The Land of Sad Songs – Stories From Protect and Survive Finland
- Thread starter DrakonFin
- Start date
Very glad to see this back. Always thought it was amongst the best of the P&S spin-offs.
There was also one very minor supporting character from the early installments in this chapter, can you spot him?
The dog (Sharik) or that Pavel fellow ?
I was going to say "maybe that Finnish engineer who lived in Sweden", but then I remembered I'm thinking of another fellow with a Swedish girlfriend, not the one from this most recent chapter.
Well I'll be damned, I must admit that I truly feel sorry for Paavo Väyrynen
The power of fiction, eh?
JN1 said:
Thank you for your support. If everything goes according to plan, I intend to finally write my remaining, planned story arc to its conclusion by the end of this summer.
Petike said:
It was that Virtala/Virtanen guy he talks about. From Chapter II:
Virtanen is a one of the most common Finnish surnames, so I wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be him.
True, it might have been better to choose a less common name. Then again, I think the name was originally partly a reference to B. Virtanen, a character in a comic strip.
EDIT: I forgot one important thing about Finnish Easter traditions, the pääsiäishanukas ("Easter budding"). See video here about how to prepare the dish.
"Happy Easter and good evening! This time we prepare an Easter Budding according to ancient Finnish traditions. The ingredients for a portion for four are as follows:
20 liters of puff pastry dough
8 liters of melted butter
1 apple
1 raw buddy."
(Originally from the sketch comedy show Velipuolikuu. Rather appropriately for the P&S-verse, that sketch was first aired April 21st 1984.)
Last edited:
I felt sorry for him ever since he started treking the post-Exchange Finnish countryside. All alone, far from home (a home that has ceased to exist), in a foreign land, in the middle of winter after a great catastrophe. Who wouldn't feel the weight of the world descending on his shoulders if he/she was in such a situation...
The black swans mean death
Tuonela
History repeats itself
The rulers won't change their minds
Tuonela
The bombers take off from their fields
I stand alone and look at them go
The sky rains death, so precious is the fatherland
Tuonela
Grass covers the graves of heroes
Leaves fall from the wreaths of honor
They braved death just for someone's word
Tuonela
….
Skädäm: Mustat joutsenet (1985)
A Finnish Air Force MiG-21F-13 of the Reconnaissance Squadron landing at the Luonetjärvi airfield in the fall of 1983. FNA archives.
XLI. Homesick and Tired, Part 2
Interview nr. 259, 21.12.2011. JON.
Subject: Man, 48 (M233)
Occupation in 1984: Student
Location: Rauma, Western PPO
[The subject is a skinny man with a longish hair and a mustache. He is dressed in well-worn blue overalls. He walks with a limp and seems to suffer from alcohol withdrawal.]
[Thank you for taking some time to talk to me again. If it is alright with you, I think we could talk a bit about the time after the Swedish aid started arriving to Rauma in the spring of 1984. Is that all right with you?]
That is that part you would want to talk about, wouldn't you?
[I beg your pardon?]
It is you Swedish... It seems you rather want talk about what you did for Finland than what you didn't... I mean what you could have done but didn't.
[Subject fidgets in his chair.]
You know the statue they have in Seinäjoki? The one they put up on the 15th Helicopter Day? Can't remember what they call it, with a Swedish man in a suit helping up an injured Finnish guy in a uniform? That is how you want us to see you. And you want us to worship Palme [1] as much as you do.
[Subject stops to dig a cigarette from his pocket and light it up. For the rest of the interview, he waves the cigarette to accentuate his words.]
Palme was okay. Like our Acting President, Leppänen, a man in a tight spot who managed to do more good than harm. But some of you seem to think he was the second coming of Jesus bloody Christ. Well he wasn't. He and that Prince Bertil of yours... They did always put Sweden first in everything. Which is of course perfectly understandable, when you think of it. What I'm saying that some of you lot should come down from your high horse and stop condemning the FNA at every turn. Finland had it so much worse than you lot did, and your help was really just a drop in an ocean. A welcome drop, sure, but still...
And think about the volunteers that came from Sweden with those ships in 1984, would you. The bigger part of them were Finns. Not Swedes but Finns that had gone west to do the dirty and dangerous jobs you didn't want to do yourself anymore. I remember that, many people from my village had gone to Sweden, and at one time I considered that myself. After the war, of course, it would have been pretty impossible, too, what with the restrictions you put up.
I was in the Navy during the war. During the winter the ships could not be used, and so my unit was assigned to a coastal fort near Rauma. No real action here in the west, so we did odd jobs, put up sandbagged positions, had various drills, and later, after the Exchange, would be used as muscle to help in evacuations of the Pori and Turku areas, and then in keeping up order– it was pretty chaotic, let me tell you. Nobody knew who was in charge, there was radioactive fallout everywhere and the people were hysterical, injured and lost. By the time the Swedish ships started arriving we had a lot of that sorted out around here, all by ourselves thank you very much. We had survived the winter on our own.
But I can't say the Swedish aid didn't help. Where I was it at the very least improved the morale of the people, knowing that you were not alone anymore. In May I remember there was this project started on the countryside around Rauma to go through the villages to see if the farms were ready to start the agricultural work of the spring – growing as much food as possible was seen as a dire necessity by those in charge. It stands to reason, too. Food was well running out in places already. And so many conscripted military units were made into agricultural task forces, to be sent to help where it was badly needed.
Luck of the draw, I managed to avoid much of the heavier farm work myself. Me and a couple of other guys from the unit were given a more cushy task – visiting farms and doing reconnaissance, like. Somebody had to have a look-see which farms were occupied and where the people had left, or where there were more people than there should have been. I think Petty Officer [REDACTED] had a father in a high place and that helped to get us selected. So it was him, me and this third guy called [REDACTED] driving around the countryside in a car, with a map and a notepad. The third guy was a musician from Pori, he had been something of a celebrity just before the war – he had been in the telly and everything, the girls were crazy about him - and I remember well how the Petty Officer used to rib him about it all the time, asking him about his makeup and all his girlfriends, and so on. The two almost came to blows a few times, and the Volunteer had to break it up.
