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Twenty-three: Matters of Pressing Mutual Importance

On September 13th, a rainy Wednesday in the Finnish capital, the people reading their morning papers learned that in embattled Poland the defenders kept falling back on all fronts. Warsaw was getting encircled, and Marshal Rydz-Śmigly had ordered the Polish armies to start withdrawing towards the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. The Helsingin Sanomat tried to balance its reporting between Polish and German sources not to give too much weight to the official position of either government. Some of the paper's intrepid reporters were even present in the flashpoints themselves. Väinö Länsiluoto reported his views from Danzig, just recently a Free City under a League of Nations mandate, to give the readers facts about the situation on the ground, and to tell Finns that some Finnish nationals had been right there in Danzig to see the hostilities begin as the Finnish steam freighter Kastelholm had been just coaling at the mouth of the Vistula when the first shells were fired against the Westerplatte on August 31st. On the Hel Peninsula to the north, Länsiluoto reminded his readership, Polish units still continued a defensive struggle against the German invaders. The Battle of Hel would continue until September 28th, when due to the hopelessness of the defenders' position and the dwindling of their supplies the commander of the Polish Navy, Rear Admiral Unrug, ordered the Hel garrison to surrender – thus officially ending organized resistance in Poland.

While Poland's doomed struggle still continued and as Red Army troops stood poised to cross the Polish eastern border to take what had been promised to Moscow in the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Finnish domestic news were dominated by effects of the war on the shores of the Baltic on the Finnish society and the economy. The threat of foreign trade being cut had been accentuated by the near-sinking of the Finnish steel barque Olivebank which hit a sea mine on the North Sea on the 10th and managed only with help from nearby Danish ships to stay afloat.[1] As the ship was towed to Esbjerg for repairs, the reported views of the Olivebank's captain, Carl Granith, were used in the Finnish papers to demand better protection for peaceful trade vessels of neutral nations during wartime. Traditionally, 80-90% of all Finnish trade was carried on merchant ships, so the matter was generally seen as crucial for the small nation that had declared itself neutral in the unfolding European war.

The Finnish government had little chance of helping Finnish ships far from the home shore, but what the Paasikivi cabinet did was to increase measures to control the import and export of crucial materials, and to boost the resources available for stockpiling and the planning thereof. The supply committee of the economic defence council had already in August been given the task to start preparing the necessary legal framework for organizing emergency supply matters, and to handle acute problems with shortages. This groundwork proved very important when the creation of the new Ministry of Supply begun. The Ministry, led at first on the cabinet level by Rainer von Fieandt, officially came into being on September 18th, when the building previously used by the forestry department of the Helsinki University was mostly taken over for its various offices. The creation of the Ministry was spearheaded by its general secretary Artturi Lehtinen, with significant help from Henrik Ramsay, the chairman of the economic defence council (which now also become a part of the Ministry). Both the capital and the provinces were scoured for talent for the Ministry for which manifold responsibilities were projected already in September.

At this time, several plans of diversifying the Finnish access to foreign trade were floated. There was talk of building a railway line to the Norwegian coast through the Finnish Western ”arm”. A railway line to Petsamo was also discussed in the Eduskunta. The Finnish Foreign Ministry even inquired for the possibility to buy the rails from the British. It proved impossible under the circumstances. What all these plans practically boiled down to, in the short term, was an effort to improve road connections towards both Petsamo and the ports of Narvik and Skibotn in Norway. In Petsamo there was an active effort to improve and enlarge the rather limited port facilities as well, connected naturally to the ongoing works at the Kolosjoki nickel mine. Here the Anglo-Canadian Inco-Mond Corporation was prepared to start nickel production by late 1940 or early 1941, should nothing untoward slow down the construction of the modern smelter and the power station built to provide electricity for the mining operation.

Things were moving also on the military sector, despite problems. The work of the National Defence Council had been practically stopped for over two weeks because of the death of Rudolf Walden and the continued medical problems of C.G.E. Mannerheim. On the third week of September, Lieutenant General Harald Öhquist was officially installed as the acting chairman of the Defence Council, as the wheelchair-bound President Kallio again refused practically bedridden Mannerheim's permanent resignation from his post on the 15th. In retrospect, it might be understandable that Kallio hoped for the old Field Marshal to again take his post at the Defence Council, as a unifying national figure, but when we now know the severity of Mannerheim's depression in September 1939, and the continuing pain he was under due to the complications arising from the emergency amputation he had gone through, it might have well been better for the nation that his resignation had been accepted at this point.

