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The Lapland War (Finnish: Lapin sota) was fought between Finland and Nazi Germany from September 1944 to April 1945 in Finland's northernmost Lapland Province. While the Finns saw this as a separate conflict much like the Continuation War, German forces considered their actions to be part of the Second World War. A peculiarity of the war was that the Finnish army was forced to demobilise their forces while at the same time fighting to force the German army to leave Finland. German forces retreated to Norway, and Finland managed to uphold its obligations under the Moscow Armistice, although it remained formally at war with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, one government in exile in London, and the British Dominions until the formal conclusion of the Continuation War was ratified by the 1947 Paris peace treaty.
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Germany and Finland had been at war with the Soviet Union since June 1941, co-operating closely in the Continuation War. As early as the summer of 1943, the German High Command began making plans for the eventuality that Finland might make a separate peace agreement with the Soviet Union. The Germans planned to withdraw their forces northward in order to shield the nickel mines near Petsamo.
During the winter of 1943–1944, the Germans improved the roads from northern Norway to northern Finland by extensive use of prisoner of war (POW) labour. Casualties among these POWs were high, in part because many of them had been captured in southern Europe and were still in summer uniform. In addition, the Germans surveyed defensive positions and accumulated stores in the region. Thus, when Finland signed the Moscow Armistice with the Soviet Union in September 1944, the Germans were prepared.
While German ground troops were reorganised for withdrawal to the north, the German navy mined the seaward approaches to Finland and attempted to seize the island of Gogland in Operation Tanne Ost. Sailors on Finnish ships in German-held ports, including Norway, were interned, and German submarines sank several Finnish civilian vessels.
The Soviets demanded that all German troops be expelled from Finland. The Finns were thus placed in a situation of having to fight to free their lands of German forces. The Finns' task was complicated by the Soviet demand that the major part of Finnish armed forces be demobilized at the same time, even while conducting a military campaign against the Germans. General Hjalmar Siilasvuo, the victor of Suomussalmi, led the Finns against the Germans, who were commanded by General Lothar Rendulic.
During the first few weeks the withdrawal of German and advance of Finnish troops was organised jointly by the headquarters of both armies, a fact that was kept secret from the Soviets. The Germans fell back according to a common timetable, and the Finns attacked and fired at the empty trenches. After two weeks the Soviets realised the deception, and demanded the Finns conduct immediate heavy action against the Germans.
Fighting intensified when the Finns launched a risky invasion from the sea on 1 October 1944 near Tornio, on the border with Sweden. Heavy combat lasted for a week, and the Germans were forced to withdraw.
At the onset of the Tornio invasion, Finnish troops took about 100 Germans as prisoners of war. In an effort to free them, Rendulic ordered Finnish civilians to be taken as hostages. Starting on 1 October 1944, the Germans imprisoned 132 people in the town of Kemi and 130 in Rovaniemi, 24 of them women. General Rendulic sent Major General Mathias Kräutler to Finnish headquarters in Tornio to deliver a letter to Lieutenant Colonel Wolf Halsti. He demanded that the Germans POWs be freed, or the Finnish hostages would be shot and the Kemi pulp mill burned down.
Halsti conveyed this message to Lieutenant General Hjalmar Siilasvuo, commander of the Finnish III Army, who refused all bargains or deals with the Germans. Halsti delivered this reply, adding that should anything happen to the civilian hostages or to the mill, he would personally order all the German POWs held by his troops to be shot, together with all German staff and patients of the German military hospital in Tornio.
With this threat of reprisals against German POWs and wounded patients, the Germans dropped their threats, and released the Finnish hostages unharmed on 11 October, near Rovaniemi. During the intervening ten days, the situation was carefully followed in the Finnish press, helping to turn the general attitude of the Finns against their former German allies. A popular anti-German attitude intensified when Rendulic ordered scorched-earth tactics, including the burning of many villages and the destruction of much of Lapland's civilian infrastructure.