[The Volunteer?]
Right, he was this big, muscular guy with a black beard, reminded me of Juha Mieto, actually. Though he spoke in this Savonian dialect, see, not in Ostrobothnian...
[Subject pauses for a moment.]
Now, I ain't telling this righ, am I? The Volunteer was of course one of the Swedes, or well, a Finn, like I told ya. He had volunteered to come along to get an idea of how things were in the countryside – I understood his brother was a farmer somewhere East and he didn't know what had happened to him, so...
[It seems like the subject remembers something.]
Say, there is one thing I should tell you about. It was the strangest thing... We were somewhere near Pyhäjärvi, you see, east of here, and there were a couple of farms we had to check out. The first one was all right, and the farmer had a pretty daughter, too, I think. I remember her looking goggle-eyed at [REDACTED]. The other... When we arrived at the farmhouse it was all quiet, like. Seemed rundown. So we knocked on the door. No answer. Tried it and it was unlocked. The Petty Officer had a pistol, we too had been issued with old rifles, and we entered the house carefully. There had been looters here, even if was technically within Säkylä's domain [2], so it didn't hurt to be careful.
The house seemed empty. Someone had been in there, though, and pretty recently, too. We fanned out to search the house. I went to the kitchen, and lo and behold, there was a small dog sleeping next to the fireplace. A mangy little thing, but certainly alive. It perked up as I entered and started yapping at me. As I was going to shout to the guys not to worry, I heard the gunshot. And then another.
[What had happened?]
The Petty Officer had found a man sleeping on the floor in the master bedroom. A dirty, bearded man dressed in clothes that had seen better days. The man had spoken in his dream, in a foreign language that sounded Russian, like. When he tried to wake him up, speaking to him calmly – he said – the man had suddenly pulled out a pistol and shot at him. He shot back with his own.
It was some serious marksmanship and no mistake. At a distance of, what, three meters, the Russian – that's what he was, the sorry wreck of a man – had managed to hit the Petty Officer just barely, with a grazing shot on his shoulder. He suffered only a minor wound. And surprised, the Petty Officer missed the Russian altogether, shooting up a bedside lamp instead. It was most certainly dead, in pieces on the floor when I arrived.
The Volunteer then stepped in and calmed things down – bloody courageous of him, with the two damned gunslingers and all – and weapons were lowered. The Russian passed out again. He seemed very weak. So as I ripped up some sheets and put a quick field dressing on the Petty Officer's wound, the Volunteer picked up the Russian from the floor and carried him to the car – we agreed this was a marvel our superiors would be interested to see, too. I remember how light and small the Russian seemed as the big Savonian picked him up. Like a rag doll he was, his arms and feet limp. The dog followed us to the car so we allowed it to come along with what would have been its master, or so it seemed. The Russian didn't wake up again until three days later in Rauma, when those soldiers from Seinäjoki came for him.
But that, as they say, is another story, and I really need a beer. You care for one, my Swedish friend? I'll tell the rest if you buy me one or several.
[Subject smiles, dumping his cigarette in the ashtray on the table.]
...following the Exchange and the aftermath had passed, and the military authorities could start reconstructing a chain of command, it was found out that the Halli facility in Central Finland was the single permanent Finnish Air Force base that had not been rendered unusable by the nuclear strikes and fallout. As a considerable number of aircraft still remained in the dispersed auxiliary highway bases around the country, the functioning military authorities decided that the Halli base should become the primary site where all fighter and trainer aircraft should be concentrated. While this decision ran against the grain of the pre-war ideology of asset dispersion, after the silence from east of the border had continued for months and no Soviet aircraft was spotted after the Exchange, it was thought that the risk of new enemy attacks against the base was low.
So as soon as contact was re-established with the highway bases, the remaining personnel was ordered to fly all aircraft in airworthy condition to Halli as soon as possible. From thereon, some of the liaison and transport aircraft would be transferred (after maintenance) to the so-called Administrative Airports created in Seinäjoki and Mikkeli for the use of the civilian and military bureaucracy being rebuilt and reorganised.
In reality the Air Force units in the highway bases were slow to execute these orders, as in many places a major part of the support personnel had been ordered to various necessary tasks including support for population control and food confiscation, evacuations and decontamination operations. While by early May most functioning highway bases could send some of their aircraft and pilots to Halli, bringing along the support personnel and various technical assets proved...
Fragment 88.
Logged 02.07.2008
JAG
[A number of machine-typed pages from the FNA archives, apparently written by [REDACTED], a former Finnish Air Force officer.]
After a necessarily light breakfast of oatmeal porridge with a little canned fruit and crisp bread with margarine, most men chose to bring along their mug of instant coffee to the briefing room. Before the war that would have been frowned upon, but now the remaining coffee was treated almost religiously and it seemed appropriate to drink the lean offerings while listening to the sermon of the morning.
After everyone was seated, the Squadron Commander started with the weather report, received from what passed now for a national weather service, followed by some missives from what now in similar fashion passed for an Air Force HQ after Tikkakoski was lost in the Exchange. The men in the room listened silently, sipping the last of their coffee thoughtfully. Nobody but the CO would say anything until it was time for today's schedule.
These men in the room were now the gutted Finnish Air Force's striking fist, so to speak, the recently created and named Readiness Squadron[3], based in the Halli airbase in Kuorevesi. The name of the unit was a fancy way of saying that this was the only unit in the FAF that in late spring of 1984 had any readiness at all for organised air operations with armed aircraft. The unit was basically built around the the staff and organisation of the Flight Test Centre, operating at the base since before the war, a unit limited in size but having the capability to operate and maintain all aircraft in the national inventory. That the FTC worked in co-operation with the nearby Valmet aircraft factory that had put together many of the airplanes the FAF used was another good reason for choosing this location.
