Another update ? 
Do these domestic approximations involve chicory roots ? Just like in the days of our poorer granddads...
Do these domestic approximations involve chicory roots ? Just like in the days of our poorer granddads...
The Land of Sad Songs – Stories From Protect and Survive Finland
- Thread starter DrakonFin
- Start date
That, and roasted grain, sugar beets, dandelion roots, amongst other things. There would have been a lot of people alive in the 80s with WWII-period know-how into this stuff.
Tobacco, or rather the lack thereof, will of course be another thing causing immeasurable suffering in post-Exchange Finland...
Yes, quite logical.
Immeasurable suffering due to lack of lung cancer. How tragic.
Anyway, Koivisto is permanently out of the game, isn't he ?
Does the FNA of 2008 tolerate political parties or is post-Exchange Finland basically just a governmental technocracy with no public say in how things are handled ?
Falkenburg
Monthly Donor
Just catching up on the various P&S-verse Threads and I have to say this remains my favourite.
I feel cold when I read your Updates, DrakonFin (In a good way).
Very fine writing. Outstanding when one considers the fact English is a second language for you (I presume).
You create vivid glimpses into an all too sadly plausible world.
Falkenburg
I feel cold when I read your Updates, DrakonFin (In a good way).
Very fine writing. Outstanding when one considers the fact English is a second language for you (I presume).
You create vivid glimpses into an all too sadly plausible world.
Falkenburg
Immeasurable suffering due to lack of lung cancer. How tragic.
Oh, there will no lack of cancer in postwar Finland...
Anyway, Koivisto is permanently out of the game, isn't he ?
I'm afraid so, he and Sorsa both. Finland's postwar history might look a lot different had they been there to see what remained of the nation through the dark 80s.
The FNA is governed by a self-perpetuating technocratic-militaristic nomenklatura. Parties are tolerated, officially, though in practice they only have any relevance on the municipal level. The parliament is suspended seemingly indefinitely through various "emergency" pretexts and only "trustworthy" people are allowed as party leaders, making the parties suchs as they are the government's lapdogs. Also, far left parties are outright banned.
Yeah, though of a different kind.
Yeah.
Hm, exactly what I suspected. Kind of reminds me of Egypt prior to the 2011 revolution (30 years of "emergency martial law" - what a joke).
Thank you, if you feel cold while reading this I must be doing something right because that is one of the effects I am aiming for.
You are right, English is a second language for me and I have never really actively spoken it for example, apart from short trips abroad. Writing this and hanging around at the forum is my main way of getting practice in English these days, so I am also happy if you like the text language-wise.
I'd like to repeat the props of your excellent TL. Totally Turtledove worthy for the genre!
If this Forum allows you to develop and practice your English so well, I'm going to start haunting German and Italian forums!
If this Forum allows you to develop and practice your English so well, I'm going to start haunting German and Italian forums!
Wait what? Jesus Christ, I wish I could write as well as you and I'm a native speaker. The tone, voice, and atmosphere of this story are incredible and I would be lucky to produce something so moody and evocative.
Flatwater Forever: Protect and Survive Middle America's Podcast
Includes....Chipperback sings Finnish Rock...
Includes....Chipperback sings Finnish Rock...
How much in the rank and file of the parties accepts this in private? Contact with PPO must also show their inadequacy to a modern world.
Non-relatedly, but a very good indicator of the FNA recovery, in case it's not planned in one of the updates, what's the status of tertiary education in the FNA (and PPO)?
It is easy to fit an eternity into one moment
The emperor has not turned his thumb down yet
The hardest thing is to wait for the bullet with closed eyes
It is quiet on the Western Front
Chorus:
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
It is easy to bury yourself to an empty face
To accelerate at the stop sign
The biggest fool of all hasn't met his match yet
Again the crown is handed to the winner
Chorus:
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
Apulanta: Odotus (2000)
XXXII. On the Western Front
Fragment 145.
Logged 04.10.2011
HAN
[This fragment is part of of an autobiographical account of a former PPO politician, kept at the provincial archives in Seinäjoki.]
The airplane's single engine gave out a steady drone that was sort of soothing and almost enough to make me sleep. But I was too tired for that, in a sort of hyper-vigilant state because of the stress and the importance of the task we had been given. So I sat on my seat in a stupor instead, thinking back on the beginning of the flight. We had thought it would be a good idea to fly over the old provincial capital to get a look of the damage as long as we were airborne anyway. As soon as we passed the ring of camps and field hospitals outside the town and I caught sight of the blackened stumps of the buildings that still remained standing and the bomb crater near the harbour area, all now covered by a veil-like layer of off-white snow, I knew this was a mistake. The overflight served no useful purpose and only depressed me further. I could read the same from Kairamo's face. Ahola's look remained impassably blank though. I found it very hard to read the military man.
Now we were over the sea ice, or so the pilot told us. The cabin was quiet save the everpresent engine noise. I stared out into the diffuse grey light outside.
The Air Force pilot tapped his headphones and turned to speak to us.
”- Sorry to disturb you, but I am picking up a transmission on the international distress frequency. It appears to be in Russian. Anyone of you gentlemen know the language?”
Kairamo, sitting close to the pilot, extended his hand.
”- Give me the 'phones, Lieutenant. I'll try to decipher it.”
The man donned the headset and assumed a look of intense concentration.
”- Now, lets see.. Right, it is Russian. Monotonous. This seems like an automated message... Ok, here goes....”
He started translating the text aloud so we could all hear it.
” - TO THE SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION... THIS IS A SWEDISH GOVERNMENT BROADCAST... DUE TO A NUCLEAR EXCHANGE BETWEEN THE WARSAW PACT AND NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION YOUR NATION HAS SUFFERED CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE... YOUR GOVERNMENT AND STATE HAVE BEEN DESTROYED... REPEAT YOUR GOVERNMENT AND STATE DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE... ALL THE STANDING ORDERS YOU MAY HAVE AND ALL THE SPECIFIC ORDERS YOU WERE GIVEN UNTIL 2IST FEBRUARY 1984 ARE NOW INVALID... SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION, YOU ARE ALONE... THE KINGDOM OF SWEDEN IS READY TO HELP YOU... BROADCAST YOUR IDENTITY AND POSITION ON THIS FREQUENCY AND YOU WILL BE CONTACTED BY THE SWEDISH AUTHORITIES... STAND DOWN AND YOU WILL NOT BE FIRED UPON... SURRENDER AND YOU WILL BE TREATED WELL... TO THE SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND... It repeats.”
Kairamo managed a thin smile.
”- So, it is not for us... I feared it would be a Soviet broadcast. But no, you can trust the Swedish not to miss a trick. I hope the message works.”
Almost instinctively that made me look out the window to see if I could spot a surviving Red Navy ship on the icy sea below. It was to no avail: the cloud cover below was too thick to see anything.
We settled back to quiet contemplation. In a few minutes, though, the pilot interrupted us again.
”- Gentlemen, it looks like we got company.”
He nodded towards the south-west.
Sure enough, it was easy to see the two sleek jet airplanes diving towards us, clearly on an intercept course.
Ahola sat up and smoothed the front of his blue Air Force jacket.
”- Finally,” he said, ”I thought they'll let us fly alone the whole way.”
