The destroyed railway station at Kauniainen (Grankulla) on the Turku-Helsinki railway. Photo taken by a FNA recon and recov team. FNA archives.
XX. The Municipal Response
The municipality's civil defence duties are determined by the Civil Defence Law. The power entrusted to the municipal authorities gives them the responsibility for the general safety of the local people in normal times as during an emergency.[1]
The first line of civil defence were the local authorities, and as per existing plans and legislation the general mobilization had prompted the creation of a network of Civil Defence Boards, under the jurisdiction of the municipalities. The organization was led by the mayor or the leader of the Municipal Board, with his/her chief of civil defence. The municipal organizations, in turn, were under either the provincial emergency leadership or a semi-provincial civil defence area command centre (for an amalgamation of cooperating communities).[2]
Each municipality was required to create dedicated units for medical care, fire and rescue, technical services, support, communications and reconnaissance (for radiation and harmful chemical agents). The size and composition of the local organization and its subordinate units was determined by the size of the local population, according to guidelines set by the Ministry of the Interior.[3] These units drew their work force from ordinary emergency services, bolstered by civilians with appropriate training or credentials, enlisted for work duty during the mobilization.
The municipalities' area was divided into civil protection sectors, each one with a local leader in charge. These sectors varied from villages in the countryside to urban residential buildings and factories. The required equipment and vehicles were held in reserve, which in turn had been restocked locally during the run-up to the war – to the extent the situation allowed. Communications were based on phone lines (often purpose-built and isolated) and VHF radios.
By mid-February, the majority of the local organizations were in reasonably high preparedness. The biggest stumbling blocks during the mobilization had been the difficulties in obtaining qualified personnel for local civil defence duties, the Defence Forces being seemingly unquenchable in its thirst for manpower. The second problem was the poor availability of civil defence materials and equipment. This was also partly caused by military requirements, but increasingly by the unpredecented demand for such in a Europe preparing for a showdown between the superpowers. As a result, in many places the civil defence had to do with improvised means to safeguard the people.
Full Readiness requires a decision by the Council of State to invoke the necessary parts of the Civil Defence Law.
In Full Readiness, the civil defence command posts and units are ordered into Work Readiness. When in Work Readiness A, the command posts will be operational immediately and the units within 5 minutes. In Work Readiness B, the corresponding times are 15 and 60 minutes. The readiness in effect at any time is decided by the municipal command centre on its own or as ordered by the civil defence area command centre or the provincial command centre.[1]
In the event the local authorities, as a rule and within their possibilities, handled their responsibilities admirably. They took appropriate measures to get the people, and more meaningfully, themselves to fallout shelters in time. Radiation levels in the outside were being measured, and after the initial panic the local authorities would continue notify the adjacent areas and the provincial command centre (where communications worked and/or these could be reached) about the radiation in the air.
It has been estimated that outside the directly damaged area [4] about 80% of the municipal governments and/or local civil defence organisations were functional when three weeks had passed from the exchange. In some provinces, this number approaches even the figures for Sweden and Switzerland in the same time period. It has to be noted, however, that in Finland the deterioration of local governance took due to the local conditions a more gradual course; the municipalities would in average lose more of their functions in March-April than immediately after the exchange.
The Finnish local authorities were more poorly off than those in the two other nations. For one thing, for the first weeks after the exchange the national emergency leadership was not contactable or indeed operational. The same applied to most provincial authorities. Only in Mikkeli, like previously mentioned, the provincial government stayed safe and in control through the first few weeks. In some parts of the country, the governor and his organization had been wiped out by the nuclear blast (most notably, in Turku, Hämeenlinna and Rovaniemi) and in most other places the communications with the rest of the country had been cut or the leadership's shelter had been damaged.
The conditions varied. In Joensuu, the above-ground damage was mainly caused by the shockwave and the firestorm resulting from a Soviet tactical strike and communications were restored within a week, though at high cost; in Oulu and Vaasa the blast from the large-yield weapon undermined the structural integrity of the shelter , which had to be abandoned. In Kuopio, the local government would be trapped in its otherwise intact command post under the Kotkankallio hill until a relief convoy sent from a nearby municipality cleared one of the exits in mid-March.
In the absence of a functional higher leadership, the municipal authorities were working, for the while, autonomously or coordinating their actions with neigbouring towns or the larger semi-provincial civil defence area. Some provinces had formed mobile civil defence command units and in a few cases these started acting as a surrogate government: such was the case, for example, in the Oulu province. Here the civilian command unit would depend heavily on the large military personnel present in the area.