If one would have looked around just then and deciphered the unit insignia and patches on the uniforms of the Air Force officers in the room, one would have realised that this was a highly heterogenous collection of FAF pilots and ground personnel. There were men here from almost every pre-war squadron, and they doggedly held on to their old unit symbols – it was only later that an official Readiness Squadron insignia would be adopted as a way of ”moving forward” and ”building esprit de corps”. There were even a couple of pilots from the Lapland Air Wing here, with the Draken patch on their sleeves.[4] The Laplanders had taken the brunt of the Soviet air attack before the Exchange, and only those who had been ordered to fly to the auxiliary bases in the south when the defence of Lapland was abandoned had survived.
For most men here, return to this kind of illusionary ”normalcy” the Halli base enjoyed in a wrecked, starving nation must have been jarring after spending weeks in often quite primitive, wintery conditions in the highway bases. Many men in the room exhibited signs of stress, sickness and exhaustion as it was – and this was the better part of the personnel available, the men that had been deemed suitable for duty by the base doctor in the medical checkups after arrival.
The Readiness Squadron was, I understand, originally seen as a temporary unit, a way to bring order into the post-Exchange chaos as were other similar measures in the Defence Forces. The unit became permanent, however, and since 1984 most of the traditional squadrons have lived on at best as ghost units of sorts, partly because of the prohibitive cost of rebuilding the airbases lost to nuclear weapons, parly because the numbers and condition of remaining military aircraft have made it nigh impossible to restart the old squadrons to operational status.
The Squadron Commander had led the Flight Test Centre before the war, and despite being a military professional with more flight experience than many here combined, he had more the air of an engineer than a combat pilot. Most pilots in the room, however, had flown at least a few combat sorties against the Soviets in the frantic first days of the war. Some of them had even managed to shoot down an attacking aircraft, grimly outnumbered as the defenders were.
Today, I would take part in a reconnaissance mission. So the Squadron Commander told me after he pulled me and [REDACTED], one of the Karelian Air Wing pilots from Rissala away from the rest of the crowd after the official part of the briefing was over. He had told about the mission just before, but being deep in my thoughts I must have missed the part where my name was mentioned. We sat down and went through the specifics. The old Colonel looked at us in a fatherly way and outlined today's operation, with the air of a seasoned instructor. Me and [REDACTED] just listened and nodded, it was all fairly straightforward and simple, as these things went.
In an hour or so, I had donned my pressure suit and helmet and stood by the hangar while the ground crew was making the last preflight check-ups on my plane. I had been flying this silvery-coloured old MiG-21-F-13, registration code MG-32, since just before the war. It had been brought over from the Reconnaissance Squadron for tests a few weeks before the Soviet attack. It still had Recce Squadron's insignia on its tail. Now it was one of the last surviving planes of the type to have recce equipment installed, along with the Vinten cameras. And that was why me and this plane were ordered on this mission.
After the ground crew leader gave me the signal, I made the walk-around checkup of the plane, climbed the external ladder to the cockpit and settled down to begin the necessary start-up procedures. It had taken some time to get used to the video sight where the gyro gunsight usually was, and to the camera controls on the right – the controls on the older models of the MiG-21 are not very simple and logically arranged as it is.
After I had started the engine with the help of the external power source, I tested the primary flight controls and taxied to the runway. After the few final checks and getting a permission from the tower I took off to the skies of Central Finland. [REDACTED] took off right after me in his MiG-21BIS, the newer model with Karelian Air Wing markings.[5]
After falling into formation we headed south.
The MiG-21 is capable of speeds exceeding Mach 2. Or was, at any rate. This time, though, such a speed was not needed, and so we approached the southern coast at the speed of 400 knots IAS. Our orders were to maintain radio silence as long as possible – only after completing our main objectives and on the way back would we be allowed to use our radios in case of an emergency. Because of the camera equipment, my plane was only armed with the 30 mm cannon. The MiG-21BIS flown by [REDACTED] had four infrared-guided air-to-air-missiles in the hardpoints under the wings, but his 20 mm cannon had not yet been reinstalled after maintenance – but as our orders were not to engage the enemy unless coming under attack ourselves, that had been considered acceptable as the plane was otherwise among the very few perfectly operational MiGs available that day.
Our first objective was Hämeenlinna. I flew two passes over the town area, taking pictures with the cameras all along. I decided to slow down for this to around 300 knots IAS – close to the lowest sensible airspeed for the aircraft type – to get as accurate photos as possible. As with other Finnish towns that had suffered a nuclear attack, Hämeenlinna was surrounded by a large swath of felled and burned forest, which showed like a black scar from the air now as most of the snow had melted away. It was as if someone had reintroduced slash-and-burn agriculture on a massive scale. It was soon learned that often the burn area and the area of heaviest fallout did not fully coincide. 30 years later, some of this damage can still be seen from the air.
After Hämeenlinna we headed towards Helsinki for a similar recon run. I hadn't given much thought to the damage in Hämeenlinna proper, being preoccupied with operating the cameras, but the condition of the capital gave me some pause. We flew roughly along the Helsinki – Hämeenlinna highway [6] directly towards the capital. Without knowing exactly where we approached the greater Helsinki area it would have been very hard to recognise this as the town that still was a lively Nordic capital just months before.
The suburbs were a mass of black, burned-out husks of buildings, roughly from a bit north of Ring 3. Around the Helsinki-Vantaa airport the area of heavy damage reached more towards the north – it was not hard to see that the airport had been specifically targeted by a lower-yield weapon.