...now temporarily by Deputy Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. The relocation of the Cabinet and Parliament to Gothenburg had caused many difficulties in restarting regular government work. Generally, late April has been considered to mark the dividing line between a time of acute crisis of governance and an eventual slow stabilisation. It seems that many Swedish citizens who lived through the period generally agree with historians in this regard, though the rediscovery of a new sense of national purpose is often attached more to the famous April 21st public address by Prince Bertil, the new Regent of Sweden, than any concrete understanding of reorganization of the government. To many, this date marks the beginning of the regency period, even though from a legal point of view it had begun two months earlier to the day when King Carl XVI Gustaf perished in the nuclear fire that destroyed most of Stockholm.[1]
Also on April 21st, unknown to the Swedish public listening to their radio sets and getting slowly accustomed to the radiation warnings, the rationing and the rolling blackouts of the reconstruction era, official talks were ongoing to re-establish relations between the Government of Sweden and that of the Republic of Finland.
On behalf of the Swedish authorities this was predicated by the realization, in early April, that Finland still had a surviving entity claiming national authority. Official contacts between the two governments had been severed on the night of the Exchange, when the recently frantic radio traffic, civilian and military, emanating from Helsinki was cut abruptly never to return. The loss of contact was not total, however. After the Exchange, several Swedish military installations had intercepted Finnish radio traffic and even had some verified radio contacts with local authorities, military units and civilian radio operators in Finland, mostly based on the south-western and north-western coastal areas.
However, as long as the clean-up of the damages done to the Stockholm area and the military targets hit by Soviet theater missiles, such as the Boden fortress area, the main naval base at Karlskrona and the Söderhamn airfield (until recently home to the 16th [Hälsinge] Air Wing) could be brough under control, it was deemed impossible to extend concrete help to the surviving Finns. The ice situation on the northern Baltic, the now very scarce Swedish icebreaking assets and the possibility of Soviet submarines still hiding below the Baltic ice sheet also contributed to the decision to apologetically rebuff any Finnish pleas for assistance. In a typically Swedish fashion, the government also came up with legal fig leafs for its hands-off policy to reassure itself of the wisdom of the course it had chosen: the official, temporary (and ostentatious) freezing of several Nordic agreements vis-a-vis Finland as an answer to Finnish mobilization in December-January as well as a artificially strict reading of the 1963 Nordic Mutual Emergency Assistance Agreement in Connection with Radiation Accidents.[2]
Military reconnaissance of the Finnish territorial waters and the coast areas however continued, though the Swedish Air Force's already depleted assets were stretched thin because of the need to keep an eye on the southern Baltic and investigate the Soviet Baltic coast, as well as to try and find out as much as was possible about the situation in Norway, Denmark and northern Germany, as well as parts of the North Sea and the northern Atlantic, with both visual and electronic reconnaissance. Due to existing organizational restraints and wartime damage, existing ELINT assets were still directed towards the Soviet Union in the south-west. The scope of air operations was also generally limited by a fear of depleting fuel stocks before they could be replenished in the uncertain future.[3]
Meanwhile on the other side of the Baltic ice, in the areas under the tenuous control of the mixed parliamentary-provincial administration at Seinäjoki and the Emergency Cabinet in Mikkeli, a crash project had been started to restore reliable communications between surviving centres and to be able to contact the (reputedly existing) Swedish government. The work was spearheaded by the new Minister of Transport and Communications in Mikkeli, Kari Kairamo, the former CEO of the Nokia corporation[4]. Evacuated to Etelä-Savo in January, Kairamo was quickly drafted by the Emergency Cabinet as an expert and soon as a Cabinet Minister. Kairamo, a hugely able and resourceful man (but also given to periodic depression) and an expert in electronics worked hard to direct military and civilian assets into bringing various damaged or abandoned installations back into use.
This meant, for example, restoring at least some of the above-ground structures to Air Force Communications Centres that had been affected by a nuclear blast but still had serviceable underground facilities. The Kanavuori site near Jyväskylä was a case in point. There were also similar underground installations jointly operated by the military and the Mail and Telecommunications Authority, such as the Luolavuori complex near Pori in the south-west. The work on these sites started to reach concrete results by April, when Kairamo's dedicated task force could also use a Frontier Guard Bell Jet Ranger helicopter preserved in Kajaani. While this work was hard and slow under the conditions, due to both wartime damage and various bottlenecks, it was still less work- and resource-intensive than the parallel effort of restoring road and railway connections and thus proved more successful in the short term.
Thus, on the second week of April, regular and reliable radio connections with the Swedish government became available the first time since February. In days, the contact led to the Swedish suggesting that the Finns send official representatives to discuss the ”normalization of relations”, as soon as possible. The resulting Finnish delegation, sent jointly by Seinäjoki and Mikkeli, boarded a FAF Piper PA-28 Archer II that took off from the Ilmajoki airfield[5] on the morning of April 18th. A military Learjet would have been available, too, but there were fears about technical problems and also the possiblity of the largish jet aircraft being misidentified by the Swedish air defence. The flight plan for the mission was created together with the Swedish to avoid any possible problems. It was decided that the plane should rendezvous with Swedish Air Force aircraft over the Gulf of Bothnia, after which it was escorted[6] to Uppsala airfield, where it landed to refuel, and from there on continued the journey under constant escort to the new seat of the government in Gothenburg.
Fragment 145., continued.
The night was already falling as the pilot brought the plane down on the tarmac in our final destination. We we directed by a ground crew in winter overalls towards the mouth of an underground hangar apparently blasted into stone. As we taxied towards the growing semicircle of light, I saw both fighters and what I assumed was a bomber or a reconnaissance plane. Another bigger plane with different dimensions sat in the hangar partly in sight, covered with tarps apparently in a hurry. I noticed Ahola keeping his gaze fixed to this covered plane as long as it was in sight.
As we climbed out of the cramped cabin, I was surprised to hear that the Swedish were playing the Finnish national anthem to mark our arrival. Granted the sound was bit tinny coming through the underground base's wall speakers, but it was a pleasant gesture none the less. The one thing missing in comparison to similar occasions before the war was the press. There was only one photographer in sight, and I believe he was on government payroll.
The delegation that came to greet us was led by Bodström, the Foreign Minister. He was trailed by a small retinue of suits and uniforms. We shook hands.
” - Minister Kairamo, Mr. Liikanen, Colonel...ah, Ahola, welcome to Gothenburg. It is good to see you here, though I hope the circumstances of our meeting would have been different.”
” - As do we, Minister, as do we. Thank you for inviting us.”
It struck me how healthy and fresh Bodström looked in comparison to Kairamo. Clearly the situation here in the West was somewhat different than on our poor borders.
” - Well, gentlemen, let us get going. I am sure the military wants to get the hangar back into its own control. We have a little evening meal waiting for you, and I suggest we start the negotiations in earnest tomorrow morning.”
” - Sounds good, Mr. Minister. Lead the way.”
We walked out through a side entrance and packed into a convoy of black Saabs and Volvos waiting for us. I noticed the car Kairamo and I was directed to had small Finnish state flags on the hood. Another little detail they had thought of. As the door opened, we were suddenly face to face with one major detail more.
” - Get in, young men, and close the doors. It is cold out there.”
The older man who said that had sat motionlessly in the corner of the back seat until then.
” - Sure”, said Kairamo, ” but I must say you kind of startled me right now.”
I agreed with him. Max Jakobson made a diplomatic face.
” - Oh, so Mister Bodström didn't inform you I was waiting for you out here? I'm positively shocked.”
The convoy started to move.
” - I am happy to see you alive”, the veteran diplomat said, ”I was pretty poorly off myself for a couple of weeks there. But now I thought I have to come along and greet you. There are many thing you don't know, and a lot of other things we will have to discuss with the Swedish. It will not be easy. Like I said, I am happy to see you. But I hope you won't hold it against me if I say I would have rather wanted to see Koivisto or Sorsa. It pains me to hear what happened to the cabinet. Hell, what happened to the whole capital area and the whole country.”
