 10 more. They were delivered between 18 January and 16 February, and the first entered service on 2 February. The British also supplied further Bristol Blenheim bombers, anti-tank rifles, guns, uniforms and 40 ambulances. After lengthy disputes with the Air Ministry, the sale of 12 Hawker Hurricane fighters was finalised on 1 February. Finnish pilots collected them in Wales at the end of February, but only 10 reached Finland, and not until 7 and 10 March, too late to take part in the fighting. Between 4 and 29 February France sent 30 Morane-Saulnier MS.406 fighters, which went to No. 28 Squadron and shot down 16 Soviet aircraft by the end of the war, together with a great deal of artillery and ammunition, much of it obsolete. Of 44 American Brewster F2A Buffalo fighters, only a few were assembled in Sweden before the end of the war, and of the 17 British Lysanders ordered, the first arrived in March.

All of this had to bypass Germany, which in December 1939 had blocked the transit of arms for the Finns so as not to irritate its Soviet ally. Aircraft from Britain flew via Stavanger in Norway to Sweden, while crates of dismantled machines went by ship to Norwegian ports and on by rail. According to a Finnish tally of May 1940, the most equipment came from Sweden, worth some 1.5 billion Finnish marks, ahead of Italy (around 790 million), France (around 600 million), Britain (around 500 million) and the United States (around 270 million). Many of these deliveries, however, arrived only after the war was over.

Place in the war

Neither the volunteers nor the arms deliveries could offset the superiority of the Red Army, which in mid-February was breaking through the Mannerheim Line. Finland accepted the Soviet peace terms on 12 March, and the fighting stopped the next day. Most of the foreigners never fired a shot, and the Hungarians did border duty in Karelia until May. The British volunteers were stranded in Finland when Germany occupied Norway and Denmark in April 1940. As late as the spring of 1941, more than a hundred of them were still waiting in a camp for Soviet visas, since the only way home led through the USSR. Kermit Roosevelt took part in the Norwegian campaign in 1940 and died in Alaska in 1943 as a major in the US Army.

The Winter War also drew dividing lines that would reappear. Swedish volunteers fought alongside the Finns again in 1941, in the Continuation War, but Finland was then allied with Germany. Imre Kémeri Nagy died in 1942 of wounds received as an officer of the Hungarian army fighting the USSR, and the Dane Christian Frederik von Schalburg commanded Danish volunteers in the Waffen-SS. On the other hand, Norwegian volunteers such as Max Manus became heroes of the resistance against the Germans. For Britain and France the wave of sympathy for Finland became one of the reasons why they thought ever more seriously of an expedition to Scandinavia, and this in turn hastened German preparations to occupy Norway.