Inside Ring 1 almost everything was levelled and at places the ground looked strangely smooth, glass-like. It was hard to place the pre-war locations of any familiar buildings or streets in that moon landscape – though there was one thing helping me. Due to some quirk of fate, the stony Kallio Church stood almost intact north of the city centre. Its tower had half-collapsed, but otherwise the structure was easily recognisable, blackened though it was like a ghastly post-nuclear citadel.
As stricken as I was because of what I saw, [REDACTED] must have felt even worse. He was originally from the capital, and I had heard that his parents were in Helsinki during the Exchange. Despite my shock, I managed to take the necessary pictures. During the mission debriefing, these photos were praised as very good, and that helped me to feel at least some satisfaction about the sortie, despite everything else.
As we turned east to follow the coast towards Loviisa, I noticed that the movements of the other plane were somehow angular, a bit erratic. I went closer and asked [REDACTED] with hand signs if he had problems. He signed ”everything OK” and so we continued east, towards the last mission objective. At that moment, I put it all down to a slight problem with the hydraulics – not unusual in those conditions.
The last objective was twofold. Like from Hämeenlinna and Helsinki, we would have to take photos for recon purposes. But here our targets were not dead towns but living people - the Red Army, or its remnants around Hamina. The military leadership had decided that along with determining the positions and numbers of the Soviets a show of force would be organised. The USSR seemed to have no operational fighter aircraft in use near Finland – or if it had, such had not been seen since the Exchange. As in North Karelia along the Eastern border former Red Army soldiers had been abandoning their officers in droves and seeked refuge in Finland [7] where an organised society seemed to exist, so it was thought the Soviets around Hamina could be intimidated into abandoning the weapons and units they still had and then surrendering to the troops of the Finnish Emergency Cabinet.
And so we were tasked to make the Soviets know our existence – we would fly over Hamina, as low as it was safe to make it impossible to not to see the air power the Finns still had. It was also thought that if the Soviets still had functional radars and AA, flying in low, fast and unexpected would help us avoid trouble. A message would also be sent to the Finnish civilians in the area that there was an organised Finnish centre of power, one that had the ability to take on the area's erstwhile masters if need be.
We approached Hamina so low it was easy to see houses and even people on the ground – some way west of the town area we passed what looked like Finnish positions, with a T-55 flying a Finnish state flag. The soldiers seemed surprised seeing us. But they were not as surprised as the people in Hamina, what seemed like civilians coming out from the buildings and uniformed Soviet soldiers standing in small knots on the streets. I could even see some of them pointing at us as we roared past over the octagon-shaped centre of the old garrison town.
On the second pass it happened. Suddenly [REDACTED] broke formation and his plane started losing altitude fast. In seconds, it crashed directly into a largish warehouse with several Soviet military vehicles in front. An explosion followed.
During the mission debriefing I was asked several times if [REDACTED] gave any indication of any problems, or perhaps that he was doing this deliberately. For the life of me I couldn't remember him trying to communicate anything to me after the ”OK” sign after Helsinki. That is what I told my superiors. I had no chance to try and stop what happened. I could not help my comrade who died there in Hamina on that clear day in late May.
To this day I can't say if it really was a mechanical malfunction as the official report and the unit's history says it was, or whether my comrade chose to end his life then and there. Be it as it may, there is one thing I do know: he didn't even try to use his ejection seat.
Notes:
[1] Olof Palme (1927-1996) was the Prime Minister of Sweden during the Exchange and the Reconstruction. Along with the Regent, Prince Bertil, he is highly regarded in Sweden for his leadership during the years of crisis. Palme's funeral in Gothenburg in 1996 was a huge national event of mourning.
[2] The Pori Brigade garrison is in Säkylä on the east side of Pyhäjärvi. After the local provincial government was incapacitated, the training unit's leadership took it upon themselves to keep the peace in the surrounding areas. This is also where a lot of troops taking part in the Reclamation of South-West Finland were supplied from and received their orders from.
[3] Valmiuslentolaivue, or VaLLv. The unit's insignia is a skeletal fist holding a lightning bolt. The unit's wartime veterans are sometimes referred to as "the Undead".
[4] The Lapland Air Wing operated the Saab 35 Draken as its primary fighter aircraft since 1976.
[5] The Soviet MiG-21BIS (NATO designation Fishbed-L/N) was used by the Karelian Air Wing since 1980. The plans to buy more of these planes from the USSR in 1983-84 were cancelled because of the war.
[6] This is pre-war Highway 3 that continued north-west towards Tampere, Seinäjoki and Vaasa. Parts of the highway remain unusable to this day.
[7] These Soviet POWs/refugees were taken to the hastily built Hammaslahti internment camp south of Joensuu. After the camps on the Line, this internment camp is said to have some of the worst mortality rates in 1984-85, often said to be due to a combination of small food rations, heavy compulsory work and a shortage of qualified medical staff.
Tuonela
History repeats itself
The rulers won't change their minds
Tuonela
The bombers take off from their fields
I stand alone and look at them go
The sky rains death, so precious is the fatherland
Tuonela
Grass covers the graves of heroes
Leaves fall from the wreaths of honor
They braved death just for someone's word
Tuonela
….
Skädäm: Mustat joutsenet (1985)
A Finnish Air Force MiG-21F-13 of the Reconnaissance Squadron landing at the Luonetjärvi airfield in the fall of 1983. FNA archives.
XLI. Homesick and Tired, Part 2
Interview nr. 259, 21.12.2011. JON.
Subject: Man, 48 (M233)
Occupation in 1984: Student
Location: Rauma, Western PPO
[The subject is a skinny man with a longish hair and a mustache. He is dressed in well-worn blue overalls. He walks with a limp and seems to suffer from alcohol withdrawal.]
