Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Pavel Kiselev
[REGNUM] Exactly 80 years ago, on October 23, 1944, soldiers of the 14th Army of the Karelian Front drove the Germans out of the Kola Peninsula, took the village of Nikel (Kolosjoki in Finnish) and reached the Soviet-Norwegian border. It is on this day, October 23, that the Murmansk Region celebrates the anniversary of the liberation of the Arctic from the Nazis. But the Red Army did not stop there.
On the same day, ships of the Northern Fleet landed tactical troops in the Varanger Fjord (Varangian Gulf) and other Arctic bays of Norway. At the same time, the Red Army soldiers of the 14th Army crossed the border lake Salmijärvi and advanced to the approaches to the town of Kirkenes, the "capital" of the Norwegian Far North.
The Petsamo-Kirkenes operation was coming to an end – the defeat of the German group in the Finnish region of Petsamo (the ancient Pomor Pechenga region, which returned to our country after 1944) and in the Norwegian part of Lapland. In Russian historiography, this operation is known as “Stalin’s tenth strike” – the last of the ten major offensives of 1944 that determined the outcome of World War II.
The commander of the Karelian Front, Kirill Meretskov, nicknamed "the marshal of the northern directions", received well-deserved marshal's shoulder straps for the operation. The northwestern borders of our country from Vyborg to Murmansk were completely protected.
But, although by the autumn of 1944 the Nazi forces, including in occupied Norway, had already been undermined, the final "Stalinist blow" was not easy for the Red Army. The front beyond the Arctic Circle had to be broken up - like an icebreaker breaking ice.
HOW THE SAVAGE DIVISION THWARTED FALKENHORST'S BLITZKRIEG
The Karelian Front was, one might say, the most “stable” unit of the Red Army. While other fronts were “reformatted” and renamed, this formation existed unchanged from August 1941 to November 1944.
The front line that was established in Karelia and on the Kola Peninsula, from Lake Ladoga to the Barents Sea, was the longest (more than 1.5 thousand kilometers through taiga, mountains and tundra) - and "frozen". For three long years, neither side managed to ensure a decisive advantage here. But in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, the threat to our Arctic was very serious.
The war came to the Kola North on June 29, 1941. Then the advancing Nazis (commanded by the recent conqueror of Norway, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst ) and their Finnish allies managed to create a threat to Murmansk and the Northern Fleet bases.
But by mid-July, the soldiers of the 14th Army under the command of General Valerian Frolov (who had distinguished himself not long before in the Soviet-Finnish War) were able to stop the enemy approximately thirty kilometers from the border after heavy fighting.
Two landings of the Northern Fleet Marines on the flank of the enemy advancing along the coast disrupted the plans of a blitzkrieg in the North. The ground forces and the fleet managed to slow down the German advance at the coastal ridge of Musta-Tunturi. Therefore, the enemy was unable to break through to the east and capture the strategically important Rybachy Peninsula - the "unsinkable battleship" that controls the entrance to the Kola Bay, where Murmansk is located.
In September 1941, the Wehrmacht Army "Norway" attempted for the second (and as it turned out, the last) time to break through in the Murmansk direction. But General Frolov's soldiers stopped the enemy at the Zapadnaya Litsa River.
The 1st Polar Division of the People's Militia, which was assembled in September, distinguished itself here. The division, which included volunteer dock workers and workers from shipyards, was nicknamed "Wild" by the people. The militiamen from the "Wild Division" (soon reformatted into the "normal" 186th, and then the 205th Rifle Division) fought bravely from start to finish - they celebrated the Victory by liberating the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic. The first commander of the "Wild Division", Lieutenant Colonel Semyon Azarov, who died in one of the battles in Northern Karelia in 1942, was posthumously awarded the Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
And then, in the autumn of 1941, regular troops and militias pushed the Germans back across the Zapadnaya Litsa River – at this line the front in the Far North “froze” until October 1944.
"WE DIDN'T EXPECT STUBBORN RESISTANCE FROM THE RUSSIANS"
Murmansk was relatively safe, and from January 1942, American and British naval convoys began to arrive here, transporting military equipment, food, and other vital resources under Lend-Lease. The Allied cargo then went south by rail through Karelia, and from there, along the Road of Life, it reached besieged Leningrad. The Luftwaffe bombed the communication routes in the Arctic and Karelia, but the railroad workers courageously repaired the destruction.
