An excerpt from Gordon Sander’s forthcoming book on Finland: “In The Shadow of the Peace”
PROLOGUE
March 13, 1940
RECEIVED WISDOM is that November 30, 1939, the first day of the Winter War, was the most shocking day in Finnish history.
Of course there is no doubt that November 30th was traumatizing for Finns. Anyone who is old enough to be there on that fateful day and saw the Soviet SB2 bombers emerge out of the cloud cover over Helsinki and witnessed the death and destruction the aerial intruders wrought, or who has seen the horrifying newsreels from that day, including the passenger bus in front of Central Station that was incinerated along with its occupants, with the smoldering remains of one of the passengers lying near by, can attest to that. November 30th was indeed Finland’s day of infamy, as US President Franklin Roosevelt described the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that signalled the start of World War II two years later.
November 30th was Finland’s Pearl Harbor.
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AND yet, as those dwindling number of Finns who are old enough, and sapient enough to remember, there is another day in Finnish history that was possibly even more traumatic than November 30 th : March 13, 1940 the heart-stopping day when Vaino Tanner, the Finnish foreign Minister announced that an armistice between Moscow and Helsinki had been reached and the 105-day-old war--a war which many Finns had actually thought they were winning--had suddenly come to a stop.
It had been only two days since the Finnish people, who had been shielded from the bitter truth by the zealous press censors, had first learned that negotiations with the hated Russkies were underway.
Still, few imagined that the Talvisota, a war into which the entire nation had enthusiastically thrown itself, a war in which Suomi had suffered so much and lost thousands of its soldiers and fought so hard, could possibly end the way it did.
And yet that is exactly what happened that dread day, Finland’s true day of infamy, eight three years ago.
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NONE of the dozens of foreign journalists who had descended on Finland to report the David and Goliath war and were bivouacked at the Hotel Kamp, would ever forget March 13th . Of all the passages in the droves of books and articles the members of the so-called Kamp Corps would write about their experiences during the Talvisota, the most moving are the ones the Finn- friendly correspondents wrote about what they saw and felt as they walked the streets of the capital that day and beheld the faces of the stunned, grief-stricken Finns around them.
The experience was all the more vivid—and painful—for the newsmen because, unlike the people around them, they had been tipped off about what was coming. This was one scoop they would rather not have had.
At the Kamp, Geoffrey Cox, the veteran New Zealand newsman who had reported the duration of the war, had spent the night of March 12th in a state of suspended animation, waiting for confirmation of the dread news that the peace treaty with Moscow had been signed, as he wrote in his memoir:
That night of the 12th of March I walked around in the blackout, past the heaps of snow piled by footpaths, to the Press Room. Every correspondent knew that tonight we would probably hear something. I looked around the Press Room that night, at the green-covered tables with files of translations from the Finnish press, the photos of Suomssalmi on the walls, the heavy curtains drawn for the blackout. Here I had head the first communique of the war read out; here I had seen Miss Helsinkis, the pretty Finnish girl who acted as chief secretary, looking every night for the figures of Russian planes brought down.
Cox asked the Finnish girl how she felt now. “I live in Viipuri,” she responded, sadly, “Last week I saw on a newsreel my flat, smashed to pieces by a bomb. But I don’t mind that so much as stopping the fight now that we have suffered so much.
Later that agonizing evening of March 12th, Cox’s fellow scribe, Leland Stowe, the veteran correspondent for The Chicago Daily News, who would become one of the best known reporters of World War II, was sitting upstairs in the room of Walter Kerr, the writer for the New York Herald Tribune, along with a number of other journalists—including Cox, who had since decided to take out his anxieties on the typewriter. “We tried to cover the heartbreak of it all with feeble jokes,” he wrote, “They all fell flat.”
Pressed for news, Laurin Zilliacus, durable Finnish press officer who had conducted many of the briefings for the Kamp Corps, now visibly depressed, conceded that it was possible that peace terms had been signed in Moscow; however, he assumed that the eduskunta hadn’t voted on them. Otherwise, he would have heard.
At least one Finn couldn’t wait. “Then,” Stowe later wrote, “the phone rang and a Finnish friend was called. He laid down the receiver and said in a dull voice: ‘The first of our friends has just committed suicide.’ It was a young woman, a writer by profession.’”
Shortly after the journalists were summoned again to the press room. Zillacus was standing mutely in front of the silent, smoke-filled room. “Fighting will stop at eleven tomorrow,” the dazed young man said, forgetting that “tomorrow” was actually that same day.
