laststandonzombieisland

Here we see, some 85 years ago this month, a Finnish dragoon (Rakuuna) on horseback, 12th of September 1941, near Tsalkki-Suojärvi on the Russo-Finnish border during the Continuation War between the two countries, which saw Finland allied with Germany.

The above dragoon was likely from Finland’s oldest cavalry regiment, the Nyland Regiment of Dragoons, or the Uudenmaan rakuunarykmentti (URR).

While you wouldn’t think of Finland, with its dense forests, rugged coastline, and frozen north, as good cavalry country, the country has a horse soldier tradition going back over 400 years.

Finns under the Swedish Crown

The Swedes formed the Uusimaa Riders (Nylands ryttare), along with the Viborg (Viborgs läns kavalleriregemente), and Karelian Cavalry Regiments (Karelska kavalleriregementet) as far back as 1618, when Karelia (the region north of what is now St. Petersburg around the White Sea and Lakes Ladoga and Onega) and Finland were firmly under the Swedish crown.

These rugged light horsemen in blue and yellow uniforms fought throughout the Ingrian War and Thirty Years War then later morphed into the Uusimaa and Hämeenlinna Dragoon Regiment (Nylands och Tavastehus läns dragonregemente) and the Karelian Dragoon Corps (Karelska dragonkåren) in 1721-1724 for another 80 years of tough service against the Russians, Sweden’s traditional enemy from 1475 onwards (the two countries fought each other something like 15 times between 1475 and 1809, periods always bracketed by uneasy peaces and a frontier filled with breaches, smugglers, and bandits).

These storied units were all disbanded in 1809 after the territories were lost to Tsar Alexander I.

Russia’s ‘Finnish’ Dragoon lineage

Going back to 1806, even before the country was a Grand Duchy of Russia, ceded to the latter as a prize of war in 1809 by the Swedes, the “Finnish Dragoon Regiment” was established in Vitebsk– some 400 miles south of anything that can be considered Finland, likely without a single officer or dragoon who spoke Finnish.

Made from a squadron drawn from five other Russian line cavalry regiments, it was soon fighting the French (1807), then the Swedes (1808), then the French again (1812-14), then the Poles (1830s) and the French one more time (in the Crimea at the Black River) before renamed as the 13th Dragoon Regiment (Field Marshal Count Minich’s) in 1860.

The next Finnish Dragoon Regiment was actually raised in Finland in 1889 in the Karelian town of Villmanstrand (now Lappeenranta), with its first colonel the Helsinki-born Oskar Theodor Schauman (the latter a figure in the Finnish military after the country gained independence in 1918).

Short-lived, it was disbanded in 1901 due to pro-Russian reforms that included getting rid of such “nationalist” units, and Colonel Schauman was cashiered and took an appointment in a local fire brigade.

The third Finnish dragoon regiment, established in 1901, was dubbed the 20th (20-i Dragunskii Finlyandskii polk) and based in the same barracks as the old, but make no mistake, it was an all-Russian unit, formed from platoons drawn from 25 line cavalry regiments.

Its commander was also Russian, Col. Alexander Antonovich Grigorkov.

Among its future commanders over the next two decades were the future German puppet leader of Ukraine in 1918 (Pavel Skoropadsky), the general who compiled the most detailed records of the Russian Army in the Great War while in exile in Paris (Nikolai Golovin), the Georgian Prince Melikov, Reznikov Dmitry Pavlovich, who was killed as a major general with the Whites during the Civil War in 1919, and Swedish-born Petr Viktorovich Engelhardt, who was dismissed from the Army after the revolution and settled in Finland as a horse trainer.

Part of the Russian XX Army Corps in 1914, the 20th Finnish Dragoons, known as “The Black Dragoons,” rode off to fight the Germans and Austrians and never came back.

Their final colonel, 40-year-old Prince Vladimir Nikolaevich Gagarin, disbanded his regiment on 21 April 1918 and led his 140 remaining counter-revolutionary officers and men south, where they joined the Whites. Gagarin died in Paris in exile in 1948.

By that time, the Finns had already founded and sent to war two full-fledged native dragoon regiments of their own.

The URR and the KRjR/HRR

The flower of free Finland’s cavalry organizations in 1917 was being cultivated at the Saksanniemi police school, where a mounted gendarme unit, under former Finnish Dragoon riding master (master kavalerii) Gaston Ahrenberg, was being trained.

Once the brief Finnish Civil War kicked off in February 1918, Ahrenberg became major and eventually colonel of a new force built around his 70 mounted police cadets, augmented by Finns of the Tsar’s old army who had riding experience. It became the Uusimaa Dragoon Regiment (Uudenmaan Rakuunarykmentti).

A second regiment, the Karelian Cavalry Regiment (Karjalan ratsujääkärirykmentti, KRjR), was founded in Joensuu in March 1918 by the Jaeger Rittmeister Sven Weckström and 23 fellow Jaeger dispatch rider (Melderreiter), trained officers and NCOs who had served in German service during the Great War.

Interwar

Both units covered themselves with glory during the Finnish Civil War, with the KRjR who established its depot in Hämeenlinna and being renamed the Hämeen ratsurykmentti (HRR) in March 1919.

Forming the Ratsuväkiprikaati (Cavalry Brigade), the URR and HRR were an elite branch of the cash-strapped Finnish military over the interwar years. They turned out well at parades and as honor guards for important events and regularly sent officers to represent the country at the Olympics.

One officer, Oskar Wilkman (Vilkama), had ridden with the Russian pentathlon team (which included Rasputin assassin Grand Duke Dmitri) in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics against American Lt. George S. Patton, then rode for the Finns in the 1920 Antwerp games at which point he was the regimental colonel of the URR.

Formed as battalion-sized three-squadron regiments with an anti-tank troop in support and the bicycle-mounted 1st Jaeger Battalion as mobile reserve, the entire brigade in 1939 on paper numbered just 4,238 officers and men at war strength- including the regimental bands as well as the staff and cadets of the Finnish Army Cavalry School!

Even at that, the stables across the entire Finnish military only had 4,700 horses on hand, including breeding stock, against a need to mobilize 50,000 for the war for transport, support, and dispatch rider purposes.

Nonetheless, from the Winter War (Nov. 1939-March 1940) through the Continuation War (June 1941-Sept. 1944) against the Soviets and then the tail-end of WWII against the Germans, the Finnish cavalrymen carried on the fight and acquitted themselves well.

The brigade was commanded during the war by BG Harry Uno Alfthan, a graduate of the old Nicholas Cavalry School and late of the Tsar’s 6th (Grand Duke Ernst-Ludwig of Hesse’s) Klyastitsy Hussar Regiment during the Great War.

After 1942, the cavalrymen were typically dismounted due to the static trench warfare nature of the Finnish Vyborg front facing besieged Leningrad.

The HRR was disbanded in November 1944 but was rebooted in 1986, its lineage used by the Lahti-based Hämeen rykmentti (HämR) training regiment until 2014.

Meanwhile, the URR kept its horses until 1 March 1947 when, laying a bouquet of tulips on the cavalry brigade’s war memorial, the final mounted detachment was disbanded. The URR endured as an infantry unit with a dragoon name through 1989.

Even after it gave up its horses, a former URR colonel, Adolf Ehrnrooth, represented Finland in the equestrian events at the 1948 Olympics in London at age 43.