FINLAND: Why Finns Fight

The tall Swede, looking like a grown-up Boy Scout on a jamboree, stood before a scarred building in Sortavala and laughed delightedly. Prince Gustaf Adolf, 35, who will one day be Sweden’s King if his longevous royal grandfather (83) and father (60) die in time, was on a tour of Finland’s Russian Front. His Finnish guides had just shown him a church which the preposterous Russians had converted into a combination stable and restaurant. On the wall was a poster saying: OBSERVE CLEANLINESS.

The Prince and his escort moved on. They had passed from Finnish soil to soil the Russians had stolen from Finland; now they moved on to soil the Finns had just stolen from Russia—ancient Karelian soil, not Russian, said the Finns. As they went the Finnish officers explained why Finns keep on fighting Russia.

They need not have explained. His Royal Scandinavian Highness understood very well. First, he knew, there was race. Gustaf Adolf knew perfectly the feeling of the blond north countrymen for the Slavs: his great namesake, Gustavus Adolphus, had fought the Muscovites at Great Novgorod, and Charles XII nearly crushed the Russian Peter called Great. The hatred was old in the blood.

But more important than race was nation. The Finns had spent over 100 years as Russian subjects hungry for nationhood. They had achieved nationhood only after World War I. Now they wanted national boundaries they could defend, and that, to them, meant all of Sovietized Karelia.

The young Prince had other reasons for understanding. Now, as always, Sweden was very close to Finland. Sweden had acted as go-between in the exchange of notes in which Britain demanded that Finland stop fighting Russia (TIME, Oct. 6), in which Finland last week refused. Sweden, like Finland, was squeezed between the great belligerents.

What about this business of fighting shoulder to shoulder with Germans? That, too, Prince Gustaf Adolf could understand. He was married in Germany to a German princess; he had often been in Germany: he had seen.

Tough old Vaino Tanner, Finland’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, who had also been to Germany, had that very afternoon protested that the Finns were not Nazis: “The Finns are Democratic and want the parliamentary system, as they have heretofore. I want especially to point that out to some circles abroad who may believe that Finland is moving in another direction. We don’t lose our heads. Finland regards herself as Nordic. . . . We must try for a more definite form of cooperation with other Scandinavian countries.”

There were only three other Scandinavian countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Two of them were under the heel of the bogus Nordics, the Nazis.

Gustaf Adolf, future King of the Swedes, could believe that the Finns were fighting for two principles which one day would be the undoing of Nazi Germany: the self-determination of nations, no matter how small, and collective security. And even if the Germans tried later to prevent the realization of those principles, the Germans, for their own reasons, were helping them to fight their fight.

Gustaf Adolf and his escort came to a rise by the river Svir called Mannerheim Hill. As the young Prince stood on the hill Russian artillery shells whistled over his head—and behind him blond men were killed. Yes, he understood why Finns fought.