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Fifteen: The Storm and the Harvest
Fifteen: The Storm and the Harvest
The summer storm that ravaged Eastern Finland on the 8th and 9th August 1939, called the Sylvi Storm [1] according to it being Sylvi's name day, surprised Finnish meteorologists. In hindsight, though, the weather had been hot and dry in Finland for a surprisingly long period in late July and early August, and a thunderstorm was a natural culmination to the prevailing weather. The storm brought along with it heavy rains all around the Eastern part of the country, especially on the Karelian Isthmus, in Northern Karelia and in Northern Savonia. There were heavy bouts of lightnings and some destructive gusts of wind as well.
As harvest time was just beginning in the Finnish countryside, the storm led to many farms losing much or their crops in the affected areas. The effects were very patchy, though, and in some municipalities the storm affected the great majority of the farms while in the neighbouring one there were next to no damages caused by it. It took mere days for local notables and political representatives of the Agrarian League to start advocating for state support in terms of both direct monetary grants and indirect tax considerations for the affected farms and communities to help the locals carry the losses incurred.
The prevailing feelings in Finland in mid-August were shock and grief. The so-called Hannila shots [2], the misdirected artillery barrage that killed and injured several Finnish and foreign political and military leaders at the great war games in and around Viipuri on August 8th sent the nation into a political crisis the kind that had not be seen since the early 1930s and the heyday of the far right nationalist Lapua Movement.
Several books and articles have been written about the Hannila shots, in Finland and Sweden, the most recent of them the acclaimed Hannila: When the Sky Fell Down by the young Finnish historian Jenni Indrenius. It is hard to overstate the importance the incident had on the political reality of the First Republic at summer's end 1939. Like Mika Waltari did in his novel The Number of Our Days, most historians now see the Hannila shots as the bookend to the 1930s in Finland, and as the beginning of the WWII period proper. The fact that it was only two weeks from the incident to the announcement of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, on August 22nd, is naturally important for this view. After a period of relative calm, the events in Finland and around the small northern nation started gaining momentum, taking Finland towards the bigger storm known as the Second World War, much like a treetrunk floating in a meandering little river that suddenly turns into fast-flowing rapids.
The first people to stumble on the site of the carnage caused by the explosion of several 122 mm high explosive artillery shells in the midst of a group of high-ranking observers were troopers from the Häme Mounted Regiment. Four mounted soldiers, part of the "White" force's reconnaissance efforts, investigated the site of the artillery strike on the initiative of a young officer. This was caused, apparently, by the realization that the area in question should not have been a target for the field guns of Artillery Regiment 2, supporting the "White" force's assault in the exercise.
What the men, Lieutenant Vaara, Sergeant Jokinen, Private Argillander and Private Hämäläinen found were dead and dying men, some of them mutilated beyond recognition. Four people had died apparently immediately: Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, Minister of Defence Juho Niukkanen, General Rudolf Walden, the industrialist and a member of the Defence Council [3], and Per Edvin Sköld, the Swedish Minister of Defence. Eight others were injured in various ways, from surprisingly light injuries to life-threatening ones.
Three mounted troopers started a frantic effort to help the injured members of the group of observers, while Sergeant Jokinen was sent to find the nearest field radio or, failing that, field telephone, as soon as possible to summon medics to the scene and to reach the leadership of the war games [4] to call an immediate halt to the exercise. There was a number of Finnish liaison personnel at the scene, too, some of whom were also injured. At the insistence of Lieutenant Vaara, these shell-shocked men also started assisting with the first aid efforts.
Happily for the victims of the artillery strike, it was only about seven hundred meters to the closest infantry command post, and from there help could be called in. Almost exactly 45 minutes after the fateful artillery shots, Lieutenant General Hugo Österman, in his HQ at Heinjoki, then ordered all operations to do with the war games halted and sent also orders to the effect that all efforts must be taken to help the injured men in Hannila. The Viipuri city hospital was alerted, and best available means of transport were organized for the effort. Practically and rather fortuitously, this meant calling in two of the Air Force's Junkers floatplanes, a W 34 and a K 43, slated to take part in the exercise specifically in a medical evacuation role, to land on the nearby Hannilanjärvi to fly the stricken men to Viipuri. For the Commander of the Civil Guards, General Malmberg, even this modern means of transport was not enough: he took his last breath in the air enroute to the Karelian capital.
