Gustaf Mannerheim – the Greatest Finn of All Time?

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim (1867-1951) was a legendary Finnish

military leader and statesman.

Every nation needs its heroes and myths, the great men and women of the history. We Finns have one great person above all. In 2004, Gustaf Mannerheim was voted the greatest Finnish person of all time in the Great Finns ("Suuret suomalaiset") contest. Who was this man and what did he do? I want to introduce Mr. Mannerheim to my friends around the world. Welcome to the journey to the Finnish history!

Baron Gustaf Mannerheim is a fascinating, even mythical, figure. He served as the military leader of the "Whites" in the Finnish Civil War, the Regent of Finland (1918-1919), the Commander-in-Chief of Finland's Defence Forces during World War II, the Marshal of Finland, and the sixth President of Finland (1944-1946). Besides his mother tongue, Swedish, Mannerheim learned to speak Finnish, Russian, French, German and English. He also spoke Polish and Portuguese and understood some Mandarin Chinese.

Mannerheim was an officer and a gentleman, a soldier and a war hero, a skillful politician and a diplomatic statesman, a patriot, but never a nationalist. In addition to that, he was an adventurous explorer, a warm-hearted supporter of humanitarian causes, a big-game hunter, a well-travelled cosmopolitan and a generous host in his own home. He possessed one quality common to all great men, an immense will-power that carried him through all the difficult times.

I have to say, the more I learn about Mannerheim, the more I respect him. It is fair to say that Mannerheim saved Finland three times: in 1918, in 1940 and in 1944 – always during wartime. Even Stalin respected and admired Marshal Mannerheim. Stalin told a Finnish delegation in Moscow in 1947 that the Finns owe much to their old Marshal. Thanks to Mannerheim, Finland was not occupied.

Mannerheim is a controversial but mostly loved person. Some people (for example communists) hate him and say that he was a fascist and a friend of Adolf Hitler's. That is a treacherous lie. In fact, Mannerheim was a monarchist and he hated Nazism and "the German barbarism". However, during World War II, Finland needed Germany's assistance against the Soviet Union. Germany was Finland's only "ally" or brother-in-arms in that situation, and the Germans also needed Finland when they started their Operation Barbarossa in 1941. It was a "relationship of mutual exploitation".

 
Anastasia Arapova, a Russian wife of Mannerheim.

Anastasie and Sophie, daughters of Anastasia and Mannerheim.

Youth in Russia

Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was born on June 4th 1867 at Askainen in Finland. He served 30 years in the Imperial Russian Army (1887-1917). At the time, from 1809 to 1917, Finland was a nominally autonomous part of the Russian Empire. It was called The Grand Duchy of Finland. Mannerheim received his military training at the Nikolaevski Cavalry School in St. Petersburg.

During the Russian years of Mannerheim, many remarkable things happened to him, including service in various regiments of the Imperial Guards, marriage with a noble Russian lady called Anastasia Arapova (Анастасия Николаевна Арапова) in 1892, participation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, an extended reconnaissance journey across Asia and China on horseback in 1906-1908, and the First World War.

Mannerheim and Anastasia had two daughters, Anastasie and Sophie. Both were born in St. Petersburg, Russia. The third child, a son, was stillborn. This tragedy probably destroyed the marriage once and for all. Mannerheim separated from Anastasia Arapova in 1902, and they divorced in 1919. Mannerheim never married again. Anastasia died in Paris in 1936.

Mannerheim loved Russia but he hated Bolshevism (communism). He said, "the Bolsheviks destroyed the Russia I loved". After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, General Mannerheim returned to Finland.

Mannerheim himself summed up his Russian period in the following words in his memoirs: "...and when I looked back on that time that I had spent in the uniform of the Tsar I had to admit with gratitude that my expectations had been totally fulfilled. I had entered higher circles and enjoyed broader perspectives than I could ever have done in Finland in those last decades of the 19th century. Each stage in my military career had been extremely rewarding, and to cap it all I had had the good fortune to belong to, and even to command, an elite force that had good officers and an excellent esprit de corps [the morale of a group]. The act of leading such troops, in peace and war, had given me the utmost satisfaction. I had seen much that was of interest on two continents." (Otava 1951. Part I, pp. 236-237.)

After the October Revolution in Russia, the Finnish government declared independence on December 6th 1917. The next year, a horrible Civil War broke out in Finland.

Mannerheim at Aksu in China in 1907. He was also an adventurous explorer. His Chinese
name was 马达汉 (Ma Dahan, 'The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds').

