Twenty-Nine: Finnish Civil War, fourth and final part
Finnish Civil War, part four and end:
Kirkkonummi was an easy victory for the Vaasa army – but it would prove to be a misleading one. What the Vaasa army encountered – and quickly dispersed – at Kirkkonummi was but more of an armed reconnaissance troop. Its retreating members reported about the location, size and weaponry of the attackers to the units which manned the massive fortifications of the Krepost Sveaborg.
The size of the Vaasa army exceeded the worst expectations of Helsinki’s defenders. Apparently, this was the last, desperate, all-or-nothing attack aiming at the heart of socialist Finland. Immediately, a sharp dispute broke out among the leadership of the Järjestyskunta stationed in and around Helsinki: while Oskar Rantala and Aksel Aarre insisted on mobilizing yet more volunteers from the country’s main city to stem the tide of such a massive Vaasa attack, Adolf Aminoff and other experienced but more conservative high-ranking officers taken over from the old Imperial Russian Army opposed this because they feared that such ad hoc militia could only be recruited in Helsinki from among those who had until very recently been Red Revolutionary fighters. As a consequence, reinforcements were being demanded from other parts of the Kuopio territory, but no immediate recruitment was ordered in Helsinki itself.
This would quickly turn out to be a mistake. The fortifications were strong and well-endowed with all sorts of artillery pieces, and by flexibly shifting and rotating militia units from MG nest to MG nest depending on where the onslaught was most intense, the defenders of Helsinki were able to inflict staggering losses on the Vaasa troops – so many dead and wounded indeed that, as night fell after the second day of the offensive, Jääkäri officers reported about a growing mutinous mood among their rank and file and openly questioned the chances of a breakthrough.
They were convinced to continue when the last secret weapon which the Germans had bestowed upon them reached the front section around Leppävaara. On the third day of the Vaasa assault on the Krepost Sveaborg, the attack was initiated with a bombardment of poison gas shells which immediately killed hundreds of defenders and incapacitated hundreds more - none of them had anticipated this, so nobody had worn masks of any kind. The attackers seized the opportunity and broke through the defenders front, with unit after unit streaming through the breeched defenses even when they came under heavy fire again by fresh defending militia drawn from other sections of the fortification line. Thousands upon thousands of Vaasa troops poured in through the gap, and now only a last line of fortifications, those built already in 1914 in the vicinity of Huopalahti, stood between them and the country’s largest city.
In this situation, Aksel Aarre decided to ignore all orders and decisions and began immediately to organize the distribution of arms to (indeed mostly formerly Red Revolutionary) volunteer units who, in many places, had already assembled at their own initiative. It was only their courageous, somewhat disorganized but desperately motivated counter-attack which ultimately prevented the attacking Vaasa army from breaking through the last line of defenses, too.
Now it was the attackers who were bottled up between the two defensive perimeters, with no escape in sight. They took refuge in civilian buildings across Helsinki’s outskirts, dug in and prepared for a street fight.
But this last stand did not happen. Armas Kohonen, commander of the Vöyri Battalion, initiated negotiations with Helsinki’s defenders – a very controversial decision taken against the will of a number of die-hard officers who preferred to “die standing rather than live on their knees” – and so, on July 20th, 1918, over 15,000 surviving Vaasa troops (almost as many men had already been lost in the attack so far, with the usual ratio of killed vs. wounded and the wounded being captured already) surrendered themselves at once to the Kuopio Senate’s Järjestyskunta. Helsinki’s defenders had suffered over 4,000 dead and twice as many wounded men – a high toll which is probably also attributable to the poor training which many defenders had enjoyed, and the maximum effect of the poison gas due to the absence of protective masks. But they had stood firmly, in spite of internal divisions and dangerous hesitations.
In Vaasa, the message of this failure was clear. Their army had lost more than half of their men – and the chaotic situation in Petrograd and the imminent collapse of German control over Ingria could only mean that, in the very near future, both reinforcements and supplies sent by Moscow would roll without impediment towards the Kuopio territory again. On July 24th, 1918, Pehr Evind Svinhufvud shot himself in the head and was found dead by his personal attendant. Over the course of the next week, several thousand people fled Finland across the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden, among them the rest of Svinhufvud’s cabinet and some members of the Vaasa counter-Eduskunta. They were not exactly welcome in Sweden, where their arrival and the asylum granted to them proved a controversial issue between the partners supporting Prime Minister Nils Edén’s coalition government, but their fear of socialist retribution was great.
