The sheer number and potency of the Russian attacks came close to overwhelming the Finns during the war’s first frantic days. Mannerheim was especially worried about his frontline officers. Most of them were reservists, under fire for the first time, facing enormously daunting odds, and for at least the first few days they were more concerned with just keeping their units from disintegration than they were with launching fancy counterattacks. Mannerheim’s first priority was to intervene decisively on at least one front—to do something, appoint somebody who could stop the passivity and fatalism that was clearly spreading through the ranks of the outnumbered defenders. But where should he make that move, take that gamble?
The decision was made somewhat easier by the priorities of geography. Danger to the overall Finnish cause increased dramatically in a north-to-south direction. It was annoying to lose Petsamo, of course, but that loss was neither surprising nor alarming, given its remoteness from Finnish population centers and its proximity to the Soviet bastion at Murmansk. The attacks on Salla, Kuhmo, and Suomussalmi were dangerous, but they were developing slowly. Far graver danger loomed in Ladoga-Karelia, to the north of Fourth Corps, where the situation was growing more desperate with each passing hour. And nowhere was the situation unraveling faster than on the Tolvajärvi road. It was there that Mannerheim chose to take drastic action, and it was there, in a battle that is still virtually unknown outside of Finland, that the Finnish Army would find its first Winter War hero, fight one of its most impressive battles, and win its first significant victory.
By the end of the war’s first day, Mannerheim’s headquarters was inundated with alarming reports about the intensity of fighting in the Suojärvi area, north of Fourth Corps’s flank, an area where little activity had been anticipated. The northernmost prong of the Russian drive had been launched by the 155th Division, advancing against token resistance toward an important road junction at Ilomantsi. Next, forty-odd miles farther south, the Russian 139th Division had been identified, moving through the Suojärvi lakes along the axis of the Tolvajärvi road, obviously making for an important interior road that ran through Värtsilä and Korpiselka. Both of these advances seriously threatened the critical rail line that ran from Joensuu through Sortavala, then skirted the western shore of Ladoga, and thence ran down to the Isthmus. In other words, the Finns’ main lateral supply line for the whole Ladoga front, the artery they had planned to use to send reinforcements to the Isthmus after the long-planned Fourth Corps counterattack, was imperiled.
The Russian Fifty-fifth Division was on the move, parallel to the railroad line between Suojärvi and Loimola. If it got beyond Kollaa, Mannerheim knew, the planned Fourth Corps counteroffensive would become compromised, perhaps rendered impossible. In the meantime, while all these surprise attacks were knifing through spotty resistance, the Russian Eighteenth Division was proceeding slowly but steadily along the Uomaa road, while the 168th Division, on the Ladoga shore road, was advancing from Salmi through Pitkäranta to Kitelä. By midday December 1, it was clear that the worst danger was above Suojärvi on the Tolvajärvi road, where the defense looked to be on the verge of disintegration. Some of the reports reaching Mannerheim were in fact exaggerated, but their panicky tone was an accurate reflection of the way things were going.
Opposing the Russian 139th Division was a force of about 4,000 men designated “Task Force R,” for their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Räsänen. It was an ad hoc formation comprised of four independent infantry battalions of varying strengths and states of equipage, and a “bicycle battalion” designated “PPP-7.” The “PPP” stands for a Finnish designation too lengthy and eye glazing to warrant its full reproduction here; the “bike battalions” were not uncommon in European armies at this time, and, of course, they did not fight on bicycles but merely used them for transportation. PPP-7, by this time, had traded its useless two-wheelers for skis, although photos of the Tolvajärvi campaign indicate that at least they rode to the front on wheels, before the snow got too deep.
A shaky patchwork force to begin with, Task Force R suffered as well from the absence of a strong hand at the helm. The “R” himself, Lieutenant Colonel Räsänen, seems to have been stunned by the crisis pitch of the whole tactical situation, a series of interlocking threats that must have looked, both on the map and on the ground itself, quite overwhelming. Räsänen lost his grip on things about twenty-four hours after the fighting started. The situation was one that demanded vigorous personal example, and frontline presence, by the commanding officer. Räsänen appears to have spent virtually all of his time inside a bunker back at Ägläjärvi, six miles behind the nearest Finnish position. Given the chronic unreliability of Finnish communications, and the speed with which the Russian threat was developing, six miles might as well have been sixty. The defense was in effect leaderless.
6. Fourth Corps Sector and Events at Tolvajärvi and Ilomantsi
Task Force R had been spread thinly to begin with, and its artillery support was puny: five or six modern weapons husbanded in the rear, at Vuontele, and two fifty-year-old field guns dug in closer to the border itself. On November 30, the Russians streamed across a wide strip of frontier above, below, and in front of Lake Suojärvi, using every road, cow path, and game trail in the region. They did not move as aggressively, however, as their colleagues in the Fifty-sixth Division, who were hammering vigorously southward on the Kollaa road. At the least sign of Finnish resistance they went to ground. In one instance, a single well-camouflaged Lahti automatic rifle team held up an entire Soviet regiment for more than an hour near Jehkila, at the northeast tip of Lake Suojärvi.
By early December 1, however, weight of numbers forced the Finns back to prepared delaying positions at Varpakyla. Here the Russians tried to storm the line with frontal attacks over open terrain and suffered accordingly. But having thus diverted the Finns’ attention, they worked strong columns around the roadblock’s flanks and forced the Finns to abandon their line and scurry back to another delaying position some five or six kilometers farther west. As they pulled back, Finnish sappers blew a dam on the western shore of Lake Suojärvi and unleashed a flood of icy water between friend and foe. This held the Russians for exactly as long as it took for the water to freeze, which in these latitudes was not long, and then the Finns were pushed back again. This time, they were forced to uncover a north-south road between Suojärvi and Salonjärvi and to abandon a stout little roadblock that had been thrown up on the isthmus between the two lakes.
Task Force R now concentrated along the western bank of the Aittojoki River, with the bicycle battalion held in reserve at Ägläjärvi. Also ordered into line along the Aittojoki was a virgin unit tagged with the uninspiring name “Special Battalion No. 112.” No one had very high hopes for this unit, for it was made up entirely of rear-echelon troops with little training and shabby equipment.
On Mannerheim’s direct order, Task Force R launched a concerted counterattack on December 3, with the objective of reopening the road between Lake Salonjärvi and Lake Suojärvi. The defenders jumped off bravely and made considerable progress; the attack seems to have taken the Russians by surprise. The appearance and deployment of Soviet tanks then worked its usual havoc, stalling the attack in its tracks; at this juncture, with the outcome wavering, a large Soviet force was spotted moving across the ice of Lake Salonjärvi, obviously intending to encircle the Finns battling along the main road. The situation was saved by the 112th Special Battalion, which launched a mettlesome counterattack against this outflanking force, halted it, and even pushed it back into the forest. This vigorous little action allowed the main Finnish force to disengage and withdraw, in surprisingly good order, to the prepared defenses along the western bank of the Aittojoki.
They were not there for long. Before dawn the next morning, December 4, the Russians came against them in great strength in the gloomy darkness. The Aittojoki line held for three hours, during which time the invaders launched repeated and costly frontal attacks.
One such attack finally broke through and erupted into a rear area where the bicycle battalion had established its headquarters. There was chaotic fighting as officers, quartermaster troops, clerks, medics, and walking wounded fought the attackers with side arms, knives, weapons grabbed from the dead. The defense rallied around the battalion commanding officer, a major, whose example steadied the men and brought some coherence to their resistance. He might have been able to stabilize the situation, but he was seriously wounded about midway through the battle. With the telepathic speed peculiar to battlefield rumors, the word spread that he had been killed. That threw the impromptu defensive perimeter into disorder, and rumors quickly traveled to the Aittojoki positions that there were Russians running wild in the rear. That did it: the Aittojoki line caved in, and Task Force R withdrew in disorder. This time, Räsänen’s headquarters retreated all the way back to Tolvajärvi, arriving there about noon.