We went through what seemed like a pretty ordinary suburban area. I saw streetlights blink off and on a few times. Nothing as bad we had grown accustomed to in Seinäjoki, though.
” - Mr. Jakobson,” said Kairamo, ”I have here an official letter from the Acting...President that empowers you to act as the Finnish ambassador in Gothenburg, with all that entails. Would you be willing to accept your old post back?”[7]
Jakobson looked at the letter, opened it and held it to the light.
” - Signed by Leppänen and 'For the Finnish Government', eh? Don't ask me if I am willing to do this, because I am not. But my sense of duty says I have to accept your...his offer. Nobody would forgive me if I chickened out now. Myself included.”
We looked out at the peaceful, snowy townscape as we approached central Gothenburg.
” - And besides,” Jakobsson mused, ”it is not here the most difficult battles will be fought, if I understand the situation in Finland correctly. But perhaps what we do here will give whoever fights for Finnish survival at least some of the weapons they so sorely require. The men and women who wield those weapons to the national advantage will be the heroes Finland needs now. I not a hero, I am merely an old diplomat.”
He stayed silent for a moment.
” - You know, in Bertold Brecht's play about the life of Galileo one of the characters says that a country without heroes is an sad place. And what does Galileo answer? That it is not so, he points out, more sad is the country that needs heroes. And that, alas, is the place our poor Fatherland is in right now.”
He reached for the suitcase beside him and pulled out a stack of papers.
” - You should read these. It is imperative for the discussions we'll be starting in the morning. These papers, you see...
[The pages 3-7 of this fragment have been redacted en masse under the provisions of the Swedish Protection of the Realm Act.]
Notes:
[1] An excellent account of the evacuation of the royal family and the demise of the king is given in Nilsson et al.: For Sweden -With the Times. The Short Reign and Untimely Death of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, 1973-1984; Gothenburg University Press, Gothenburg, 2007.
[2] The agreement detailed in its Annex that in the event of a ”radiation accident”, on the Finnish side only the Council of State and under it the Ministry of Commerce and Industry had been authorized to ”receive requests and to accept offers of assistance”.
[3] One good measure for the confusion and fog-of-war experienced post-Exchange is that up to the first week of March 1984 the Swedish military planners in fact still maintained active counter-measures in anticipation of a Soviet airborne and/or amphibious invasion of Skåne and other parts of the south-western coast. This seems amazing in retrospect, given the damage caused by the nuclear war, but what is obvious in hindsight – that the surviving parts of the Soviet armed forces were barely able to feed themselves, let alone to engage in any offensive operations – took time to dawn on the information-deprived and shell-shocked military leaders and by extension to the relocating political elite.
[4] Nokia was a Finnish electronics company that pre-war build communications equipment for the Finnish state and the Defence Forces and was one of the driving forces in creating the Nordic Mobile Phone Network (NMT). As a government contractor and an actor on the export market, Nokia was roughly analogous to the Finnish state as Ericsson to the Swedish, albeit in a more modest fashion. During the Finnish reconstruction the surviving parts of Nokia were folded into the FNA's Ministry of Transport and Communications.
[5] The Ilmajoki airfield near Seinäjoki as well as the Mikkeli airfield were now dubbed ”administrative airports” and together with the surviving FAF airbase in Halli become the main sites operated by remaining Finnish Air Force personnel. During the spring and summer 1984 this reorganization included the disestablishment of most wartime highway bases.
[6] The aircraft in question included armed SK 60 jet trainers of the 20th Air Wing flying from the dispersed airfield at Gimo and JA 37 Viggens of the 16th (or Uppland) Air Wing based at Uppsala.
[7] Jakobson had been the Finnish ambassador to Sweden between 1971-74.
The emperor has not turned his thumb down yet
The hardest thing is to wait for the bullet with closed eyes
It is quiet on the Western Front
Chorus:
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
It is easy to bury yourself to an empty face
To accelerate at the stop sign
The biggest fool of all hasn't met his match yet
Again the crown is handed to the winner
Chorus:
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
I'd so want to show you the Sun
To carry you behind the black veil
All you have to do is to let go
I want to take you away
Apulanta: Odotus (2000)
XXXII. On the Western Front
Fragment 145.
Logged 04.10.2011
HAN
[This fragment is part of of an autobiographical account of a former PPO politician, kept at the provincial archives in Seinäjoki.]
The airplane's single engine gave out a steady drone that was sort of soothing and almost enough to make me sleep. But I was too tired for that, in a sort of hyper-vigilant state because of the stress and the importance of the task we had been given. So I sat on my seat in a stupor instead, thinking back on the beginning of the flight. We had thought it would be a good idea to fly over the old provincial capital to get a look of the damage as long as we were airborne anyway. As soon as we passed the ring of camps and field hospitals outside the town and I caught sight of the blackened stumps of the buildings that still remained standing and the bomb crater near the harbour area, all now covered by a veil-like layer of off-white snow, I knew this was a mistake. The overflight served no useful purpose and only depressed me further. I could read the same from Kairamo's face. Ahola's look remained impassably blank though. I found it very hard to read the military man.
Now we were over the sea ice, or so the pilot told us. The cabin was quiet save the everpresent engine noise. I stared out into the diffuse grey light outside.
The Air Force pilot tapped his headphones and turned to speak to us.
”- Sorry to disturb you, but I am picking up a transmission on the international distress frequency. It appears to be in Russian. Anyone of you gentlemen know the language?”
Kairamo, sitting close to the pilot, extended his hand.
”- Give me the 'phones, Lieutenant. I'll try to decipher it.”
The man donned the headset and assumed a look of intense concentration.
”- Now, lets see.. Right, it is Russian. Monotonous. This seems like an automated message... Ok, here goes....”
He started translating the text aloud so we could all hear it.
” - TO THE SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION... THIS IS A SWEDISH GOVERNMENT BROADCAST... DUE TO A NUCLEAR EXCHANGE BETWEEN THE WARSAW PACT AND NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION YOUR NATION HAS SUFFERED CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE... YOUR GOVERNMENT AND STATE HAVE BEEN DESTROYED... REPEAT YOUR GOVERNMENT AND STATE DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE... ALL THE STANDING ORDERS YOU MAY HAVE AND ALL THE SPECIFIC ORDERS YOU WERE GIVEN UNTIL 2IST FEBRUARY 1984 ARE NOW INVALID... SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND CITIZENS OF THE SOVIET UNION, YOU ARE ALONE... THE KINGDOM OF SWEDEN IS READY TO HELP YOU... BROADCAST YOUR IDENTITY AND POSITION ON THIS FREQUENCY AND YOU WILL BE CONTACTED BY THE SWEDISH AUTHORITIES... STAND DOWN AND YOU WILL NOT BE FIRED UPON... SURRENDER AND YOU WILL BE TREATED WELL... TO THE SAILORS, SOLDIERS AND... It repeats.”
Kairamo managed a thin smile.
”- So, it is not for us... I feared it would be a Soviet broadcast. But no, you can trust the Swedish not to miss a trick. I hope the message works.”
Almost instinctively that made me look out the window to see if I could spot a surviving Red Navy ship on the icy sea below. It was to no avail: the cloud cover below was too thick to see anything.
We settled back to quiet contemplation. In a few minutes, though, the pilot interrupted us again.
