Environments of Defence: Finland and the Winter War

ABSTRACT

In January 1940, the British writer John Langdon-Davies travelled to Finland to report on the Winter War with the Soviet Union (November 1939–March 1940). On his return he wrote a book entitled Finland: the First Total War in which he proposed that it was the ability of the Finnish people to adapt to their environment that enabled the determined defence of their country from forces far greater in number and with superior armaments. His theme originated with the “military science,” as he put it, of collective defensive action that embraced the topography of Finland, its climate, and the skills evolved by life within it. He proposed that since its independence in 1917 and the subsequent civil war, Finland had been designed as a social democracy fit for purpose in its resilience to both political and military threat. Langdon-Davies considered Finnish modern architecture of the 1930s as part of a national strategy that embraced place, cooperation, and social wellbeing. He positioned architecture and design within interconnected military, social and economic contexts, as a kind of expanded functionalism both technical and poetic. This paper argues that Finland: the First Total War contributes to understandings of architecture as a protagonist in national defence.

Author Notes

This paper is a tribute to Emeritus Professor Harriet Edquist and her ability to see clearly points of connection. I wish to thank the following for their helpful observations at various stages in its development: participants at the “Looking Inside Design” workshop, RMIT/University of Melbourne, 25 June 2021; Professor Jonathan Woodham; Professor Jüri Kermik; and the anonymous reviewers.

Archivists and librarians at the University of Reading Special Collections, the British Architectural Library, the British Library and the Library of the Society of Friends provided direct access to sources prior to the national lockdowns of 2020–21. The digitized photographic archive of the Finnish Defence Forces (SA-Kuva) deserves particular recognition as a research source: in the extent of the holdings (160,000 images); the retention of their original arrangement; and its open access policy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. John Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1940). In 2014 Finland: the First Total War was translated into Finnish. John Langdon-Davies Hyökkäys Lumessa: Brittikirjeenvaihtajan Talvisota, trans. Simo Liikanen (Helsinki: Paasilinna, 2014).

2. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2009).

3. Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: designing and building for the Second World War (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011), 19.

4. Cohen, Architecture in Uniform, 13.

5. John Langdon-Davies, Militarism in Education (London: Headley, 1919).

Man and His Universe appeared in 1937 and in 1938 a revised edition of A Short History of Women that was first published in 1928. See the Rationalist Association website https://rationalist.org.uk/.

6. See Miquel Berga, John Langdon-Davies,1897–1971: Una Biografia Anglo-Catalana (Barcelona: Editorial Pòrtic, 1991) and John Langdon-Davies, Air Raid. The technique of silent approach: high explosives: panic (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938). After the Second World War Langdon-Davies continued to publish on diverse subjects and in the 1960s he conceived the influential series of classroom resources on historical topics known as Jackdaws. Comprising facsimiles of historical “evidence” they sought to encourage interpretative skills. These were the subject of a paper this author presented at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education “Education, War and Peace,” Institute of Education, London, 2014 and in this author’s inaugural professorial lecture “Curating the Past: the Monument, the Archive and the Database,” University of Brighton, 2014.

7. Langdon-Davies to Murray Ragg, 7 June 1940. File 152/2, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Archive, University of Reading, UK.

8. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 10.

9. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 31.

10. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 49–60. The military historian William Trotter pointed out that Western news correspondents were responsible to a considerable degree for initiating what was to become the almost legendary status of motti tactics, see William R Trotter The Winter War: the Russo-Finnish war of 1939–40 (London: Aurum, 2003), 131–140. It was first published in the United States as A Frozen Hell: the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939–40 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991).

11. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 60–62.

12. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 64–65.

13. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 1.

14. Trotter, The Winter War, 143.

15. Bair Irincheev and Brian Delf, The Mannerheim Line 1920–39: Finnish Fortifications of the Winter War (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2009), 21–22.

16. Trotter, The Winter War, 69. The cellophane may have been produced at the artificial silk and film manufacturer Kuito Oy in Imatra, which was itself camouflaged, see SA-Kuva image ref: a_84.