[Thank you for taking some time to talk to me again. If it is alright with you, I think we could talk a bit about the time after the Swedish aid started arriving to Rauma in the spring of 1984. Is that all right with you?]
That is that part you would want to talk about, wouldn't you?
[I beg your pardon?]
It is you Swedish... It seems you rather want talk about what you did for Finland than what you didn't... I mean what you could have done but didn't.
[Subject fidgets in his chair.]
You know the statue they have in Seinäjoki? The one they put up on the 15th Helicopter Day? Can't remember what they call it, with a Swedish man in a suit helping up an injured Finnish guy in a uniform? That is how you want us to see you. And you want us to worship Palme [1] as much as you do.
[Subject stops to dig a cigarette from his pocket and light it up. For the rest of the interview, he waves the cigarette to accentuate his words.]
Palme was okay. Like our Acting President, Leppänen, a man in a tight spot who managed to do more good than harm. But some of you seem to think he was the second coming of Jesus bloody Christ. Well he wasn't. He and that Prince Bertil of yours... They did always put Sweden first in everything. Which is of course perfectly understandable, when you think of it. What I'm saying that some of you lot should come down from your high horse and stop condemning the FNA at every turn. Finland had it so much worse than you lot did, and your help was really just a drop in an ocean. A welcome drop, sure, but still...
And think about the volunteers that came from Sweden with those ships in 1984, would you. The bigger part of them were Finns. Not Swedes but Finns that had gone west to do the dirty and dangerous jobs you didn't want to do yourself anymore. I remember that, many people from my village had gone to Sweden, and at one time I considered that myself. After the war, of course, it would have been pretty impossible, too, what with the restrictions you put up.
I was in the Navy during the war. During the winter the ships could not be used, and so my unit was assigned to a coastal fort near Rauma. No real action here in the west, so we did odd jobs, put up sandbagged positions, had various drills, and later, after the Exchange, would be used as muscle to help in evacuations of the Pori and Turku areas, and then in keeping up order– it was pretty chaotic, let me tell you. Nobody knew who was in charge, there was radioactive fallout everywhere and the people were hysterical, injured and lost. By the time the Swedish ships started arriving we had a lot of that sorted out around here, all by ourselves thank you very much. We had survived the winter on our own.
But I can't say the Swedish aid didn't help. Where I was it at the very least improved the morale of the people, knowing that you were not alone anymore. In May I remember there was this project started on the countryside around Rauma to go through the villages to see if the farms were ready to start the agricultural work of the spring – growing as much food as possible was seen as a dire necessity by those in charge. It stands to reason, too. Food was well running out in places already. And so many conscripted military units were made into agricultural task forces, to be sent to help where it was badly needed.
Luck of the draw, I managed to avoid much of the heavier farm work myself. Me and a couple of other guys from the unit were given a more cushy task – visiting farms and doing reconnaissance, like. Somebody had to have a look-see which farms were occupied and where the people had left, or where there were more people than there should have been. I think Petty Officer [REDACTED] had a father in a high place and that helped to get us selected. So it was him, me and this third guy called [REDACTED] driving around the countryside in a car, with a map and a notepad. The third guy was a musician from Pori, he had been something of a celebrity just before the war – he had been in the telly and everything, the girls were crazy about him - and I remember well how the Petty Officer used to rib him about it all the time, asking him about his makeup and all his girlfriends, and so on. The two almost came to blows a few times, and the Volunteer had to break it up.
[The Volunteer?]
Right, he was this big, muscular guy with a black beard, reminded me of Juha Mieto, actually. Though he spoke in this Savonian dialect, see, not in Ostrobothnian...
[Subject pauses for a moment.]
Now, I ain't telling this righ, am I? The Volunteer was of course one of the Swedes, or well, a Finn, like I told ya. He had volunteered to come along to get an idea of how things were in the countryside – I understood his brother was a farmer somewhere East and he didn't know what had happened to him, so...
[It seems like the subject remembers something.]
Say, there is one thing I should tell you about. It was the strangest thing... We were somewhere near Pyhäjärvi, you see, east of here, and there were a couple of farms we had to check out. The first one was all right, and the farmer had a pretty daughter, too, I think. I remember her looking goggle-eyed at [REDACTED]. The other... When we arrived at the farmhouse it was all quiet, like. Seemed rundown. So we knocked on the door. No answer. Tried it and it was unlocked. The Petty Officer had a pistol, we too had been issued with old rifles, and we entered the house carefully. There had been looters here, even if was technically within Säkylä's domain [2], so it didn't hurt to be careful.
The house seemed empty. Someone had been in there, though, and pretty recently, too. We fanned out to search the house. I went to the kitchen, and lo and behold, there was a small dog sleeping next to the fireplace. A mangy little thing, but certainly alive. It perked up as I entered and started yapping at me. As I was going to shout to the guys not to worry, I heard the gunshot. And then another.
[What had happened?]
The Petty Officer had found a man sleeping on the floor in the master bedroom. A dirty, bearded man dressed in clothes that had seen better days. The man had spoken in his dream, in a foreign language that sounded Russian, like. When he tried to wake him up, speaking to him calmly – he said – the man had suddenly pulled out a pistol and shot at him. He shot back with his own.
It was some serious marksmanship and no mistake. At a distance of, what, three meters, the Russian – that's what he was, the sorry wreck of a man – had managed to hit the Petty Officer just barely, with a grazing shot on his shoulder. He suffered only a minor wound. And surprised, the Petty Officer missed the Russian altogether, shooting up a bedside lamp instead. It was most certainly dead, in pieces on the floor when I arrived.