”- Gentlemen, it looks like we got company.”
He nodded towards the south-west.
Sure enough, it was easy to see the two sleek jet airplanes diving towards us, clearly on an intercept course.
Ahola sat up and smoothed the front of his blue Air Force jacket.
”- Finally,” he said, ”I thought they'll let us fly alone the whole way.”
...now temporarily by Deputy Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. The relocation of the Cabinet and Parliament to Gothenburg had caused many difficulties in restarting regular government work. Generally, late April has been considered to mark the dividing line between a time of acute crisis of governance and an eventual slow stabilisation. It seems that many Swedish citizens who lived through the period generally agree with historians in this regard, though the rediscovery of a new sense of national purpose is often attached more to the famous April 21st public address by Prince Bertil, the new Regent of Sweden, than any concrete understanding of reorganization of the government. To many, this date marks the beginning of the regency period, even though from a legal point of view it had begun two months earlier to the day when King Carl XVI Gustaf perished in the nuclear fire that destroyed most of Stockholm.[1]
Also on April 21st, unknown to the Swedish public listening to their radio sets and getting slowly accustomed to the radiation warnings, the rationing and the rolling blackouts of the reconstruction era, official talks were ongoing to re-establish relations between the Government of Sweden and that of the Republic of Finland.
On behalf of the Swedish authorities this was predicated by the realization, in early April, that Finland still had a surviving entity claiming national authority. Official contacts between the two governments had been severed on the night of the Exchange, when the recently frantic radio traffic, civilian and military, emanating from Helsinki was cut abruptly never to return. The loss of contact was not total, however. After the Exchange, several Swedish military installations had intercepted Finnish radio traffic and even had some verified radio contacts with local authorities, military units and civilian radio operators in Finland, mostly based on the south-western and north-western coastal areas.
However, as long as the clean-up of the damages done to the Stockholm area and the military targets hit by Soviet theater missiles, such as the Boden fortress area, the main naval base at Karlskrona and the Söderhamn airfield (until recently home to the 16th [Hälsinge] Air Wing) could be brough under control, it was deemed impossible to extend concrete help to the surviving Finns. The ice situation on the northern Baltic, the now very scarce Swedish icebreaking assets and the possibility of Soviet submarines still hiding below the Baltic ice sheet also contributed to the decision to apologetically rebuff any Finnish pleas for assistance. In a typically Swedish fashion, the government also came up with legal fig leafs for its hands-off policy to reassure itself of the wisdom of the course it had chosen: the official, temporary (and ostentatious) freezing of several Nordic agreements vis-a-vis Finland as an answer to Finnish mobilization in December-January as well as a artificially strict reading of the 1963 Nordic Mutual Emergency Assistance Agreement in Connection with Radiation Accidents.[2]
Military reconnaissance of the Finnish territorial waters and the coast areas however continued, though the Swedish Air Force's already depleted assets were stretched thin because of the need to keep an eye on the southern Baltic and investigate the Soviet Baltic coast, as well as to try and find out as much as was possible about the situation in Norway, Denmark and northern Germany, as well as parts of the North Sea and the northern Atlantic, with both visual and electronic reconnaissance. Due to existing organizational restraints and wartime damage, existing ELINT assets were still directed towards the Soviet Union in the south-west. The scope of air operations was also generally limited by a fear of depleting fuel stocks before they could be replenished in the uncertain future.[3]
Meanwhile on the other side of the Baltic ice, in the areas under the tenuous control of the mixed parliamentary-provincial administration at Seinäjoki and the Emergency Cabinet in Mikkeli, a crash project had been started to restore reliable communications between surviving centres and to be able to contact the (reputedly existing) Swedish government. The work was spearheaded by the new Minister of Transport and Communications in Mikkeli, Kari Kairamo, the former CEO of the Nokia corporation[4]. Evacuated to Etelä-Savo in January, Kairamo was quickly drafted by the Emergency Cabinet as an expert and soon as a Cabinet Minister. Kairamo, a hugely able and resourceful man (but also given to periodic depression) and an expert in electronics worked hard to direct military and civilian assets into bringing various damaged or abandoned installations back into use.
This meant, for example, restoring at least some of the above-ground structures to Air Force Communications Centres that had been affected by a nuclear blast but still had serviceable underground facilities. The Kanavuori site near Jyväskylä was a case in point. There were also similar underground installations jointly operated by the military and the Mail and Telecommunications Authority, such as the Luolavuori complex near Pori in the south-west. The work on these sites started to reach concrete results by April, when Kairamo's dedicated task force could also use a Frontier Guard Bell Jet Ranger helicopter preserved in Kajaani. While this work was hard and slow under the conditions, due to both wartime damage and various bottlenecks, it was still less work- and resource-intensive than the parallel effort of restoring road and railway connections and thus proved more successful in the short term.
Thus, on the second week of April, regular and reliable radio connections with the Swedish government became available the first time since February. In days, the contact led to the Swedish suggesting that the Finns send official representatives to discuss the ”normalization of relations”, as soon as possible. The resulting Finnish delegation, sent jointly by Seinäjoki and Mikkeli, boarded a FAF Piper PA-28 Archer II that took off from the Ilmajoki airfield[5] on the morning of April 18th. A military Learjet would have been available, too, but there were fears about technical problems and also the possiblity of the largish jet aircraft being misidentified by the Swedish air defence. The flight plan for the mission was created together with the Swedish to avoid any possible problems. It was decided that the plane should rendezvous with Swedish Air Force aircraft over the Gulf of Bothnia, after which it was escorted[6] to Uppsala airfield, where it landed to refuel, and from there on continued the journey under constant escort to the new seat of the government in Gothenburg.
Fragment 145., continued.
The night was already falling as the pilot brought the plane down on the tarmac in our final destination. We we directed by a ground crew in winter overalls towards the mouth of an underground hangar apparently blasted into stone. As we taxied towards the growing semicircle of light, I saw both fighters and what I assumed was a bomber or a reconnaissance plane. Another bigger plane with different dimensions sat in the hangar partly in sight, covered with tarps apparently in a hurry. I noticed Ahola keeping his gaze fixed to this covered plane as long as it was in sight.
As we climbed out of the cramped cabin, I was surprised to hear that the Swedish were playing the Finnish national anthem to mark our arrival. Granted the sound was bit tinny coming through the underground base's wall speakers, but it was a pleasant gesture none the less. The one thing missing in comparison to similar occasions before the war was the press. There was only one photographer in sight, and I believe he was on government payroll.
The delegation that came to greet us was led by Bodström, the Foreign Minister. He was trailed by a small retinue of suits and uniforms. We shook hands.
” - Minister Kairamo, Mr. Liikanen, Colonel...ah, Ahola, welcome to Gothenburg. It is good to see you here, though I hope the circumstances of our meeting would have been different.”
” - As do we, Minister, as do we. Thank you for inviting us.”
It struck me how healthy and fresh Bodström looked in comparison to Kairamo. Clearly the situation here in the West was somewhat different than on our poor borders.
” - Well, gentlemen, let us get going. I am sure the military wants to get the hangar back into its own control. We have a little evening meal waiting for you, and I suggest we start the negotiations in earnest tomorrow morning.”
” - Sounds good, Mr. Minister. Lead the way.”
We walked out through a side entrance and packed into a convoy of black Saabs and Volvos waiting for us. I noticed the car Kairamo and I was directed to had small Finnish state flags on the hood. Another little detail they had thought of. As the door opened, we were suddenly face to face with one major detail more.
