Battle of Ukhta

On 11 September 1918, in White Sea Karelia, about 160 kilometres west of Kem, one of the most important clashes in the fighting for the region in 1918 took place. The Karelian Regiment, raised by the British from local Karelians, attacked Finnish volunteers in the village of Ukhta, today the settlement of Kalevala on Middle Kuito Lake. The British chronology of the war records under this date the capture of “Ukhtinskaya”. This was the British name for Ukhta, taken from the local district, while the Finns called it Uhtua. General Charles Maynard, commander of the Allied forces in the Murmansk area, reported that the Finnish White Guard had suffered a “complete defeat” at Ukhta that day. According to him the village had long been the Finns’ main base in Karelia.

The Finnish volunteers had been in Ukhta since the spring. The detachment of Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Wilhelm Malm, who wanted to join East Karelia to Finland, made an unsuccessful attack on Kem on 10 April, then withdrew to Ukhta and spent the summer there. The local Karelians, however, did not support the Finns in the numbers they had expected, and some of the volunteers went home. In July Malm was replaced by Captain Toivo Kuisma, a former Jäger, who brought a new detachment numbering, according to Finnish historians, about 250 men, mostly very young. Meanwhile the British, who had held Kem since June, began recruiting Karelians. The Karelian Regiment was raised and led in battle by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Woods of the Royal Irish Rifles, an officer from Belfast. His men wore a badge with a green shamrock on an orange field and were called the “Irish Karelians”. At the end of August the regiment set out from Kem up the Kem river. At the same time a second column advanced west from Kandalaksha, made up of Red Finns of the Murmansk Legion and commanded by a Canadian, Major Burton.

Woods’s column advanced along the northern bank of the river and in several small skirmishes pushed the Finns back as far as Ukhta. Finnish historians describe this fighting as a series of raids on isolated outposts. At Jyskyjärvi 18 Finns of a 28-man post were killed, and at Kostomuksha only four of 19 men escaped. According to Finnish authors the Karelians also killed the wounded and prisoners. At Ukhta, as Maynard wrote in his memoirs, a “miniature battle” took place whose outcome long hung in the balance. It was decided by a manoeuvre of the Karelians, who outflanked the Finns across ground thought to be impassable. The village fell to the attackers together with all its stores, including a large quantity of ammunition, many rifles, several trench mortars and machine guns. Maynard wrote that German officers and NCOs were among the dead, although he himself believed that German units had not taken part in the fighting. He called the Karelians’ losses slight. Finnish chronologies of the events of 1918 also record a lost battle of the Finnish volunteers at Ukhta on 11 September.

The picture of the campaign in Finnish sources is, however, more modest than in British ones. Finnish historians put the Karelian Regiment at 300–400 men, while Soviet and Russian studies state that in the second half of August it numbered about 1,200 soldiers, half of them fit for combat. According to Finnish authors Kuisma began to withdraw only at the end of September. His main force gathered at Voknavolok (Finnish Vuokkiniemi) near the border, where it beat off one more Karelian attack, and on 2 October crossed into Finland. Of the roughly 300 men who fought in Kuisma’s detachment, 83 were killed.

Maynard greeted the victory at Ukhta with enormous relief. Through August and the first half of September he had been receiving reports of German preparations on the Finnish border, and even rumours that 6,000 German soldiers were gathering near Ukhta. The general feared that Rüdiger von der Goltz had sent the Finns ahead to clear the way to the Murmansk railway. Now he concluded that Murmansk was safe for at least a few months. At the beginning of October the Karelian Regiment and the legion joined up, and the Finns had to leave almost the whole of White Sea Karelia. The success, however, awakened among the Karelians hopes of self-rule that the British had no intention of fulfilling. Ukhta later became a centre of the Karelian independence movement.