FINLAND-SWEDEN: Defenders of the Alands

Defenders of the Alands

Sweden’s aged King Gustaf, who mortally fears Soviet Russia, was having the Communist jitters again last week. Last month the League of Nations took U. S. S. R. into its fold of respectability (TIME, Oct. 1). Straightway King Gustaf, by no complicated chain of associations, thought of the Aland Islands. The Aland Archipelago in the elbow of the Baltic Sea separating Sweden and Finland is the ticklish spot in Sweden’s naval strategy. Overlooking the harbor of Stockholm, the Alands are some 300 sandy, stony little islands and one big one. They are full of Swedes but, after 600 years of being passed around among Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Russia, they now belong to Finland. They were heavily fortified by the Russian Tsars and in the closing years of the War they became the object of a free-for-all among the Bolsheviks, the Red & White Finns, the Swedes and the Germans. The Islanders themselves howled for Sweden. The White Finns won and Sweden nearly went to war about it. The League of Nations intervened and gave the islands to Finland. Then, worse than now, King Gustaf had Communist nightmares. He feared that Finland might turn Red any day. The best he could do was to force young Finland to destroy all the great Russian forts on the Aland Islands. Thus, the Alands were no help to him but neither were they a menace. Since then, however, agrarian Finland has proved its right to Gustaf’s confidence by showing itself thoroughly antiCommunist. Finland was no threat last week but what of emboldened Soviet Russia? The form Gustaf’s fear took was that Russia may some day seize the unfortified Aland Islands, thus irreparably separating Sweden and Finland. Swedish generals agreed last week that it had indeed been a bad blunder to destroy the Aland forts in 1922. It would be wise, they thought, to pay Finland to rebuild them. Seeing eye-to-eye with them was at least one big man in Finland—Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, president of the Defense Council. Baron Mannerheim has a good claim to the title of Finland’s “Grand Old Man.” Now 67, he fought through the Tsars’ wars to the rank of Major General of Cavalry in 1917. After the last Tsar abdicated and Kerensky took over, Mannerheim went home to Finland in disgust, just in time to pull together a White Army and beat off the Bolsheviks. In May 1918, he rode into Helsingfors at the head of his victorious troops. Inevitably he was made Regent of the new Government, for then Finland had an idea it would turn to a monarchy. When it switched to a republic, he quit. When King Gustaf forced Finland to destroy the Aland forts, General Mannerheim was pained as a strategist, as a true monarchist and as a loyal Finn. Today he lives, as becomes a Grand Old Man, quietly in Helsingfors with his Russian wife, accepting honorary figurehead positions. Not one to go off halfcocked, he lately said, “The dismantling of the Aland Island fortifications has created immense new dangers for Finland and Sweden.”