At Ägläjärvi lay strong natural defenses; there the weary men of Task Force R tried to make a stand. They had regrouped and dug in by the morning of December 5. Spurred on by angry signals from Mannerheim, Räsänen’s staff formulated a risky and overly ambitious plan: they positioned the bicycle battalion forward, in a rather exposed position, and braced it on the flanks and rear with Special Battalion No. 112. These two units were expected to absorb the Russian attack and hold it in place while the rest of Task Force R, now being assembled out of sight in the dense forests north of the road, pounced suddenly on the Russians’ flank.
It would have been a sound plan for a force that was rested, well led, and graced with good communications. But the strength and fury of the Russian assault undid the entire scheme; the bicycle battalion broke under the pressure in a quarter hour. The irony of the situation was that, during that period of time, the Russians were so embroiled breaking through PPP-7 that a sudden attack from the woods on their right would have struck them like an avalanche. The reasons why the maneuver was not started are unclear: Räsänen may have issued orders that never got through, or he may have lost his nerve and either canceled them or never issued them at all.
A general retirement was ordered, and this time it was conducted in some order, thanks to a stubborn rearguard action fought by Special Battalion No. 112—fast becoming the fire brigade unit of the whole front. The Finns were now close to Tolvajärvi itself. They had been battered for nearly a week by superior forces, they had been overrun time after time by tanks without being able to defend themselves effectively, and they had been shelled heavily every single day without being able to reply with anything more than museum pieces. When not in combat they were marching or digging. They were exhausted, hungry, cold, scared, depressed, and whipped. Räsänen felt that he had no choice but to signal headquarters that his men were beyond the point where they could be counted as effective troops.
Mannerheim had already reached that conclusion, not just about the Tolvajärvi road, but about the whole Suojärvi front in general. The same day he had ordered Task Force R to retake the ground east of the Aittojoki, he had also ordered a general counterattack up the Kollaa road, against the Fifty-sixth Division, with the objective of recapturing the railroad station at Suvilahti. This operation, too, had failed, and the Russians were now dangerously close to the Kollaa River line.
The momentum clearly belonged to the enemy. Up on the Tolvajärvi axis, the Finns had retreated under fire for a distance of almost forty miles. The men’s nerves were frayed: there were instances of Finnish troops firing on each other, and units that had taken to their heels at the sight of Russian tanks now ran away at the mere rumor of tanks. By the end of the war’s first week, the enemy had covered without undue difficulty one-half of the distance to the rail junction at Värtsilä. If the Russians took that city, the entire Finnish front in Ladoga-Karelia would collapse, and the Mannerheim Line itself would then be open to attack from the rear.
Mannerheim had reserves, of course, and the main function of strategic reserves is to counter such unforeseen threats. His problem lay in the size, the multiplicity, and the far-flung disposition of these Soviet thrusts. Once his two reserve divisions had been committed, there was nothing else left; he could not afford to make a mistake. His original strategy had called for husbanding all the reserves and then using them as a single powerful instrument on the Isthmus, where, in his opinion, the war would either be won or lost.
Now he was forced to parcel out smaller batches of men to various flashpoints in the wilderness north of Lake Ladoga. Even if those reinforcements could turn the tide in every battle to which they were committed, those victories could not, in and of themselves, alter very much the odds against them on the Isthmus. But the potential danger from those invading columns, should they penetrate the wilderness zone and spread out through Finland’s internal communications, was too great to be ignored. Moreover, the threat was immediate in nature, while the Isthmus situation was still fluid, still developing.
In reserve, Mannerheim had the Sixth Division at Luumäki in southern Finland and the Ninth Division encamped at Oulu, both understrength and not yet fully equipped. He could also draw upon a few battalions of reservists, sketchily trained and lightly armed, and nine battalions of quartermaster troops who had recently been earmarked as combat reserves—there being not enough quartermastering to do, thanks to all the shortages of clothing and equipment. They were thoroughly unprepared for a combat role.
Nevertheless, it was time to make the hard decisions, and Mannerheim acted decisively: on December 4, he ordered JR-25, of the Ninth Division, to entrain for Kuhmo, to serve there as the nucleus for a newly formed brigade. He dispatched JR-27 toward Suomussalmi on December 7. The third and last remaining part of the Ninth Division, JR-26, had already been deployed on the Isthmus.
On December 5, JR-16 of the Sixth Division was placed under Mannerheim’s personal command and sent to Tolvajärvi, to put some backbone into the crumbling defenses there and, it was hoped, act as the vanguard for a counterattack. JR-17 and JR-19 were sent to the Isthmus, where they joined the scratch units already feverishly constructing an “intermediate” and a “final” line of fortifications behind the Mannerheim Line.
Having made these decisions, Mannerheim took comfort from the fact that the Soviet columns north of Ladoga were isolated and unable to support one another. If they could be destroyed quickly, most of those precious reserves might be redeployed to the Isthmus before the new year. Mannerheim was taking a bold, calculated risk. Given field commanders of sufficient aggressiveness and imagination, it just might work.
The Marshal was fortunate enough to have such officers. First, he cleared out some dead wood by sacking the commander of Fourth Corps, Major General Heiskanen. To replace him he brought in one of his best officers, Major General Woldemar Hägglund. An alumnus of the 1918 class of the Twenty-seventh Jaegers, Hägglund was a Finn of the dark, stocky type—touched, as it were, with the Mongol brush. Hägglund proved a good choice: with two divisions and a far-flung array of hodgepodge outfits, he would successfully check, and fight to a standstill, an eventual total of ten Russian divisions.
In Colonel Paavo Talvela, Mannerheim would find his strong right arm on the battlefield itself. A battalion commander during the civil war, Talvela had also led a regiment of border guards during the uneasy years following independence. He was a success in civilian life as well, serving as vice president of the national film company and president of the State Liquor Board.
It happened that during the civil war Talvela had led troops in the Ladoga-Karelia region; he knew that landscape intimately. Later he had war-gamed extensively over maps of that area during his stint at the Finnish War College, where he had graduated at the top of his class. On the day that Suojärvi fell, Talvela went to Mannerheim and requested that he be given a combat command in that threatened sector. He also begged Mannerheim to release to him a regiment of the Sixth Division, JR-16, whose commander, Aaro Pajari, was both a friend and another respected veteran of civil war battles in that area.
Mannerheim was not yet ready to make that decision, but in the next twenty-four hours the situation at the Tolvajärvi front deteriorated badly. Task Force R’s counterattack came to grief, the defensive line along the Aittojoki crumbled, and on December 5, Ägläjärvi fell to the Russians, putting them halfway between the border and their objective, the railhead at Värtsilä. North of Tolvajärvi, the Russian 155th Division was making steady progress in its drive on Ilomantsi. If Ilomantsi fell, the enemy would have a clear route to Korpiselka, twenty-five miles to the south. And if Korpiselka fell, all the Finnish troops around Tolvajärvi would be cut off. The key to these campaigns was the possession of roads, and the Russians were closing in on too many sensitive arteries.
Mannerheim decided to wait no longer. He summoned Talvela back on the evening of December 5 and sent out the orders to shift regiment JR-16 from Oulu to Värtsilä; a single artillery battery was also earmarked for additional support. Talvela arrived at Mannerheim’s headquarters in Mikkeli on Finnish Independence Day, December 6, at about 4:00 A.M. Mannerheim was up; indeed, he was in full dress uniform.
He explained the situation to Talvela, outlining the failures and frustrations of the past forty-eight hours. In his opinion, the threat was most dangerous in the Tolvajärvi/Ilomantsi sector, although things were still chancy between Ladoga and Suvilahti, where Fourth Corps was trying to cope with developments there. What had begun as a single eruptive thrust had now shaped up into two discrete campaigns: the one on Fourth Corps’s northern flank, along the road from Suvilahti to Kollaa, and the one that had now reached crisis condition on the roads to Tolvajärvi and Ilomantsi. Mannerheim had therefore decided to detach all the troops on that front from Fourth Corps and make that sector operationally independent, its commander reporting directly to Mannerheim’s headquarters. All Finnish troops in the Tolvajärvi/Ilomantsi sector would henceforth be known as “Group Talvela.”