The Volunteer then stepped in and calmed things down – bloody courageous of him, with the two damned gunslingers and all – and weapons were lowered. The Russian passed out again. He seemed very weak. So as I ripped up some sheets and put a quick field dressing on the Petty Officer's wound, the Volunteer picked up the Russian from the floor and carried him to the car – we agreed this was a marvel our superiors would be interested to see, too. I remember how light and small the Russian seemed as the big Savonian picked him up. Like a rag doll he was, his arms and feet limp. The dog followed us to the car so we allowed it to come along with what would have been its master, or so it seemed. The Russian didn't wake up again until three days later in Rauma, when those soldiers from Seinäjoki came for him.
But that, as they say, is another story, and I really need a beer. You care for one, my Swedish friend? I'll tell the rest if you buy me one or several.
[Subject smiles, dumping his cigarette in the ashtray on the table.]
...following the Exchange and the aftermath had passed, and the military authorities could start reconstructing a chain of command, it was found out that the Halli facility in Central Finland was the single permanent Finnish Air Force base that had not been rendered unusable by the nuclear strikes and fallout. As a considerable number of aircraft still remained in the dispersed auxiliary highway bases around the country, the functioning military authorities decided that the Halli base should become the primary site where all fighter and trainer aircraft should be concentrated. While this decision ran against the grain of the pre-war ideology of asset dispersion, after the silence from east of the border had continued for months and no Soviet aircraft was spotted after the Exchange, it was thought that the risk of new enemy attacks against the base was low.
So as soon as contact was re-established with the highway bases, the remaining personnel was ordered to fly all aircraft in airworthy condition to Halli as soon as possible. From thereon, some of the liaison and transport aircraft would be transferred (after maintenance) to the so-called Administrative Airports created in Seinäjoki and Mikkeli for the use of the civilian and military bureaucracy being rebuilt and reorganised.
In reality the Air Force units in the highway bases were slow to execute these orders, as in many places a major part of the support personnel had been ordered to various necessary tasks including support for population control and food confiscation, evacuations and decontamination operations. While by early May most functioning highway bases could send some of their aircraft and pilots to Halli, bringing along the support personnel and various technical assets proved...
Fragment 88.
Logged 02.07.2008
JAG
[A number of machine-typed pages from the FNA archives, apparently written by [REDACTED], a former Finnish Air Force officer.]
After a necessarily light breakfast of oatmeal porridge with a little canned fruit and crisp bread with margarine, most men chose to bring along their mug of instant coffee to the briefing room. Before the war that would have been frowned upon, but now the remaining coffee was treated almost religiously and it seemed appropriate to drink the lean offerings while listening to the sermon of the morning.
After everyone was seated, the Squadron Commander started with the weather report, received from what passed now for a national weather service, followed by some missives from what now in similar fashion passed for an Air Force HQ after Tikkakoski was lost in the Exchange. The men in the room listened silently, sipping the last of their coffee thoughtfully. Nobody but the CO would say anything until it was time for today's schedule.
These men in the room were now the gutted Finnish Air Force's striking fist, so to speak, the recently created and named Readiness Squadron[3], based in the Halli airbase in Kuorevesi. The name of the unit was a fancy way of saying that this was the only unit in the FAF that in late spring of 1984 had any readiness at all for organised air operations with armed aircraft. The unit was basically built around the the staff and organisation of the Flight Test Centre, operating at the base since before the war, a unit limited in size but having the capability to operate and maintain all aircraft in the national inventory. That the FTC worked in co-operation with the nearby Valmet aircraft factory that had put together many of the airplanes the FAF used was another good reason for choosing this location.
If one would have looked around just then and deciphered the unit insignia and patches on the uniforms of the Air Force officers in the room, one would have realised that this was a highly heterogenous collection of FAF pilots and ground personnel. There were men here from almost every pre-war squadron, and they doggedly held on to their old unit symbols – it was only later that an official Readiness Squadron insignia would be adopted as a way of ”moving forward” and ”building esprit de corps”. There were even a couple of pilots from the Lapland Air Wing here, with the Draken patch on their sleeves.[4] The Laplanders had taken the brunt of the Soviet air attack before the Exchange, and only those who had been ordered to fly to the auxiliary bases in the south when the defence of Lapland was abandoned had survived.
For most men here, return to this kind of illusionary ”normalcy” the Halli base enjoyed in a wrecked, starving nation must have been jarring after spending weeks in often quite primitive, wintery conditions in the highway bases. Many men in the room exhibited signs of stress, sickness and exhaustion as it was – and this was the better part of the personnel available, the men that had been deemed suitable for duty by the base doctor in the medical checkups after arrival.
The Readiness Squadron was, I understand, originally seen as a temporary unit, a way to bring order into the post-Exchange chaos as were other similar measures in the Defence Forces. The unit became permanent, however, and since 1984 most of the traditional squadrons have lived on at best as ghost units of sorts, partly because of the prohibitive cost of rebuilding the airbases lost to nuclear weapons, parly because the numbers and condition of remaining military aircraft have made it nigh impossible to restart the old squadrons to operational status.
The Squadron Commander had led the Flight Test Centre before the war, and despite being a military professional with more flight experience than many here combined, he had more the air of an engineer than a combat pilot. Most pilots in the room, however, had flown at least a few combat sorties against the Soviets in the frantic first days of the war. Some of them had even managed to shoot down an attacking aircraft, grimly outnumbered as the defenders were.
Today, I would take part in a reconnaissance mission. So the Squadron Commander told me after he pulled me and [REDACTED], one of the Karelian Air Wing pilots from Rissala away from the rest of the crowd after the official part of the briefing was over. He had told about the mission just before, but being deep in my thoughts I must have missed the part where my name was mentioned. We sat down and went through the specifics. The old Colonel looked at us in a fatherly way and outlined today's operation, with the air of a seasoned instructor. Me and [REDACTED] just listened and nodded, it was all fairly straightforward and simple, as these things went.