17. Irincheev and Delf, The Mannerheim Line 1920–39, 21–22. See also Trotter, The Winter War, 64.

18. In Trotter’s view, “manned by stubborn troops, it was a formidable defense line, even if it fell far short of André Maginot’s monument to militarism’s Age of High Baroque.” See Trotter, The Winter War, 62–5.

19. Lieutenant Colonel Johan Christian Fabritius led the fortification department of the Finnish forces during the 1930s. A Nazi sympathiser, he went on to become head of Naval intelligence during the Continuation War, and died under arrest in 1946. On the use of forced labour in fortifications work, its administration and supervision see Otto Aura, “Rakennustöitä jatkosodassa. Työ, työvoima sekä rationalisointi linnoitustöissä 1941–44.” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2012).

20. Irincheev and Delf, The Mannerheim Line, 19. See also Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 17. On the use of raw timber in wartime construction, see Cohen, Architecture in Uniform, 61 and in Finland, Erkki Helamaa 40 Luku: korsujen ja jälleenrakentamisen vuosikymmen (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1983).

21. In 2019 the University of Helsinki conducted a collaborative project “Archaeology of the Mannerheim Line – Mapping the Heritage Value Of Finnish Second World War Defensive Line in Karelian Isthmus, Russia,” https://blogs.helsinki.fi/mannerheim-line-archaeology/history-of-mannerheim-line/. See also the mapping project Northern Fortress led by Alex Goss, http://www.nortfort.ru/mline/index_e.html.

22. Trotter, The Winter War, 187.

23. Trotter, The Winter War, 188. Langdon-Davies records his own experiences of Soviet air raids. These are followed by an analysis of the well-organised Finnish precautions, see Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 130–161. His book Air Raid: the Technique of Silent Approach published by Routledge in 1938 contributed to debates on this topic. A powerful account of the air attacks on Helsinki was created in the exhibition curated by Anna Kortelainen and designed by Minna Santakari, “State of Mind. Helsinki 1939–1945,” HAM Helsinki Art Museum and Helsinki City Museum Villa Hakasalmi, 18 October 2019–1 March 2020.

24. In 1938 the Tourism Committee of Viipuri published a guide in English that featured both the city’s historic buildings and its recent additions.

Ullberg was succeeded as city architect by Ragnar Ypyä (1900–1980) who had worked with Aalto and also for the Ministry of Defence. See Laura Berger, “The Building that Disappeared: The Viipuri Library by Alvar Aalto” (PhD diss., Aalto University, 2018), 270.

25. Langdon-Davies’s employs the term “manager” although Laura Berger describes him as the mayor pointing out that he also held the military rank of major. The news report named him “Mr Aalno Tuulna” but this should have been Arno Tuurna. See Berger, “The Building that Disappeared,” 270.

Langdon-Davies’s reports were syndicated to other newspapers around the world, this one appeared in the Evening Standard on 26 February 1940 and a day later in the Sydney Daily Telegraph. “GRIM SCENE AS VIBORG EVACUATED” The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1931–1954) 27 February 1940: 3. Web. 8 May 2019 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248229456.

26. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 194.

27. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 32.

28. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 197. Anne Mäkinen has undertaken research on the Construction Office of the Finnish Ministry of Defence see her entry “Finnish Defence Forces Buildings” on the Docomomo Suomi Finland website, see https://en.docomomo.fi/projects/finnish-defence-forces-buildings/.

29. Some of the photographic captions were placed incorrectly although it is unclear whether this was the fault of Langdon-Davies, the production department at Routledge & Sons, or the printers. The publication files at the University of Reading, see note 7, shed no light on this although the illustrations were certainly assembled in some haste. The photographs of architecture were clearly from official sources or a press agency since they depict the buildings soon after their construction. Other photographs, those recording the visit to the Kuhmo area, were made by Langdon-Davies. In the 2014 Finnish translation of his book only one of the captions was corrected, the other misidentifies Aalto’s hospital at Paimio and Bryggman’s sports institute.

30. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 196.