Now that Talvela had been put in command, Mannerheim listed his objectives: halt the enemy drives on Tolvajärvi and Ilomantsi, throw them back, and recapture Suojärvi’s road network, cutting off the supplies of the southern Russian column, on the Kollaa road. Even when all possible reinforcements arrived, Talvela would still have less than one-half the known manpower of his opponents, no armor whatsoever, no air support except for reconnaissance flights, and so few mortars and guns that the disparity in firepower was, on the face of it, quite absurd. Even so, Talvela was ready and eager to give it a try.
The Marshal had picked his man well. Paavo Talvela was another veteran of the legendary Twenty-seventh Jaegers and had first seen action as an ardent young patriot on the Russian front in 1917. He volunteered for the Jaeger program in Germany and returned to Finland with that unit in 1918. During the civil war campaigns, he rose to the rank of major. During the republic’s early years, Talvela had been politically active, working tirelessly to consolidate the influence of the clique of ex-Jaeger officers in opposition to the anti-German senior officers. Promoted to colonel in 1928 at the relatively young age of thirty-one, he resigned his commission two years later as a political gesture. He held several executive positions in civilian life, with considerable success, but he remained keenly concerned with matters of national defense. He was also one of the few men to become personally close to Mannerheim himself and visited the Marshal numerous times at his private home, a sure sign of high favor. Mannerheim had his failings as a general, though fewer than many more famous commanders one could name, but bad judgment of men was not one of them. In Talvela he saw a man who could stabilize a seemingly impossible situation: fiercely patriotic, energetic, imbued with boldness and resolution, physically tough, Talvela was an imaginative tactician and was thoroughly familiar with the terrain his forces would be operating in.
Talvela’s first action was to telephone Pajari, who had reached Värtsilä with his troops on December 6. Drive to Tolvajärvi, Talvela ordered him, find out what was going on up there, then drive back to Värtsilä, where Talvela would meet him late that night. Pajari moved fast: he arrived on the Tolvajärvi front by car at about 10:00 P.M. He spoke to the commanders on the spot, interviewed a random sampling of their men, encouraging them to speak freely, studied the ground, scanned the latest intelligence reports on the enemy’s strength and intentions, then left. He had seen all he needed to see.
He met with Talvela in Värtsilä at about 3:00 A.M. His situation report was grim: the defenders of Tolvajärvi, he told Talvela, were right on the edge; they were physically exhausted, and discipline was being maintained only by a thread. One more Russian push would probably snap that thread. These men had been retreating, or engaging in uniformly futile delaying actions, for a week, pounded by artillery they could not reply to and overrun by tanks they could oppose only with machine guns and hand grenades. The enemy, the Russian 139th Division, was well led and evidenced a high degree of training and tactical cohesion. Time and time again they had executed bold flanking attacks, unhinging the Finns’ defensive positions.
Furthermore, the weather had not been in the Finns’ favor: snowfall had been both light and spotty, which meant that the off-road snowdrifts were not yet large enough to seriously hamper Russian infantry, and the ground covering was not yet deep enough for the Finns to make full use of their ski mobility. In terms of manpower, the odds against Group Talvela were something like five to one. The Russians’ superiority in artillery was overwhelming, and of course they enjoyed an absolute monopoly on armor. To halt such an attack, Pajari concluded, a near miracle would be needed. To wrest the initiative from the Russians and actually throw them back seemed beyond the realm of the possible.
Talvela also had to be concerned about the secondary threat at Ilomantsi. There the Russian 155th Division had rolled unchecked in a southwesterly direction until it was only ten miles or so from Ilomantsi. A ragtag force amounting to two Finnish battalions was delaying them as best it could, but the only thing that really kept the enemy from smashing through and taking the Tolvajärvi positions from the rear was the lack of aggressiveness being shown by the 155th Division’s commander, General Gusevski. As long as there was no sudden eruption of Russian activity, however, Talvela felt he could concentrate his attention on Tolvajärvi.
The first thing he had to do was stop the disintegration of the defenders. The terrain on the western shore of Lake Tolvajärvi was well suited for defensive action, and it was there, Talvela decided, that the Finns should turn and make their stand. He sent Pajari back to the front armed with full authority to take charge. Pajari arrived at dusk on December 7 and relieved Lieutenant Colonel Räsänen of his command.
It was almost too late. In the brief period of time since Pajari’s first nocturnal inspection, the Tolvajärvi front had crumbled. The sorely tried PPP-7, for example, had retreated five miles since daylight from its positions at Ristisalmi, on the eastern shore of Lake Ala Tolvajärvi, to Lake Hirvasjärvi, north of Lake Tolvajärvi.
On the affirmative side, a second battery of artillery had arrived on December 6, and two more were known to be en route. Fourth Corps was sending a fresh battalion from its reserves (ErP-9; “Er” standing for “independent” or “detached”). Most heartening of all was the fact that Pajari’s own regiment, JR-16, began to reach the Tolvajärvi front on December 7.
That unit’s first battalion (1/JR-16) arrived at the front early that morning and at once dug in to the north and west of a bridge that spanned the narrows between Lakes Tolvajärvi and Taivaljärvi, a location known as Kivisalmi. The Third Battalion (3/JR-16) arrived later and took up defensive positions along the western shores of Tolvajärvi and Hirvasjärvi. Talvela himself arrived late in the day and immediately undertook a personal reconnaissance.
What he saw was not encouraging. Before the First Battalion had finished digging in at Kivisalmi, it had been hit hard and had abandoned its positions in a state of panic. Some of its men fled as far west as Korpiselka before regaining control of themselves. The resultant gap in Finnish lines allowed the enemy to gain control of Kottisaari Island, as well as a tactically important peninsula known as Hirvasharju, a long narrow finger of land that extended to the northwest and split Lake Hirvasjärvi off from Lake Tolvajärvi. Located there was a newly built two-story tourist hotel, constructed chalet-style with its second floor overhanging the first. The marvelous view it afforded of the lakes and their surrounding hills, impressive enough to warrant such a tourist facility, was to prove of inestimable value to the Russians in the days to come. Now they truly held the high ground. The commander of the Russian 609th Regiment inspected the captured building, savored its qualities as both an observation post and a ready-made bunker, and promptly turned it into his own headquarters.
The Finns would pay a heavy price for the ground they lost on this day. Talvela arrived on the scene in time to try personally to rally some of the fleeing men of 1/JR-16, but they were too dispersed for his efforts to make much difference. The panic simply ran its course until the fleeing men grew ashamed of themselves and drifted back to the fold.
Some of the panic-stricken men of 1/JR-16 ran through, and almost infected, the arriving formations of 3/JR-16, under personal command of Lieutenant Colonel Pajari. Pajari did what officers are supposed to do in such situations: he sauntered casually along the line his men had been fortifying, admonishing them to hang on and do their duty. His calmness, his firm but reasonable tone of voice, kept the panic from spreading to his own men, and for the moment they appeared steady enough.
In truth, however, Pajari had some basis for misgivings about this unit. The Third Battalion of JR-16 was comprised almost entirely of working-class men from the factories of Tampere, an industrial city that was in 1939, as it had been in 1918, a center of left-wing political power. And in 1933, during celebrations marking the fifteenth anniversary of Tampere’s capture by the Whites, Pajari had been involved in an incident. On that occasion, some of the local Social Democrats had hoisted red flags underneath the Finnish colors to protest a ceremony that in their opinion commemorated the crushing of a genuinely spontaneous workers’ uprising. Pajari had personally organized and led a force of 200 Civic Guardsmen, mostly officers and noncoms who were by all accounts unarmed, to rip down the red banners.
In the weeks of press attention that followed the incident, working-class resentment focused on Pajari, and a lot of unpleasant old wounds were reopened in the Tampere area. Memories of that incident certainly loomed large in Pajari’s mind as he paced the rows of freshly dug foxholes near Tolvajärvi, trying to set an example for soldiers, at least a few of whom might have wanted him dead only five short years ago. In any event, the Third Battalion stood firm throughout the day, aided by the fact that the enemy, no doubt fortunately, contented itself with consolidating its gains on the far shore of Tolvajärvi. Through field glasses, Pajari could see the Russians industriously fortifying the tourist hotel.
