The Gulf of Viipuri had never figured in prewar planning by the Finnish Army. It had been assumed that any threat to the gulf would be naval and could be taken care of by the powerful and well-sited shore batteries that covered the approaches. The islands that screened Viipuri from the sea were fortified, but not against an over-the-ice offensive from the Finnish coast. Nothing had been done at all, not even map exercises, to prepare a defensive plan for the western coast behind Viipuri. Under ordinary wintertime conditions, by late February, the ice over the gulf would have become too unstable and too dotted with thin spots, to support heavy vehicle traffic. But this year, it remained frozen as solid as ever, capable of bearing the weight of trucks, light tanks, and up-to-medium-caliber field artillery. “General Winter” had turned traitor.
But before the Russians could strike at that vulnerable coastline, they had to fight their way across the gulf itself, and this required the subduing of garrisons on several dozen islands that were not technically part of the Rear Line but that were situated so as to form breakwaters, delaying and blunting the edge of the invaders’ columns. The defenders of these isolated positions knew that every hour the enemy spent fighting them was another precious hour gained for strengthening the defenses around Viipuri.
It cost the Russians heavily to subdue these positions. Little Tuppura Island, for instance, just west of the Pulliniemi Peninsula, held out for twenty-four hours against a full Russian division, its garrison killing about 1,000 enemy infantry and knocking out a dozen tanks, at a cost of 260 Finnish dead. In addition to the two six-inch coast defense guns on the island itself, the Tuppura defenders were supported by a battery of twelve-inch rifles at Ristiniemi, across the mouth of the gulf. The heavy armor-piercing shells from those huge guns blasted gigantic cracks in the ice, sinking tanks and spilling hundreds of infantry into the fatally cold water. Here is a Russian survivor’s description of one of the assaults on Tuppura:
We heard noises behind us—our tanks were arriving. They drew abreast of us and we formed up to advance behind their sheltering steel. The range decreased steadily … now the machine guns on the beach opened up … now our tanks shuddered as their big guns began shelling the island; then they fired their machine guns, and we could see tracers splintering the rocky parapets on the beach ahead.… It is hard to describe my feelings: we were entrusting our very lives to these tanks and the protection they gave us from the rain of Finnish fire.… the Finns’ main battery began firing shrapnel, and soon there were wounded men writhing on the ice all around.… a sound in the air like a rushing freight train: those infernal shore batteries across the Gulf began hitting us again, sending over shells that weighed many tons and that burst through the ice so violently that it shattered like glass.… this caused great shock waves of water to surge up and wash out over the surface, making it necessary for us to advance through pools of soupy, ice cold mush.… although our bodies were well-clad, our feet soon felt the effects of having to march in boots filled with this slush. Suddenly, there was a great roar as one of those heavy shells struck the ice close by.… the tank behind which we were advancing suddenly shuddered to a halt and began to rise into the air at an alarmingly steep angle; then, with a huge gulping sound, the vehicle took a nose-dive and instantly slid out of sight through a jagged rupture in the ice.1
The Red Army was now battering at the very gates of Finland, hurling its inexhaustible power against the Rear Line. Beyond that line lay the cultural, economic, and psychological heart of Finland. Mannerheim was taking a grimly calculated risk by standing and fighting it out at the Rear Line—further westward, where numerous lakes, some of them very large, channel the land into narrow corridors, there was better defensive ground, even without time to fortify it. But those areas were a long way beyond Viipuri, and continued retention of Viipuri was one of the few bargaining chips Finland still held. If the Isthmus Army could just hold out a little bit longer, until the spring thaw melted the gulf and frozen lakes and turned the ground in front of Viipuri into a quagmire, then it might well be possible to halt the Russian drive in place, giving Finland an improved negotiating position. The Red Army command was of course aware of spring thaws, too, and it assaulted this final defense line furiously.