After the situation allowed going outside for hours at a time, local boards in undamaged or lightly damaged areas restarted the municipal apparatus, allowing for public order, medical care, communications and perhaps most importantly, food rationing. Where the local Rationing Board hadn't taken control of grocery stores and food storages in its area, it did so now. As the local authorities took over also other materials and equipment to ensure the continuity of their operations, police, auxiliary police, military personnel and sometimed even armed members of the civil defence units[5] were used to enforce the decisions undertaken.
The police will have to be prepared for general enforcement duties, especially cordoning off dangerous areas, upholding the law and public order, the identification of the deceased, and ensuring public compliance with civil defence orders.[1]
While most municipalities coped comparatively well with the first weeks post-exchange, despite the loss of power and contact with higher leadership, some of them were very soon overwhelmed with the follow-up effects of the nuclear explosions. These were usually localities nearby the blasts themselves, and especially in Southern Finland. Generally speaking, the whole area south of Pori and Tampere in the west and Lahti and Imatra in the east would be categorizable into this group. The majority of the bigger towns in this more densely inhabited part of the country had been targeted, and this was devastating even for the surrounding smaller communities.
Firstly, this area received the worst fallout in Finland, both initially and later. This included fallout from the explosions in Finland, from the Stockholm blast, from the lesser Swedish targets and from Western Central Europe, carried to Finland by the prevailing winds from the west and the south-west. Secondly, these areas had to deal with a large influx of refugees and evacuees from the parts of the bigger centres not directly destroyed. Thirdly, due to the major roads and railways running through said bigger centres, these areas were in effect cut off from the more northern areas with less damage and quicker, better organized recovery.
The executive organization for local, general civil defence has to able to, in an emergency, to save within 24 hours a number of injured people corresponding to 1% of the population of the municipality.[1]
Typical examples were Hyvinkää, Lohja, Loimaa and Toijala, small-to-middling municipalities and towns trapped between two or three blast areas. Here it was very soon found out that the organizational and first of all medical resources were grossly inadequate. It has to be remembered that in the last few days before the exchange these areas had also been receiving temporary evacuees, hastily accommodated in public and private properties, from the same towns they were now receiving a disorganized stream of refugees, usually with various injuries. It didn't take long before the local authorities were at a breaking point. Temporary hospitals were set up in any available property or even tents, and for example even the process of determining the level of injuries (triage) often led to inexperienced medical personnel wasting their time and resources for attempting to save mortally wounded or heavily irradiated arrivees.
In several places in Southern Finland, the medical organization had effectually broken down by the fourth week post-exchange, somewhere also along public order. Where authorities continued to be able to treat people, triage had been brutally simplified to allow the treatment of only those with good chances of surviving and more civilians had been ordered to ”work duty tasks” to take some load off from the actual medical professionals. It has to be remembered that with the bigger towns, the most effective and modern medical facilities in the country had been lost, along with the largest medical organizations. The surviving areas had simple facilities, and meaningfully in many places the local hospital didn't even have a generator to provide it with electrity now that the national grid was down. The major problem this brought about is obvious: through February and March the temperatures even in southern Finland stayed below -10 degrees Celsius, sometimes falling as low as -25.
In addition to their normal duties, Church authorities are involved in the planning of supply and support. It is also their duty to prepare to look after the deceased and to take part in the identification of those that have perished.
While some coordination between local boards was possible in these areas, for example between the mostly rural municipalities inside the triangle formed by the Helsinki-Tampere-Turku railways, the paralysis affecting the provincial and national authorities spelled that for the first weeks available resources could not be concentrated where they were most sorely needed. It is not unusual to hear survivors' stories about local boards refusing aid to a neighbouring municipality out of fear of losing important personnel and limited equipment. And without higher authorities available to order the sending of assistance, they could get away with such behaviour.
One factor worth noticing is that the affected areas in Finland lost most significant road and rail connections to the surroundings for indefinite periods of time. In fact, some of the roads blocked in February 1984 have not been cleared since. In many places, Finnish municipalities are connected with few roads running through large stretches of forests and actual wilderness. The railway network is sparse. The blast effects from the nuclear explosions both destroyed the roadways and rails themselves, but even more pointedly felled huge swathes of forest on the roads and rails. Together with the ubiquitous snow, in many areas roads were simply unclearable with the available local assets and even seemingly short distances became unpassable.
