Battle of Napue, 1714: the battle that began Finland's Great Wrath

Napue was the last land battle of the Finnish campaign of the Great Northern War. Finns remember it as the beginning of isoviha, the Great Wrath; in Swedish it is the battle of Storkyro, and Russian histories long called it Lappola, a name that the Russian historian Sergei Lapshov shows came from a mix-up in the staff papers, since no place of that name stood on the battlefield.²

Finland falls

After Poltava in 1709 and the capture of Vyborg in 1710, Peter the Great carried the war into Finland. In the summer of 1713 his army and galley fleet took Helsingfors and Åbo, and on 6 October Admiral Apraksin beat Armfelt's corps at Pälkäne, where Golitsyn led the decisive crossing of a lake on rafts behind the Swedish position. The Swedish museum service's description of the battle notes that by then the Russians held most of Finland and had reached the Gulf of Bothnia, from where they could threaten Sweden itself.³

Armfelt fell back to Ostrobothnia, around Vaasa. Lapshov describes his army as worn down: up to half of it was recruits of the fifth levy and peasant militia, many of the militia had only pikes, horses were poor, and desertion grew as the Russians occupied the men's home districts. Counting from the Swedish historian Uddgren, Lapshov puts it at 3,033 regular infantry, 1,547 cavalry and 1,086 militia, about 5,700 men with seven light guns.⁴

A winter march

In January 1714 Golitsyn, the hero of Pälkäne, took command. He picked the fittest soldiers from the regiments in southern Finland, bought or requisitioned a thousand pairs of skis, forbade looting so that peasants would sell food, and on 7 February set out for Vaasa with about 10,000 men: some 5,600 infantry, 2,900 dragoons, between 1,000 and 1,600 Don Cossacks and twelve guns on sledges. In deep snow he sent skiers ahead to pack the road, and the army covered about 300 versts (some 320 kilometers) at roughly 25 versts a day.⁵

At a council at Storkyro on 15 February nearly all Armfelt's officers urged retreat. Armfelt refused: he had orders from the Royal Council in Stockholm to hold Ostrobothnia, its ports and its grain, and a retreat in midwinter, Lapshov argues, would have destroyed the army anyway. From noon on 17 February his men stood in line across the frozen Kyrönjoki at Napue, in frost and snowstorms, for almost three days as the Russians took longer than expected to arrive.⁶

Around the flank

Golitsyn did not attack the position head on. He left four dragoon regiments on the river as a feint and on the morning of 19 February led his main force in two columns through some five versts of forest, rock and frozen bog around the Swedish left; a local farmer, Matts Paulsson Tuuri, showed one column the way. Armfelt saw the danger late and wheeled his line to face north, struggling waist deep in snow, but he was in line before the Russians cleared the trees.⁷

The battle began around noon. Armfelt attacked first, hoping to roll up the Russian left before it was fully formed. His infantry advanced through the snow and fired its last volley at 12 to 15 meters; Golitsyn later wrote that he had never been under such quick and heavy fire. The fighting turned into a bayonet and pike melee. Colonel Odert Reinhold von Essen's brigade drove back two Russian battalions and took a battery, and at one point six of the Russian guns were in Swedish hands.⁸

Golitsyn waited until the snow was trampled hard enough for horses. At about 2 p.m. Brigadier Chernetsov's dragoons, fighting on foot, swung around the weak Swedish left, Cossacks appeared on the river behind the Swedish line, and the peasant militia ran for the woods. The cavalry of Colonel de la Barre, which had stood idle, rode off toward Storkyro. Less than two hours after it began the battle was over: three Finnish infantry regiments were almost destroyed, Essen died with, according to Lapshov, thirty-two bayonet wounds, and Armfelt led the survivors north.⁹

How many died?

The figures are far apart. Golitsyn reported 5,134 enemy dead and 535 prisoners, and his own loss as 421 killed and 1,014 wounded. Armfelt reported 1,600 killed, 900 wounded and more than 500 captured. Lapshov, comparing Armfelt's strength before and after, the burials on the field and the officers' casualty lists, arrives at about 2,500 to 2,700 killed, wounded and captured. A Finnish regional tourism account gives about 3,000 Finnish and 1,500 Russian dead.¹⁰

The Great Wrath

The Russians entered an almost deserted Vaasa on 23 February (Old Style). What followed is remembered in Finland as the Great Wrath. Lapshov cites Finnish estimates that some 8,500 civilians of Ostrobothnia were carried off and that more than 20,000 people fled to Sweden over the ice. In Isokyrö, a study of local oral tradition at the University of Jyväskylä found that stories of Cossacks quartered in the district who robbed, tortured and killed were still told well into the twentieth century. Finland stayed under Russian occupation for the remaining seven years of the war. A monument by Matti Björklund-Visanti was raised at Napue in 1920; the battlefield itself lies across the river in Laurola.¹¹