“His voice was that of a man at a funeral,” Stowe recalled. “For a moment no one spoke. Then the room slowly emptied, as correspondent after correspondent went to type out his cable telling the world that Russia had won.”
Tanner, the foreign minister, Zillacus added bleakly, was to speak to the Finnish people at mid-day, detailing the terms of the shock armistice.”
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SEVERAL hundred kilometers to the east, on the bomb-gutted Karelian Isthmus, astonished Finnish officers began receiving word of the imminent ceasefire, which they passed on to their equally shocked men, who tried to get to a safe place to protect themselves from the Soviet artillery, which were intent on shelling Finnish positions until the last minute—and possibly beyond that as well.
Horribly, a number of Finnish troops and foreign volunteers were killed after the official ceasefire time of 11 am by the vindictive Soviets. In the north just such a tragedy took place near Salla, when the Russians deliberately bombed an outfit of Swedish and Norwegian volunteers, who had recently taken over the fighting for their Finnish brothers there, causing numerous casualties.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there were a lot of Finns who wanted to keep on fighting too, as Geoffrey Cox wrote:
At Kuhmo one company warned that they must stop fighting at 11 o’clock Finnish time, had hurled themselves against a Russian position at dawn in their anger and fought until almost every man was wiped out.
At Viipuri a Finnish icebreaker, sent in to try and crack the ice of the bay and cut off the Russians on the western shore—a brilliant strategic move—kept moving at 11 o’clock. Russians fired on it, killing seventy men.
At Taipale, on the blood-soaked Karelian isthmus, where Finnish troops had held their positions since the beginning of the war, and had continued to repulse the onrushing Soviet berserkers until the bitter end, some of the men actually stood and cheered the news of the ceasefire, thinking that it was the Russians who had succumbed, not them. That was how little they knew what was going on.
It was only later that horrible, endless day of March 13 th when they realized their mistake that the Finns got angry.
By then, of course, it was too late to keep on fighting, but how they wanted to, as Leland Stowe recorded, “At eleven o’clock the order to cease firing was given along the entire front. Finnish soldiers who could scarcely stand received it first with astonished disbelief and then with bitter cries of protest. ‘To hell with it all. It would be better to go on.’”
“Without munitions, without artillery, the Finns asked nothing except to fight on. In their hearts, they were never defeated.”
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BUT sadly, horribly, tragically, they were.
Now in Helsinki, and elsewhere, the reality of that fact was about to sink in as the country braced itself for the supreme shock of Tanner’s armistice speech.
That morning of March 13th , Stowe had tried to prepare Clara, his loyal assistant, for the traumatic news.
“I had warned Clara that peace was coming and she had cried ‘No, no!” And then fiercely [after he told her what suspected would be the final terms]: ‘But we’ll fight if we have nothing but our knives….Hanko? They will take Hanko? I tell you our children and our grandchildren would fight to take Hanko back.”
“No,” Clara had insisted, “they can never do that to us.” ‘
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BUT, as Vaino Tanner confirmed in the address he bravely made to the country that day, surely one of the most painful addresses any politician has had to make to his own people, “they”—the members of the Finnish government who had been charged with the dread duty of negotiating with Stalin and Molotov—had indeed done it.
Not that “they” had had much choice, although it would take some time before shocked Finns could accept that immutable fact.
Instinctively, Stowe, Cox and some of the other members of the Kamp Corps who had been stationed in Helsinki for most of the Talvisota decided that they could not bear to hear Tanner’s speech at the Kamp.”
John Langdon Davies, another member of the corps, made for a nearby canteen operated by Elanto, the Social Democratic-owned restaurant and grocery cooperative—“which I knew to have a wireless, and which I supposed, of the usual crowd of blue-coated, worked, shop girls, typists, clerks, soldiers, skilled workmen and the rest. I went there and sat down at a little table. It was early still, and for the next quarter of an hour people came in and took their places at different tables.”
Leland Stowe had decided to do the same. For his part, Cox decided to listen to the speech in the dining hall of the Hotel Seurahuone.
Following are excerpts what the three heard and saw that memorable, sorrowful afternoon on March 13, 1940.
First Langdon-Davies:
A woman announcer stated that in a few minutes the Foreign Minister woud speak. The wireless orchestra played Martin Luther’s hymn. The hymn came to an end. It had been the same hymn that the otherwise silent crowd had sung spontaneously at Helsinki railway station when last year the negotiators had gone to Moscow.
