() was a secret Finnish Defence Forces operations order approved on 13 June 1952. It is notable as the first Finnish operations order following the end of World War II. It described on a high level the Finnish response to an attack from northern Norway by Western Powers, potentially in conjunction with naval attacks from the Baltic Sea. A Soviet attack was not officially considered a possibility due to the Finno-Soviet Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance of 1948.
The plan divided Finland into four areas of responsibility that were expected to conduct operations independently if they lost contact with the Finnish High Command. Troops from areas of responsibilities not under active combat, together with strategic reserves of the High Command, would be used to counter-attack any enemy forces that threatened to penetrate out of other areas of responsibility.
The plan was criticized for being unrealistic in terms of the tasks expected of the Finnish Air Force, having an overtly complex chain of command, and being too slow to implement in the context of the threat scenarios. In addition, the high level of secrecy prevented key civilian leaders from being contacted before mobilization. was replaced with operations plan in December 1957, following the Soviet return of the Porkkala peninsula in 1956.
Historical background From Finland's independence in 1917 to World War II, the Finnish Defence Forces were organized around the singular task of defeating an attack by the Soviet Union on the Karelian Isthmus. In the case of an attack, the peace-time army would fight a delaying action while the full wartime army was mobilized. After mobilization, the army would continue to delay Soviet forces until international aid could be organized. The only exception to this focus on the Soviet Union was a short-lived 1919–1921 defensive plan aimed at Sweden caused by the Åland Islands dispute. These plans were abandoned following a League of Nations decision that the islands belonged to Finland.
Finnish participation in World War II is thought of as consisting of three distinct phases of military action. The 1939–1940 Winter War began on 30 November 1939 when the Soviet Union invaded Finland, ending in Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. Following several months of peace, Finland launched the Continuation War, the Finnish component of Operation Barbarossa, by attacking the Soviet Union alongside Germany. As part of the Finno-German cooperation, German forces entered Finland in early June, launching Operation Silver Fox from northern Norway and Finnish Lapland on 22 June. Finnish forces crossed the Finno-Soviet border during the night of 9–10 July 1941. Finland sought to exit the war in 1944, following the Soviet Vyborg–Petrozavodsk offensive. Hostilities between Finnish and Soviet forces ended on 19 September 1944, but German operations in northern Finland continued. As part of the Moscow Armistice, Finns were required to expel remaining German forces from Finland. This led to the Finno-German Lapland War, where a demobilizing Finnish Army attacked the German forces remaining in the country. The last German forces left Finnish soil by 27 April 1945. This practically ended hostilities, but no official treaty stating this was ever signed.
Following the end of the Finno-Soviet hostilities, the principally Soviet Allied Control Commission entered Finland. The commission's role was to observe and ensure that Finland abided by the armistice agreement. As such, its members were given complete access to any and all information and locations the commission deemed necessary for their work. Finland also leased Porkkala to the Soviet Union. The Porkkala peninsula, located only west of the Finnish capital of Helsinki, thus became a Soviet naval base, severely limiting the Finnish ability to defend their capital against a potential Soviet attack. Finland also agreed to demilitarize the Åland islands and reduce the Finnish Defence Forces to a size of 37,000 men.
The subsequent Paris Peace Treaty placed restrictions on Finnish armaments. The treaty banned motor torpedo boats, submarines, bombers, guided missiles and nuclear weapons and limited the number of naval vessels and aircraft allowed. The maximum size of Finnish military forces was modified to 41,900 including border guards. According to Finnish military historians Tynkkynen and Jouko, the most problematic aspect of the treaty was a requirement for Finland to forfeit or destroy all armaments (including e.g. small arms) beyond those needed by the 41,900 sized defence forces: doing so would have effectively preventing a larger Finnish mobilization. However, disagreements between Soviet Union and the United Kingdom on what, exactly, was to be done to the extraneous armaments allowed Finland to simply not act on this latter requirement.
In 1948, Finland signed the Finno-Soviet Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, also known as the FCMA treaty. The treaty alleviated some of the worst Finnish fears about the intentions of the Soviet leadership and a potential occupation: while it contained a requirement for Finland to resist any outside invasion of Finnish soil by "Germany or its allies", it explicitly forbade the Soviet Union from unilaterally deciding that Soviet military assistance was necessary. Another significant development in vicinity of Finland was the joining of Norway into NATO in 1949.
