Word: vaasa
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...since March. A Red Guard had sprung up in support of the Social Democrat Party, which had just lost its majority in the Diet. A White Guard was also being organized around officers of the old Imperial Army, had succeeded in getting arms & ammunition smuggled into the port of Vaasa, on the Gulf of Bothnia. Mannerheim went to Vaasa. Late in January the Social Democrats seized the government, proclaimed Finland a Socialist Workers Republic. Instead of the coup d'état they had planned, they got a civil war. A few White members of the Senate escaped from Helsinki...
...since the first terroristic raids of the war. More than 300 bombers, flying high, raided almost every important city of southern Finland, including Helsinki (where the house of U. S. Minister H. F. Arthur Schoenfeld was struck), concentrating on the Turku-Helsinki railroad and the Bothnian railroad terminus of Vaasa. Civilian casualties were small (not more than 15), but many business structures in the smaller cities were in flames, due to inadequate fire-fighting equipment. The planes went as far north as the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, bombed the Swedish island of Kallaks, near Lulea, thereby...
...lights, pocked the airport and factory section, wrecked the new Technical Institute, but in two days of bombing did not succeed in impairing communications. Thermit incendiary bombs* set the west end of Helsinki ablaze. Other prime targets were the ports of Viipuri, Kotka, Hangö, Turku and Vaasa, the big power plant at Imatra, gas mask factory at Lahti. After unloading their bombs, the planes swooped to machine-gun their objectives. Finnish anti-aircraft guns and fighting planes shot down a dozen or more Red attackers, whose pilots expressed surprise. They had been told it was safe to bomb anywhere...
...coalition Government formed under Risto Ryti met in a vault under the National Bank, of which he is president, prepared to withdraw to Vaasa on the west coast when Helsinki became unlivable. The U. S. Legation withdrew to Grankulla, down the Gulf coast to the west. Departing householders were asked to water their homes inside and out before leaving, to form ice insulation against incendiary bombs...
...most important place in Finland last week was not Helsingfors (Helsinki), the capital; not the seaports of Vasa (Vaasa) or Viborg (Viipuri), but the farming village of Lapua. The Finns who speak Finnish and the Finns who speak Swedish all spoke of Lapua last week, as did all of Finland's 624 newspapers and magazines. Acute observers saw emerging from Lapua a minor Mussolini, possible Dictator of the country, by the name of Vihtori Kosola...
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