Landing at Pechenga

On 3 May 1918 the British armoured cruiser Cochrane entered the bay at the mouth of the Pechenga river, by the settlement of Pechenga (Finnish: Petsamo), in the westernmost corner of the Russian Arctic coast, right by the border with Norway. Men of the Royal Marines, sailors from the ship and Russian Red Guards brought from Murmansk went ashore. They were to defend the settlement against a detachment of Finnish volunteers which had for several days been crossing the tundra on skis to annex Pechenga to Finland. The British chronology of the war records the landing of marines at Pechenga only under 4 June 1918, but the British official history of the war at sea and Finnish sources agree that the landing took place as early as 3 May, and that the clashes came the following week. By June only a permanent garrison from Cochrane remained at Pechenga.

The dispute over Petsamo

Pechenga was a small fishing settlement with an Orthodox monastery founded in the 16th century by the monk Tryphon. Its bay did not freeze, and, as the British naval historian Henry Newbolt wrote, it was only an hour’s sailing across the Varangerfjord from the Norwegian port of Vardø. The British wanted to assemble here the escorts of convoys sailing from Vardø to Archangel, and above all to prevent the Germans from setting up a submarine base in the bay. The Finns had long sought access to the Arctic Ocean. As recently as 1 March, Lenin’s government had promised Petsamo to the Finnish Reds, but they were just then losing the civil war against the Whites, who were supported by the Germans, who in April had landed in Finland.

With the consent of the Finnish Senate, a volunteer expedition set out from northern Finland, numbering according to Finnish historians about 150–200 people, including a few women. It was led by two doctors, Thorsten Renvall and Onni Laitinen. Equipment and ammunition were hauled by reindeer, driven by hired Lapps. At the end of April the volunteers crossed the border. The population abandoned their villages ahead of them, and in one of them the volunteers shot a fleeing inhabitant.

The landing

On 3 May the Murmansk soviet learned that an armed detachment of Finnish Whites was heading towards Pechenga. At its request the British Rear-Admiral Thomas Kemp sent Cochrane (Captain J. U. Farie) there with a detachment of Russian Red Guards on board. According to Newbolt, the ship landed the Russians and a detachment of marines the same day, and, with the consent of the local soviet, also 144 sailors under Commander John W. Scott, who took charge of the defence of the settlement. Finnish historians write of about 150 British under Captain Brown, who occupied the barracks by the monastery, and of about 40 Russian sailors from the cruiser Askold. They were joined by Finnish Red Guards who had fled abroad after their defeat in the civil war. The British thus fought side by side with the Reds, at the invitation of the Soviet authorities, against allies of Germany.

The Finns repulsed

The Finns appeared only around 10 May. British patrols, floundering through deep snow, could not keep up with the skiers and twice had to fall back. On 12 May (according to some sources 11 May) the volunteers attacked the villages on the bay, but were repulsed, with Cochrane supporting the defenders with its fire. Losses were small, though the sources give them differently: by their own figures the Finns lost two killed (the British reported ten killed and four missing), and on the defenders’ side one man was killed, according to Newbolt a Russian border guard. Captain Brown was seriously wounded. The expedition, beset by hunger, sickness and quarrels among its leaders, fell back more than 60 kilometres within a day. The last volunteers, who held a post near the Norwegian border, were forced by hunger to surrender to the Norwegians at the beginning of June.

The Finnish Senate later protested in London that the British navy had prevented the Finns by force from occupying land which, according to Helsinki, belonged to Finland. The British replied that they were not prejudging the matter, but that as long as the Germans threatened Murmansk they would not give up Pechenga. The clashes at Pechenga were the first fighting by British soldiers in northern Russia. Pechenga eventually went to Finland under the peace treaty with Soviet Russia in 1920.