Finland’s Winter War with Russia: Northern Lights and Molotov cocktails & More News Here

With Finland barrelling in direction of Nato membership within the face of Russian aggression, it’s well timed to recollect how this Baltic nation was invaded by its mighty neighbour greater than 80 years in the past.

In November 1939 an age-old border battle between the 2 international locations resurfaced when Russian tanks rolled into Finland. The Soviet offensive touched numerous overseas hearts; it was a traditional story of David vs Goliath. The outcome was a flood of worldwide volunteers who struggled by way of the snowy wastes to assist the Finns in what got here to be dubbed the Winter War.

One of the roughly 13,500 males to enlist was my father, Bonar Dunlop. Originally from New Zealand, he’d come to London to review artwork on the Royal Academy. He signed up in early March 1940, pissed off by Britain’s Phoney War. Days later, he was crusing with about 160 different volunteers in a convoy from Leith in Scotland to Norway. Although he solely managed to ship two letters from Finland, he later wrote an account for radio broadcast by the BBC’s Pacific service.

The contingent had a troublesome journey into Finland: “For four days solidly we travelled in hard-seated railway carriages from Bergen across and up the Scandinavian peninsula, then staggered and slid over the unfamiliar ice of the river which forms the frontier between Sweden and Finland, so it was an uncouth and unsteady band that the Finns were astonished to see enter their country.”

But it was too late. Days earlier, Finland had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union. “We found a country in mourning bearing all the signs of the war it had undergone. Everything was white, from the snow itself to the white-painted lorries and trains and the white camouflage uniforms of the soldiers. Their blue and white flags flew at half-mast and the people looked disheartened and sad, even the children. For the first two months I hardly saw a Finn so much as smile… It was not so much their desire to win back historic Karelia and other parts surrendered to the Russians… but their deeprooted distrust of Moscow.”

He hammered house this level: “The Finns seemed to possess the uncanny instinct of smelling a Muscovite wherever there was one in the forests.” Indeed, this ingrained suspicion of their neighbours was justified lower than an hour earlier than the Armistice got here into power, when the Soviets fired an intense, hour-long barrage backed up by bombs. The outcome was lots of of casualties amongst Finnish troops who had been simply beginning to have a good time their survival after months of bitter preventing.

[See also: Why is Finland joining Nato?]

Meanwhile the volunteers arrived in Lapua, in south-west Finland, the place the worldwide brigade was stationed. “Here was a motley gathering of adventurers and soldiers of fortune… with an issue of three miserable cigarettes every other day and food that was usually the driest, hardest tack. We started our training which meant arms drill in 50 degrees of frost, skirmishing and mock battles in three feet of snow, and sentry duty at night when one’s breath seemed to freeze while wondering at the Northern Lights flickering overhead. I often went off on skis with a companion, making runs through the forest in deep snow & sometimes also dazzling sunshine. The country is magnificent.”

In a letter to his mom, he wrote: “A week ago we made a great trek across country, lasting two days and a night. The most pathetic sights I have seen in Finland have been the refugee trains from Karelia (the region captured by Russia), packed with every imaginable article with the people herded together in cattle trucks. When we reached Savonlinna, it raised our spirits no end, for it is a charming town… Today a certain Lord Balfour has appeared on the scene very mysteriously & offered to take back to England at least one letter from each man.”

As a talented rider, my father ended up within the horse transport part, rounding up errant Russian mounts with which he transferred Karelian refugees and their meagre belongings by cart to distant farms. “Molotov [the Soviet foreign minister] has left his mark here very distinctly, with many houses blown to smithereens,” my father famous.

The statistics for the three and a half months of warfare had been horrific. About 25,000 Finns died and, staggeringly, greater than 200,000 Russians (the true whole is unknown), in addition to many extra hundreds captured and wounded. These figures spelled out the formidable resistance and preventing talent of the Finns, regardless of a determined lack of assets and ammunition: “They had reduced the technique of fighting in their country to a very fine art” – similar to the Ukrainians in the present day. One of their many ingenious guerrilla ruses had been the mass-produced petrol bomb used to assault Soviet tanks. It turned often called the “Molotov cocktail”.

However, the sheer numbers in Stalin’s infantry, in addition to some 4,000 tanks and intense carpet-bombing, proved relentless – and finally victorious. This was regardless of sorely insufficient tools. Many Russians died of hypothermia and troops invading on skis typically had cloth-bound toes – weapons weren’t their solely scarcity. What wasn’t lacking was vodka, swilled on the entrance for heat, stamina and inebriation. Sounds acquainted.

My father, with Norway underneath Nazi management, trekked lots of of miles into the Arctic Circle in an try and discover a ship to Britain. Thwarted, and by then broke, he intentionally turned himself in to be imprisoned and thereby fed. Eventually he discovered his strategy to a tutoring job and artwork faculty in impartial Stockholm, the place Nazi occupations saved him for 18 months. Incredibly, his final exit was on the “Stockholm Express”, a secret courier flight for spiriting Swedish ball bearings (additionally spies) to Britain in change for planeloads of gold ingots or US {dollars}. Strapped into the bomb bay of the Mosquito bomber collectively with a handful of Norwegian refugees, he was formally listed as “ball bearings”. Hardly an exalted finish to a momentous journey.

[See also: Finlandisation is not an option for Ukraine]

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