By the time Talvela conferred with Pajari early that night, the situation appeared to have stabilized. Both men had seen enough to know that the virus of defeat was spreading throughout their entire force, veterans and replacements alike. They agreed that some sort of dramatic action was necessary to curb the panic, regain some measure of initiative, and prove to the men that the Russians could be beaten.
Talvela formulated a bold scheme for a raid-in-strength against a sensitive position behind enemy lines, across the ice of Lake Tolvajärvi and against one of the Russian units known to have bivouacked along the road that led to Ägläjärvi. Talvela wanted to lead the attack himself, but his officers talked him out of it. Pajari volunteered, in spite of the fact that he had already put in a full day.
The raiders would be drawn from Pajari’s own JR-16, specifically from its Second Battalion, which had passed a quiet day in reserve. Two companies set out just before midnight, moving across the ice south of Kottisaari Island. A feint attack, to draw the Russians’ attention in the opposite direction, was launched about an hour later against Kottisaari itself. But the unit that mounted the attack was the already shaky Seventh Bicycle Battalion, and when its commander, a major named Ericsson, was killed early in the skirmishing (the second battalion commander to die in five days), the attack faltered, and PPP-7 soon faded back to the Finnish side of the lake.
7. Pajari’s Raid and Climactic Battle of Tolvajärvi Campaign
Meanwhile the raiding party advanced across the open ice through a moonless, inky void. There was no sound except the soft chuff of skis on powder and the sourceless, directionless whisper of the ice itself as it shifted, settled, thickened, or responded to pressure. No man who made the march would ever forget the eerie stillness, the near absolute blackness of the night, the strain of not knowing from one minute to the next when they might encounter a Russian patrol or an ambush. Under such conditions it was not surprising that the two companies lost contact. The Ninth Company ran into a patch of open water, detoured south to get around it, and lost all contact with the Fourth Company. Eventually the Ninth did get across the lake, ran into some small Russian pockets, and exchanged fire with them, with results unknown.
Fourth Company continued on its original route, led by Lieutenant Urho Isotalo, with Pajari at his side. About an hour after crossing the lake, Finnish scouts reported spotting large bonfires in a gully not far from the Kivisalmi bridge. Just before the Finns got their first clear look at the objective, they encountered a small Russian security patrol and killed every man in it soundlessly.
Beyond there lay a long low ridge, heavily timbered; beyond the crest of that ridge the sky throbbed with firelight. The raiders fanned out at the base of the ridge and advanced slowly, so that every man might reach the crest at the same time. When Pajari crawled the last few meters to the top and carefully peered through the snow-draped evergreen boughs that hid his force, he was confronted with a target that he later described as “delicious.” The ridge line was a scant 100 meters from the enemy encampment. At a guess, Pajari estimated that there was a full battalion down there. The campfires were enormous—whole trees had been piled up and set ablaze—and the enemy stood clustered in thick rings around them, outlined like targets on a shooting range. No sentries were visible anywhere. Farther off, in the direction of the road to Ägläjärvi, Pajari discerned similar bonfires around similar encampments—another two battalions, he estimated. With one company, he was preparing to ambush an entire regiment.
It took time to spread the ambush out properly along the ridge line, and while Pajari’s men were getting settled, they heard strong volumes of fire over their left shoulders—the feint attack on Kottisaari Island. Using this noise as cover, the company quickly finished taking its positions. The Russian battalion below them merely looked up at the sound of the distant firing, shrugged, and returned to their bonfires.
By 2:00 A.M. 140 riflemen and sixteen automatic weapons were spread out in a semicircle along the ridge crest, under good concealment in the snow and brush. Every man had his targets lined up in advance. Pajari himself fired the first shot as a signal, and the ridge line on either side of him crashed and flamed as volley after volley smote the fire-lit gully. The effect on the enemy was instantaneous. So great was the shock of the ambush that Pajari, writing about the battle later, could not recall seeing or hearing a single shot fired back at them. After three or four minutes’ firing time, there were no more standing targets; the dead lay in heaped-up rings around their campfires.
The Russian units encamped farther along the road responded with wild outbursts of fire in all directions, while Pajari stealthily led his men out through a gully quite close to one of the encampments, in order to confuse any pursuers. From the volumes of fire and the patterns of muzzle flashes, it was obvious that two of the Russian battalions had gotten locked into a fire-fight with each other; they were still exchanging fire when the Finns passed out of earshot, two hours later.
The return march was more tiring and more nerve-racking than the approach. The excitement of the ambush was wearing off. And half way back to Finnish lines, Pajari collapsed and had to be transported back in an improvised litter—the only Finnish casualty of the raid. Pajari, it turned out, had a serious heart condition; he had known about it for some time, yet he had volunteered to lead the raid anyway. Word of the raid’s success, the first Finnish victory anywhere on the crisis-plagued Fourth Corps front, spread quickly and had a bracing effect on the defenders’ spirits. The Russians could not only be beaten, they could be made fools of. The enemy seemed to have been stung badly by the raid, too, for it attempted no large-scale actions for the next two days, December 9 and 10.
Still, the front was not exactly quiet. Snipers were active on both sides, patrols clashed in the deep woods, and there were artillery duels: small packets of fire from the Finns, sudden massive eruptions from the wellstocked Soviet batteries. One such barrage drove Pajari’s raiders out of the farm buildings where they had been resting after their nocturnal exertions.
With things simmering rather than boiling at the Tolvajärvi front, Talvela decided to absent himself long enough for a quick inspection of the secondary front at Ilomantsi, some twenty-five miles to the northwest. Up there, the enemy 155th Division was still advancing, albeit at a slow pace, and it was still powerful. A sudden breakthrough here would imperil the big counterattack Talvela was already planning at Tolvajärvi.
The situation he found at Ilomantsi was this: by December 7, the Russians had reached a point only twelve miles from the Ilomantsi-Korpiselka road junction. The Finns had opposed them from a dominant terrain feature called Möhkö Hill. Talvela had ordered Möhkö held at all costs, and its weary defenders, Battalion ErP-11, under Major Nikoskelainen, had managed to hang on, repulsing several attacks before finally being forced to withdraw to Oinaansalmi on December 9.
All Finnish forces in the Ilomantsi sector were now grouped under the command of Colonel Per Ekholm, another Twenty-seventh Jaeger veteran who had once been Talvela’s superior officer during his stint with the Civic Guard. Designated “Task Force E,” this group was now at peak strength: four battalions, two of whom, however, were poorly trained ex-quartermaster troops. On December 8, the Ilomantsi defenders received their first new “artillery support”: a single battery of mortars. A day and a half later, Task Force E received a battery of real artillery, such as it was: two old “French 75s,” one of which was later discovered to be inoperable. Add these new weapons to the four turn-of-the-century pieces the Finns already possessed, and Ekholm now had a handful of 81 mm. mortars and five light field guns, the most modern of which barely qualified as “obsolescent,” to wage war against a full division armed with at least forty modern cannon.
Nevertheless, Ekholm turned on the Russians and struck them hard. One of his patrols discovered an understrength enemy battalion, about 350 men, wandering behind the Finnish left flank about five miles northeast of Ilomantsi, near a bog called Tetrilampi. Ekholm organized a strike force, ordered that it be heavily equipped with automatic weapons, and quickly surrounded the curiously apathetic enemy force. He laid an ambush during the last hours of darkness, and at first light the Finns opened a murderous cross fire. The Russian force was annihilated; not a single man escaped. To the commander of the 155th Division, it seemed as though the forest had simply swallowed up one of his battalions. Russian tactics, from that day on, became noticeably more cautious.
Talvela thought the omens looked good. On both fronts his men had stopped retreating and had struck the invader with stinging jabs. The effect of those actions had been to throw the Russians off balance and slow them down. Now, Talvela believed, was the time to strike, with concerted, all-out attacks on both fronts. He completed his plans on December 10, briefed his officers, and selected December 11 as the time to attack.