As soon as the tragic nature of the apparently misdirected artillery shots became apparent to the Finnish military leadership present, the question of whether these strikes could have been deliberate rather than accidental was considered by some. Orders were sent from Heinjoki to the units taking part in the exercise to find and apprehend those that were responsible for the incident forthwith. This lead in practice to infantry units surrounding artillery batteries in temporary mini-sieges and standoffs, sometimes threatening artillerymen at gunpoint, before the situation was resolved.
At the same time, the authorities in the Finnish capital were contacted in expectations of potential incidents taking place in Helsinki as well. The later historical studies about the Hannila shots suggest that in the event especially Major General Edvard Hanell, the commander of the ”White” force in the exercise, was all but sure that the attack was deliberate and just a prelude to an imminent larger attack against Finland. This sort of response to the event was natural under the circumstances, even if in hindsight it arguably appears very much like unfounded paranoia.
In Helsinki the military leadership's reaction mirrored Hanell's view. Upon receiving word from Viipuri, the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Oesch, placed all the capital area military units under alert, and also all the Civil Guards in the capital and surroundings were alerted. Of course due to the exercise in Viipuri taking up so much of active Finnish forces, the cupboard was pretty bare. The first troops appearing as reinforcements to patrol the surroundings of the ministries in central Helsinki were Navy conscripts roused at the naval barracks in Katajanokka, quickly armed with rifles and marched to the Senate Square by a flustered junior officer from the gunboat Karjala. The first actual regular command to reach battle readiness in the capital area was the Kuivasaari fortress island, where the battery of 12 inch Obuhov guns stood ready for action as quickly as three hours after the word of the Hannila incident reached the island.
In the evening of August 8th as the summer storm known as Sylvi pounded Eastern Finland with all her might, as the military authorities in Viipuri and the nearby municipalities were trying to make head or tails of the situation, and as surgeons in the Viipuri city hospital struggled to save the lives of seriously injured men under the light of oil lamps [5], in Helsinki uniformed men were seen setting up road blocks on the main streets and roadways leading to the heart of the Finnish capital.
The news of the Hannila incident did not take long to be transmitted outside Finland. Journalists from across Europe were taking part in covering the war games in Viipuri, and many of them rushed to tell their readers about what had happened as soon as possible. Some of the most iconic photos of the aftermath of the incident were also taken by foreign photographers.
...
...
The old man had woken up early and was now eating a light breakfast in his spartan room. Outside, snow fell slowly on the trees in the park. Under the overcast sky, everything appeared to be painted in shades of grey.
Nothing stirred.
As the man finished his coffee, there was a discreet knock on the door. Slowly, deliberately the old man stood up to reach his familiar military bearing. It was quite difficult. Then, slowly, he headed for the door.
Reaching his hand for the brass knob to open the heavy wooden door, Gustaf Mannerheim felt a twinge in his lower body, as if something was not all right. A cold sweat was rising to his forehead.
He opened the door but there was nobody there.
He then looked down. On the ground there was a single black riding boot, shined to perfection.
”I need to summon my servant to remind him that he forgot my other damn boot”, the old cavalry officer thought.
Then he felt a slight vertigo and reached out for the wall next to him to steady himself. He could see his own image in the mirror across the hallway, recognizable but distorted.
A realization came to him.
”No, that's right. One boot is all that I need now.”
…
It did not take long for the artillery section in question to be be identified. As the artillery battalion's HQ confirmed the coordinates the section had been ordered to fire at, and as the artillerymen of the section itself all separately agreed that slightly different coordinates, those of the unfortunate group of observers, had been used instead, it was certain who was responsible for the artillery strike.
The problem was that Sergeant Antti Karvonen, the man who had relayed the wrong coordinates to the section (on this every member of the section agreed) was nowhere to be found. He had gone missing in the confusion following the accident. The man was never seen again. There are several theories as to what happened to Sergeant Karvonen on August 8th, ranging from the mundane to the fanciful and even supernatural. The most realistic theory yet put together, first suggested already during the war, was that the body of an unknown man in a Finnish military uniform, found floating near Käkisalmi on the shores of Lake Ladoga in the spring of 1940 belonged to Karvonen. If we accept the theory, it would suggest that the artillery sergeant took his own life by drowning himself after the incident.
Lieutenant Arvo Vaara, the cavalry officer who led the first aid efforts on the scene of the incident became to be seen as the hero of the day. His actions in Hannila were rewarded with a high military decoration and in early December 1939 he would be promoted to captain.
….
….
