Lapland War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lapland War began not with a declaration but with a surrender demand issued at around 08:00 on the 28th of September 1944, when Finnish advance units halted a small German rearguard contingent some 20 kilometres southwest of Pudasjärvi. For three years, these two forces had fought side by side against the Soviet Union. Now, with a single order, they became enemies. What made this conflict so strange was that neither side truly wanted to fight the other. The Germans had already been planning their exit for over a year. The Finns had just signed an armistice and were under Soviet pressure to make the expulsion real. And looming over both was the question of what would happen to Finnish Lapland, a vast and sparsely populated northern region, once the Wehrmacht finally left. The answers to that question would take until 1957 to fully resolve.

• 2. A Year of Planning

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  As early as mid-1943, the German high command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, began preparing for the possibility that Finland might negotiate a separate peace with the Soviet Union. The objective was to shield the nickel mines near Petsamo, and the plan required a northward withdrawal into Norway. Through the winter of 1943 to 1944, German forces improved the roads between northern Norway and northern Finland using prisoner-of-war labour. Casualties among those prisoners were high; many had been captured in southern Europe and were still wearing summer uniforms when put to work in the Arctic. On the 9th of April 1944, the withdrawal plan was formally designated Operation Birke, meaning birch. Fortifications against a possible attack from the south began going up in June 1944. The accidental death of Generaloberst Eduard Dietl on the 23rd of June 1944 brought a new commander to the 20th Mountain Army: Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic. Under his leadership, the army would eventually move over 200,000 men, 32,000 horses and mules, and between 17,500 and 26,000 motorised vehicles across the Arctic in winter.

• 3. The Letter and the Armistice

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  Before President Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim accepted the Soviet demands, he wrote a personal letter directly to Adolf Hitler. He told Hitler that German soldiers in Finland had entered Finnish history as a unique example of a correct and cordial relationship. He made clear, however, that he could not and would not turn arms against Germans. The Moscow Armistice, signed on the 19th of September 1944, changed everything. It required Finland to break diplomatic ties with Germany and expel or disarm any German soldiers remaining on Finnish soil. Germans who had not left by the 15th of September deadline were to be handed over to the Soviet Union. The ceasefire also demanded that the majority of the Finnish Defence Forces be demobilised even as they were expected to push the Wehrmacht out. The Finns estimated the evacuation alone would take three months. The 20th Mountain Army had 180,000 tonnes of rations, ammunition, and fuel to move. The timeline was impossibly tight and the Soviets were watching.

• 4. Naval Confrontation in the Gulf

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  On the 15th of September 1944, the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, attempted to seize the island of Suursaari in the Gulf of Finland in Operation Tanne Ost. Soviet aircraft flew in to support the Finnish defenders and the landing failed. The same day, a Finnish coastal artillery fort at Utö island moved to intern German net-laying ships passing into the Baltic Sea. On the 16th of September, a German naval detachment that included a cruiser escorted by five destroyers arrived at Utö. The cruiser stayed out of range of the Finnish 152 mm guns and threatened to open fire. To avoid bloodshed, the Finns let the net-layers pass. Finland responded by immediately removing its ships from the joint evacuation arrangement. The last German convoy departed from Kemi in northern Finland on the 21st of September 1944, escorted by submarines and, south of Åland, by German cruisers. Both sides were navigating an uneasy middle ground between cooperation and open conflict, and the fragile secret agreement that had kept the evacuation orderly was about to collapse.

• 5. The Battle of Tornio

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  On the 30th of September 1944, three Finnish transport ships, the SS Norma, the SS Fritz S, and the SS Hesperus, left Oulu for Tornio without air or naval cover. They arrived on the 1st of October and unloaded their troops without interference. The original plan called for the main assault at Kemi, but a stronger-than-expected German garrison there, already alerted by local fighting, pushed the Finns to redirect toward Röyttä, the outer port of Tornio. Infantry Regiment 11 of the 3rd Division landed alongside a Civil Guard uprising already under way inside the town. The Finnish attack soon stalled. Looted alcohol from German supply depots contributed to the disorganisation. Generaloberst Rendulic ordered 262 Finnish civilian hostages taken in an attempt to trade them for captured soldiers. The Finns refused. The hostages were released on the 12th of October. A total of around 12,500 Finnish soldiers came ashore across six landing waves. German aircraft, including Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors using Henschel Hs 293 glide bombs, attacked the shipping without success. The fourth wave was less fortunate: on the 4th of October, Stuka dive bombers sank the SS Bore IX and the SS Maininki at the pier. The Germans withdrew from Tornio on the 8th of October.

• 6. Rovaniemi Burns

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  Rovaniemi sat at a critical road junction in Lapland, and the battle for it illustrated how the war unfolded along its three main roads. On the 7th of October, the Finnish Jaeger Brigade forced the German Mountain Regiment 218 into a delaying action at Ylimaa, about 65 kilometres south of Rovaniemi; the Germans slipped away on the 9th of October after inflicting substantial losses. On the 13th of October at Kivitaipale, 20 kilometres south of Rovaniemi, Mountain Regiment 218 returned to rescue one of its own battalions that the Finns had managed to surround. In Rovaniemi itself, the Germans initially targeted governmental buildings, but fire spread into the predominantly wooden town. A train carrying ammunition caught fire at the railroad station on the 14th of October, triggering an explosion that accelerated the destruction. The first Finnish units reached the vicinity of Rovaniemi that same day. The Germans repelled Finnish attempts to capture the last intact bridge over the Kemi River and left the mostly scorched town to the Finns on the 16th of October 1944. Operation Nordlicht, approved by Hitler on the 4th of October and codenamed on the 6th, had superseded the more gradual Operation Birke: the new plan called for a rapid, organised withdrawal directly behind Lyngen Fjord in Norway under active pressure from Finnish forces.

• 7. Scorched Earth and the Aftermath

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  By November 1944, the war had effectively ended. The Wehrmacht withdrew from Karigasniemi in north-eastern Lapland on the 25th of November 1944. The German 7th Mountain Division held positions along the Lätäseno River, 100 kilometres from Norway, until the 10th of January 1945. The last German soldiers left Finland on the 27th of April 1945. A Finnish battle patrol marked the occasion by raising the flag on the three-country cairn where the borders of Norway, Sweden, and Finland meet. What they left behind was staggering. Estimates of German demolitions in Lapland alone included 14,900 buildings, representing 40 to 46 percent of Lapland's property, 470 kilometres of railway, 9,500 kilometres of road, 675 bridges, and 3,700 kilometres of telephone and telegram lines. American historian Earl F. Ziemke later wrote that the Arctic winter evacuation of over 200,000 men had no parallel. Finnish casualties numbered 774 killed, 262 missing, and around 2,904 wounded. Germany suffered around 1,000 deaths, 2,000 wounded, and 1,300 soldiers taken prisoner and handed to the Soviet Union. Demining teams worked in Lapland for decades: by 1973, they had recovered more than 800,000 cartridges, 70,000 mines, and 400,000 other explosive devices, totalling over 1,142,000 units. The railway network did not become fully functional again until 1957.