The worst danger spot was the western coast of the Gulf of Viipuri. Adding that terrain to the Rear Line lengthened its frontage beyond the Finns’ manpower capacity. Troops had to be found, a command had to be organized. Mannerheim prevailed upon the commander of the Swedish Volunteers to take his men from training depots and use them to replace Finnish battalions tied down on the quiescent Salla front. Beginning on February 22, 8,000 Swedes and 725 Norwegians took over that front, releasing five experienced Finnish battalions and a handful of artillery pieces for redeployment on the gulf coast. These units, in addition to the three coastal battalions already in the area, were now designated “Coastgroup.” To command the new task force, Mannerheim imported the blustery victor of the arctic battles, General Kurt Wallenius.
The old pirate had done extremely well up in the wide, open spaces of Lapland, where he had proven himself a master of fluid guerrilla tactics and where he had more or less run the whole show. When Wallenius arrived on the Isthmus on February 28, however, he found a different kind of war. He took one long look at the chaos, the terror, the desperation, the sheer, screaming, overwhelming noise of the Isthmus battle, went back into his command post, and began drinking heavily. He stayed reeling drunk for three days, barely able to stand up during important command conferences. On March 3, Mannerheim summarily relieved him of his command and forbade him ever to serve in the Finnish Army again. General Oesch, the hard-working chief of the general staff, dutifully replaced him and achieved a minor miracle of organization in shaking down Coastgroup into a coherent tactical command.
On the same night that Oesch took command of Coastgroup, the Soviet Twenty-eighth Corps pushed across the gulf in force and wrested two small beachheads on the western coast at Vilaniemi and Haranpaaniemi. Simultaneously the Russian Tenth Corps thrust over the gulf on a northward curving axis that lay east of Tervajoki, attacking without letup the clusters of defended islets that guarded the inner harbor of Viipuri. Savage counterattacks threw back the earliest Russian lodgments; when they retreated, they left hundreds of dead and the blackened hulks of fifteen tanks.
Once joined, the struggle for the gulf would mount steadily in intensity until it reached a climactic fury that equaled the Summa battles of February. Sensing that the gulf was the most sensitive and vulnerable point in the Rear Line, and knowing that they had only a limited time before the ice began to break up, the Russians shifted the greatest weight of their entire offensive effort in that direction, sending wave after wave of men and machines out over the ice.
As the surface of both gulfs grew crowded with thousands of moving men, the Finnish Air Force made its last, bravest, and most desperate effort, flying sortie after sortie until its pilots collapsed from exhaustion, strafing the advancing columns from treetop levels, and braving umbrellas of interceptors and rain forests of flak. Finnish ace Eino Luukkanen left a vivid impression of one such mission:
We did not have to search for our target, for no sooner had we crossed the shoreline than we could see, about six miles away, a column of men and horses trudging across the ice. I judged that the column, which looked like a long black snake, was a reinforced battalion of about five hundred men, and from the air the troops appeared motionless. Suursaari was covered by fog, so we had little to fear from Russian fighters, and as we closed with our target our Fokkers lined up in single file for the strafing run. We could not have been offered a better target. The Russians were not even wearing white parkas as camouflage, and were sharply defined against the snow-covered ice. I gently eased the stick forward to commence my strafing run. I can only assume that the Russians had been promised some form of air cover, for they made no attempt to break column at the noise of our engines. I levelled off at thirty feet, loosing a lethal stream of bullets into the column from all four guns.
Panic immediately overtook the Russians as I roared past their heads. Some dropped in their tracks, some endeavored to hold the frightened horses, while others scattered in all directions, slipping and sliding on the ice. My undercarriage almost scraped their heads.… Backwards and forwards we roamed across the remnants of the column, pouring some eight thousand rounds into the Russians from our thirty-two machine guns.2
Observers at a Finnish shore battery, who witnessed the massacre through their immense spotting glasses, later passed the word to Luukkanen’s squadron that they had killed at least half of the entire column.
On March 5, the Russians hurled an entire division at Vilaniemi Peninsula, supported by 100 tanks. This gigantic formation was taken under fire by the shore batteries at Ristiniemi. Tight clusters of huge shells designed to smash through battleship armor rained down on the attacking columns, blowing enormous crevices into the ice, shattering the broken surface so violently that entire companies of men were swallowed by the fatally cold waters, in a manner unforgettably similar to the climactic scenes of the film Alexander Nevsky.