Without further announcement, Foreign Minister Tanner began to speak. Scarcely a word had been spoken and now there was absolute silence. People stared at their plates: the Foreign Minister read out the terms of peace.
Every now and then as the true tragedy unfolded itself my eye was caught by a quick, short movement of a man or a woman suddenly brushing away tears. Twice, there was another movement.
“Of course,” the British scribe added, “I could not understand anything that was being said, except the proper names.”
It was the words Viipuri and Hanko that produced this movement. A spasmodic stifled cry, which seemed to come from almost everyone in the room, as if in response to a physical blow from an unseen weapon.
The mother and sister at my own table were now sitting with closed eyes. The girl at the next table was staring at the young man in uniform as if something incomprehensible had frightened her. Only once there was the slightest interruption. Somewhere down the room, like a pistol shot, a man’s voice snapped out, ‘Never!’”
Geoffrey Cox, at the Seurahuone, watching an equally traumatic tableau, thought about some of the Finns he had met and come to admire during the three months he had spent covering the war:
Every name came as a blow. “Viipiri.’ Gone. I thought of the fair girl on the ski jump in Rovaniemi, who had fought so willingly because she wanted to get back to Viipuri.
‘You should see the sea there in the evenings in the summer,’ she said.
‘Sortavala, Kalisalmi, Hanko…On and on went the names. Suddenly the lotta [seated next to him] burst into tears, her shoulders heaving.
Stowe, for his part, was impressed with Tanner’s self-discipline.
The foreign minister’s voice was steady and emotionless, supremely Finnish in its self-control. ‘We were compelled to accept peace,’ he said.
On all sides of me faces stared, never registering so much as a twitch of their features. Tanner’s voice went steadily on. He was enumerating the Soviet conditions. ‘My God!’ exclaimed an English-speaking girl across the table.
Two more women were crying, but without making a sound. Tanner was explaining how foreign help had failed to come in sufficient strength and in time, how the Scandinavian governments had refused passage for British and French troops.
My eyes were drawn back to the young woman by the window. Now she lay limp in her chair, her face averted toward the drawn curtains. Her shoulders were shaking slowly and ceaselessly.
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NORTH of Helsinki in Lahti, Pekka Tillikainen, a roving reporter for YLE, was listening, half- asleep, to a portable radio when Tanner came on. “One program number flowed into another and we were half asleep,” he remembered. “Then it came. Out of our radio receiver, came the news of the disaster, wrapped in cotton wool. It came with reasoned, serious phrases.
“It brought disappointment, bitterness, sorrow. It brought this,” he later wrote, “even though there were pockets of soldiers at the front where this meant salvation from death.”
It didn’t matter: a piece of Finland died on March 13th .
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AMONGST those immersed in sorrow and bitterness, along with her family on that bitter day, along with the rest of the thunderstruck Finnish nation, was Mai-Lis Toivenen, a lotta from Koivisto who had been an aircraft spotter during the just concluded war.
Two weeks before, Toivenen, like many of the lottas assigned to the areas overrun by the Soviets, had been honorably discharged.
She had then joined her mother, Eva, and her three younger brothers, Reijo, Martii, and Eero, at a farmhouse in Korkeakoski, a small town in central Finland whence her family had been evacuated.
As it happened, the farm where they were staying didn’t have a properly worjing radio, so the family had to hike down the road to find another place where they could hear the armistice speech. While they walking, Mai-Lis recalled in her memoir, the five of them had to pass through a clearing in the woods.
Looking up through the curtain of the anbient trees, they were greeted by the sight of another curtain, luminously hanging in the night sky: the Northern Lights.
A suspicious sort, Eva Paavola took the supernatural sight as a portent.
“The war does not end here,” she said aloud for her children to hear.”
“There will be a new war.”
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UNFORTUNATELY, Eva’s grim premonition upon beholding the Northern Lights the night of March 13th proved correct.
Sixteen long, twisty, shadowy months later, there would indeed be another war with Russia, a longer and even costlier war, a war in which Finland was a co-belligerent with Nazi Germany.
The Continuation War, it was called. That far less glorious war would last three years.
How did that disastrous war come to pass?
How did Finland wind up on the same side as Nazi Germany, a country which a sizable proportion, despite their hatred for the Soviets, also detested?
How did it come to be that in 1942, two years into that far less noble conflict, that Adolf Hitler flew to Finland to help celebrate Gustaf Mannerheim’s 75th birthday?
What was the chain of events and decisions that led to that strange circumstance?
What was life like during those sixteen long shadowy months?