But the Russians, at least on the Tolvajärvi front, were not as passive as they seemed, and before Talvela could launch his counterattack on the eleventh, he suffered a nasty surprise on his own left flank. An entire Soviet battalion had marched, undetected, through the tree-choked wilderness north of Lake Tolvajärvi. Without any warning, they erupted from the trees and fell upon Pajari’s only supply line, the road to Korpiselka, at a point about two miles northwest of Tolvajärvi village.
There were no defensive works here, and few combat troops either, just field kitchens, some artillery personnel, quartermaster and medical units, and the headquarters company of JR-16. At about 11:00 P.M. on the night of December 10–11, the Russian battalion struck from the forest. The Finns were taken completely by surprise and by all rights should have been routed from the field in short order.
But something strange happened. The first target overrun by the enemy raiders was a field kitchen where large vats of sausage soup were simmering. After scattering the handful of panic-stricken cooks who stood in their way, the attackers caught a whiff of the soup and the majority of them paused and began to eat. The momentum of their original attack, which had been devastating, vanished, and the startled Finns received a priceless interval of time in which to recover.
And recover they did, rather quickly. As chance would have it, Colonel Pajari himself happened to be in the vicinity when the Russians struck. He put together a makeshift force of some 100 cooks, clerks, medics, supply sergeants, and artillerists and led them personally in a vigorous counterattack. He controlled his improvised company by the simple expedient of shouting orders in a fierce parade-ground voice and limiting them to five or six words. What followed, an engagement promptly dubbed the “Sausage War” by the Finns, was one of the few recorded instances of bayonet fighting in the Winter War. It was close, brutal, and without mercy.
Two of Pajari’s men formed a hunter-killer team: one man carried a powerful flashlight, the other a Suomi submachine gun. These two prowled the woods, locating small isolated groups of Russians or individual stragglers. When the prey was spotted, the light was switched on, and the Russians invariably froze like deer, just for an instant, and that instant was all that the Suomi gunner, Sergeant Miinalainen, needed. With short bursts of 9 mm. slugs, he cut down man after man.
While the hand-to-hand melee was raging, two hastily summoned companies of frontline troops arrived and attacked the Russians from the east. By 4:00 A.M. the Russians were in full retreat, and by dawn the fighting had petered out entirely. Exact Russian casualties were hard to estimate, for many men died unseen and uncounted in the forest. Out of the entire battalion, only a few dozen men are known to have made it back to Russian lines. Daylight revealed at least 100 frozen corpses strewn around the bullet-riddled soup pots of the field kitchen, some with hunks of sausage still stuck to their gray lips.
During the height of the fighting a war cry was sounded from Finnish lips that had not been heard since the Thirty Years’ War: “Hakkaa Päälle!” It translates literally as “Cut them down!” but has the more vicious connotation of “No quarter!”
While the “Sausage War” was raging in the rear, another battle erupted on the southern flank. A Russian battalion moved out from Kottisaari Island across the ice, evidently hoping to fall on Tolvajärvi village from the south. The Finns had listening posts out on the ice, and the Russian move was spotted. Word was passed to Lieutenant Eero Kivela, whose company, a part of JR-16, was closest. Leaving two platoons and his heavy machine guns to guard the village, Lieutenant Kivela outflanked the outflankers with three rifle platoons. At first light, the Russians were just across the lake, still in the open. Kivela’s men picked their targets and killed scores with their first volley. The Russians panicked and fled back across the open ice, where they made superb targets. Kivela’s men kept firing until the last of them had vanished into the predawn gloom. About 200 Russians lay dead on the ice. Kivela’s men helped themselves to sixteen light machine guns before retiring.
There were several other, less threatening, Russian probes during the first half of December 11, all successfully repelled, and by the time the shooting had died down, so many Finnish troops had been in firefights that Pajari recommended to Talvela that the counteroffensive be postponed for twenty-four hours, so that everyone could get his wind back. Talvela agreed. On the whole, the actions of December 10–11 had gone in favor of the Finns, and it did not seem prudent to launch a do-or-die counterattack with worn-out men, however much improved their morale might seem.
Talvela’s plan for the counterattack of December 12 also took into consideration the fact that many of Pajari’s men were still tired. The initial operations were therefore detailed to the freshest units: battalion ErP-9 and two companies of First Battalion, JR-16. Talvela thought that if these fresh troops could only unlock the Russian defenses, then the other units could be put into motion to add weight and flexibility to the attack. This two-tiered tactic was risky, and only a commander with absolute faith in his men could have developed such a plan with any realistic hope of success.
This was the plan: one strong pincer would cross the northern end of Lake Hirvasjärvi, then pivot to the southeast and strike the Hirvasharju peninsula from the rear. It was there, on the high ground surrounding the new tourist hotel, that the enemy had centered his strongest defenses. Only when he was sure that this northern pincer had made some progress would Pajari lead a frontal assault on the peninsula. In addition to the troops he had originally brought with him, Pajari was able to deploy some reinforcements that had just arrived on the Tolvajärvi front: one company from JR-37 and the Tenth Independent Battalion (ErP-10). At the same time the northern attack went in, a southern pincer comprised of two companies of ErP-112 would also assault Kottisaari Island. If the high ground on Kottisaari were taken, the Russians’ one and only supply line, the road over the Kivisalmi bridge, could be brought under fire. Talvela hoped that the two initial northern-flank/southern-flank attacks would cause the enemy to weaken its center, perhaps commit its reserves. If Talvela’s timing and luck were good, he could then hit the tourist-hotel sector with some hope of success. Like most such elaborate battlefield plans, however, this one survived intact for only a few minutes.
Plans were also laid for the counterattack up at Ilomantsi. On December 11 the Russians had attacked at Oinaansalmi and at the ferry crossing at Kallioniemi and had been thrown back at both places, with moderate casualties. At the former location, Ekholm’s men had knocked out two Red tanks with Molotov Cocktails and satchel charges; at the ferry, the Russians left 134 dead on the ice. The plan for December 12 called for three of Ekholm’s battalions to tackle the Russians at Möhkö, both from flanks and frontally, while his fourth battalion remained on the defensive at the ferry crossing.
December 12, then, was to be the day of decision for both sectors of Group Talvela’s front. Talvela had done well since his arrival. He had imparted vigor and resolve to the defense, and his two strong right arms, Ekholm and Pajari, had scored impressive tactical victories against isolated enemy detachments. But the bulk of both Russian divisions remained intact and very strong; the Finns had purchased their victories so far at a considerable cost in men and a much higher cost in energy. The odds remained desperately stacked against them. It is one thing to defend, or even to counterattack from within a defensive context, and another thing altogether to launch a complex offensive against an enemy with a distinct advantage in numbers and a crushing advantage in firepower. That enemy, moreover, was well dug in, was well supplied with ammunition, and had a tradition of being much tougher on the defensive than in the attack. But the Finnish Army believed in intangibles, and on December 12, that faith, together with the courage, resilience, and initiative of a handful of officers and men, would be just barely enough to tip the scales.
Pajari’s northern pincer maneuver went wrong almost from the beginning. Major Malkamäki’s two companies of JR-16 (Second and Third companies) were hampered by foot-deep snowdrifts and did not reach their jumping-off points until well after daylight, thus losing all hope of tactical surprise. Worse, while the Finns thought they were sneaking up on the Russians, two battalions from the Russian 718th Regiment were doing the same thing to the Finns, from the opposite direction. The result was a frantic meeting engagement that took both sides by surprise. Malkamäki’s Third Company, on the extreme Finnish left, took the full impact of this encounter and was badly knocked about by Russian machine-gun fire. Most of that company withdrew, and some of its men did not stop until they got as far as the Tolvajärvi road. The Second Company slipped out of the meeting engagement and did manage to get across the lake and execute a southward turn, but was stopped cold at about 11:00 A.M. when it ran into heavy fire. It lost contact with the unit on its right flank, ErP-9, at about the same time.