In an hour or so, I had donned my pressure suit and helmet and stood by the hangar while the ground crew was making the last preflight check-ups on my plane. I had been flying this silvery-coloured old MiG-21-F-13, registration code MG-32, since just before the war. It had been brought over from the Reconnaissance Squadron for tests a few weeks before the Soviet attack. It still had Recce Squadron's insignia on its tail. Now it was one of the last surviving planes of the type to have recce equipment installed, along with the Vinten cameras. And that was why me and this plane were ordered on this mission.
After the ground crew leader gave me the signal, I made the walk-around checkup of the plane, climbed the external ladder to the cockpit and settled down to begin the necessary start-up procedures. It had taken some time to get used to the video sight where the gyro gunsight usually was, and to the camera controls on the right – the controls on the older models of the MiG-21 are not very simple and logically arranged as it is.
After I had started the engine with the help of the external power source, I tested the primary flight controls and taxied to the runway. After the few final checks and getting a permission from the tower I took off to the skies of Central Finland. [REDACTED] took off right after me in his MiG-21BIS, the newer model with Karelian Air Wing markings.[5]
After falling into formation we headed south.
The MiG-21 is capable of speeds exceeding Mach 2. Or was, at any rate. This time, though, such a speed was not needed, and so we approached the southern coast at the speed of 400 knots IAS. Our orders were to maintain radio silence as long as possible – only after completing our main objectives and on the way back would we be allowed to use our radios in case of an emergency. Because of the camera equipment, my plane was only armed with the 30 mm cannon. The MiG-21BIS flown by [REDACTED] had four infrared-guided air-to-air-missiles in the hardpoints under the wings, but his 20 mm cannon had not yet been reinstalled after maintenance – but as our orders were not to engage the enemy unless coming under attack ourselves, that had been considered acceptable as the plane was otherwise among the very few perfectly operational MiGs available that day.
Our first objective was Hämeenlinna. I flew two passes over the town area, taking pictures with the cameras all along. I decided to slow down for this to around 300 knots IAS – close to the lowest sensible airspeed for the aircraft type – to get as accurate photos as possible. As with other Finnish towns that had suffered a nuclear attack, Hämeenlinna was surrounded by a large swath of felled and burned forest, which showed like a black scar from the air now as most of the snow had melted away. It was as if someone had reintroduced slash-and-burn agriculture on a massive scale. It was soon learned that often the burn area and the area of heaviest fallout did not fully coincide. 30 years later, some of this damage can still be seen from the air.
After Hämeenlinna we headed towards Helsinki for a similar recon run. I hadn't given much thought to the damage in Hämeenlinna proper, being preoccupied with operating the cameras, but the condition of the capital gave me some pause. We flew roughly along the Helsinki – Hämeenlinna highway [6] directly towards the capital. Without knowing exactly where we approached the greater Helsinki area it would have been very hard to recognise this as the town that still was a lively Nordic capital just months before.
The suburbs were a mass of black, burned-out husks of buildings, roughly from a bit north of Ring 3. Around the Helsinki-Vantaa airport the area of heavy damage reached more towards the north – it was not hard to see that the airport had been specifically targeted by a lower-yield weapon.
Inside Ring 1 almost everything was levelled and at places the ground looked strangely smooth, glass-like. It was hard to place the pre-war locations of any familiar buildings or streets in that moon landscape – though there was one thing helping me. Due to some quirk of fate, the stony Kallio Church stood almost intact north of the city centre. Its tower had half-collapsed, but otherwise the structure was easily recognisable, blackened though it was like a ghastly post-nuclear citadel.
As stricken as I was because of what I saw, [REDACTED] must have felt even worse. He was originally from the capital, and I had heard that his parents were in Helsinki during the Exchange. Despite my shock, I managed to take the necessary pictures. During the mission debriefing, these photos were praised as very good, and that helped me to feel at least some satisfaction about the sortie, despite everything else.
As we turned east to follow the coast towards Loviisa, I noticed that the movements of the other plane were somehow angular, a bit erratic. I went closer and asked [REDACTED] with hand signs if he had problems. He signed ”everything OK” and so we continued east, towards the last mission objective. At that moment, I put it all down to a slight problem with the hydraulics – not unusual in those conditions.
The last objective was twofold. Like from Hämeenlinna and Helsinki, we would have to take photos for recon purposes. But here our targets were not dead towns but living people - the Red Army, or its remnants around Hamina. The military leadership had decided that along with determining the positions and numbers of the Soviets a show of force would be organised. The USSR seemed to have no operational fighter aircraft in use near Finland – or if it had, such had not been seen since the Exchange. As in North Karelia along the Eastern border former Red Army soldiers had been abandoning their officers in droves and seeked refuge in Finland [7] where an organised society seemed to exist, so it was thought the Soviets around Hamina could be intimidated into abandoning the weapons and units they still had and then surrendering to the troops of the Finnish Emergency Cabinet.
And so we were tasked to make the Soviets know our existence – we would fly over Hamina, as low as it was safe to make it impossible to not to see the air power the Finns still had. It was also thought that if the Soviets still had functional radars and AA, flying in low, fast and unexpected would help us avoid trouble. A message would also be sent to the Finnish civilians in the area that there was an organised Finnish centre of power, one that had the ability to take on the area's erstwhile masters if need be.
We approached Hamina so low it was easy to see houses and even people on the ground – some way west of the town area we passed what looked like Finnish positions, with a T-55 flying a Finnish state flag. The soldiers seemed surprised seeing us. But they were not as surprised as the people in Hamina, what seemed like civilians coming out from the buildings and uniformed Soviet soldiers standing in small knots on the streets. I could even see some of them pointing at us as we roared past over the octagon-shaped centre of the old garrison town.
On the second pass it happened. Suddenly [REDACTED] broke formation and his plane started losing altitude fast. In seconds, it crashed directly into a largish warehouse with several Soviet military vehicles in front. An explosion followed.
