On This Day: Russians invade ill-prepared Sweden to take Finland - Feb. 21, 1808
(edited from Wikipedia)
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Finnish War
The Finnish War was fought between the Kingdom of Sweden and the Russian Empire from 21 February 1808 to 17 September 1809 as part of the Napoleonic Wars. As a result of the war, the eastern third of Sweden was established as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire. Other notable effects were the Swedish parliament's adoption of a new constitution and the establishment of the House of Bernadotte, the new Swedish royal house, in 1818.
[War starts]
On February 21, 1808, 24,000 Russian troops crossed the border in Ahvenkoski and took the town of Lovisa.
The Russian advance was swift. On the first day of the war they besieged the Swedish sea fortress of Svartholm. Borgå was captured on 24 February and Helsingfors on 2 March. Abandoned Swedish fortifications on the Hangö Peninsula were taken and manned on 21 March and on the same day the Russian army took Åbo while a small detachment was sent to Åland. Before the end of March 1808 even Vasa was taken. In Savolax, Russians also advanced rapidly and took Kuopio on 16 March. Swedish forces had mostly just withdrawn before the advancing Russian often destroying usable materials. For example, the Swedish archipelago fleet's ships that been docked in Åbo (nearly 50 gun sloops) were torched to prevent their capture.
[War continues]
Date - 21 February 1808 – 17 September 1809 (1 year, 6 months, 3 weeks and 6 days)
Location- Finland and Sweden
Result - Russian victory
Territorial changes - Sweden loses Finland, Åland, a part of Lapland and a part of West Bothnia, from which the Grand Duchy of Finland was constituted, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire.
Background
After the Russian Emperor Alexander I concluded the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit with Napoleon, Alexander, in his letter on 24 September 1807 to the Swedish King Gustav IV Adolf, informed the king that the peaceful relations between Russia and Sweden depended on Swedish agreement to abide by the limitations of the Treaty of Tilsit which in practice meant that Sweden would have been required to follow the Continental System.
[Britain as ally]
The [Swedish] king, who viewed Napoleon as the Antichrist and Britain as his ally against Napoleon's France, was apprehensive of the [Continental] system's ruinous consequences for Sweden's maritime commerce. He instead entered into negotiations with Britain in order to prepare a joint attack against Denmark, whose Norwegian possessions he coveted.
In the meantime, the Royal Navy attacked Copenhagen and the Anglo-Russian War (1807–1812) was declared. Referring to the treaties of 1780 and 1800, the emperor demanded that Gustav Adolf close the Baltic Sea to all foreign warships. Although he reiterated his demand on November 16, 1807, it took two months before the king responded that it was impossible to honor the previous arrangements as long as the French were in control of the major Baltic ports. King Gustav Adolf did this after securing an alliance with Britain on 8 February 1808. Meanwhile, on 30 December 1807 Russia announced that should Sweden not give a clear reply Russia would be forced to act.
Although most Swedish officers were sceptical about their chances in fighting the larger and more experienced Imperial Russian Army, Gustav Adolf had an unrealistic view of Sweden's ability to defend itself against Russia. In Saint Petersburg, his stubbornness was viewed as a convenient pretext for Russia to occupy Finland, thus pushing the Russo-Swedish frontier considerably to the west of the Russian capital and safeguarding it in case of any future hostilities between the two powers.
[Competing Swedish plans]
The situation was problematic for Sweden, since it once again faced both Denmark and Russia as potential enemies requiring the Swedes to split their forces. The king had thought it impossible to defend Finland should the enemy attack during the winter and chose largely to ignore the repeated warnings of the Russian threat he received in early 1808. Most of the Swedish plans assumed that warfare would be impossible during winter, disregarding the lessons from recent wars. In addition, several new good roads had been built into Finland greatly reducing the earlier dependency on naval support for any large operation in Finland.
The Swedish plan was to first passively defend and hold on to the fortifications in the southern coast of Finland, in which Sweden had strong garrisons, while the rest of the Swedish Army retreated to the north. Then in the spring, counterattack simultaneously from north and south, when the Swedish army would have naval support and the Russian army would be spread over Finland and thus have long supply lines. The basic reason for the plan was to avoid major decisive battles.
Some advocates existed for taking a more active approach immediately, namely Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Möller, who advocated for taking an immediate offensive and Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt who supported actively delaying the advancing enemies in co-operation with the garrisons in the southern coast.
In the end, instructions which the new Swedish commander in Finland, General Wilhelm Mauritz Klingspor, received from the king were an unsuccessful and open-ended mixture of ideas from these very different plans.