Contact was lost because one company of ErP-9 had gotten mangled in the meeting engagement and had retreated all the way back to Tolvajärvi village by 10:30. Two companies of ErP-9 did manage to join 2/JR-16 at the Hirvasvaara ridge, about a half hour after that company had gone to ground. Even with three companies, the Finns at Hirvasvaara could make no progress. They were drawing heavy Russian fire from two directions. At noon Major Malkamäki judged the whole venture to be hopeless and ordered a withdrawal. Most of the Finns then executed a wide-swinging retreat to the northwest, around the upper end of Lake Hirvasjärvi. Part of 2/JR-16 also withdrew at this time, but part of it, perhaps 100 men or so, did not and stayed dug in at Hirvasvaara. Although they were unable to advance any farther, they kept fighting.
Whether this determined little stand was the result of platoon-level initiative, or whether these soldiers simply didn’t get the word to pull out, is not clear. What is clear is that by staying at Hirvasvaara, they tied down a large number of Red troops who otherwise would have been free to oppose Pajari’s attack on the peninsula. Their contribution to the outcome of the battle was far out of proportion to the number of men involved.
While the Finn’s northern pincer was coming to grief, the southern pincer, the assault on Kottisaari Island, was not faring a whole lot better. Two companies of ErP-112 attacked the southern end of the island at 8:00 A.M., supported by heavy machine guns and three or four pieces of artillery. Elements of ErP-112 penetrated as far as some rocky islets near the Kivisalmi bridge but were forced back shortly after noon because their supporting company (9/JR-16) never showed up. That happened because regimental headquarters never managed to give its commander a jumping-off time; by the time he got his orders, the designated hour was long past and he had to wait for further instructions. Once again the lack of reliable field radios had sabotaged a Finnish operation.
Pajari’s main thrust, against the Russian center, also fared poorly at the start. The initial attack was assigned to the Second Battalion of JR-16, but Pajari did not wish to send his men against fortified positions over open ground without artillery support, and the guns didn’t get into position until two hours after they were supposed to. When they finally did open fire, the effect was so paltry that Pajari cursed himself for having bothered to wait for them.
Throughout the bitter struggle for the Hirvasharju peninsula, the Finns tried, with some success, to compensate for their lack of artillery support by employing their Maxim heavy machine guns as light artillery. Finnish machine-gun teams were trained to advance in close coordination with the infantry and often deployed their weapons to engage specific targets with pinpoint fire at dangerously close ranges. Since the weapons, with full water jacket, weighed more than forty pounds even without a tripod, it took strong men as well as brave ones to handle this job in combat. Casualties among Finnish machine gunners were high in every offensive engagement. Time and time again during the blistering fight around the hotel, the Finns used their Maxims the way a better-equipped army would use bazookas, grenade launchers, or light mortars. This tactic provided yet another example of the Finns making the most of their limited resources, but it was a costly expedient.
The attack went in with two companies abreast. Lieutenant Isotalo led his Second Company (2/JR-16) across the straits on the southern side, with surprisingly light casualties, thanks in part to the enormous volume of fire put out by his supporting machine guns. On the northern side, Sixth Company was not so lucky. Pinned down by intense but wildly inaccurate artillery fire and, more seriously, by much more accurate fire from Russian light automatics, most of its men drifted south out of the worst of it and mingled with the platoons of Fourth Company. Fifth Company, under command of Lieutenant Aarne Heinivaho, attacked somewhat later than the Fourth and Sixth, more or less right into the middle of things. The result was that for a time all three companies were hopelessly intermingled, and command control became difficult.
There was still some momentum behind the Finnish attack, however, and intense firefights erupted all along the peninsula. Several machine-gun squads crossed the straits and began firing in close support of the infantry. First they silenced a number of Russian foxholes and gun pits on the western end of the peninsula, then they began dueling with the Russian heavy MGs that had been galling the infantry from the direction of Hirvasvaara.
As the Finns fought their way forward, the tourist hotel loomed ahead as a dramatic, magnetic objective. Fire blazed from its windows and from the loopholes that had been cut into its thick log walls. The engagement became one of individual efforts, of platoon leaders organizing private little battles, using whatever small forces they could control, friends and strangers alike. Several platoon leaders were hit. Lieutenant Isotalo was shot in the hand; he paused long enough to have it bandaged, then went forward and took control of his men once more. The worst fighting occurred at a line of gravel pits about 200 yards west of the hill where the hotel loomed. Here the Russians had emplaced ten heavy machine guns and at least as many Degtyarev automatic rifles. The fighting was close and savage, but the Russians gave way first, and the survivors of the gravel-pit line retreated to the hotel.
At this juncture, three Soviet tanks were spotted advancing on the road that led from the hotel to the Hevosalmi straits. The road was so narrow, however, and the terrain on both sides so jagged, that they were compelled to advance slowly and in a single-file line. Pajari had sited his 37 mm. Bofors guns in anticipation of just such a contingency, and all three tanks were destroyed before they could really intervene in the battle.
The men of 2/JR-16 had now fought their way to the foot of the hill leading to the hotel. Disorganized and winded, they were stopped cold by shelling and by withering automatic fire. At noon a general retirement was ordered back to the line of the gravel pits. Once this had been accomplished, the Finns sorted themselves out again into proper companies, platoons, etc. During a brief lull, the Finns were able to grab a smoke, eat, and replenish their ammunition. A mortar platoon also crossed the straits and dug in behind a low ridge west of the gravel pits—just in time, as it happened, to disrupt an attempted Russian counterattack from the direction of the hotel.
While this midday lull was taking place, Pajari received his first hard news about what was happening on his right flank. Predictably it came not by radio but from the lips of an exhausted runner. When he had listened to the man’s tale, Pajari knew he could expect no real help from that direction. Reports from the stalled Second Battalion on the peninsula indicated that they had run out of steam: it would be hard to get these men to leave the relative safety of the gravel pits and advance once more into the heavy fire coming from the hotel and the high ground around it. Pajari had no reason to doubt the pessimistic reports he was getting. With his own eyes for the past hour, he had seen the steady flow of wounded men coming back from the peninsula, and he had been dismayed to see the proportion of platoon-level officers and noncoms on the stretchers.
Pajari had now come to the leadership crux of the battle. There was clearly a dangerous threat on his northern flank, for a strong Russian force there had routed one of his companies and blunted the attack of all the others in that pincer. As far as he knew at that moment, there was not a single Finnish soldier on the eastern side of Lake Hirvasjärvi. That part of his plan had become a shambles. And if he had not been hurt as badly on the southern pincers, at Kottisaari, neither had he gained very much ground. The only place where even a partial degree of success had been gained was in the center. So far it didn’t look like a propitious day for making a gamble. Pajari had only the most limited reserves, and to achieve anything he would have to commit them all at one point. But where? How serious was the threat up on his northern flank? How realistic were his chances of crashing through a position as strong as the hotel?
While Pajari was mulling over this decision, he received a new message. Contrary to the first reports, there was a Finnish force still fighting on the northern flank. There were, it transpired, scattered pockets of Finnish resistance in the woods north of Lake Hirvasjärvi, and the two or three isolated platoons still clinging to their perimeter in the Hirvasvaara area. That news, modest though it was, tipped Pajari’s decision. Some portion of his original plan had survived, after all; there was at least enough of a Finnish demonstration on that northern flank to divert some of the enemy’s attention to that direction.
Pajari ordered the Third Company of ErP-10 to reinforce the men at the gravel pits, and he sent the Second Company straight across Lake Myllyjärvi to attack the base of the Hirvasharju peninsula, where it had a wishbone configuration, the idea being to increase pressure on the hotel from the northwest.
At 1:30 P.M. the attack against the hotel resumed. It was by far the toughest objective the Finns had yet assaulted. The building was centered atop a sixty-foot hill. Designed chalet-fashion, the bottom story was built of logs and granite walls, and the second story, also massively walled with logs, overhung the first. Its walls had been loopholed and its windows sandbagged. There were rifle pits scattered around the building, and the entire position fairly bristled with machine guns and Degtyarevs. Given a few medium-sized field guns or some reliable air support, the Finns could have sat back and pounded the place to matchsticks in relative comfort. But lacking that kind of firepower, it would be an infantryman’s battle, and it would be bloody.