During the mission debriefing I was asked several times if [REDACTED] gave any indication of any problems, or perhaps that he was doing this deliberately. For the life of me I couldn't remember him trying to communicate anything to me after the ”OK” sign after Helsinki. That is what I told my superiors. I had no chance to try and stop what happened. I could not help my comrade who died there in Hamina on that clear day in late May.
To this day I can't say if it really was a mechanical malfunction as the official report and the unit's history says it was, or whether my comrade chose to end his life then and there. Be it as it may, there is one thing I do know: he didn't even try to use his ejection seat.
Notes:
[1] Olof Palme (1927-1996) was the Prime Minister of Sweden during the Exchange and the Reconstruction. Along with the Regent, Prince Bertil, he is highly regarded in Sweden for his leadership during the years of crisis. Palme's funeral in Gothenburg in 1996 was a huge national event of mourning.
[2] The Pori Brigade garrison is in Säkylä on the east side of Pyhäjärvi. After the local provincial government was incapacitated, the training unit's leadership took it upon themselves to keep the peace in the surrounding areas. This is also where a lot of troops taking part in the Reclamation of South-West Finland were supplied from and received their orders from.
[3] Valmiuslentolaivue, or VaLLv. The unit's insignia is a skeletal fist holding a lightning bolt. The unit's wartime veterans are sometimes referred to as "the Undead".
[4] The Lapland Air Wing operated the Saab 35 Draken as its primary fighter aircraft since 1976.
[5] The Soviet MiG-21BIS (NATO designation Fishbed-L/N) was used by the Karelian Air Wing since 1980. The plans to buy more of these planes from the USSR in 1983-84 were cancelled because of the war.
[6] This is pre-war Highway 3 that continued north-west towards Tampere, Seinäjoki and Vaasa. Parts of the highway remain unusable to this day.
[7] These Soviet POWs/refugees were taken to the hastily built Hammaslahti internment camp south of Joensuu. After the camps on the Line, this internment camp is said to have some of the worst mortality rates in 1984-85, often said to be due to a combination of small food rations, heavy compulsory work and a shortage of qualified medical staff.
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Oh, thank God!!!!!1!!!yks!!!! I don't know how I could have continued if he hadn't survived. Of course that's a moot point since I'm a handful of dust in the ruins of Helsinki, but still. *waves a pink chiffon scarf*
Oh, thank God!!!!!1!!!yks!!!! I don't know how I could have continued if he hadn't survived. Of course that's a moot point since I'm a handful of dust in the ruins of Helsinki, but still. *waves a pink chiffon scarf*
I am happy you approve.
(Let's see how many other early 80s and later Finnish celebrities I still manage to cram into the remaining updates, more or less...um, plausibly.
)Nice continuity-heavy chapter.
My guess is that the escort pilot was so depressed at the sight of his former hometown that he wanted to take revenge on the Soviets in Hamina ASAP. The weird "dizzy flying" moments after they left Helsinki are pretty indicative of him feeling uneasy or even angry. Kind of odd that he didn't try to force-fire his 4 air-to-air missiles into the Soviet weapon depos before he hit them. Maybe he would have done more damage that way.
In any case, I'm interested in what repercussions this unsuspected attack on rump Soviet military capability will have. And I wonder what will happen to Fedya once the local Finnish garrison and authorities interogate him...
My guess is that the escort pilot was so depressed at the sight of his former hometown that he wanted to take revenge on the Soviets in Hamina ASAP. The weird "dizzy flying" moments after they left Helsinki are pretty indicative of him feeling uneasy or even angry. Kind of odd that he didn't try to force-fire his 4 air-to-air missiles into the Soviet weapon depos before he hit them. Maybe he would have done more damage that way.
In any case, I'm interested in what repercussions this unsuspected attack on rump Soviet military capability will have. And I wonder what will happen to Fedya once the local Finnish garrison and authorities interogate him...
Nice continuity-heavy chapter.
My guess is that the escort pilot was so depressed at the sight of his former hometown that he wanted to take revenge on the Soviets in Hamina ASAP. The weird "dizzy flying" moments after they left Helsinki are pretty indicative of him feeling uneasy or even angry. Kind of odd that he didn't try to force-fire his 4 air-to-air missiles into the Soviet weapon depos before he hit them. Maybe he would have done more damage that way.
True about the missiles. I liked to keep it as ambiguous as possible as to if the pilot did this on purpose or whether there really was a mechanical failure that caused him to crash - using the missiles when that was explicitly against orders would wreck that ambiguity.
(BTW, the plane in the picture, flown by the narrator in the story, was the first aircraft to breach Mach 2 in the Finnish airspace, in May 1963, flown by Captain Kauko Juvonen. The plane is today held by the Aviation Museum of Central Finland.)
These issues will definitely be addressed in future installments.
Petike said:
A small handful, a lot less than MiGs or Hawks.
The coastal fort near Rauma is Kuuskajaskari isn't it? My dad was there with the Coastal Artillery in the 80s after graduating from Cadet School.
Fedja is safe then, for now.
I'm still waiting the cat to appear to the scene, though
That is a fair thing to expect, I can't promise anything in that field, though.
Maailmanmatkaaja said:
That's right. What happened ITTL is that having, for the while, a number of "excess" conscripts mobilised, the Navy sent out work details to the various fortified islands under the purview of the Turku Coastal Regiment to help with putting them on a war footing in the weeks before the Soviet invasion. During and after the Exchange many Navy sailors were thus stranded - and this saved the guys in this update because if they were anywhere around Turku or the Pansio naval base, say, when the big red button was pushed, they would very likely be dead.
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Yay! *purrs like a cat* (no relation to uncle Fedya)I am happy you approve.
(Let's see how many other early 80s and later Finnish celebrities I still manage to cram into the remaining updates, more or less...um, plausibly.