Ironically, this typically Finnish problem stemming from the nuclear war also limited the ways the destruction affected the municipalities further away from the various ground zeros: the affected areas were in a way sealed from the rest of the country. People who would have otherwise or in the summer reached the neighbouring villages or towns alive, even on foot, died en route due to the radiation, to hypothermia or to blood loss. The disruption of communications led to a major die-off in terms of the walking wounded but in doing so saved many communities, allowing them to use their local resources for the benefit of their own residents....
...One special area of interest to the researchers of
Minne 1984 has been the southwestern corner of Finland that had seen fighting between the Finnish troops and the Soviet attackers during the few days of conventional war.
Declared a warzone, this part of Finnish Southern Karelia and Kymenlaakso was now de facto controlled by the Soviet units that had stopped there in their drive towards the capital at the time of the exchange. The need on both sides to take shelter from the fallout had resulted in an undeclared cease fire, and the military units had proceeded to take cover in various buildings. A ragged front line interspersed with impassable forests left a lot of no man's land between the two sides. Part of the border area being evacuated in January, in many places the Soviet troops had taken over empty dwellings, shops and industrial properties. In time, the area started to look like a collection of unorderly military camps of varying sizes.
The western extent of the Soviet advance was in Hamina, where the attacker had just prepared to take the old garrison town from the dug-in Finnish troops when his plans were so rudely interrupted by nuclear war. Three weeks after the exchange, the Western third of the town was still in Finnish hands and the Soviets had taken control the eastern part and the outlying countryside. With both sides registering high radiation – Hamina was very poorly placed between the capital area, Loviisa, Kouvola
and Lappeenranta – even at this point the soldiers rarely ventured out of their hiding places. Food was an important concern, of course, as both sides had lost much of their supply organisation as well as contact with the higher command. This necessitated sending out foraging parties, sometimes approved by the officers in charge, but often put together by the hungry, confused soldiers themselves.
On March 8th a group of Soviet soldiers from a supply unit found a K-chain grocery store near the town centre. As they started to empty the shop's storage, they were stumbled upon by a squad of Finnish jaegers on a similar mission. Shots were fired, and as both sides brough in support from nearby units, the scuffle escalated to a small pitted battle along the street. This First Battle of Ratapihankatu, as the Finns ironically call it, lasted two hours and ended as abruptly as it had started when a few misdirected mortar rounds landed on the contested shop, soundly destroying it and the food left inside.
Similar scuffles took place along the edge of the areas occupied by Finnish and Soviet troops, but due to the radiation, the continuing bitter cold, the poor condition of both the men and the vehicles and the broken down chains of supply and command made it sure that neither side would for the foreseeable future try any operations that would have been likely to unsettle the erstwhile status quo.
In the coming weeks, the Finnish civilians still left in the areas now belatedly occupied by the Russians found out, to their surprise, that they were under the jurisdiction of a ”Soviet Military Government in Finland”, with its headquarters in the eastern part of Hamina. It is certain that the painted signs and posters, in both Finnish and Swedish, had been thought up by whoever had conceived the operation to take over Southern Finland, and by their numerous language mistakes it can be deduced that it had been a rush job. While perhaps originally intended as the enforcer of the Politbyro's iron will in occupied Helsinki, this Military Government now ruled a tiny strip of irradiated Southern Finland and consisted of a couple of Colonels and a number of junior officers, trying desperately to hold on to any fleeting authority they still had among their highly demoralized, partly rebellious, radiation-stricken and soon starving soldiers. Its effort to...
Notes:
[1] Excerpts from
The Local Organization for Civil Defence, an intructional booklet approved by the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, published in 1979.
[2] The amalgamations (
kuntayhtymä or
samkommun) were, for example, often running the health services in peace time.
[3] Municipalities and towns were divided by size into ten categories, C1 to C10. C1 included just the capital, C2 the six larger towns between 75 000 to 175 000 people. In the other end of the spectrum, C10 was composed of the municipalities with under 2000 residents.
[4] Here estimated as more than 30 kilometers outside ground zero. The number does not include the municipalities entirely evacuated before the exchange, mostly in Lapland and along the eastern border.
[5] This was in the early days mostly limited to those areas with more damage and/or no available military personnel.