Prime Minister A.K. Cajander was buried in the Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki on Sunday, August 20th. The official state funeral was well-attended, with thousands of people lining the streets from the Helsinki Cathedral to Hietaniemi in the fine sunny late August weather. General Lauri Malmberg's funeral was organized in Helsinki as well, with full military honours. Juho Niukkanen, the Minister of Defence, was buried in his home municipality of Kirvu on the Karelian Isthmus. Urho Kekkonen, the Minister of the Interior, was one of the men carrying his coffin. Kekkonen still walked with a limp, like he would for the rest of his life. General's Walden's funeral was, surprisingly, also a very modest affair, including only the closest family.
Per Edvin Sköld, the Swedish Minister of Defence, became the first Swedish state official whose dead body was transported on an aircraft home from abroad, to be buried in Swedish soil.[6] General Linder had stayed in Finland for the while, to handle the aftermath of the incident in different ways, and shaken and injured as he still was, he now returned home on the same plane as the late Minister Sköld.
Field Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim was brought to Helsinki on August 18th. He would start his long period of convalescence in his Kaivopuisto home. Historians generally agree that in the months after the Hannila incident, Mannerheim suffered from depression, partly brought on by various complications following from the amputation of his right leg from the knee down.
Even before of the public funerals of Cajander and Malmberg, and the more private ones for Niukkanen and Walden, the damage the Hannila incident had done to the Finnish state leadership had to be repaired. With the president still in a poor condition, and with both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence dead, the state leadership was decimated and in sore need of replenishment. On August 10th, Eljas Erkko, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, assumed the position of Acting Prime Minister for the time being, after consulting with the surviving members of the cabinet and the leaders of the parties in the ruling coalition. But more would need to be done. The immediate response of the Finnish government, such as it was, was to call the parliament to Helsinki by the beginning of the third week of August, to end the summer vacations of the parliamentarians early.
When the members of the Eduskunta on Monday, August 14th filed into the plenary chamber, there were many views as to what should be done about the situation. While in the early hours of the first meeting after the summer holiday, the mood was suitably somber (following a moment of silence held for those dead in the Hannila incident), it took no time for quite vocal disagreements to break out. Paavo Susitaival, the member of parliament for the Patriotic People's Movement, was the first to call for a special election in the parliament for a president, to be taken on the same week. Susitaival argued that Finland was in an immediate danger of a Soviet invasion while the nation was practically decapitated politically, and that a strong president would be something the nation would need under the circumstances. Susitaival called also for an immediate declaration of a state of war and the mobilization of the military reserves after the special election.
As the discussions in the Eduskunta continued on Tuesday the 15th also other parties started to agree with the special election for a new president. Urho Kekkonen himself argued for this on behalf of the Agrarians. As the discussion about the parliament declaring Kallio unable to prosecute the duties of the President of the Republic and choosing a new president according to an expedited procedure, a note was brought to the Social Democratic speaker of parliament, Väinö Hakkila.
What the small piece of paper said was that just an hour earlier, President Kyösti Kallio had regained consciousness in the hospital and according to the doctors attending him now appeared quite lucid.
….
...
Notes:
[1] Sylvi-myrsky.
[2] Hannilan laukaukset. Hannila is a village in the municipality of Antrea, some 20 km north from Viipuri.
[3] Rudolf Walden was the founder and main owner of the Yhtyneet Paperitehtaat Oy (United Paper Mills Inc.), a major Finnish industrial concern created in 1920. Together with Gösta Serlachius of the G.A. Serlachius company, he was also a leading member of the Finnish Paper Mills' Association, a de facto cartel dominating the Finnish interwar forestry sector. In terms of his military and defence policy role, Walden was seen as C.G.E. Mannerheim's closest collaborator in the National Defence Council.
[4] The exercise HQ was located in the Heinjoki municipality, roughly 10 kilometers south from Hannila.
[5] The storm having cut electricity for the while.
[6] The AB Aerotransport Junkers Ju 52 carrying Sköld's remains landed in Stockholm's Bromma airfield on August 13th.
…
To Be Continued...
Fifteen: The Storm and the Harvest
The summer storm that ravaged Eastern Finland on the 8th and 9th August 1939, called the Sylvi Storm [1] according to it being Sylvi's name day, surprised Finnish meteorologists. In hindsight, though, the weather had been hot and dry in Finland for a surprisingly long period in late July and early August, and a thunderstorm was a natural culmination to the prevailing weather. The storm brought along with it heavy rains all around the Eastern part of the country, especially on the Karelian Isthmus, in Northern Karelia and in Northern Savonia. There were heavy bouts of lightnings and some destructive gusts of wind as well.
