Foreign war volunteering is a recurring phenomenon across conflicts in the modern period, even if it has been often overshadowed by national mass mobilization. Foreign volunteers seem to appear most frequently in civil wars and similar conflicts, most famously the Spanish Civil War and the various conflicts in former Yugoslavia after its collapse, as well as the on-going multi-faction war in Syria and the Russian-sponsored uprising in Ukraine which has now led to a full-scale war, the kind Europe has not seen since 1945. It is rarer for volunteers to join a war between two fully functional independent states.
This is why Finland’s transnational recruits during the Second World War make for such an interesting and compelling research topic. At the time, albeit young, Finland was a fully functioning country with its own armed forces, diplomatic service, and civil and military bureaucracy. To make matters more complicated, Finland fought three separate wars during the 1939-1945 period, two of which included foreign volunteers.
Some volunteers came to Finland on their own while others had their travel arranged for them. Yet others were recruited by the Finns, while some were encouraged to join the conflict by their governments at home. Individuals, small groups, and entire military units arrived in Finland, some fully equipped, while many only had the clothes on their back. Several hundred were former Red Army soldiers, switching allegiance in the middle of the conflict, becoming transnational recruits.
Finnish bureaucracy was taken by surprise by the volume of volunteers and struggled to cope with them during a war. Despite mistakes and setbacks, the recruitment, training and organization of volunteers improved through the time period and, while most volunteers were not militarily useful, by the end of the Continuation War, the remaining foreign units had performed just as well as any Finnish unit had.
Between the Winter War and the Continuation War, as well as after the latter, the Finnish state took care of the volunteers, trying to repatriate them back home, or alternatively finding them livelihoods, and paying pensions to disabled veterans and widows, as hundreds of foreigners had paid the ultimate price for a country, they had not been born in.
Ultimately the volunteers’ main impact was in propaganda and morale, proving that Finland was not alone facing the Soviet Union. Finnish political and military leadership preferred not to use them as cannon fodder, and they were mostly kept either away from the frontlines or at quiet parts which saw little action in the hope that their presence would keep Western powers – especially the United Kingdom – interested on Finland. After the war, their memory waned as the focus of war memorialization fixated on the national effort and, only relatively recently, has studies emerged looking at the separate groups. This thesis is the first to look at them all from the perspective of the host nation as previous studies have either focused on a single group or just one of the conflicts, and the aims and troubles of the host nation have largely been ignored.