For an hour the fighting seesawed. The Finns fought their way through the Russian foxholes one at a time and hurled grenades through the hotel windows. Sometimes the Russians hurled them back. One Finnish company commander was killed, another badly wounded. What tipped the balance was the timely arrival of Pajari’s reserve, Second Company, ErP-10, on the northern arm of the peninsula. As Pajari had planned, this force now brought the hotel under heavy fire from a second direction, forcing the defenders to return fire in two directions at once, and weakening the overall volume of fire.
A few Finns who had managed to get fairly close to the hotel building worked their way to its southern side and began to snipe at the windows from there, thus bringing the position under fire from yet a third direction. To the hotel’s defenders, it looked very much as though they were in danger of being surrounded. At first a few, then more, Russians in the vicinity began to give ground and withdraw in the direction of the Kivisalmi bridge. Sensing the letup in resistance, the Finns closed in on the hotel, throwing dozens of grenades into the bottom-floor windows and rapidly silencing all resistance.
The Russians still held the top story, however, and from that vantage point they were firing on everything that moved. Clearly there could be no general Finnish advance as long as the hotel was still holding out. Lieutenant Siukosaari, commanding the Sixth Company, thought that the easiest way to eliminate the problem was simply to pour petrol into the building, torch it, and shoot down any Russians who tried to flee. He was overruled by a major standing nearby, who ordered a more conventional assault. Whether this was done out of squeamishness or out of respect for the hotel itself, which had been a source of intense local pride before the war, is unclear.
In any event, Lieutenant Siukosaari led the attack, armed with a Lahti pistol. In a scene reminiscent of a western movie, he ran head on into a similarly armed Russian officer at the doorway leading to the hotel’s kitchen. Both men “slapped leather” at the same time. Lieutenant Siukosaari fired first, at a range of about three feet, then led his men charging into the hotel over the Russian’s crumpled body.
Once inside, Siukosaari’s men made short work of the second story. They tossed dozens of grenades upstairs, then rushed up the stairway. They found twenty-eight Russians still alive, most of them wounded and none of them in any mood to continue the fight. They also found the corpse of the commander of the 609th Regiment, together with a great many valuable documents that were promptly sent back to the intelligence experts. Of more immediate value were eighteen usable automatic weapons and thousands of rounds to feed them; Lieutenant Siukosaari’s platoon instantly doubled its own firepower.
Pajari, meanwhile, had thrown in his last “fresh” unit, Bicycle Battalion PPP-7, again, in hopes of giving even more impetus to the attack. The defense around the hotel had crumbled, and the Finns had enough energy to mop up as far as the Kivisalmi bridge. Pajari ordered them to keep going as far as Ristisalmi, another four miles, but they were too weary to advance another meter beyond Kivisalmi.
December 12 was also the day of decision up at Ilomantsi. The ambitious double-pincers attack on Möhkö, from north and south, failed to accomplish much. Another breakdown in battlefield communications apparently was the main reason for the failure. Up near Kallioniemi, however, the Finns scored a defensive victory by knocking out four more Russian tanks on December 12.
December 13 saw several Soviet infantry probes repulsed at Kallioniemi and a renewed Finnish effort against Möhkö. By day’s end it seemed clear that a stalemate had been reached along the whole Ilomantsi front. Task Force Ekholm, though bravely and skillfully led, simply did not have the firepower or manpower to throw the Russians back; and as for the Russians, the 155th Division still did not have any skis, nor did it receive any, until the last few weeks of the war, and it was just about paralyzed. The cold was severe, down to twenty-five degrees below zero, and the snow was more than a foot deep, with more falling every day. Ekholm’s men held good defensive ground. As long as weather conditions made deep flanking movements impossible, the Russians would not be able to budge them.
At both Oinaansalmi and Kallionsalmi, position warfare became the norm. Ekholm waged an active defense, however, staging raids and probing attacks throughout the remainder of the war. Once, in mid-December, the Russians tried to slip a battalion around to threaten Finnish communications, and there was a virtual replay of the “Sausage War” incident, with Colonel Ekholm personally rallying a company of clerks, supply officers, and other rear-echelon types and counterattacking vigorously. Although the Ilomantsi front never really became “quiet,” it had become quiescent by the end of December, with both sides almost literally frozen in place. If there were no dramatic Finnish victories at Ilomantsi, it could still be said that Ekholm and his men performed their primary task very well: they prevented a Russian breakthrough, guarded the backdoor for the Finns at Tolvajärvi, and thereby contributed mightily if indirectly to Group Talvela’s great victory.
On December 13, Battalion PPP-7 advanced as far as Ristisalmi, while the rest of Pajari’s weary force took the day off. In retrospect, Pajari regretted this decision. There was plenty of fight left in the Russian 139th, and events proved that the best way to deal with the situation was to launch constant relentless attacks before the enemy had a chance to recover and dig in. Once dug in, the Russians proved themselves to be stubborn fighters, and the Finns always suffered more losses when attacking them under those conditions. After the breather of December 13 Pajari drove his men mercilessly. Some of them hated him for it at the time, but since the war many of those same men have admitted publicly that his tactics were the right ones for the circumstances.
What the Finns did not know on December 14 was that a fresh Russian division had entered the battle. The Seventy-fifth Division, from Eighth Army reserves, had been sent in to replace the badly mauled 139th. Pajari first learned of this ominous development from intelligence reports reaching him on December 16. Aerial reconnaissance from the morning of December 17 confirmed heavy enemy traffic moving in both directions along the Ägläjärvi road. Fresh troops of the Seventy-fifth were moving up and survivors of the 139th withdrawing toward the border. There is some evidence that the spectacle of the retreating 139th, its men half frozen and burned out, burdened with hundreds of wounded, had a marked effect on the morale of the new men moving west.
Pajari’s response was to push his men even harder. The attack was resumed on December 14, with ErP-9 as the leading element. Its attack was stopped cold when two Russian tanks appeared, driving back and forth with impunity and firing at will on the Finns, who were pinned against a thin ridge with nothing stronger to throw at the tanks than hand grenades—not even a gasoline bomb. Word of the holdup reached the battalion’s sole antitank gun, a mile in the rear. One of its gunners, an enterprising corporal named Mutka, hitched his 37 mm. gun to a big farm horse and moved it to the front lines in true Napoleonic style, himself riding bareback on the animal for part of the distance. Once he reached the front, Mutka unlimbered quickly, drew a bead on the tanks, which were offering themselves as splendid targets, and knocked them both out with three or four shots. The sudden destruction of both tanks had a demoralizing effect on the Red infantry, and the Finns were able to surge forward for about a mile before encountering heavy resistance again, at Metsanvaara ridge.
Talvela was able to send forward about 350 replacements on December 15. Pajari could replace some of his losses, but the fresh troops were over-age reservists, willing enough to fight but sketchily trained and wretchedly armed.
On December 16 the Finns pushed beyond Metsanvaara and made good progress until they ran into a stone wall of resistance at a roadblock just west of Lake Hietajärvi. Dug in there were 200 men from a Russian officer-candidate school: they were young, well trained, physically tough, heavily armed, and fiercely motivated. Survivors of the Tolvajärvi campaign all seem to agree that these were the finest Russian soldiers they faced during the entire affair. Finnish casualties were high; one platoon from the Sixth Company of ErP-9 lost six out of twenty, including its commander, in the first hour of fighting. The defenders stood their ground until killed; only two of the young officers are known to have survived, so intense was the fighting.
Meanwhile, to avoid an incessant series of such engagements, Pajari was trying to outflank the main road. He sent one company from ErP-10 on a wide end run to the south, through Vieksinki, and from that direction its men launched a number of guerrilla strikes against the Russians on the Ägläjärvi road. Two companies of ErP-10 performed a symmetrical and complementing maneuver in the north, moving through Ylajärvi, hoping to strike Ägläjärvi by surprise from the northwest.