As harvest time was just beginning in the Finnish countryside, the storm led to many farms losing much or their crops in the affected areas. The effects were very patchy, though, and in some municipalities the storm affected the great majority of the farms while in the neighbouring one there were next to no damages caused by it. It took mere days for local notables and political representatives of the Agrarian League to start advocating for state support in terms of both direct monetary grants and indirect tax considerations for the affected farms and communities to help the locals carry the losses incurred.
The prevailing feelings in Finland in mid-August were shock and grief. The so-called Hannila shots [2], the misdirected artillery barrage that killed and injured several Finnish and foreign political and military leaders at the great war games in and around Viipuri on August 8th sent the nation into a political crisis the kind that had not be seen since the early 1930s and the heyday of the far right nationalist Lapua Movement.
Several books and articles have been written about the Hannila shots, in Finland and Sweden, the most recent of them the acclaimed Hannila: When the Sky Fell Down by the young Finnish historian Jenni Indrenius. It is hard to overstate the importance the incident had on the political reality of the First Republic at summer's end 1939. Like Mika Waltari did in his novel The Number of Our Days, most historians now see the Hannila shots as the bookend to the 1930s in Finland, and as the beginning of the WWII period proper. The fact that it was only two weeks from the incident to the announcement of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, on August 22nd, is naturally important for this view. After a period of relative calm, the events in Finland and around the small northern nation started gaining momentum, taking Finland towards the bigger storm known as the Second World War, much like a treetrunk floating in a meandering little river that suddenly turns into fast-flowing rapids.
The first people to stumble on the site of the carnage caused by the explosion of several 122 mm high explosive artillery shells in the midst of a group of high-ranking observers were troopers from the Häme Mounted Regiment. Four mounted soldiers, part of the "White" force's reconnaissance efforts, investigated the site of the artillery strike on the initiative of a young officer. This was caused, apparently, by the realization that the area in question should not have been a target for the field guns of Artillery Regiment 2, supporting the "White" force's assault in the exercise.
What the men, Lieutenant Vaara, Sergeant Jokinen, Private Argillander and Private Hämäläinen found were dead and dying men, some of them mutilated beyond recognition. Four people had died apparently immediately: Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, Minister of Defence Juho Niukkanen, General Rudolf Walden, the industrialist and a member of the Defence Council [3], and Per Edvin Sköld, the Swedish Minister of Defence. Eight others were injured in various ways, from surprisingly light injuries to life-threatening ones.
Three mounted troopers started a frantic effort to help the injured members of the group of observers, while Sergeant Jokinen was sent to find the nearest field radio or, failing that, field telephone, as soon as possible to summon medics to the scene and to reach the leadership of the war games [4] to call an immediate halt to the exercise. There was a number of Finnish liaison personnel at the scene, too, some of whom were also injured. At the insistence of Lieutenant Vaara, these shell-shocked men also started assisting with the first aid efforts.
Happily for the victims of the artillery strike, it was only about seven hundred meters to the closest infantry command post, and from there help could be called in. Almost exactly 45 minutes after the fateful artillery shots, Lieutenant General Hugo Österman, in his HQ at Heinjoki, then ordered all operations to do with the war games halted and sent also orders to the effect that all efforts must be taken to help the injured men in Hannila. The Viipuri city hospital was alerted, and best available means of transport were organized for the effort. Practically and rather fortuitously, this meant calling in two of the Air Force's Junkers floatplanes, a W 34 and a K 43, slated to take part in the exercise specifically in a medical evacuation role, to land on the nearby Hannilanjärvi to fly the stricken men to Viipuri. For the Commander of the Civil Guards, General Malmberg, even this modern means of transport was not enough: he took his last breath in the air enroute to the Karelian capital.
As soon as the tragic nature of the apparently misdirected artillery shots became apparent to the Finnish military leadership present, the question of whether these strikes could have been deliberate rather than accidental was considered by some. Orders were sent from Heinjoki to the units taking part in the exercise to find and apprehend those that were responsible for the incident forthwith. This lead in practice to infantry units surrounding artillery batteries in temporary mini-sieges and standoffs, sometimes threatening artillerymen at gunpoint, before the situation was resolved.
At the same time, the authorities in the Finnish capital were contacted in expectations of potential incidents taking place in Helsinki as well. The later historical studies about the Hannila shots suggest that in the event especially Major General Edvard Hanell, the commander of the ”White” force in the exercise, was all but sure that the attack was deliberate and just a prelude to an imminent larger attack against Finland. This sort of response to the event was natural under the circumstances, even if in hindsight it arguably appears very much like unfounded paranoia.