An important figure in the military leadership under the circumstances was Colonel A.F. Airo, Mannerheim's trusted staff officer who since 1938 had worked as the Head of Operations at the General Staff and as Mannerheim's secretary in the Defence Council. During the heightened tensions of the fall of 1939, Airo was consistently a voice of prudence and caution who opposed the very idea of accepting any demands the USSR might make to the Finnish government. Together with Lieutenant General Oesch (the Chief of the General Staff), Airo and Colonel Valo Nihtilä kept working and implementing plans for mobilizing the Finnish military for war, if need be, during the de facto hiatus in the official Defence Council's work. In hindsight, Airo's cool and exaggerated carefulness appears even slightly reckless: on September 14th, for example, the same day the Red Army finally begun its invasion of Eastern Poland in earnest, Airo decided that the men of the infantry battalion called up for ”extraordinary exercises” in Turku to remilitarize Åland if need be could be sent back to home as the unit was, for the time being, unnecessary. In the event, Airo's view was that Finland should avoid any and all provocations that Moscow could use in its political operations against the Finnish government's position.

Incidentally, the belated official inquiry into the near-collision of the armored coastal ship Väinämöinen and the Soviet freighter Metallist was completed two days later. The findings of the Navy's internal review, signed and accepted by Major General Valve himself, were that the captain of the ship had followed the requirements of ”good seamanship” and that only the ship's watch officer was to be reprimanded for ”temporarily failing to maintain efficient visual surveillance of the ship's vicinity”. Between the lines, the report indicated that the incident was in big part attributable to the erratic course followed by the Soviet freighter, a fact that the Soviet embassy did not fail to notice. It appeared the only follow-up, for the time being, was a mooted protest by the Soviet ambassador.

Deep inside Polish territory, the German and Soviet troops met at Brest-Litovsk on September 21st and on the 23rd organized a highly symbolic victory parade in the town which name carried interesting connotations for both erstwhile allies. This celebration aptly echoed British cartoonist David Low's famous Rendezvous, published in the Evening Standard three days previously, with Hitler and Stalin meeting cordially in a bombed-out city, trading bows and back-handed compliments with each other. As now the Polish issue was all but wrapped up, with mere contractual formalities with the Third Reich and a bloody mop-up operation remaining, Joseph Stalin turned his eyes towards the other, smaller nations on the Western border of the USSR.

On September 21st the Estonian government received an invitation from Moscow to send a representative to negotiate a new trade agreement with the USSR. On the 23rd, then, the Estonian Foreign Minister Karl Selter flew from Tallinn to Moscow, to immediately upon his arrival meet Molotov in the Kremlin. What Selter would face in Moscow was something else than trade issues. The first thing Molotov hit Selter with was a Soviet condemnation of Estonia for allowing the Polish submarine Orzel to leave Tallinn after it had fled from the Polish waters to avoid being sunk or captured by the Germans.[2] According to Molotov, by international agreements the Estonians should have interned the submarine for the remainder of the war, and to him this incident very much highlighted the pressing need for more and better mutual security arrangements in the Baltic Sea area.

In this vein, Molotov arrived to his point: a suggestion that Estonia and the USSR should enter into a treaty of mutual assistance, one that would include Estonia granting its eastern neighbour the right to have military bases in its area. To stop Selter from making any counterarguments, Molotov told the Estonian that it would be best if what he said wouldn't be considered a mere suggestion, but actually an ultimatum: should the Estonian government refuse to accept the Soviet demand, the USSR would be forced to realize the goals outlined in the draft treaty ”by other means”. Molotov also told Selter that Estonia should not expect help from the Germans – a point that was during the next day confirmed through the Estonian ambassador in Berlin.