To revive the attack, Talvela gave Pajari operational command of all Finnish reserves in the Tolvajärvi sector on December 17. His order of the day stated the situation plainly: “The last energies of the troops must be used. …” A quick check was made to see if any of the overrun Russian armor could be salvaged, but Pajari’s ordnance men radioed back to Talvela that the vehicles were “junk” and would have to be reconditioned thoroughly before anyone could use them. Pajari was also promoted, an overdue gesture one might think, to full colonel on December 17.
A new danger faced the Finns on December 18. Soviet tactical air strikes were launched for the first time on this front, with results that were more disturbing than damaging. Pajari’s flanking attacks made little dent on the strong Ägläjärvi defenses. The one from the north did not achieve surprise and was stopped by a roadblock at Valimaki, a couple of miles above the main Russian perimeter at Ägläjärvi. Five miles to the southeast Pajari slipped another unit, ErP-112, through the forest south of the main Russian position and ordered it to cut their supply lines at Pojasvaara. Here, too, the enemy was dug in and seemingly waiting for the Finns. ErP-112 had no artillery support, and by the time it made contact with the enemy its men were exhausted from a forced march through dense forest. After a day of desultory skirmishing, it withdrew.
On December 19 Mannerheim promoted Talvela to major general. Mannerheim was also on the verge of calling off the whole Finnish counter-offensive. The casualty lists were appalling, and he had begun to question whether Talvela’s men were capable of much more. Talvela, however, was fired up, and he insisted that his men still had enough drive to break through the Russian defenses and roll them back far enough to stabilize the front. Mannerheim agreed to give him a little more time to try but was ready to call a halt if casualties seemed excessive.
In the predawn darkness of December 20 the Russians made a vigorous sally from the Ägläjärvi perimeter, using a battalion of infantry and nine tanks. The leading tank made straight for the Finns’ antitank platoon and rammed the first gun it came upon. The formidable Corporal Mutka thereupon closed with the tank, while it was still grinding metal with one of his precious Bofors guns, and blew it up with a satchel charge, blocking the road for the rest of the enemy’s armor. When daylight arrived, Mutka bore-sighted his one remaining Bofors gun and hit the last Russian tank in the column, setting it afire. He then worked forward with deadly accuracy, knocking out two more vehicles. The crews of the surviving tanks, seeing what was coming, abandoned their vehicles, which the Finns captured intact and with their motors still running. The Russian attack evaporated. The Finns tried to follow it up with their own attack on Ägläjärvi but were unable to penetrate its defenses.
On this same day, Pajari reached the end of his physical endurance. That a man with a serious heart condition had managed to lead such a battle, and indeed, taken up a gun and fought in it more than once, seems incredible. Talvela ordered him to the rear, and command passed to Lieutenant Colonel Kaarlo Viljanen, yet another of the Finnish officer corps’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of Twenty-seventh Jaeger veterans.
Fighting continued on December 21, 22, and 23, without discernible gains but with increasing casualties. Russian air attacks on the Tolvajärvi-Ägläjärvi road grew heavier, but by now the Finns had moved in some light flak batteries to deal with them, and three Russian planes were shot down on the twenty-first alone.
Late on December 21, 2/JR-16 and two companies of ErP-9 attacked Ägläjärvi from the north, while two companies of ErP-10 and all of ErP-112 struck from the south. It was a night attack, and at first it went well. The Finns managed to cross the ice and close on the village without heavy losses. Russian fire, though heavy, was mostly wild. Once inside the village, however, it was another matter. The Russians had fortified every barn, cellar, farmhouse, and outbuilding. Automatic weapons, sited for converging fire, raked every open lane and pasture. Casualties among Finnish platoon leaders and NCOs were heavy. One battalion lost all three of its company commanders. A battalion commander, a middle-aged reservist who had no business being in the middle of such a fight, went berserk, ordered his machine guns to fire on friendly troops, and threatened to shoot any man who disobeyed him. Several Finns were wounded before the man could be restrained and disarmed. When the officer came to his senses and saw what he had done, he went to pieces. He was led from the field, sobbing and wailing.
Each building had to be reduced as a separate strong point. “The houses were shot full of holes like sieves,” remembered one participant.1 The Finns grenaded each building, but even the wounded Russians kept fighting. There were vicious firefights inside the riddled buildings, nasty close-up work with pistols, grenades, bayonets. One detachment of Finns managed to set up a roadblock west of the village and cut it off from reinforcement. Finally, the northern arm of the attack, ErP-10 and ErP-112, entered the village from a new direction. The fighting now became so close that neither side could use its mortars. It was simply a matter of who broke first. By noon the balance shifted in favor of the Finns, when the Second Company of the once-forlorn PPP-7 gained a foothold in the center of the village and knocked out a number of interlocking machine-gun nests that had been galling the Finns for hours. By 2:00 P.M., the Russians were in retreat.
At nightfall, December 23, the Finns had reached the banks of the Aittojoki River, and there the entire Finnish effort simply ran out of steam. Mannerheim wisely called off the attacks. There was good defensive terrain along the Aittojoki, and it seemed clear that the original Soviet threat to Tolvajärvi and the important roads beyond it had been decisively checked.
In proportion to the numbers engaged, the Tolvajärvi campaign was for the Finns the bloodiest of the war. Fully one-third of Talvela’s officers and noncoms were killed or wounded, and one-quarter of his rank and file: a total of 630 men killed and 1,320 wounded.
Russian losses will never be known accurately; an unknown number—certainly at least 1,000—perished unseen and uncounted in the snowy wastes. Between Tolvajärvi and the Aittojoki, 4,000 Russian bodies were counted; their wounded probably numbered 5,000, and almost 600 were taken prisoner. Russian armor was virtually wiped out: fifty-nine tanks and armored cars were destroyed. The Finns welcomed into their arsenal 220 usable Russian machine guns and light automatics.
Talvela’s accomplishment was remarkable. He had eliminated the direct threat to the entire Ladoga-Karelia front, and he had also burned up a good part of the Eighth Army’s reserves, thus improving Fourth Corps’s chances closer to Ladoga.
Psychologically, the victory at Tolvajärvi was like a shot of adrenalin to Finnish troops everywhere. The enemy at Tolvajärvi had not been composed of second-rate troops, either, for the 139th Division had been tough, aggressive, and boldly led. But its morale was not good: the Russians didn’t know why they were fighting and the Finns did. Yet the Finns’ morale had also been very low before Talvela and Pajari arrived. As Task Force Räsänen, the Finns were actually beaten, and their entire front was on the edge of collapse. If the Tolvajärvi campaign proved anything, other than the toughness of the Finnish soldier, it reaffirmed the power of a commander of strong will and personality to materially change the course of battlefield events, even at the eleventh hour.
Back at Fourth Corps headquarters, General Hägglund no longer had to worry about being outflanked from the north. For the rest of the war, Group Talvela’s front was the scene of only limited ground activity, although Russian air raids in this sector were heavy from time to time. On Christmas Day, for instance, General Pajari’s headquarters at Aittojoki was severely bombed just as Christmas services were being held. The regimental chaplain, among others, was killed where he stood. Finnish fighter patrols were quickly sent to the vicinity and arrived in time to shoot down four of the bombers.
In late December the first American-Finnish volunteers to reach the front were put into the line in Talvela’s sector. This was a token force only, about a platoon’s worth, but it saw more or less constant patrol action until the war’s end and seems to have acquitted itself well.
Late in January the Russians in the Tolvajärvi-Ägläjärvi sector escalated the scale of combat by launching a number of effective probes, this time using ski troops, that caused the Finns some temporary problems. There was much small-scale skirmishing in the forest, rather complicated for such small battles, usually involving one side or the other making wide flanking loops with their skiers. Each side won engagements and lost some, but the Russians never quite managed to get anything going on this front that might have significantly altered the basic stalemate. Although company-sized detachments came fairly close on several occasions, they never again reached the Tolvajärvi-Aittojoki road with anything bigger than a reconnaissance patrol.
1Chew, 55.