Murmansk itself was also periodically under attack. The Germans launched one of their largest air attacks on June 18, 1942. That day, a total of about 23 tons of bombs of various calibers were dropped on the city. But the Nazis no longer tried to break through on the ground in the north of the Kola Peninsula.
Fierce battles were fought further south, in the direction of the city of Kandalaksha, a port on the White Sea and a major railway junction. The capture of this city threatened to cut off the Murmansk region from the rest of the USSR. Despite enormous losses, the Germans and Finns repeatedly tried to capture Kandalaksha, but each time they encountered fierce resistance from Soviet troops in the north of Karelia and the south of the Kola Peninsula. The front stabilized here as well.
"A soldier taken prisoner testified: 'We were promised to take Kandalaksha in 12 days and reach the White Sea, but we still haven't managed to do this, even though 6 months have passed. The soldiers' mood is depressed - they didn't expect such stubborn resistance from the Russians,'" wrote the first secretary of the Murmansk regional committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), member of the military council of the 14th Army, Mikhail Starostin, in his diary.
The reasons for the enemy's "disappointment" are clear - through the efforts of Starostin and brigade commander Kuzma Sinilov, fortifications were created on the border of the Murmansk border district and the Kandalaksha fortified region in a short time. In the same diary, Starostin cited the words of another captured German - a corporal of one of the infantry regiments of the "Norway" army: "Your actions in the Murmansk direction are very successful... This is the only place on the front where, from the very beginning of the war, our units have not been able to advance."
THE STRANGE WAR OF MARSHAL MANNERHEIM
The protracted status quo was broken by Stalin's fourth blow - the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk operation in the summer of 1944. The joint actions of the Leningrad and Karelian fronts made it possible to simultaneously develop an offensive on Vyborg and break through in Karelia (from the Svir River to Petrozavodsk). The success of the Red Army removed one of the most effective allies of the Nazis - the Finnish army - from the war. At the end of August, Finland's military leader, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, dismissed the openly pro-German President Risto Ryti, took over the presidential powers and requested an armistice with the USSR.
On September 4, 1944, the war between the Soviet Union and Finland was officially ended.
“The Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs told the German ambassador that relations between their countries had been broken off, and at the beginning of the month he sent out radio messages to all corners of Finland about the withdrawal of German troops from Finnish territory by September 15,” recalled Marshal Meretskov.
At the same time, the military leader noted, the Finns were not eager to enter the war with their former ally, the Third Reich. The command of the Finnish army approached the headquarters of General Lothar Rendulic, commander of the 20th Mountain Army of the Wehrmacht, "with a proposal to resolve the issues amicably." The Germans agreed to move the border of the Finnish military zone to the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia, and maintained a strong group in northern Finland and Norway.
ENEMY ON THE GRANITE RAMPART
After the Finns withdrew from the war, “ almost the entire Soviet border from the granite cliffs of Lapland to the Ladoga Lowland was restored,” Meretskov noted. The key word is “almost.”
In the Far North, hidden behind powerful reinforced concrete and granite fortifications, stood the 19th Mountain Rifle Corps of the Germans.
"For three years the enemy had been building a Lapland defensive wall here," the marshal recalled. " With Finland's withdrawal from the war, additional defensive work was simply feverish. Our intelligence constantly reported that special enemy construction units were gnawing into the granite around the clock, building new reinforced concrete and armored firing points and shelters, digging trenches and communication passages."
A relatively small section of the front, 90 km long, was turned into a solid "fortification" with antitank obstacles and ditches, in front of which minefields and barbed wire were installed on mountain passes, in hollows and on roads. Enemy engineers used the difficult terrain to their advantage: lakes, rivers, rocks. Artillery was entrenched on the dominant hills and on the banks - in field caponiers.
The Lapland (or Granite) Wall of the Germans covered the most vulnerable sections of their front on the Kola Peninsula and in Northern Norway - “from the Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa Bay (Gulf) and the isthmus of the Sredny Peninsula to Kirkenes,” recalled Khariton Khudalov, a participant in the battles on the Kola Peninsula in 1941–44 and the Petsamo-Kirkenes Operation.
TANK SURPRISE
By the beginning of Stalin's tenth strike, by October 7, 1944, the front line in the Russian Arctic ran from Malaya Volokovaya Bay along the isthmus of the Sredny Peninsula and from Bolshaya Zapadnaya Litsa Bay to Lakes Chapr and Koshka-Yavr.
