"When we heard that peace had come..."

Son of Corporal Vilho Leinonen got a name only after his father came home

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By Matti Huuskonen
     
      The place is the Lasipalatsi restaurant in Helsinki, March 2005. In front of me sits Pekka Leinonen, 63, a teacher from Espoo, a man who should actually not exist.
      Leinonen places a letter on the table. It was written by his father Vilho Leinonen on March 13, 1940, the day that the Winter War ended.
      When we heard the news came that there was peace, but not what the conditions were, I said that we'll have a son... ... but now it looks like we won't do that. As long as the border runs where it has been put.
      The country has been torn apart.
      The determination expressed in the letter did not hold. In the early autumn of 1940, during the interim peace, the family's second child is conceived.
     
Corporal Vilho Leinonen left his home in Suojärvi on October 7th, 1939. His unit gathered at the Suvilahti school near what was then the border.
      It is there that the men of Suojärvi and Salmi are organised into the Separate Battalion 10. Leinonen is assigned to its machine gun company.
      In October and November the company builds fortifications along the border. Leinonen writes every other day to Central Finland, where his wife Helga and their six-month old daughter Marja-Liisa have been evacuated.
     
The log book of the machine gun company comes alive on November 28th. The number-one squad is ordered out to near the national border.
      Two days earlier the Red Army fired on its own territory on the Karelian Isthmus. Shells rained down on the village of Mainila, and a diplomatic note was sent to Finland.
      On November the 30th Soviet forces cross the border.
      "The melee began", reads the company's war journal.
     
In the first days of the war Finland and Leinonen were in retreat.
      In less than a week the Red Army reaches Tolvajärvi and threatens a junction which would open the way to Kollaa, and as war is a domino game, it would also have led the way to the rear of the Finnish forces on the Isthmus.
      The military command decides on December 5th to stop the game in its tracks. Command of the Tolvajärvi-Ilomantsi forces is given to Colonel Paavo Talvela. The first thing that he does is to send Lieutenant-Colonel Aaro Pajari to Tolvajärvi.
      Under Pajari's command, Leinonen also goes on the offensive.
      The Finns achieve their first major victory on December 12th, when Pajari's men take back the Tolvajärvi travellers' hostel.
      Talvela and Pajari push their forces back to the municipality of Suojärvi by the new year. The front is stabilised at Aittojoki.
      The machine gun company gets to take a sauna, which Vilho Leinonen says was needed.
      We all look like forest bandits, and there would seem to be some animals smaller than squirrels under my shirt, he writes to his beloved Helga on January 5th, 1940.
     
After being promoted to the rank of undersergeant, Leinonen is discharged in May. He steps off the train in Jyväskylä, and immediately recognises his sister, Sirkka Järvinen, who is pushing a pram with his little girl Marja-Liisa.
      "Daddy's sunshine!" Järvinen recalls from more than 60 years back how the child rose toward the sky in the soldier's hands.
      On July 14th, 1941 a son is born. Three days later his father goes back to fight the Continuation War.
     
No leaves are granted, and the boy's christening is postponed.
      Leinonen writes his last message on October 2nd, from Vuohtjärvi in East Karelia: P. has been taken. P - the city of Petrozavodsk, which Finnish forces occupied the previous day.
      In Jyväskylä Vilho Leinonen's father Pekka, and Vilho's sister Sirkka open the white coffin."
      "It is our Vilho, and he fulfilled everything to the letter", Sirkka Järvinen remembers the words that were spoken by the casket.
      Father had come back, and his son was christened.
      In March 2005 at the Lasipalatsi restaurant in Helsinki Vilho Pekka Juhani Leinonen, 63, places a notebook pierced by a bullet onto the table.
      Underneath its cover there is a funeral notice, listing the bereaved: Helga, Marja-Liisa, and the little boy.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.3.2005

More on this subject:
 Collapse was imminent within days
 FACTFILE: A severe peace

MATTI HUUSKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
matti.huuskonen@hs.fi