The Russians wanted a presence on the sea coast and had expected to drive through Finland with ease. The Finns were resisting heroically and managing to hold the Russians, preventing them from penetrating far into their homeland. There was enormous sympathy and support in Britain for the tiny Finnish nation bravely defying the huge bullying Russian army. This then was the obvious place for us to go, and nobody doubted that we would end up there.
In war time everything seems to be done in secret and the negotiations with the Finns were no exception. It took a long time but eventually all was agreed. I was chosen to go and we were split up into sections. The first party left on 18th January 1940 but I was part of the second section. We set off from London on 19th February having been supplied with uniform by the British Red Cross. We drove our ten ambulances and support vehicles to Newcastle, but the activity in the North Sea delayed our departure until 6th March. Eventually we arrived at a small town in East Central Finland called Liperi. Soon afterwards we learnt that the Finns had negotiated an uneasy peace. They had ceded large areas of land in the East to the Russians. The Finns were devastated because they had been winning hands down, but their leader General Mannerheim, knew that without fuel oil they were bound to lose in the end. ( All their supplies came from Russia) . The area to be given up was an enormous tract of land, as seen on the map. However it was very sparsely inhabited and was largely unproductive tundra. We were told that all the inhabitants of the widely dispersed settlements had opted to return to the West and so remain in Finland. It was to be our job to transport them.
That sounds very simple but it was not quite so straight-forward. One difficulty arose because of the lack of communications in 1940. There were virtually no telephones in the North Eastern areas, and no radio. Many of the Russian units were quite unaware that the war was over which caused problems! Some of the isolated settlements which we were to evacuate to the West first heard the news of peace and its provisions from us. Naturally they were shocked and very reluctant to leave.
The Finns had appreciated that someone with authority and able to speak English should accompany each small convoy of vehicles.
On my first trip, to a tiny settlement requiring only one vehicle, I was very fortunate to have a Lieutenant of about my own age who, until called up, had been a seaman on a British vessel. I felt very naīve and inexperienced compared with his cosmopolitan poise. Also being a sailor, he could navigate, a very necessary skill when travelling over tundra. The flat featureless and snow-covered landscape gave no clue to the whereabouts of the road. There had been posts at regular intervals but they had been removed to make things more difficult for the Russians.
The lieutenant and I got on very well. He could not drive, never having had the need to do so, so I just carried on getting very tired in the process. We had about 200 miles to go which does not seem very far, but the conditions were such that any lack of concentration resulted in near disaster. The compass was in constant use and we were both getting rather anxious about our navigation when the Lieutenant suddenly pointed ahead. A thin column of smoke was rising in the frosty air in the distance.
I stopped the ambulance and we solemnly shook hands. He confessed that had we not found the settlement we should have been in real trouble.
When we got to the three houses that comprised the village I went straight to sleep. I was shaken awake some hours later and told all was ready for the return journey and the petrol tank was full again. I cannot remember how many people were on board but it was certainly very crowded. I got the impression that, although sad to leave, the people, nearly all women, were glad and relieved that their country was looking after them, and taking them back to what they thought of as 'home'.
When we arrived at the town that was our destination for delivery of our passengers I saw for the first time what total war meant to a small nation like Finland. Every single person had a job to do in furtherance of the war effort. The 'town' was more like a large village. The mayor, a lady of some education, made two speeches. First to the Lieutenant and I which when translated caused some embarrassment since you might have thought that we had defeated the Russians single-handed. The second speech was to the new arrivals, and even in translation it came across as a very warm welcome. We then saw the effects of really good organisation. We were ushered to the warm relaxation of a sauna, while our clothes were taken away for washing, mending and even buttons were found that more or less matched. Then followed excellent food, in spite of the fact that it was made of the same ingredients supplied by the army ever since we had arrived. Frozen balls of reindeer meat day after day, week after week had reduced us to screaming point. However no-one expected a beleaguered army to do any better. The army must have suspected a certain apathy in our reception of those frozen sacks because one day they produced frozen fish balls. These were so awful that we begged to return to reindeer meat. How the lady mayor managed to produce such a meal from the same ingredients remains a mystery. Even the Lieutenant said that he did not think there was anyone in Finland who could cook reindeer like that.
Before we drove off the next day we were asked to attend a small ceremony. It was, to our astonishment, a christening. On the previous day we had been asked to stop for a while because one of our women passengers was 'not well'. We should have guessed then that she was giving birth because I had been asked to provide rather a lot of hot water. It was not questioned at the time as we were within an hour or two of the end of our journey and the water could be spared.
The real clincher came when the Lieutenant asked for my Christian name because the child, a boy, was to be named after the two of us!
Over the next few weeks we made several similar trips to evacuate those living in the ceded territories. Several of them were far beyond the Artic Circle. It was on one of those journeys, as it happened on my birthday, that we were surprised to receive letters from home. The Finns were very good at understanding how important small things like letters can be and had sent a motorcycle dispatch rider to catch us up. One of my letters was a formal advice from the Midland Bank informing me that I had been absent without leave for over six months, and was sacked. My reaction is not hard to imagine! However, I should record that after my service with the Free French, when I returned to England severely wounded, wearing several medal ribbons, the Bank graciously reversed it's decision. They sent a high official to visit me in hospital, who came as near as banks do to admitting a mistake.
It soon became clear that the evacuation work was virtually finished. The question whether we should stay or return home was settled when, early in April, news came of the German invasion of Norway. This presented us with a dilemma. Some of the party decided to stay, but twenty five of us took the decision to cross Sweden again and try to get through the mountain passes into north Norway. Our aim was to join the British, French and Norwegian army units who were trying to halt the German "Blitzkrieg" which was rapidly moving northward.
The Finns saw the importance of speed but they had no petrol for us, instead they offered a train! It consisted of an ancient wood-burning locomotive of Russian origin, one passenger coach complete with samovar, and sufficient flat trucks for our vehicles. The line we would have to take to get to the Swedish border passed, in several places, through the newly ceded territory. The whole train was so old we doubted if it would ever get there. The maximum speed we managed to achieve was just over walking pace. Fortunately, Finland is almost universally flat and so the question of going uphill never arose. Several of us were able to add engine-driving to the other skills we learnt in Scandinavia, and we did finally puff into the border town of Tornio once again. Judging by the astonished and rapturous reception we received no-one had expected to see us ever again.
The Swedes passed us through to the Norwegian border as fast as they could because they were fearful for their neutrality. The Norwegians were welcoming and reported that it was far too early for the pass over the mountains to be open, but that they were working on it. It was before the days of bulldozers but there were, of course, snowploughs. The picture shows how they did in the end get us all through, but within hours the route was impassable again. There would be no going back, and so began our experience in another theatre of war.