From here, it was decided to strike in the direction of the city of Petsamo (Pechenga), the "capital" of the region, which passed from the USSR to Finland several times. From 1918 to 1940, the Pechenga region was owned by the Finns (and thus had access to local nickel mines and access to the Arctic Ocean). At the end of the "Winter War" of 1939-40, the region went to the USSR, and in June 1941, it was again captured by the Finns. But after Mannerheim left the war and withdrew his troops to the south, the Petsamo-Pechenga region was controlled by the Germans.
The first stage of the operation - the infantry offensive with simultaneous landings of marines - was especially difficult. The enemy, who stubbornly resisted and went on counterattacks, was smoked out of "fox holes" and crevices using smoke bombs, as Soviet military historian Nikolai Rumyantsev noted.
"Granite structures, from which it was impossible to dislodge the Nazis by any means, were blown up with TNT. The rugged terrain, steep climbs and rock deposits made it difficult for troops to move, especially the escort guns. There were no roads here yet. Often the guns were carried by hand" or with the help of reindeer and horses, Rumyantsev wrote.
At the same time, where the terrain allowed, the rifle units were reinforced with tanks - T-34 and even heavy KV-1. This was the first example in history of the large-scale use of tanks in offensives in the Far North - and the main surprise for the enemy.
The enemy considered it impossible to use tank troops in the Arctic conditions, so the mountain rangers from Rendulic's army were not trained to fight tanks, Rumyantsev explained. The historian pointed out that despite all the Germans' efforts to build a line of defense, " large gaps between resistance nodes and strong points and a limited number of anti-tank weapons in all accessible directions were a weak point in the enemy's defense."
"KIRKENES WAS BURNING..."
After fierce fighting, Soviet troops broke through German positions along the entire front and reached the Titovka River. Having blown up the bridges, the Germans retreated, pursued by Soviet troops, who landed troops to cut off the enemy.
On October 13, Soviet troops prepared to storm Petsamo, and units of the 126th Light Rifle Corps set up a checkpoint on the only retreat route. But the Germans were partly lucky - the 2nd Mountain Division broke through the blockade, ensuring the retreat of General Rendulic's main forces. On October 15, Soviet troops liberated Petsamo.
On October 22, the Red Army crossed the Norwegian border. The last barrier remained - Kirkenes.
" At this line, the advancing troops encountered prepared defenses, previously occupied by fresh enemy units. The Nazis supported their troops' actions on land with fire from large-caliber coastal batteries located on the rocky shores of Bekfjord... Muffled explosions were heard. Kirkenes was burning. Fierce battles continued all night," noted Nikolai Rumyantsev.
Despite the desperate resistance of the mountain rangers (who also used six-barreled mortars), our troops crossed the Beckfjord on the night of October 24-25 and resumed the offensive on the city.
By October 29, the Red Army had managed to liberate Eastern Finnmark, the northernmost province of Norway. Thanks to the heroism of our soldiers, 854 Soviet prisoners of war and 772 civilians, whom the occupiers had taken from the Leningrad region, were freed.
The units of the army of the Norwegian government in exile, transferred by the British from the north of Scotland, together with units of the 14th Soviet Army began the liberation of their country from the north. However, the current authorities of Norway prefer not to remember the joint fight against Nazism.
WRONG FLAG
At the end of October, Eastern Finnmark celebrates the liberation of its land from the German occupiers. As IA Regnum noted, representatives of the USSR, and later of Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union, were traditionally invited to the commemorative events.
Thus, in 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov flew to Kirkenes for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Finnmark. The Norwegian side was represented by King Harald V and the then Prime Minister of the country.
However, after the start of the special military operation, the Norwegian authorities for some reason decided that their country was liberated by Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky was invited to the 80th anniversary celebration this year, and starting in 2022, Ukrainian flags, not Russian ones, began to appear at the memorial event.
Nevertheless, on October 25, the remaining employees of our diplomatic corps in Norway after the reduction will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Northern Norway from Nazism - this was announced at our Consulate General in Kirkenes. It is expected that those Norwegians who remember the feat of the Red Army will come to the "Russian Monument" - a monument to Soviet soldiers on Roald Amundsen Square in this city. Just as it is remembered on our side of the border.
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