” - Get in, young men, and close the doors. It is cold out there.”
The older man who said that had sat motionlessly in the corner of the back seat until then.
” - Sure”, said Kairamo, ” but I must say you kind of startled me right now.”
I agreed with him. Max Jakobson made a diplomatic face.
” - Oh, so Mister Bodström didn't inform you I was waiting for you out here? I'm positively shocked.”
The convoy started to move.
” - I am happy to see you alive”, the veteran diplomat said, ”I was pretty poorly off myself for a couple of weeks there. But now I thought I have to come along and greet you. There are many thing you don't know, and a lot of other things we will have to discuss with the Swedish. It will not be easy. Like I said, I am happy to see you. But I hope you won't hold it against me if I say I would have rather wanted to see Koivisto or Sorsa. It pains me to hear what happened to the cabinet. Hell, what happened to the whole capital area and the whole country.”
We went through what seemed like a pretty ordinary suburban area. I saw streetlights blink off and on a few times. Nothing as bad we had grown accustomed to in Seinäjoki, though.
” - Mr. Jakobson,” said Kairamo, ”I have here an official letter from the Acting...President that empowers you to act as the Finnish ambassador in Gothenburg, with all that entails. Would you be willing to accept your old post back?”[7]
Jakobson looked at the letter, opened it and held it to the light.
” - Signed by Leppänen and 'For the Finnish Government', eh? Don't ask me if I am willing to do this, because I am not. But my sense of duty says I have to accept your...his offer. Nobody would forgive me if I chickened out now. Myself included.”
We looked out at the peaceful, snowy townscape as we approached central Gothenburg.
” - And besides,” Jakobsson mused, ”it is not here the most difficult battles will be fought, if I understand the situation in Finland correctly. But perhaps what we do here will give whoever fights for Finnish survival at least some of the weapons they so sorely require. The men and women who wield those weapons to the national advantage will be the heroes Finland needs now. I not a hero, I am merely an old diplomat.”
He stayed silent for a moment.
” - You know, in Bertold Brecht's play about the life of Galileo one of the characters says that a country without heroes is an sad place. And what does Galileo answer? That it is not so, he points out, more sad is the country that needs heroes. And that, alas, is the place our poor Fatherland is in right now.”
He reached for the suitcase beside him and pulled out a stack of papers.
” - You should read these. It is imperative for the discussions we'll be starting in the morning. These papers, you see...
[The pages 3-7 of this fragment have been redacted en masse under the provisions of the Swedish Protection of the Realm Act.]
Notes:
[1] An excellent account of the evacuation of the royal family and the demise of the king is given in Nilsson et al.: For Sweden -With the Times. The Short Reign and Untimely Death of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, 1973-1984; Gothenburg University Press, Gothenburg, 2007.
[2] The agreement detailed in its Annex that in the event of a ”radiation accident”, on the Finnish side only the Council of State and under it the Ministry of Commerce and Industry had been authorized to ”receive requests and to accept offers of assistance”.
[3] One good measure for the confusion and fog-of-war experienced post-Exchange is that up to the first week of March 1984 the Swedish military planners in fact still maintained active counter-measures in anticipation of a Soviet airborne and/or amphibious invasion of Skåne and other parts of the south-western coast. This seems amazing in retrospect, given the damage caused by the nuclear war, but what is obvious in hindsight – that the surviving parts of the Soviet armed forces were barely able to feed themselves, let alone to engage in any offensive operations – took time to dawn on the information-deprived and shell-shocked military leaders and by extension to the relocating political elite.
[4] Nokia was a Finnish electronics company that pre-war build communications equipment for the Finnish state and the Defence Forces and was one of the driving forces in creating the Nordic Mobile Phone Network (NMT). As a government contractor and an actor on the export market, Nokia was roughly analogous to the Finnish state as Ericsson to the Swedish, albeit in a more modest fashion. During the Finnish reconstruction the surviving parts of Nokia were folded into the FNA's Ministry of Transport and Communications.
[5] The Ilmajoki airfield near Seinäjoki as well as the Mikkeli airfield were now dubbed ”administrative airports” and together with the surviving FAF airbase in Halli become the main sites operated by remaining Finnish Air Force personnel. During the spring and summer 1984 this reorganization included the disestablishment of most wartime highway bases.
[6] The aircraft in question included armed SK 60 jet trainers of the 20th Air Wing flying from the dispersed airfield at Gimo and JA 37 Viggens of the 16th (or Uppland) Air Wing based at Uppsala.
[7] Jakobson had been the Finnish ambassador to Sweden between 1971-74.
Last edited:
Love that little touch on Swedish policy, had me chuckling away. Interesting to see Jakobson out of retirement. No doubt he will write a a book about this. "The Diplomacy of the xxxx"
You can hear it in the wind, all is not right
One gets tired and the other can't go on either
Against the Moon you can see a wolf howling
But morning's dew won't form on the leaves of the rowan tree
I think of all this as I look to the south
There nuclear winters don't shake their spears
And the day doesn't shine, shine embarrassed of itself
You can walk through the shallow waters
But we go and sow the wind
Chorus:
Here, we are reaping northern crops
Northern crops
Here, we are reaping northern crops
…
Viikate: Pohjoista viljaa (2005)
XXXIII. Here Among the Fallen
Fragment 106.
Logged 11.01.2009
BFA
[This fragment is an excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of Ville Mäkiaho, a former soldier, as of 2008 a resident of Seinäjoki, Central PPO.]
It was a typical day in most regards, to begin with. Overcast skies, light wind from the south-west, it even snowed a little. I remember talking with the Second Lieutenant about the fact that there was still this much snow around, this being late April and all. That was before we saw how May and June turned out.
We had just left the Civil Guard House, walking along the street towards the town centre. There was traffic around, though the vehicles were mostly military and provincial. An army courier on a motorcycle passed as, as did a matte-green Toyota pick-up. A column of men in work duty came walking along the street, in civilian gear with the white ”TV” armbands, carrying shovels. All had their faces covered with scarfs or balaclavas, the same as we did. You rarely saw an uncovered face on the streets those days.
We were going to the central kitchen that provided the food to our unit, to clear out a misunderstanding that seemed impossible to do over the telephone. Perhaps it was what some call administrative friction, perhaps simple stupidity. Well, anyway, there was nothing better to do for the Second Lieutenant and myself, so we walked. It was just a half a kilometer and they did want us to save fuel, desperately so.
The civilian and military authorities running the town had set up a common system of central kitchens a couple of weeks after the Exchange, to simplify things by avoiding two parallel organizations doing basically the same thing. But me and my superior agreed the situation was far from ideal. It might have been simpler and more comprehensive in some regards, perhaps. But civilian volunteers and those assigned to work duty via the Employment Office and its wartime offshoots working together with soldiers did not make for the most efficient and predictable results. Just this week, we had had our meals come around consistently too late, or not at all. And there was always too little to eat. Phoning the kitchen had been in vain.
So here we were. Rounding the corner, we approached the communal kitchens that served hundreds of civilians and soldiers in this part of the town, set up in a location that used to be a largish restaurant owned by the Seinäjoki Cooperative Society.[1] There were several vehicles on the yeard, vans, trucks and a tractor with a trailer. Male TeeVees were unloading cardboard boxes from the last, with a couple of armed conscripts keeping an eye on things. As we were passing the trailer, one of the men slipped and dropped the box on the ground. Metal cans spilled out.
The Second Lieutenant stepped up and picked one of the cans, catching the attention of the Rk62-toting private.