Elsewhere along the Rear Line contact became general by the end of March 2. Near Tali, northeast of Viipuri, there was good tank country. Here, too, the loamy, sandy soil typical of the eastern Isthmus yielded to bare rocky ground, making it difficult for the Finns to dig trenches and multiplying the effect of Russian artillery, whose exploding shells filled the air with splinters of granite. To block the enemy in this sector, Finnish engineers opened the gates of the Saimaa Canal, flooding the low-lying terrain to a depth of three feet. The Russians towed their tanks right through the flood, and their infantry was preceded by companies of incredibly brave sappers who crawled through frigid water up to their chins in order to close with the defenders. In the opinion of the Finns who fought them, these were the most courageous Red soldiers they had ever seen.
March 4: There were now the equivalent of thirty Russian divisions hammering the gulf and the Rear Line, supported by at least 1,200 armored vehicles and 2,000 aircraft. Positions changed hands a dozen times a day in some places. The Finns recaptured Vilaniemi but could not hold it against tanks. Out in the gulf the island of Uuraas was lost, and heavy attacks continued against all other islands still in Finnish hands. Each of these attacks on the inner ring of Viipuri’s fixed defenses was pressed into the teeth of intense shore battery fire. Entire battalions were mauled by these weapons, but they were replaced.
March 5: The strain of circumstances was merciless. Mannerheim was taking the worst gamble of his life, and doing it while confined to a chair with a severe case of the flu. Even those who hated him had to admire the iciness of his nerve at this point, knowing that if the Russians did expand their beachhead on the gulf coast, there was nothing between them and Helsinki except a few companies of teenagers with ten days’ training. If Mannerheim gave the order now, it might still be possible to disengage and retire to more defensible lines west of Viipuri. In twenty-four hours it might be too late.
March 6: Coastgroup put through an emergency call to Öhquist, begging for artillery ammunition. Öhquist, in anguish, had to refuse: in the entire Finnish Second Corps, there remained a reserve supply, for all calibers of guns, of 600 shells. Along the gulf coast the defenders sawed or blasted holes in the ice, but within hours it refroze as solidly as ever. In Viipuri itself Finnish commanders estimated they could not possibly hold the city for longer than four or five days. Heavy fighting had reached the outskirts.
March 7–8: The Finnish Twenty-third Division fell apart. One entire battalion broke and ran away, the first time this had happened in the Finnish Army. When ordered to retake the lost ground in counterattacks, another battalion simply pointed its rifles at its officers, climbed out of its trenches, and walked off the battlefield. The Russians expanded their beachhead on the gulf coast, and for the first time artillery rounds began dropping on the Viipuri-Helsinki highway. If the Russians occupied that road, they would cut Coastgroup off from Second Corps and be in a position to surround Viipuri. Radio communications had broken down utterly; only runners got through, sometimes. Each Finnish company, each platoon, was fighting its own bitter and personal battle.
March 9–10: The order went out to evacuate all island positions still in Finnish hands. Portions of the Third and Fifth divisions began setting up for house-to-house resistance inside Viipuri itself. Russian shells battered the ancient citadel near the harbor, but even modern artillery could do little more than chip those stout granite walls. At his headquarters, General Öhquist, still in the dark as to the status of peace talks, wrote in his diary: “This is an awful gamble we are taking! It is possible that we can keep Viipuri in our hands until tomorrow night. If we are ordered to continue resistance beyond that time, it means that either the city or the troops will be doomed.”3
The Finnish Army had begun the war with approximately 150,000 men under arms. By March 10 its losses from all causes totaled about half of that figure. It was thus fighting with half its original strength, along a line twice as long as the line it had originally held, against an enemy whose reserves for all practical purposes were inexhaustible.
March 11–13: It was no longer possible to speak of a Finnish “line” on the gulf coast: from the Baltic shore to the farthest Russian advance, now just six kilometers from the western edge of Viipuri, the entire shoreline was a chaotic tangle of savage delaying actions. The Finns’ situation was by now truly desperate; yet so too was their will to resist. The Russians were never able to break through and surge forward those last few kilometers that stood between them and total victory.