As the fate of those bourgeois politicians who had remained in Finland would prove, these fears were generally unfounded. Paasivuori and his Minister for Interior Affairs, Samuli Häkkinen, sought at least not to create new obstacles for the slow and painful process of reconciliation and healing which would begin in Finland’s villages and neighborhoods, and while the terrorists of Vihan Veljet and similar organizations, which continued to rock Finland throughout the next few years, too, were pursued with the full force of the law and its organs of public order, most members of the Vaasa Jääkäri and the Suojeluskunta were pardoned and the prisoners captured during the hostilities were released before 1918 ended.
As far as Finland’s relations with the rest of the UoE were concerned, Paasivuori took a decidedly more self-confident stance than Tokoi. The Concordance, he insisted in a lengthy communication with Kamkov, would have to be modified. Finland would not demobilize its Järjestyskunta, whose size stood at almost 80,000 by the end of July 1918, and instead transform it into a Territorial Defensive Force like the one Ukraine had. The country’s military ports would be controlled by a joint organization composed of Finnish Defense and the UoE’s Baltic fleet. Kamkov harbored no desire to keep Finland under the Russian thumb as long as it did not join a hostile camp and actually felt that the entire chain of events following the fall of Petrograd had been most unfortunate consequences of the German onslaught and the adventurousness of Trotsky, a man he increasingly saw as the greatest danger for a stable development of the UoE but whose popularity had skyrocketed after leftist SD newspapers credited him with the “liberation of Petrograd”, and so the renegotiations went rather smoothly. In the CA, which still operated as a kind of interim parliament until regular elections would be held, the revision of the Concordance was controversial primarily for procedural and technical reasons and not so much for its content, but it ultimately passed with a solid majority.
And as the long, dark, and cold nights of the winter of 1918/19 descended upon Finland, accompanied by the second and more deadly wave of the influenza which struck especially the heavily populated areas in the South, a badly-shaken but finally politically restabilised Finnish Federative Republic participated in the Union-wide Presidential elections and elected a new Eduskunta, too, which would have to lead the traumatized country into a common future. The landscape of its political parties had been deeply transformed by the Civil War. But more on that in a later update.
Kirkkonummi was an easy victory for the Vaasa army – but it would prove to be a misleading one. What the Vaasa army encountered – and quickly dispersed – at Kirkkonummi was but more of an armed reconnaissance troop. Its retreating members reported about the location, size and weaponry of the attackers to the units which manned the massive fortifications of the Krepost Sveaborg.
The size of the Vaasa army exceeded the worst expectations of Helsinki’s defenders. Apparently, this was the last, desperate, all-or-nothing attack aiming at the heart of socialist Finland. Immediately, a sharp dispute broke out among the leadership of the Järjestyskunta stationed in and around Helsinki: while Oskar Rantala and Aksel Aarre insisted on mobilizing yet more volunteers from the country’s main city to stem the tide of such a massive Vaasa attack, Adolf Aminoff and other experienced but more conservative high-ranking officers taken over from the old Imperial Russian Army opposed this because they feared that such ad hoc militia could only be recruited in Helsinki from among those who had until very recently been Red Revolutionary fighters. As a consequence, reinforcements were being demanded from other parts of the Kuopio territory, but no immediate recruitment was ordered in Helsinki itself.
This would quickly turn out to be a mistake. The fortifications were strong and well-endowed with all sorts of artillery pieces, and by flexibly shifting and rotating militia units from MG nest to MG nest depending on where the onslaught was most intense, the defenders of Helsinki were able to inflict staggering losses on the Vaasa troops – so many dead and wounded indeed that, as night fell after the second day of the offensive, Jääkäri officers reported about a growing mutinous mood among their rank and file and openly questioned the chances of a breakthrough.
They were convinced to continue when the last secret weapon which the Germans had bestowed upon them reached the front section around Leppävaara. On the third day of the Vaasa assault on the Krepost Sveaborg, the attack was initiated with a bombardment of poison gas shells which immediately killed hundreds of defenders and incapacitated hundreds more - none of them had anticipated this, so nobody had worn masks of any kind. The attackers seized the opportunity and broke through the defenders front, with unit after unit streaming through the breeched defenses even when they came under heavy fire again by fresh defending militia drawn from other sections of the fortification line. Thousands upon thousands of Vaasa troops poured in through the gap, and now only a last line of fortifications, those built already in 1914 in the vicinity of Huopalahti, stood between them and the country’s largest city.