” - Look here, First Sergeant,” he said to me, ”government meat!”
The generic metal can bore a label with the Defence Forces' simple tower insignia. In all caps it said ”CANNED MEAT, 20 REGULATION RATIONS, BEEF/PORK/MUTTON/HORSE”.
” - It looks brand new”, he said, ”must be true what they say about the emergency slaughters.”
The armed guard stepped closer.
” - Second Lieutenant”, he said sternly, ”I ask you kindly to put the can back into the box.”
My superior stared at the man and made as if to stuff the can into his pocket.
” - Or what, Private? You'll shoot me?”
The private's comrade, a conscript with the twin stripes of a corporal removed his safety with a click.
” - That's right, sir. Or we'll shoot.”
At that, my comrade in arms, so to speak, held the can high and then placed it gingerly in the cardboard box, as if handling a live grenade.
” - There. There's your precious can. Relax, would you? I was making a fucking joke!”
He glared at the two men.
” - Besides, it is probably made of people anyway.”
As we walked away towards the door, I saw the corporal shaking his head and ordering the TeeVees back to work. I addressed the young officer softly.
” - With all due respect, sir, I think you shouldn't joke about these things. Were damn lucky to have any food here at all, with all the rumours that are going around, about famine in the East, about warehouses going empty. And food shipments have been robbed. It is no wonder those men are on edge.”
” - I know that, I do. But man they should be able to take a joke.”
I had worked with the Second Lieutenant for well over a month now. He was younger than me, and while definitely bright and sensible (and somewhat bookish), he had that strange reckless edge that tended to surface at the most inopportune moments. He'd get into real trouble in the future, I was sure, unless that edge could be smoothed over.
” - Anyway,” he said, ”our troubles with food should be over soon.”
” - What do you mean?”
” - Don't tell anyone, but I overheard someone from the Office saying that we'll be getting aid from Sweden before long. That is where the Colonel is right now, negotiating with the politicos. It's very hush hush.”
” - Right, straight from the Horsemen Information Agency.[2] I'll believe it when I see it.”
I had heard similar rumours too, but the idea of imminent Swedish help was by then a staple, a story that had made the rounds since the Exchange. And all the while our rations got leaner and less nutritious. At that point, it was still over two weeks until Helicopter Day.
While inside the kitchens we managed to get a hold of an old Staff Sergeant who seemed to be in control and relay to him the information that our unit had 20, not 15 men and that if we still continued to receive too small rations, Colonel Ahola's office would land on the kitchen staff like a ton of bricks. We got the message across, or at least it seemed so, though the rotund man had a very ill temper. I am sure he would have kept us there all day, next to the scores of civilian and military kitchen workers stirring boiling kettles and carrying around various containers, to listen his monologue about the attendant troubles of food preparation and distribution in post-nuclear conditions. It transpired, though that we had chosen well the time for our visit, because the Staff Sergeant said that a van was being loaded that would bring our lunch around and that we could return home with it.
The delivery van was staffed by two female TeeVees and one armed soldier. We barely fit in the back with the metal and styrofoam containers. I immediately thought the younger TeeVee looked very familiar, but couldn't quite place her face. Only on a second look I noticed her armband had just a ”V”, marking her as a bona fide volunteer. She looked certainly healthy and keen, all things considered.
Our small unit had inhabited the old Civil Guard House since March. We had the big house pretty much to ourselves, a rare treat these days. Only the Colonel and other guests sent by the Office bothered us. For the rest of the town, discounting of course the central kitchen, we might have not existed at all.
The Fourth Separate Technical Depot.[3] That's what it would have said we were if someone drew up a detailed organizational chart of the Defence Forces' new Western Command. One officer, three NCOs, eleven ordinary soldiers. Ambiguous responsibilities and a bogus chain of command. In fact my closest superior reported directly to Colonel Ahola himself.
In truth we were the only operational POW camp in Western Finland. Holding the grand total of five prisoners of war, the crew of a downed US Air Force aircraft, detained in this old building since they were transferred to Seinäjoki from the Raahe police station after the Exchange.
Well, not the whole time. During the first week the Americans organized an inpromptu escape and managed to get to the edge of the town centre before we could catch them again. Since then they had stayed put, not least because our motivation in keeping an eye on them had improved dramatically after the Colonel had chewed us up bad and handed out punishments liberally. But I guess the experience had also made the Americans believe that they were most well off being detained here rather than running helter skelter across the Finnish countryside, towards the theoretical safety of Sweden. Or maybe they were just biding their time and quietly preparing for another, this time meticulolously planned escape. Great Escape style, perhaps. Though I found it hard to see myself as a witless Nazi guard.
Major Ralph Rochelle, United States Air Force.
Captain Norman Rittinen, United States Air Force.
Lieutenant Beau Braswell, United States Air Force.
2nd Lieutenant Todd Rossman, United States Air Force.
Sergeant Xavier Apisa, United States Air Force.
That was basically all the militarily relevant information that had been extracted from the Americans. Oh, they did talk. To the Colonel, who came around once in a while, though less often lately. To the Second Lieutenant, whose responsibility they were most of the time. And to me. But they talked about sports, and films and books, and food. About home and loved ones. Being very careful about giving away anything that might be militarily relevant; like in fact we were.
The Americans had several large rooms in their use and most of the modern conveniences wartime Seinäjoki could offer. They could go out to the fenced yard to stretch their legs, under guard. Just yesterday Captain Rittinen had asked me for more baseballs: they had again staged an improvised baseball game on the small yard and predictably lost all the balls beyond the fence. Fortunately (Finnish) baseball equipment was not in an especially short supply in Seinäjoki.
The building had a sort of nostalgic atmosphere for a detainment facility. It was like living in a museum. Because, well, it had been a museum before the war. Being an old local HQ for the paramilitary Civil Guard, it had been collected full of the interwar organization's history, and that of the womens' auxiliary Lotta Svärd. The walls were covered with banners and uniforms in display cases. Old pictures of serious young men in simple grey uniforms, attending parades, skiing exercises and marksmanship drills. Playing Finnish baseball. I guess that was where the American airmen had got the idea for asking baseball equipment. They refused to use the Finnish rules in their practice, thought.
As the van pulled in front of the building, I saw a green Toyota pick-up parked next to our trusty Lada. Pointed it out to the Second Lieutenant. We quickly got out of the van and entered the foyer. The hall was filled with obsolete radio equipment and a strategically placed ancient switchboard. I was particularly proud of the anti-ship missile components and the old radar screen next to the duty desk. All useless junk, of course, but good enough for maskirovka purposes.
Aho was sitting at the desk, folding a paper into an airplane.
” - What's the Toyota doing up front?”, asked my superior as soon as he caught Aho's eye.
” - An infantry Captain came to interrogate our guests, sir. He is...”
He was rudely interrupted.
” - Did you check with the Office for his clearance?”
” - Well, sir, the thing is...”
” - It is a simple question, Corporal: DID YOU CHECK HIS CLEARANCE?”
Aho turned his gaze to the ground.
” - Well, no, but...”, he said in a miserable voice.
The Second Lieutenant banged his fist on the desk.
” - Get up, Aho. You're with me. We'll go and get the Captain out. Mäkiaho, call the Office.”
As the two men vanished down the hall, I saw the two female workers carrying containers inside. The call to the Colonel's office confirmed that there wëre no permits granted for today ”to access the depot”.
As I lowered the handset, the door at the end of the hall swung open and a man in an officer's uniform ran down the hall. Aho was running behind him. I heard my superior shouting angrily from the next room.