March 13: The cease-fire was to take effect at 11:00 A.M. Helsinki time. During the final hour, the firing died down slowly, ceased altogether in many places along the 100-mile front. By 10:45, the defenders had begun to relax and stretch in their cramped dugouts and foxholes. Thoughts turned to home, to loved ones, to the sheer ecstasy of having survived 105 days of unbelievable horror and violence.
And at precisely 10:45, for the sheer vindictive meanness of it, the Russians unexpectedly opened up a furious last-minute bombardment that even their own historians admit was nothing more than a gesture of revenge. There was not the slightest military reason for this savage act; hundreds of Finns were killed or wounded in a spasm of childish rage.
The defenders of the Karelian Isthmus marched out of their battered positions with their heads high. Following them was virtually the entire civilian population, streaming westward with only as many belongings as they could pack onto sleds or into carts, abandoning homes, farms, land that had been won by their forefathers; yielding as well the beautiful and historic city of Viipuri, once called “The Paris of the North.” One Finnish officer wrote to his family:
All belongings were being hastily taken away in order that they might not remain behind for the Russians, who had the right to occupy the village the next day.… it was upsetting to see villages left burning behind you in battle; it is even more upsetting to leave these undamaged houses for the Russians. But one thing was clear: we have not fled. We were prepared to fight to the last man. We carry our heads high because we have fought with all our might for three and a half months. More than that, one can scarcely demand.4
British journalist John Langdon-Davies was sitting in a Helsinki restaurant when news of the surrender terms was broadcast to the public for the first time: “Every now and then, as the true tragedy unfolded itself, my eyes caught a quick movement from first one table and then another. It was the movement of a man or woman suddenly brushing away tears.… I could not understand anything that was being said, except for the proper names. It was words like ‘Viipuri’ and ‘Hanko’ that produced this movement—a stifled, spasmodic cry that seemed to come from almost everybody in the room, as if in response to a physical blow.”5
His assignment to cover the war for Life concluded, Carl Mydans boarded a train for Sweden. It was crowded, and he had to share a sleeping compartment with three Finnish officers, one of them a colonel. During the night, all four men maintained a polite silence. The following morning Mydans was dressing and, like two of the other men, discreetly trying to maintain as much decorum as he could inside the cramped quarters. The Finnish colonel was shaving, balancing his straight razor delicately against the swaying of the train. He caught Mydans’s eye in the mirror.
“You are an American?” he asked in clear English. Mydans nodded, noticing that the other two Finnish officers were studiously averting their eyes. The colonel began to scrape at his chin once more.
“At least you will tell them that we fought bravely.”
Mydans felt his guts knot. He whispered that he would, indeed.
The colonel carefully wiped his razor, then dabbed at himself with a towel. He had cut his cheek and there was a tiny bubble of blood swelling there. When he had taken care of that, he began to button his tunic. Mydans observed that the officer’s hands were trembling.
Suddenly he peered up at Mydans with an expression of anguish twisting his features. He began in a hoarse, quiet voice: “Your country was going to help.…” Then, in a louder voice: “You promised, and we believed you.…”
Then he grabbed Mydans by the shoulders, his fingers digging in, and screamed: “A half-dozen God-damned Brewster fighters with no spare parts is all we got from you! And the British sent us guns from the last war that wouldn’t even work!”
The other Finns turned their backs and self-consciously finished dressing. The train rattled into the station. The Finnish colonel dropped his hands, fell onto a bunk, and wept convulsively.
1Lyytinen, A. E., Koivisto Ja Viipurinlahti: 1919–1944 (Helsinki: Werner Soderstrom Oy, 1958), 98.
2Luukkanen, Eino, Fighter over Finland (London: MacDonald, 1963), 70–71.
3Öhquist, Harold, Talvisota—Minun Nakokulmastani (Helsinki: Werner Soderstrom Oy, 1949), 350.
4Goodrich, 70.
5Langdon-Davies, 124.