Battle of Tolvajärvi, 1939: Finland's first victory of the Winter War

In the first two weeks of the Winter War the Finns did mostly one thing: fall back. On 12 December 1939, at a chain of frozen lakes in Ladoga Karelia, they attacked instead, and a Soviet rifle division fell apart in front of them. Tolvajärvi was the first major Finnish victory of the war, and the museum account says it raised the confidence of the entire Finnish Defence Forces.²

The threat north of Lake Ladoga

When the Red Army invaded on 30 November, its 8th Army struck north of Lake Ladoga, through forest crossed by only a few roads, and the size of the attack took the Finns by surprise. The 8th Army had six rifle divisions and an armored brigade, about 120,000 men with some 400 armored vehicles and nearly 600 guns and mortars, and its aim was to get behind the Finnish army on the Karelian Isthmus. On its northern flank a rifle corps sent one division toward Ilomantsi and another, the 139th under Brigade Commander Nikolay Belyaev, toward Tolvajärvi and on to Korpiselkä.³

Only a few Finnish battalions stood in the way, and they retreated. Reinforced in early December with three separate battalions, a bicycle battalion and two batteries, they still could not stop the Soviet division. On 8 December it took the eastern shores of Lake Tolvajärvi and Lake Hirvasjärvi.⁴

Talvela and Pajari

Field Marshal Mannerheim reached for an unusual commander. Paavo Talvela, a veteran officer who had left the army in 1930, was serving at the Ministry of Defence when Mannerheim summoned him to headquarters at Mikkeli on 6 December. His orders were to defeat the enemy columns heading for Korpiselkä and Ilomantsi and then push on to Suojärvi. The troops at Tolvajärvi became Detachment P, and from the commander-in-chief's reserve came the 16th Infantry Regiment and an artillery battalion. At Talvela's request, the regiment was put under Lieutenant Colonel Aaro Pajari, who took command of the whole detachment.⁵

Pajari counterattacked on the eastern shore on 8 December. On 10 December the Finns threw back Soviet attempts to cross to the western shore, and that evening a Soviet regiment working through the forest struck the rear of the detachment while it was preparing to attack. The crisis was over by the morning of 11 December, and the Finnish attack was put off by a day.⁶

Attack on 12 December

Belyaev had planned a new offensive for 12 December. The Finns attacked first. The decisive blow, according to Museo Militaria, was the frontal attack from the west toward the Tolvajärvi tourist lodge. At 5 p.m. Pajari reported to Talvela that he had attacked and beaten the enemy. The northern encirclement had failed, he wrote, but the southern flank had taken the island of Kotisaari and the center had pushed across the Tolvajärvi isthmus; at 1 p.m. he had thrown most of his reserves into the center, and the Soviet defense had come apart. The battle, he added, had been extremely hard on all his troops.⁷

The 139th Rifle Division, caught as it was about to attack, retreated in disorder and for a time was almost incapable of fighting. The Finns took guns enough for two batteries, 20 tanks and 60 machine guns. Belyaev was relieved of command, and by 15 December the fresh Soviet 75th Rifle Division had replaced the shattered 139th at the front.⁸

The cost and what followed

Museo Militaria puts the Finnish dead in the day's attack at about 100, and the Soviet dead at ten times as many. The figures for the whole campaign, from the Finnish National Archives and Soviet unit reports summarized by talvisota.fi, are larger: 517 men of Detachment P killed between 30 November and 31 December, and 3,552 men lost by the 139th Rifle Division in its first month of war, 761 of them killed and 1,076 missing.⁹

After a day's rest Detachment P pushed east, reached Ägläjärvi on 17 December and took it on 22 December after five days of fighting. On the 23rd its attack stopped at the Aittojoki River, where the front stayed until the end of the war. Mannerheim promoted Talvela to major general and Pajari to colonel.¹⁰