” - Goddammit, Aho, shoot the bastard!”
I tried to stop the running man, but he had the momentum on his side and pushed me aside, hitting his foot on a food container but disappearing out the door. The Second Lieutenant came limping to the hall, pistol in hand.
” - What are you idiots doing? After him!”
I was already moving when I heard him. I opened the door to see -
The Captain spread-eagled on the ground, cursing incoherently. The young female volunteer was holding him down easily, while the older woman could barely maintain her composure.
The young woman smiled at me mischievously.
” - You rarely see people running these days. If they are not up to something bad, I mean. So I decided I should stop the good Captain here, especially after I heard the shouting inside. So, there he is now. If I did something wrong, I am ready to accept the consequences.”
She was smiling even when she said that, which caused me to finally recognize her. She had had pretty much the same smile on her face almost a year ago in Tampere when she reached world record numbers in javelin. And again in Helsinki last August when she won gold for Finland in the World Championships.
As me and my superior took control of the prisoner, Tiina Lillak and her older coworker boarded the van to leave for the next food drop-off point. We barely managed to thank her for stopping the suspicious man, who launched on a rambling tirade about Communist infiltrators and conspiracies and traitors and a secret Soviet occupation.
As the Military Police jeep, summoned by the sheepish Aho, came around to pick up the man, we could have no idea that he would in fact be released on his cognizance the next day, due to a bureacratic snafu. And neither could we know that only two days later, he would go on a murderous rampage that left several people, parliamentarians and soldiers, dead or dying at the Seinäjoki Market Square.
But then, if we could have predicted the future the world would not have been in this mess in the first place.
Notes:
[1] Seinäjoen Osuuskauppa.
[2] Hevosmiesten Tietotoimisto. An old figure of speech for a dubious information source. In actual fact, horses started to play a major part in the Finnish transportation system only in late 1985.
[3] Neljäs Erillinen Tekninen Varikko or 4.ErTeknV for short.
One gets tired and the other can't go on either
Against the Moon you can see a wolf howling
But morning's dew won't form on the leaves of the rowan tree
I think of all this as I look to the south
There nuclear winters don't shake their spears
And the day doesn't shine, shine embarrassed of itself
You can walk through the shallow waters
But we go and sow the wind
Chorus:
Here, we are reaping northern crops
Northern crops
Here, we are reaping northern crops
…
Viikate: Pohjoista viljaa (2005)
XXXIII. Here Among the Fallen
Fragment 106.
Logged 11.01.2009
BFA
[This fragment is an excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of Ville Mäkiaho, a former soldier, as of 2008 a resident of Seinäjoki, Central PPO.]
It was a typical day in most regards, to begin with. Overcast skies, light wind from the south-west, it even snowed a little. I remember talking with the Second Lieutenant about the fact that there was still this much snow around, this being late April and all. That was before we saw how May and June turned out.
We had just left the Civil Guard House, walking along the street towards the town centre. There was traffic around, though the vehicles were mostly military and provincial. An army courier on a motorcycle passed as, as did a matte-green Toyota pick-up. A column of men in work duty came walking along the street, in civilian gear with the white ”TV” armbands, carrying shovels. All had their faces covered with scarfs or balaclavas, the same as we did. You rarely saw an uncovered face on the streets those days.
We were going to the central kitchen that provided the food to our unit, to clear out a misunderstanding that seemed impossible to do over the telephone. Perhaps it was what some call administrative friction, perhaps simple stupidity. Well, anyway, there was nothing better to do for the Second Lieutenant and myself, so we walked. It was just a half a kilometer and they did want us to save fuel, desperately so.
The civilian and military authorities running the town had set up a common system of central kitchens a couple of weeks after the Exchange, to simplify things by avoiding two parallel organizations doing basically the same thing. But me and my superior agreed the situation was far from ideal. It might have been simpler and more comprehensive in some regards, perhaps. But civilian volunteers and those assigned to work duty via the Employment Office and its wartime offshoots working together with soldiers did not make for the most efficient and predictable results. Just this week, we had had our meals come around consistently too late, or not at all. And there was always too little to eat. Phoning the kitchen had been in vain.
So here we were. Rounding the corner, we approached the communal kitchens that served hundreds of civilians and soldiers in this part of the town, set up in a location that used to be a largish restaurant owned by the Seinäjoki Cooperative Society.[1] There were several vehicles on the yeard, vans, trucks and a tractor with a trailer. Male TeeVees were unloading cardboard boxes from the last, with a couple of armed conscripts keeping an eye on things. As we were passing the trailer, one of the men slipped and dropped the box on the ground. Metal cans spilled out.
The Second Lieutenant stepped up and picked one of the cans, catching the attention of the Rk62-toting private.
” - Look here, First Sergeant,” he said to me, ”government meat!”
The generic metal can bore a label with the Defence Forces' simple tower insignia. In all caps it said ”CANNED MEAT, 20 REGULATION RATIONS, BEEF/PORK/MUTTON/HORSE”.
” - It looks brand new”, he said, ”must be true what they say about the emergency slaughters.”
The armed guard stepped closer.
” - Second Lieutenant”, he said sternly, ”I ask you kindly to put the can back into the box.”
My superior stared at the man and made as if to stuff the can into his pocket.
” - Or what, Private? You'll shoot me?”
The private's comrade, a conscript with the twin stripes of a corporal removed his safety with a click.
” - That's right, sir. Or we'll shoot.”
At that, my comrade in arms, so to speak, held the can high and then placed it gingerly in the cardboard box, as if handling a live grenade.
” - There. There's your precious can. Relax, would you? I was making a fucking joke!”
He glared at the two men.
” - Besides, it is probably made of people anyway.”
As we walked away towards the door, I saw the corporal shaking his head and ordering the TeeVees back to work. I addressed the young officer softly.
” - With all due respect, sir, I think you shouldn't joke about these things. Were damn lucky to have any food here at all, with all the rumours that are going around, about famine in the East, about warehouses going empty. And food shipments have been robbed. It is no wonder those men are on edge.”
” - I know that, I do. But man they should be able to take a joke.”
I had worked with the Second Lieutenant for well over a month now. He was younger than me, and while definitely bright and sensible (and somewhat bookish), he had that strange reckless edge that tended to surface at the most inopportune moments. He'd get into real trouble in the future, I was sure, unless that edge could be smoothed over.
” - Anyway,” he said, ”our troubles with food should be over soon.”
” - What do you mean?”
” - Don't tell anyone, but I overheard someone from the Office saying that we'll be getting aid from Sweden before long. That is where the Colonel is right now, negotiating with the politicos. It's very hush hush.”
” - Right, straight from the Horsemen Information Agency.[2] I'll believe it when I see it.”
I had heard similar rumours too, but the idea of imminent Swedish help was by then a staple, a story that had made the rounds since the Exchange. And all the while our rations got leaner and less nutritious. At that point, it was still over two weeks until Helicopter Day.
While inside the kitchens we managed to get a hold of an old Staff Sergeant who seemed to be in control and relay to him the information that our unit had 20, not 15 men and that if we still continued to receive too small rations, Colonel Ahola's office would land on the kitchen staff like a ton of bricks. We got the message across, or at least it seemed so, though the rotund man had a very ill temper. I am sure he would have kept us there all day, next to the scores of civilian and military kitchen workers stirring boiling kettles and carrying around various containers, to listen his monologue about the attendant troubles of food preparation and distribution in post-nuclear conditions. It transpired, though that we had chosen well the time for our visit, because the Staff Sergeant said that a van was being loaded that would bring our lunch around and that we could return home with it.
