Whites take Tampere

At half past eight in the morning on 6 April 1918 a white flag was hoisted on the observation tower in Pyynikki park, on the western edge of Tampere. The last Red Guards, pushed back into the suburbs of Pyynikki and Pispala, surrendered. Thus ended the Battle of Tampere, the largest and bloodiest battle of the Finnish Civil War. Tampere, the country’s third-largest city and its most important industrial centre, was regarded as the capital of the Finnish labour movement and since the end of January had been the main base of the Red Guard on the northern front.

The Whites of General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim advanced on the city in mid-March (Finnish and English accounts give 15 or 16 March), broke the Red front in the north and on 23 March stood before Tampere. By 26 March they had closed the ring of the siege. On the White side about 16,000–17,000 men fought, among them conscripts led by Jägers trained in Germany, and about 400 Swedish volunteers of the Swedish Brigade. The city was defended by about 14,000–15,000 Reds, men and women. On 28 March, Maundy Thursday, the Whites stormed the Kalevankangas cemetery and the eastern suburbs. They lost more than two hundred killed and did not get into the city. That same day the commander of the defence, Hugo Salmela, was killed by the accidental explosion of a grenade at headquarters.

The decisive assault began at half past two in the morning on 3 April. The Whites fought for every house in the working-class districts of Tammela and Kyttälä, already wrecked by artillery fire, and reached the rushing Tammerkoski rapids, which divide the city. On 4 April they crossed the bridges to the western bank, and on 5 April they took the rest of the city centre. The last point of resistance was the town hall, which surrendered at about half past five in the evening. In the evening some of the Reds, among them the commander of the defence, Verner Lehtimäki, escaped across the ice of lakes Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi. The civilian population hid in cellars and churches. In the cathedral alone about 1,700 people took shelter.

Estimates of the losses still vary today. According to Finnish researchers, between 600 and more than 800 Whites and between 600 and about a thousand Reds were killed in the fighting. About 11,000 Reds were taken prisoner; they were held for more than a day in the market square and then shut up in a camp at Kalevankangas. Immediately after the capitulation the Whites began to shoot prisoners: those identified as leaders, some ordinary Red Guards and almost all the Russians caught in the city. Estimates of the victims of the executions range from several hundred to about a thousand. By the autumn more than 1,200 prisoners had died in the camp of hunger, disease and in executions.

The capture of Tampere was the turning point of the war. The Reds lost their best units and supplies, and the Whites could turn their forces east, towards the Karelian Isthmus. Three days earlier the Germans had landed at Hanko, so Red Finland now had to fight on two fronts. A few days later the revolutionary government left Helsinki and moved to Vyborg. White propaganda made the battle a symbol of the “War of Liberation”, while for working-class Tampere its bloody end remained for generations one of the most painful wounds.