In Helsinki the military leadership's reaction mirrored Hanell's view. Upon receiving word from Viipuri, the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Oesch, placed all the capital area military units under alert, and also all the Civil Guards in the capital and surroundings were alerted. Of course due to the exercise in Viipuri taking up so much of active Finnish forces, the cupboard was pretty bare. The first troops appearing as reinforcements to patrol the surroundings of the ministries in central Helsinki were Navy conscripts roused at the naval barracks in Katajanokka, quickly armed with rifles and marched to the Senate Square by a flustered junior officer from the gunboat Karjala. The first actual regular command to reach battle readiness in the capital area was the Kuivasaari fortress island, where the battery of 12 inch Obuhov guns stood ready for action as quickly as three hours after the word of the Hannila incident reached the island.
In the evening of August 8th as the summer storm known as Sylvi pounded Eastern Finland with all her might, as the military authorities in Viipuri and the nearby municipalities were trying to make head or tails of the situation, and as surgeons in the Viipuri city hospital struggled to save the lives of seriously injured men under the light of oil lamps [5], in Helsinki uniformed men were seen setting up road blocks on the main streets and roadways leading to the heart of the Finnish capital.
The news of the Hannila incident did not take long to be transmitted outside Finland. Journalists from across Europe were taking part in covering the war games in Viipuri, and many of them rushed to tell their readers about what had happened as soon as possible. Some of the most iconic photos of the aftermath of the incident were also taken by foreign photographers.
...
View attachment 384599
The badly injured General Malmberg is taken aboard an Air Force Junkers floatplane to be flown to Viipuri for treatment.
This rare photo of the aerial evacuation was taken by a photographer covering General William Prior's visit to Finland for the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende.
The badly injured General Malmberg is taken aboard an Air Force Junkers floatplane to be flown to Viipuri for treatment.
This rare photo of the aerial evacuation was taken by a photographer covering General William Prior's visit to Finland for the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende.
...
The old man had woken up early and was now eating a light breakfast in his spartan room. Outside, snow fell slowly on the trees in the park. Under the overcast sky, everything appeared to be painted in shades of grey.
Nothing stirred.
As the man finished his coffee, there was a discreet knock on the door. Slowly, deliberately the old man stood up to reach his familiar military bearing. It was quite difficult. Then, slowly, he headed for the door.
Reaching his hand for the brass knob to open the heavy wooden door, Gustaf Mannerheim felt a twinge in his lower body, as if something was not all right. A cold sweat was rising to his forehead.
He opened the door but there was nobody there.
He then looked down. On the ground there was a single black riding boot, shined to perfection.
”I need to summon my servant to remind him that he forgot my other damn boot”, the old cavalry officer thought.
Then he felt a slight vertigo and reached out for the wall next to him to steady himself. He could see his own image in the mirror across the hallway, recognizable but distorted.
A realization came to him.
”No, that's right. One boot is all that I need now.”
…
It did not take long for the artillery section in question to be be identified. As the artillery battalion's HQ confirmed the coordinates the section had been ordered to fire at, and as the artillerymen of the section itself all separately agreed that slightly different coordinates, those of the unfortunate group of observers, had been used instead, it was certain who was responsible for the artillery strike.
The problem was that Sergeant Antti Karvonen, the man who had relayed the wrong coordinates to the section (on this every member of the section agreed) was nowhere to be found. He had gone missing in the confusion following the accident. The man was never seen again. There are several theories as to what happened to Sergeant Karvonen on August 8th, ranging from the mundane to the fanciful and even supernatural. The most realistic theory yet put together, first suggested already during the war, was that the body of an unknown man in a Finnish military uniform, found floating near Käkisalmi on the shores of Lake Ladoga in the spring of 1940 belonged to Karvonen. If we accept the theory, it would suggest that the artillery sergeant took his own life by drowning himself after the incident.
Lieutenant Arvo Vaara, the cavalry officer who led the first aid efforts on the scene of the incident became to be seen as the hero of the day. His actions in Hannila were rewarded with a high military decoration and in early December 1939 he would be promoted to captain.
….
View attachment 384609
The hero of the day. Lieutenant Arvo Vaara as he appeared in the Helsingin Sanomat on August 19th, 1939.
The hero of the day. Lieutenant Arvo Vaara as he appeared in the Helsingin Sanomat on August 19th, 1939.