Planning and assumptions
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, in late 1945, Finnish Defence Forces produced rough plans for a potential future mobilization. According to these plans, each military district would first mobilize a battalion-sized formation using cached weapons. These formations would then be expanded to up to a total of 12 brigade-sized formations in a second stage of mobilization. A following third stage of mobilization would then bring the army to its full strength using the post-Winter War procedures. For comparison, the size of the army had been 15 divisions at the end of the Continuation War.
Planning activities were, however, stopped in January 1946 to "avoid accusations of provocation". This ban on planning activities resulted from the Allied Control Commission hearing that the Finns were refreshing their mobilization plans based on the post-Winter War procedures, while the armistice agreement required Finland to adopt the pre-Winter War plans. The Allied Control Commission left Finland in 1947, and the production of military plans resumed soon after on 13 March 1948 with the permission of President J. K. Paasikivi.
The planning of new operations orders began in 1950. The first plans were produced for an "auxiliary complement" () of a Finnish Army consisting of 41,900 men, since that was the maximum size of the Finnish Army as approved by the Paris Peace Treaty. In this configuration, the forces would enhance border control, secure important military and civilian targets, and prepare to defend the areas assigned to them. The plans also called for Finnish forces to enter the demilitarized Åland, and the Finnish Navy to lay naval mines.
Planning continued in 1951 based on three threat scenarios or models produced by the Operations Department of the Finnish High Command. Because of the FCMA treaty, these threat models officially viewed the threat on Finland as coming strictly from the west.
Scenario A concerned an attack via northern Norway, with the attacker having no access to Swedish territory. It was also assumed that the Danish Straits would not be open for the attacker, preventing a naval landing. It was assumed that the attacker was seeking to gain access to airports to extend their reach further into the Soviet Union, and to prevent the Soviet Union from using its warm-water ports. Scenario B modified scenario A by assuming the Danish Straits would remain open to the attacker, and that the enemy would also seek to capture Åland and the Hanko Peninsula, thus denying most of the Baltic from the Soviet Navy. Scenario C further extended the previous scenarios by assuming Sweden had joined the invading powers or at least given them access to Swedish areas. In the latter scenarios, the naval invasion in south-western Finland would support a larger attack on the Soviet heartland. Later modifications to the scenarios assumed that, rather than conducting a full naval invasion, the enemy would conduct limited warfare and raids seeking to force Soviet forces to be tied down in Finland.
Irrespective of the exact formulations of the scenarios, the fact that all scenarios included an attack on Northern Finland was a significant change from Finnish pre-World War II defence plans, which treated the northern parts of the country as militarily insignificant. It was assumed that the Northern Finland component of the invasion would consists of at most 6 or 7 divisions, which would attack along two routes. One force would attack along the route Enontekiö – Muonio – Tornio – Kittilä – Rovaniemi, while another force would attack from the direct north along the route Ivalo – Sodankylä – Rovaniemi – Kemijärvi.
Of the three threat scenarios, option C was considered the most dangerous and formed the basis for defence planning. The planning proceeded based on a division of Finland into five areas of responsibility, with each area's commander being responsible for the local planning and preparations. These were quickly reduced to four by merging the Uusimaa Area of Responsibility and the Southwestern Area of Responsibility into a Southern Area of Responsibility. In an event where contact with higher command was lost, the areas would continue operations on their own.
Continued planning in 1951 expanded the plans for two larger configurations of the Finnish Defence Force. The first of these was a "protective forces" () or "fast deployment forces" configuration of 320,000 men, intended for defence of Finnish borders and the safeguarding of Finnish neutrality. This was followed by a full wartime composition of over 500,000 men.
Overview
was approved on 13 June 1952 as the first complete post-war operations order of the Finnish Army. Sources describe the operations order as both number 8 and number 10. The operations order was kept highly secret and the planning was masked as various training activities. Only 15 copies of the operations order were produced, of which only the three held at the General Headquarters were complete. For example, commanders of military districts were not – at least initially – allowed copies of the order, and instead were limited to reviewing the content in person and only for those parts relevant to their own planning. According to Tynkkynen and Jouko, it would have been normal that of the staff of an infantry brigade, only the commander would have been even aware of the brigade's wartime mission, and that neither the Finnish Ministry of Defence nor even the president of the republic were automatically notified about the plans.
The operations order assumed that fighting could not be contained to border regions in the same way as had been possible in World War II. Thus, all national resources would be required to halt an enemy attack. This was reflected in the division of the country to four areas of responsibility. In doing so, it was the first operations order to embrace the concept of "territorial defence".