The delivery van was staffed by two female TeeVees and one armed soldier. We barely fit in the back with the metal and styrofoam containers. I immediately thought the younger TeeVee looked very familiar, but couldn't quite place her face. Only on a second look I noticed her armband had just a ”V”, marking her as a bona fide volunteer. She looked certainly healthy and keen, all things considered.
Our small unit had inhabited the old Civil Guard House since March. We had the big house pretty much to ourselves, a rare treat these days. Only the Colonel and other guests sent by the Office bothered us. For the rest of the town, discounting of course the central kitchen, we might have not existed at all.
The Fourth Separate Technical Depot.[3] That's what it would have said we were if someone drew up a detailed organizational chart of the Defence Forces' new Western Command. One officer, three NCOs, eleven ordinary soldiers. Ambiguous responsibilities and a bogus chain of command. In fact my closest superior reported directly to Colonel Ahola himself.
In truth we were the only operational POW camp in Western Finland. Holding the grand total of five prisoners of war, the crew of a downed US Air Force aircraft, detained in this old building since they were transferred to Seinäjoki from the Raahe police station after the Exchange.
Well, not the whole time. During the first week the Americans organized an inpromptu escape and managed to get to the edge of the town centre before we could catch them again. Since then they had stayed put, not least because our motivation in keeping an eye on them had improved dramatically after the Colonel had chewed us up bad and handed out punishments liberally. But I guess the experience had also made the Americans believe that they were most well off being detained here rather than running helter skelter across the Finnish countryside, towards the theoretical safety of Sweden. Or maybe they were just biding their time and quietly preparing for another, this time meticulolously planned escape. Great Escape style, perhaps. Though I found it hard to see myself as a witless Nazi guard.
Major Ralph Rochelle, United States Air Force.
Captain Norman Rittinen, United States Air Force.
Lieutenant Beau Braswell, United States Air Force.
2nd Lieutenant Todd Rossman, United States Air Force.
Sergeant Xavier Apisa, United States Air Force.
That was basically all the militarily relevant information that had been extracted from the Americans. Oh, they did talk. To the Colonel, who came around once in a while, though less often lately. To the Second Lieutenant, whose responsibility they were most of the time. And to me. But they talked about sports, and films and books, and food. About home and loved ones. Being very careful about giving away anything that might be militarily relevant; like in fact we were.
The Americans had several large rooms in their use and most of the modern conveniences wartime Seinäjoki could offer. They could go out to the fenced yard to stretch their legs, under guard. Just yesterday Captain Rittinen had asked me for more baseballs: they had again staged an improvised baseball game on the small yard and predictably lost all the balls beyond the fence. Fortunately (Finnish) baseball equipment was not in an especially short supply in Seinäjoki.
The building had a sort of nostalgic atmosphere for a detainment facility. It was like living in a museum. Because, well, it had been a museum before the war. Being an old local HQ for the paramilitary Civil Guard, it had been collected full of the interwar organization's history, and that of the womens' auxiliary Lotta Svärd. The walls were covered with banners and uniforms in display cases. Old pictures of serious young men in simple grey uniforms, attending parades, skiing exercises and marksmanship drills. Playing Finnish baseball. I guess that was where the American airmen had got the idea for asking baseball equipment. They refused to use the Finnish rules in their practice, thought.
As the van pulled in front of the building, I saw a green Toyota pick-up parked next to our trusty Lada. Pointed it out to the Second Lieutenant. We quickly got out of the van and entered the foyer. The hall was filled with obsolete radio equipment and a strategically placed ancient switchboard. I was particularly proud of the anti-ship missile components and the old radar screen next to the duty desk. All useless junk, of course, but good enough for maskirovka purposes.
Aho was sitting at the desk, folding a paper into an airplane.
” - What's the Toyota doing up front?”, asked my superior as soon as he caught Aho's eye.
” - An infantry Captain came to interrogate our guests, sir. He is...”
He was rudely interrupted.
” - Did you check with the Office for his clearance?”
” - Well, sir, the thing is...”
” - It is a simple question, Corporal: DID YOU CHECK HIS CLEARANCE?”
Aho turned his gaze to the ground.
” - Well, no, but...”, he said in a miserable voice.
The Second Lieutenant banged his fist on the desk.
” - Get up, Aho. You're with me. We'll go and get the Captain out. Mäkiaho, call the Office.”
As the two men vanished down the hall, I saw the two female workers carrying containers inside. The call to the Colonel's office confirmed that there wëre no permits granted for today ”to access the depot”.
As I lowered the handset, the door at the end of the hall swung open and a man in an officer's uniform ran down the hall. Aho was running behind him. I heard my superior shouting angrily from the next room.
” - Goddammit, Aho, shoot the bastard!”
I tried to stop the running man, but he had the momentum on his side and pushed me aside, hitting his foot on a food container but disappearing out the door. The Second Lieutenant came limping to the hall, pistol in hand.
” - What are you idiots doing? After him!”
I was already moving when I heard him. I opened the door to see -
The Captain spread-eagled on the ground, cursing incoherently. The young female volunteer was holding him down easily, while the older woman could barely maintain her composure.
The young woman smiled at me mischievously.
” - You rarely see people running these days. If they are not up to something bad, I mean. So I decided I should stop the good Captain here, especially after I heard the shouting inside. So, there he is now. If I did something wrong, I am ready to accept the consequences.”
She was smiling even when she said that, which caused me to finally recognize her. She had had pretty much the same smile on her face almost a year ago in Tampere when she reached world record numbers in javelin. And again in Helsinki last August when she won gold for Finland in the World Championships.
As me and my superior took control of the prisoner, Tiina Lillak and her older coworker boarded the van to leave for the next food drop-off point. We barely managed to thank her for stopping the suspicious man, who launched on a rambling tirade about Communist infiltrators and conspiracies and traitors and a secret Soviet occupation.
As the Military Police jeep, summoned by the sheepish Aho, came around to pick up the man, we could have no idea that he would in fact be released on his cognizance the next day, due to a bureacratic snafu. And neither could we know that only two days later, he would go on a murderous rampage that left several people, parliamentarians and soldiers, dead or dying at the Seinäjoki Market Square.
But then, if we could have predicted the future the world would not have been in this mess in the first place.
Notes:
[1] Seinäjoen Osuuskauppa.
[2] Hevosmiesten Tietotoimisto. An old figure of speech for a dubious information source. In actual fact, horses started to play a major part in the Finnish transportation system only in late 1985.
[3] Neljäs Erillinen Tekninen Varikko or 4.ErTeknV for short.
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I think he might have died in the Helsinki blasts. But if he is, he is in Helsinki desperately trying to run the remains of an organization (the Uusimaa provincial government) that has been abandoned at this point by both Mikkeli and Seinäjoki.
CanKiwi said:Love that little touch on Swedish policy, had me chuckling away. Interesting to see Jakobson out of retirement. No doubt he will write a a book about this. "The Diplomacy of the xxxx"
I thought somebody might comment on that. I thought it was apt, if a bit cruel. Just to imagine the amount of handwringing taking place in Gothenburg...
And you might well be right about the book.
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I thought somebody might comment on that. I thought it was apt, if a bit cruel. Just to imagine the amount of handwringing taking place in Gothenburg...
Well, speaking of Sweden, one of the reasons I had a chuckle was I'd just been editing this before posting over on my Alternative Winter War thread - https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=6624950&postcount=637
... and it struck me as a common thread linking a number of the Finnish ATL's