As the Germans withdrew, movement was mostly limited to the immediate vicinity of Lapland's three main roads, which constricted military activities considerably. In general the actions followed a pattern in which advancing Finnish units would encounter German rearguards and attempt flanking them on foot, the destroyed road network preventing them from bringing up artillery or other heavy weapons. As Finnish riflemen slowly picked their way through the dense woods and marshland, the motorized German units would simply drive away and take up positions further down the road.[3]
Finnish forces advancing from Kemi towards Rovaniemi did not see any real action, as Finnish troops on foot were not able to keep up with withdrawing motorized German units; however, on the road leading from Ranua towards Rovaniemi there were several small battles, first at Ylimaa, then Kivitaival, then Rovaniemi. North of Rovaniemi the Finns encountered heavily fortified German Schutzwall positions at Tankavaara. On the road running along the Torne and Muonio rivers, the German withdrawal went so smoothly that there was no fighting until the Finns reached the village of Muonio.
At Ylimaa the Finns captured documents detailing German positions, forcing them to fight a delaying action off their pre-set timetable; however, as the forces were roughly even numerically, the Finnish lack of heavy weapons, and exhaustion from long marches, prevented them from trapping the defending German regiment before it received permission to withdraw.[4] At Kivitaival the tables were turned and only a fortuitous German withdrawal saved a Finnish regiment from being mauled. The German withdrawal allowed the Finns to surround one of the delaying battalions, but a full German regiment arrived and managed to rescue the stranded battalion.[5]
Finnish demobilization and difficult supply routes began to take their toll, and at Tankavaara barely 4 Finnish battalions attempted, unsuccessfully, to dislodge a German division entrenched in prepared fortifications. [6]At Muonio the Germans again had numerical and material superiority which prevented the Finns from gaining the upper hand, despite initially fairly successful flanking operations.[7]
Siilasvuo pursued the Germans, who consistently fought back so as to cover their retreat towards Norway. Motorized German troops were left behind to secure the main forces, defending their positions with heavy firepower. When the Finns arrived, they tried to bypass German posts with time-consuming and back-breaking marches through marshland and forests. Knowing this, the Germans quickly pulled out, destroying bridges and moving to the next defensive post that they had planned and equipped beforehand.
Most of the civilian population of Lapland, totaling 168,000 persons, was evacuated to Sweden and Southern Finland, with the exception of the inhabitants of Tornio area. The civilian evacuation had been carried out as a cooperative effort of German military and Finnish authorities prior to the start of the hostilities.[8] Hundreds of Finnish women who had been engaged to German soldiers or working for the German military left with the German troops, meeting diverse fates.[9]
In their retreat the German forces under General Lothar Rendulic devastated large areas of northern Finland with scorched earth tactics. As a result, some 40–47% of the dwellings in the area were destroyed, and the provincial capital of Rovaniemi was burned to the ground, as were the villages of Savukoski and Enontekiö. Two-thirds of the buildings in the main villages of Sodankylä, Muonio, Kolari, Salla and Pello were demolished, 675 bridges were blown up, all main roads were mined, and 3,700 km of telephone lines were destroyed.
In addition to the property losses, estimated as equivalent to about US $300 million in 1945 dollars (US$ 3.66 billion in 2012), about 100,000 inhabitants became refugees, a situation that added to the problems of postwar reconstruction. After the war the Allies convicted Rendulic of war crimes, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, although charges concerning the devastation of Lapland were dropped. He was released after six years.
The last German troops were expelled in April 1945. By that time, as a result of the Soviet demand for the demobilisation of the Finnish army, only 600 Finnish troops, mostly fresh recruits, were left facing them. Because of this, the latter half of the Lapland War is known in Finland as the Children's Crusade.
The military casualties of the conflict were relatively limited: 774 killed in action (KIA), 262 missing in action and about 3,000 wounded in action (WIA) for the Finnish troops, and 1,200 KIA and about 2,000 WIA for the Germans. 1,300 German soldiers became prisoners of war, and were handed over to the Soviet Union according to the terms of the armistice with the Soviets.[10] The extensive German land mines caused civilian casualties for decades after the war, and almost 100 personnel were killed during demining operations.