Vantage Point North

The only picture taken at Petäjäsaari during Winter War. As a celebration of the #Finland100 I decided to write about a small but personal piece of Finnish history. A few years ago my mother asked me to find out what exactly happened to her uncle Sulo, who had disappeared during the Second World War. She knew that it had happened at the end of the Winter War in 1940, but nothing else. She gave me his full name, rough time of birth and a copy of his last letter. In that letter he wrote that he had just arrived as fresh reinforcement to a new unit. Finnish soldiers overlooking the Lake Ladoga during the Winter War (Sa-kuva) Armed with this information I started to dig some archives and uncovered the date of Sulo's demise, only three days after the last letter was dated. The same source revealed the unit he had served in and the place of his disappearance. Another archive hosted the war diaries of the different Finnish military units, so I dug out the diary of th...