 

Mannerheim, the "White General" and the Commander-in-Chief (fourth from the left),

and other officers in Seinäjoki in spring 1918. During the Finnish Civil War, the headquarters

of the White Army operated in Seinäjoki longer than in any other location, for almost two

months. The headquarters were located in a train at Seinäjoki railway station.

 

 Mannerheim in his headquarters (a railway carriage). A lifelike wax figure in the museum.

This is my favorite room in my current workplace. By the way, Mannerheim was a

 tall man, about 194 cm. Photo by Teisuka (November 24, 2013).

White Knight of Finland

The Finnish Civil War was fought between the forces of the Social Democrats led by the People's Deputation of Finland, commonly called the "Reds", and the forces of the non-socialist, conservative-led Senate, commonly called the "Whites". In January 1918, General Mannerheim was appointed supreme commander of the White Guards. The Red Guards refused to recognise the title, and decided to establish a military authority of their own.

General Mannerheim located his headquarters in Vaasa. From Vaasa, the headquarters moved to Seinäjoki, and later further south. It was an ugly and bloody war, as only civil war can be. During the war, the White Army and the Red Guards both perpetrated acts of terror. 37 000 people died. It was a terrible national tragedy for the young nation. Finally, the White Army (the legitimate government forces) won the war in May 1918.

After the Civil War, Mannerheim was the chairman of the National Defence Committee from 1931 until the outbreak of the war, and he was the Regent of Finland in 1919 and the President of Finland from 1944 to 1946. The 1920s was the only era when he was without any public office. In 1920, he founded General Mannerheim's Child Welfare Association, with the aim of improving the health of the nation's children over the social boundaries that had emerged more prominently than ever as a result of the Civil War.

In 1921, Mannerheim also became the chairman of the Finnish Red Cross, a position which he held for the next 30 years. The operations of the organisation that similarly spanned all social boundaries was very close to his heart and he devoted all his energy to it. He was still destined to serve as the supreme commander of the Finnish Armed Forces in two wars with the Soviet Union, the Winter War of 1939-1940, and the Continuation War of 1941-1944.

Mannerheim was the General of the Cavalry, and he

loved horses throughout his life.

 

Mannerheim – the Marshal of Finland.

"With Pure Arms"

Of course, Mannerheim wasn't perfect human and he also made some mistakes. We must still realize that during World War II, he was an old guy already: over 70 years old. At that time, Mannerheim's "right hand" was the Lieutenant General Aksel Airo (1898-1985), a main strategic planner during the Winter War and the Continuation War. Airo was the virtual second-in-command of the Finnish Army under Field Marshal Mannerheim.

One more thing about World War II: The Finnish Army didn't take part in the Siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). It never shot artillery fire at Leningrad nor did it bomb the city. Mannerheim refused the offers of the Germans. Finland didn't even cut supply lines of the city. I think Mannerheim didn't want to participate in the destruction of his former hometown.

Mannerheim's Latin motto was: "Candida pro causa ense candido" (With pure arms for a pure cause). This sums up the ideal towards which he strove in everything that he did.

After leaving Presidency in 1946, Mannerheim spent his last years in quiet retirement, the summers in Finland and the winters in Switzerland. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland, on January 28th 1951, at the age of 83. He was buried with full honors in Helsinki, Finland, on February 4th.

Innumerable books have been written about Mannerheim. If you want to read one good book, I recommend the book called Mannerheim by  J. E. O. Screen (2000). Screen was a British historian who had an objective attitude towards Mannerheim.

Teisuka
museum assistant


References

• Mannerheim, Muistelmat [Memoirs] (1951)
• Pekka Nieminen, Päämaja Seinäjoella 1918 [The Headquarters in Seinäjoki in 1918] (2013)
• J. E. O. Screen, Mannerheim (2000)
• Paavo Suoninen, Mannerheim – suurin suomalainen [Mannerheim – the Greatest Finn] (2007)
• The Mannerheim Museum Website, The Marshal of Finland
• Леонид Власов, «Маннергейм в Санкт-Петербург 1887-1904» [Leonid Vlasov, Mannerheim in Saint Petersburg 1887-1904] (1994)
• Wikipedia articles (Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, The Finnish Civil War, The Continuation War, The Winter War, etc.)

The Soviet propaganda poster from 1940. This poster claims

that Mannerheim is a murderer, an executioner of the working
class, a minion of the "Bloody Nicholas" (Russian Tsar)  and
so on. Not so nice nicknames, but the communists hated

Mannerheim – and he hated communism.

The White General covered in snow. The world's first "not-abstract"
Mannerheim statue is in Seinäjoki. The statue is designed by Lauri
Leppänen, unveiled in 1955. Photo by Teisuka (November 24, 2013).