[Russian spies key part of victory]
Russia had gathered a wealth of information from Finland using spies and other sources. The level of detail was so great that Russian maps of Finland were in many respects more accurate than their Swedish counterparts. The Russians used the services of General Georg Magnus Sprengtporten when forming their plans. Sprengtporten suggested going on to an offensive during the winter since Finland would be mostly isolated when seas were frozen. His ideas were further developed by General Jan Pieter van Suchtelen before General Friedrich Wilhelm von Buxhoeveden was appointed as the commander of the Russian army in Finland in December 1807.
The plan involved using the series of fortifications built after 1790 as staging grounds for the Russian advances into Finland. In southern Finland, armies were to isolate the fortifications and first take control of the whole of southern Finland before advancing further to the north. Forces in Savolax were to press hard against the Swedes and reach the Gulf of Bothnia towards Uleåborg and Vasa to cut off the retreat of the main body of the Swedish army.
[Final Russian victory]
A British Royal Navy fleet under Admiral James Saumarez had arrived in Sweden in May and he concentrated his ships, 10 ship of the line and 17 smaller ships, to the Gulf of Finland. The presence of the British naval units kept the Russian battlefleet strictly confined to Kronstadt, and after the British constructed artillery batteries to the Porkkala cape they cut off the coastal sea route from Russian ships. Total British control of the Gulf of Finland was a large obstacle to the Russian supply network and required sizable garrisons to be posted all along the Finnish coast. The Royal Navy captured 35 Russian ships and burnt 20 others before leaving the Baltic Sea on 28 September 1809.
In August, Charles XIII, anxious to improve his position at a peace settlement, ordered General Gustav Wachtmeister to land in the north of Sweden and to attack Kamensky's rear. Engagements at Sävar and Ratan proved inconclusive and Kamensky succeeded in neutralizing this belated counter-offensive, following up with a final victory over the Swedes at Piteå.
[Peace negotiations]
Wachtmeister's action was only a prelude to the peace negotiations that opened in August and resulted in the Treaty of Fredrikshamn, in which Sweden ceded the whole of Finland and all of its domains east of the Torne river to Russia. Sweden then joined the Continental System and closed its harbours to British ships, leading to a formal declaration of war on Great Britain. A few months later, on 6 January 1810, the Russian government mediated the Treaty of Paris between Sweden and France.
Russia would create the Grand Duchy of Finland from the territory obtained from Sweden, and would attach the areas gained from Sweden in the 18th century (so-called Old Finland) to the new Grand Duchy in 1812. The Grand Duchy of Finland was to retain the Gustavian constitution of 1772 with only slight modifications until 1919. Almost all Finnish soldiers in Sweden (most of them in the Umeå area) were repatriated after the war.
Analysis
Sufficient stocks of supplies had not been prepared for the Swedish army, since King Gustaf IV Adolf thought it might be taken as provocative by the Russians. Furthermore, Swedish strategy relied on the outdated plans for Finland which took into account neither the advances in weaponry, mobility of the armed forces or the greatly improved road networks of Finland. Most of the fortifications in Finland had not been completed and those that were completed had mostly fallen into neglect and disrepair. Even the strongest of the Swedish fortresses, Sveaborg, still had several of its planned fortifications missing, most notably all the land side fortifications designed to protect against a besieging enemy.
In 1808 a British expeditionary force under John Moore arrived in Sweden, but after months of idleness departed for the beginning of the Peninsular War. Had the king accepted the landing of 10,000 British troops in Skåne, where the expeditionary force had been authorized to disembark, it would have enabled the Swedes to release at least 10,000 trained soldiers for the Finnish War. As it happened, the bulk of the Swedish army, including the best units, were kept out of the Finnish War by the king, who reserved them for his plans for conquering either Sjælland or Norway. Swedish landings were invariably made with poorly equipped and trained forces, often with troops who had very low morale. Landings were further complicated by the Swedish Navy's failure to tightly block the coastal sea route past Hangö.
Legacy [and Swedish reforms]
According to two 2015 studies by political scientists Jan Teorell and Bo Rothstein, Sweden's loss in the Finnish War led to reforms of the Swedish bureaucracy. Prior to 1809, Sweden had a reputation as one of Europe's most corrupt countries, but the loss in the war created the perception of an existential threat in the east for Sweden and motivated Swedish elites to reform its bureaucracy. The motivation behind the reforms were to make the Swedish state more effective and functional, and thus protect against the existential threat in the East.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_War
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