31. P. Morton Shand, “The Viipuri Library in Detail,” Architectural Review, 79, no. 478 (10 September 1936): 108–114. Morton Shand had visited Finland in 1935 and was a director of Finmar, the firm established in 1934 that imported Aalto’s Artek furniture to Britain. As an ex-solider in charge of camps for German prisoners after the First World War, he also knew about surveillance.

Overt references to military objects appear in Aalto’s designs. The low, cantilevered chair with wide bentwood armrests he designed for the 1936 Milan Triennale, model 400, was better known as The Tank and although beyond the timeframe of this essay the A110 light-fitting designed in 1951/2 was named the Hand Grenade.

32. Alvar Aalto and Michael Spens, Viipuri Library 1927–1935 (London: Academy Group Ltd, 2000), 36–7. See also, “the loans desk stands on the mountain top, an ideal lookout point”, that appears in Alvar Aalto: Architettura Per Leggere/architecture to Read (Roma: Gangemi, 2003), 31.

33. Alvar Aalto, Simon Breines, A L. Kocher and John McAndrew, Architecture and Furniture: Aalto (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1938). Quoted in Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 197. Laura Berger points out that Breines’s essay, written without visiting the building, lay at the root of much subsequent misunderstanding about the interior arrangement of the library. See Berger, “The Building that Disappeared,” 243.

34. Berger, “The Building that Disappeared,” 161. The emotional current to the appreciation of functional form in Aalto’s architecture is described well by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen who explains how the ceiling also “amplified the listeners’ feeling of being part of the general life force that connects man to the world and people to each other within communities and across boundaries.” Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics, 157.

35. Langdon-Davies, Finland: The First Total War, 199.

36. This “auditorium chair” was a collaboration with Otto Korhonen. It is best known as Chair 611. Aalto also designed the Defence Corps building at Seinäjoki (1924–29).

37. Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: the Early Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 85–96.

Langdon-Davies’s view of the Corps is interesting, rather than seeing it as a right-wing hangover from 1918, which as an erstwhile fellow traveller and a First World War conscientious objector he might well have done, his experiences in Finland prompted a different reaction. Instead, he argued that the existence of the Defence Corps was yet another example of Finnish good sense because through its training and preparedness it had played a large part in the population’s powerful and ready resistance to Soviet attack, see Langdon-Davies, Finland: The First Total War, 172–175.

38. Max Jakobson, Finland: Myth and Reality (Helsinki: Otava, 1987), 18. See also Max Jakobson, The Diplomacy of the Winter War: An Account of the Russo-Finnish War, 1939–1940 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1961).

Another British citizen in Finland during the Winter War was John Sykes, serving with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, see his observations on Finnish post-war politics in John Sykes, Direction North: A view of Finland (London: Hutchinson, 1967).

39. Aalto and Spens, Viipuri Library, 38.

40. Malcolm Quantrill, Alvar Aalto (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), 81.

41. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 137. Various photographs of trees and branches employed to camouflage buildings and vehicles at the time of the Winter War can be found in the photographic archive of the Finnish Defence Forces SA-Kuva.

42. Pekka Korvenmaa, “Aalto and Finnish Industry,” in Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism eds. Peter Reed and Kenneth Frampton (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 72.

43. See for example, Martha Gellhorn’s reports on the Winter War written during her visit to Finland in December 1939 reproduced in Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (London: Virago, 1986), 57–70.

44. Alvar Aalto and Karl Fleig, Alvar Aalto: Complete Works 1922–1962 (Basel: Birkhæuser Verlag, 1995), 22–23.

45. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 118.

46. Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 115. See also John Stewart and Richard Rogers, Alvar Aalto: Architect (London: Merrell, 2017), 115–132.

47. Alvar Aalto, “Finland,” Architectural Forum, 72, no. 6 (June 1940): 399–412.

48. For a detailed account of Aalto’s work in this area, see Pekka Korvenmaa, “The Finnish Wooden House Transformed: American Prefabrication, War-Time Housing and Alvar Aalto.” Construction History, 6 (1990): 47–61. While promoting his country’s cause throughout the summer of 1940 Aalto was feted and certainly advanced his own professional and business interests. A detailed account of Aalto’s war years, including his visit to Berlin in 1943, can be found in Stewart and Rogers, Alvar Aalto: Architect, 115–132.

49. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 199.

50. See Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War; “scab” page 60, “war-scar” page 61, “suppurating skin disease” and “pockmarks” page 143. Tony Lurcock has commented that Langdon-Davies’s “accounts of the blackening of the virgin snow acts as a sort of metaphor for the violation of Finland’s innocence”. See Tony Lurcock, “A Life of Extremes”: The British Discover Modern Finland 1917–1941 (London: CB editions, 2015), 200.

51. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 10.

52. J.M. Richards discussed the relationship between the natural environment and Finnish architecture employing a military analogy in his argument that it encouraged technical development in the “search for new weapons with which to defeat and conquer the elements”. He also points out that as a consequence of this relationship the concept of the organic preceded Frank Lloyd Wright and Aalto. See J. M. Richards A guide to Finnish architecture (London: Evelyn, 1966), 17.

53. Murray Ragg to Langdon-Davies, 17 January 1940. File 152/2. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Archive, University of Reading, UK. See also John Langdon-Davies, Behind the Spanish Barricades (London: Secker & Warburg, 1937) and John Langdon-Davies, Nerves Versus Nazis (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1940).

54. Walter Citrine, My Finnish Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1940). This was number 56 in the first series of Specials, 1937–1945, which covered political and social issues.

55. Langdon-Davies to Murray Ragg, 7 June 1940. File 152/2. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Archive, University of Reading.

56. John Langdon-Davies, A J. Godley, and J A. Barlow, The Home Guard Training Manual: Based by Permission on War Office Instruction Books (London: J. Murray, 1941). The section “Some Modern Warfare Terms” includes a definition of the Molotov Cocktail petrol bomb which ends, on page 182, with the statement, “Although such methods were first used in Spain the name is a result of the great use of it by the Finns against Russia.” In the entry above it, Home Guards learned of the Molotov Bread Basket, “A large container holding 50 to 100 small incendiary bombs, which breaks up in mid-air and releases the bombs simultaneously over a small area, thereby causing a number of fires at one time. First used by the Russians in Finland.”

57. Langdon-Davies, Finland: the First Total War, 196. For a detailed account of the subsequent history of the building see Laura Berger, “The Building that Disappeared: The Viipuri Library by Alvar Aalto” (PhD diss., Aalto University, 2018). Berger’s close reading of archival sources in several languages informs an approach to the library that explores the nuances of its changing meaning to different audiences over time. She upturns many repeated misconceptions about the fate of the building. In 2014, the Finnish Committee for the Restoration of Viipuri Library with the Central City Alvar Aalto Library were awarded the World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism prize. Visiting Vyborg in 2016, Owen Hatherley observes the disjuncture between Aalto’s restored library and the dilapidated condition of other modern architecture in the city including Huttunen’s flour mill. See Owen Hatherley, Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 288–303.

58. Architectural Forum, 72 no. 6 (June 1940): 399.

59. Mäkinen, “Finnish Defence Forces Buildings”. https://en.docomomo.fi/projects/finnish-defence-forces-buildings/.

60. Mäkinen, “Helsinki Mororized Company Barracks”. https://finnisharchitecture.fi/helsinki-motorised-company-barracks/

A photograph of the globe appears in Spens, Viipuri Library, 44 and Morton Shand, “The Viipuri Library in Detail,” 114.

61. An extract from Richards’s autobiography that includes an account of his first visit to Finland in 1934 at Aalto’s invitation is included in Lurcock, “A Life of Extremes,” 144–150.

62. J. M. Richards, A Guide to Finnish Architecture (London: H. Evelyn, 1966).

63. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen argues that any discussion of geography and its social construction needs to be “grounded in an actual historical moment”. See Pelkonen, Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics, 6.

64. Trotter, The Winter War, 276.

65. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 270.