In this situation, Aksel Aarre decided to ignore all orders and decisions and began immediately to organize the distribution of arms to (indeed mostly formerly Red Revolutionary) volunteer units who, in many places, had already assembled at their own initiative. It was only their courageous, somewhat disorganized but desperately motivated counter-attack which ultimately prevented the attacking Vaasa army from breaking through the last line of defenses, too.
Now it was the attackers who were bottled up between the two defensive perimeters, with no escape in sight. They took refuge in civilian buildings across Helsinki’s outskirts, dug in and prepared for a street fight.
But this last stand did not happen. Armas Kohonen, commander of the Vöyri Battalion, initiated negotiations with Helsinki’s defenders – a very controversial decision taken against the will of a number of die-hard officers who preferred to “die standing rather than live on their knees” – and so, on July 20th, 1918, over 15,000 surviving Vaasa troops (almost as many men had already been lost in the attack so far, with the usual ratio of killed vs. wounded and the wounded being captured already) surrendered themselves at once to the Kuopio Senate’s Järjestyskunta. Helsinki’s defenders had suffered over 4,000 dead and twice as many wounded men – a high toll which is probably also attributable to the poor training which many defenders had enjoyed, and the maximum effect of the poison gas due to the absence of protective masks. But they had stood firmly, in spite of internal divisions and dangerous hesitations.
In Vaasa, the message of this failure was clear. Their army had lost more than half of their men – and the chaotic situation in Petrograd and the imminent collapse of German control over Ingria could only mean that, in the very near future, both reinforcements and supplies sent by Moscow would roll without impediment towards the Kuopio territory again. On July 24th, 1918, Pehr Evind Svinhufvud shot himself in the head and was found dead by his personal attendant. Over the course of the next week, several thousand people fled Finland across the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden, among them the rest of Svinhufvud’s cabinet and some members of the Vaasa counter-Eduskunta. They were not exactly welcome in Sweden, where their arrival and the asylum granted to them proved a controversial issue between the partners supporting Prime Minister Nils Edén’s coalition government, but their fear of socialist retribution was great.
As the fate of those bourgeois politicians who had remained in Finland would prove, these fears were generally unfounded. Paasivuori and his Minister for Interior Affairs, Samuli Häkkinen, sought at least not to create new obstacles for the slow and painful process of reconciliation and healing which would begin in Finland’s villages and neighborhoods, and while the terrorists of Vihan Veljet and similar organizations, which continued to rock Finland throughout the next few years, too, were pursued with the full force of the law and its organs of public order, most members of the Vaasa Jääkäri and the Suojeluskunta were pardoned and the prisoners captured during the hostilities were released before 1918 ended.
As far as Finland’s relations with the rest of the UoE were concerned, Paasivuori took a decidedly more self-confident stance than Tokoi. The Concordance, he insisted in a lengthy communication with Kamkov, would have to be modified. Finland would not demobilize its Järjestyskunta, whose size stood at almost 80,000 by the end of July 1918, and instead transform it into a Territorial Defensive Force like the one Ukraine had. The country’s military ports would be controlled by a joint organization composed of Finnish Defense and the UoE’s Baltic fleet. Kamkov harbored no desire to keep Finland under the Russian thumb as long as it did not join a hostile camp and actually felt that the entire chain of events following the fall of Petrograd had been most unfortunate consequences of the German onslaught and the adventurousness of Trotsky, a man he increasingly saw as the greatest danger for a stable development of the UoE but whose popularity had skyrocketed after leftist SD newspapers credited him with the “liberation of Petrograd”, and so the renegotiations went rather smoothly. In the CA, which still operated as a kind of interim parliament until regular elections would be held, the revision of the Concordance was controversial primarily for procedural and technical reasons and not so much for its content, but it ultimately passed with a solid majority.
And as the long, dark, and cold nights of the winter of 1918/19 descended upon Finland, accompanied by the second and more deadly wave of the influenza which struck especially the heavily populated areas in the South, a badly-shaken but finally politically restabilised Finnish Federative Republic participated in the Union-wide Presidential elections and elected a new Eduskunta, too, which would have to lead the traumatized country into a common future. The landscape of its political parties had been deeply transformed by the Civil War. But more on that in a later update.
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