….
Prime Minister A.K. Cajander was buried in the Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki on Sunday, August 20th. The official state funeral was well-attended, with thousands of people lining the streets from the Helsinki Cathedral to Hietaniemi in the fine sunny late August weather. General Lauri Malmberg's funeral was organized in Helsinki as well, with full military honours. Juho Niukkanen, the Minister of Defence, was buried in his home municipality of Kirvu on the Karelian Isthmus. Urho Kekkonen, the Minister of the Interior, was one of the men carrying his coffin. Kekkonen still walked with a limp, like he would for the rest of his life. General's Walden's funeral was, surprisingly, also a very modest affair, including only the closest family.
Per Edvin Sköld, the Swedish Minister of Defence, became the first Swedish state official whose dead body was transported on an aircraft home from abroad, to be buried in Swedish soil.[6] General Linder had stayed in Finland for the while, to handle the aftermath of the incident in different ways, and shaken and injured as he still was, he now returned home on the same plane as the late Minister Sköld.
Field Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim was brought to Helsinki on August 18th. He would start his long period of convalescence in his Kaivopuisto home. Historians generally agree that in the months after the Hannila incident, Mannerheim suffered from depression, partly brought on by various complications following from the amputation of his right leg from the knee down.
Even before of the public funerals of Cajander and Malmberg, and the more private ones for Niukkanen and Walden, the damage the Hannila incident had done to the Finnish state leadership had to be repaired. With the president still in a poor condition, and with both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence dead, the state leadership was decimated and in sore need of replenishment. On August 10th, Eljas Erkko, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, assumed the position of Acting Prime Minister for the time being, after consulting with the surviving members of the cabinet and the leaders of the parties in the ruling coalition. But more would need to be done. The immediate response of the Finnish government, such as it was, was to call the parliament to Helsinki by the beginning of the third week of August, to end the summer vacations of the parliamentarians early.
When the members of the Eduskunta on Monday, August 14th filed into the plenary chamber, there were many views as to what should be done about the situation. While in the early hours of the first meeting after the summer holiday, the mood was suitably somber (following a moment of silence held for those dead in the Hannila incident), it took no time for quite vocal disagreements to break out. Paavo Susitaival, the member of parliament for the Patriotic People's Movement, was the first to call for a special election in the parliament for a president, to be taken on the same week. Susitaival argued that Finland was in an immediate danger of a Soviet invasion while the nation was practically decapitated politically, and that a strong president would be something the nation would need under the circumstances. Susitaival called also for an immediate declaration of a state of war and the mobilization of the military reserves after the special election.
As the discussions in the Eduskunta continued on Tuesday the 15th also other parties started to agree with the special election for a new president. Urho Kekkonen himself argued for this on behalf of the Agrarians. As the discussion about the parliament declaring Kallio unable to prosecute the duties of the President of the Republic and choosing a new president according to an expedited procedure, a note was brought to the Social Democratic speaker of parliament, Väinö Hakkila.
What the small piece of paper said was that just an hour earlier, President Kyösti Kallio had regained consciousness in the hospital and according to the doctors attending him now appeared quite lucid.
….
View attachment 384610
The burial of Juho Niukkanen, as depicted in Karjala, the main daily newspaper appearing in Viipuri, on August 21st, 1939.
Urho Kekkonen is the first pallbearer on the right.
The burial of Juho Niukkanen, as depicted in Karjala, the main daily newspaper appearing in Viipuri, on August 21st, 1939.
Urho Kekkonen is the first pallbearer on the right.
...
Notes:
[1] Sylvi-myrsky.
[2] Hannilan laukaukset. Hannila is a village in the municipality of Antrea, some 20 km north from Viipuri.
[3] Rudolf Walden was the founder and main owner of the Yhtyneet Paperitehtaat Oy (United Paper Mills Inc.), a major Finnish industrial concern created in 1920. Together with Gösta Serlachius of the G.A. Serlachius company, he was also a leading member of the Finnish Paper Mills' Association, a de facto cartel dominating the Finnish interwar forestry sector. In terms of his military and defence policy role, Walden was seen as C.G.E. Mannerheim's closest collaborator in the National Defence Council.
[4] The exercise HQ was located in the Heinjoki municipality, roughly 10 kilometers south from Hannila.
[5] The storm having cut electricity for the while.
[6] The AB Aerotransport Junkers Ju 52 carrying Sköld's remains landed in Stockholm's Bromma airfield on August 13th.
…
To Be Continued...
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