By this point, the Red Army had eleven divisions in readiness along the Estonian land border, and the Soviet fleet had been instructed to prepare for kicking off a maritime blockade of Estonia at a short notice, to stop Estonian naval vessels from escaping to Finland or Sweden, should Moscow deem this necessary. The orders to the units were sent on September 24th, at the same time as Selter boarded his plane to return to Tallinn. Both the Red Army and the navy units were expected to be in readiness at 4 a.m. on September 26th.

The Estonian government met at Toompea Hill in the evening of the 24th. The meeting, chaired by President Päts, was a gloomy affair: there was general agreement among the president and the cabinet members that Molotov's ”other means” could only be understood as military action. Due to the massive discrepancy between Soviet and Estonian military strength, the outcome of a military conflict with the USSR would be a foregone conclusion – the troops available after mobilization (which would take time) would amount to only two divisions of infantry.[3]

Thus, Selter was given instructions to negotiate with Molotov about a treaty of mutual assistance, but to try to avoid all issues that would violate Estonian sovereignty and internal security. Selter returned to Moscow on the 25th, and already on the following day he would sign a treaty which would be followed by several similar agreements between the USSR and its neighbours. In the text, both high contracting parties committed to help each other in all possible ways should they come under attack by any foreign power in Europe. Estonia granted the USSR the right to build naval bases on both Dagö and Ösel, as well as in Paldiski. It also agreed to host Soviet airbases, the locations of which would be specified later. In an additional protocol, the maximum number of Soviet army and air force troops in Estonia was set at 30 000 men, while the naval strength was not limited in any way.

In the following week, the USSR invited the governments of Latvia and Lithuania to attend a similar process. Latvia's Foreign Minister, Vilhelms Munters, was invited to Moscow on September 28th and he travelled on the 30th. The Latvian-Soviet treaty would be signed on the 2nd. The Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Jonas Černius, arrived to the Kremlin on October 1st and the treaty was signed on the 8th. All the Baltic representatives visiting Moscow were assured that the USSR was not intent on the Sovietization of their nations – after all, all the three treaties included provisions stating that the USSR's defensive arrangements would in no way violate the sovereignty or the political and economic systems of these nations. Desperately clinging on to this straw, several Baltic politicians would in the next months state that they in fact got a more lenient deal out of Stalin than they had initially hoped for. Even the belief that the USSR would be now so satisfied of its new arrangements with the Baltic nations (and the strategic benefits to be derived thereof) and would thus not seek to further attach them to the Soviet system, was expressed at high political quarters.

North of the Gulf of Finland, the line of Baltic dominoes that had been set into motion by the fall of Poland now finally reached Helsinki. On October 3rd, the day after the Soviet-Latvian treaty was signed, Molotov summoned the Finnish ambassador in Moscow, Yrjö-Koskinen, to his presence and presented to him an invitation for the Finnish Foreign Minister, Väinö Voionmaa, or some other person empowered by the Finnish government to represent it on the highest level, to arrive to Moscow to discuss ”matters of pressing mutual importance”. In doing so, Molotov asked for an answer within two days.

It was Finland's turn.


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Notes:

[1] The steel barque was owned by the Åland-based shipping concern of Gustaf Erikson, and it was enroute from Barry, Wales with just ballast in its hold to return to its home port in Mariehamn. In the event, the ship's damages were so bad that it's stay in Esbjerg stretched months longer than had been initially thought. As a result, the Olivebank' s fate during the war would prove very different than had been anticipated, too.

[2] The Orzel reached the southern tip of Gotland on September 19th. The submarine was short on provisions and did not have any navigational charts. The captain, Lieutenant Commander Kłoczkowski, was suffering from an acute illness. He thus decided to seek assistance from the Swedish. The Orzel sailed diretly into Karlskrona under a white flag, surprising the Swedish. The submarine and its crew were interned by the Swedish government.

[3] General Laidoner's forces were in many ways ill-prepared. It has been argued that especially in strategy and tactics the Estonian army was stuck in the early 20s. Later studies of the extant Estonian documents regarding military plans have posited that, mindbogglingly, the Estonian military had only training in offensive tactics, and there simply were no plans for a defensive campaign or a fighting withdrawal in the face of a superior enemy attack.

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To Be Continued