Battle of Napue, 1714: the battle that began Finland's Great Wrath

Napue destroyed the last Swedish field army in Finland in the Great Northern War. Finns remember it as the start of isoviha, the Great Wrath; in Swedish it is the Battle of Storkyro, and Russian histories long called it Lappola. The Russian historian Sergei Lapshov shows that the last name came from a mix-up in the staff papers, since no place of that name stood on the battlefield.²

Who won the Battle of Napue and why?

Russia won. Prince Mikhail Golitsyn had more men, and instead of attacking the Swedish position head on he marched most of his army through the forest onto its flank. Armfelt's mostly Finnish infantry fought hard, but when its cavalry rode off and Russian dragoons and Cossacks reached its rear, the army collapsed.³

Finland falls

After the disaster at Poltava in 1709, Russia was free to turn on Sweden's eastern half. Vyborg fell in 1710. Charles XII was meanwhile in the Ottoman Empire, and he treated the distant theaters of war as more important than the borders of his own realm; the Finnish historian Yrjö Koskinen wrote that the king paid no attention to his subjects' suffering, and R. Nisbet Bain blamed the ruin on the king's absence and obstinacy.⁴

Sweden's commander in Finland, General Georg Lybecker, gave ground almost without a fight. Armfelt, his second in command, was ordered in 1713 to defend Helsingfors against a Russian landing; judging his force too weak, he had the town burned in May with its stores so that the enemy could not use them, and withdrew inland. He then urged Lybecker to make a stand on the Kymmene river but could not persuade him. In August Lybecker was called to Stockholm to answer for his conduct, and Armfelt took over the defense of Finland.⁵

That summer Peter the Great's army and galley fleet took Helsingfors and Åbo. Armfelt tried to hold the line of the Kostia rapids at Pälkäne. On 6 October Admiral Apraksin sent part of his army under Golitsyn and Buturlin across the lake on rafts behind the position, and Armfelt was beaten. By then southern Finland was in Russian hands, and the Russian army held most of the country.⁶

Armfelt fell back over the forest uplands to the plains of Ostrobothnia. His army was in a sorry state. Yrjö Koskinen counts only about 3,000 men fit to bear arms at first, and Lapshov describes a force in which up to half of the men were fresh recruits and peasant militia, with poor horses and with desertion growing as the Russians occupied the soldiers' home districts.⁷

Two commanders, two choices

Carl Gustaf Armfelt was born in Ingria in 1666, the son of a lieutenant colonel. He began as a corporal in a Finnish cavalry regiment, then went to France and served for twelve years in the French army, starting as a private soldier and coming home a captain. From the first years of the Great Northern War he served with the army in Finland, and by 1713 he was its commander.⁸

Golitsyn, who had taken command of the Russian army in Finland, moved against Ostrobothnia in midwinter. He formed a detachment of picked men from the best soldiers of the infantry and dragoon regiments; the Russian military encyclopedia of 1914 explains that in a ruined, snowbound country he preferred a smaller force of good troops to a large one he could not feed. He marched on Vaasa by a long and hard route through Ikalis and Ilmola.⁹

The people of Ostrobothnia rallied to the army. Townsmen and peasants offered their service and drilled, and peasants from Ilmola stood as outposts on the roads from the south; at Napue the Ostrobothnian peasant militia fought beside the regiments, and it paid a heavy price for it.¹⁰

Armfelt gathered his troops and the peasant levies of the province at Storkyro. At his council of war most of his officers wanted to avoid battle. Yrjö Koskinen writes that the cavalry commander, Reinhold Johan de la Barre, proposed either falling back to Vörå so that more militia could gather, or fighting from felled trees in the forest between Storkyro and Ilmola. Armfelt overruled them and chose the open fields of Napue village, a plan Yrjö Koskinen called more chivalrous than wise.¹¹

Historians have judged that choice both ways. Veli-Matti Syrjö notes that Armfelt was criticized for fighting outnumbered on an open plain and suggests that a general trained on the battlefields of Western Europe did not fully know how to use Finnish terrain. Lapshov argues the other side: Armfelt had orders from the Royal Council to hold Ostrobothnia, its ports and its grain, and a retreat in midwinter would have destroyed the army anyway.¹²

Armfelt drew up his men on both sides of the frozen Kyrönjoki, infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings, with the militia behind and the village of Napue fortified in front of the line. Then the army waited for about three days, from 16 or 17 to 19 February, standing in snowstorms and bitter cold while the Russians came on more slowly than expected.¹³

Around the flank

The Russians reached Kvivila, a village on the river close to the Swedish position, and Golitsyn decided not to attack the line from the front. He left four dragoon regiments and the Cossacks at Kvivila to guard the baggage and the road back, and on the morning of 19 February led his infantry and the rest of the dragoons in two columns through rock, forest and deep snow, with no roads, around the Swedish left.¹⁴

Armfelt saw the danger in time to change front, swinging his line to face the Russians as they came out of the trees. Yrjö Koskinen, writing from the Finnish side, tells it a little differently: in his account the Russian infantry marched down the river, climbed the bank and spread out in a great arc against the Finnish left, while the Russian cavalry stayed on the far bank opposite the Finnish right.¹⁵

Armfelt struck first, hoping to catch the Russians while they were still deploying. Golitsyn formed his men in four lines instead of the usual two, with his guns massed in two batteries on the flanks. After about an hour of firing at close range the Swedish infantry went in with the bayonet. On the Russian left it gained ground until Golitsyn brought up troops from his second line, and at one point, by Yrjö Koskinen's account, six Russian guns were in Swedish hands.¹⁶

The turning point came on the other wing. The Swedish cavalry under de la Barre left the field before anyone else. The Swedish biographical dictionary of 1906 holds that Armfelt would have beaten an enemy three times his strength had the cavalry properly supported the infantry, and Yrjö Koskinen thought the same. With the cavalry gone, Golitsyn sent four dragoon regiments, fighting on foot, against the rear of the Finnish infantry.¹⁷

At the same time the dragoons and Cossacks left at Kvivila swept in behind the Swedish line and fell on the militia and the retreating horse. Attacked from several sides, the infantry broke and struggled away through the forest. The killing was savage, and most of the infantry officers fell. The accounts disagree on how long the battle lasted: Lapshov says less than two hours, while Yrjö Koskinen and Bain say three.¹⁸

The Russian military encyclopedia of 1914, following the General Staff historian Myshlaevsky, held Napue up as a model of Russian generalship: Golitsyn attacked although he believed the Swedes were the stronger side, chose the direction of his attack well, deployed both columns under the cover of his guns, kept a real reserve in his deep order of battle and picked the right moment to go over to the decisive attack. Lapshov, writing a century later, called the battle a triumph for Russia and a tragedy for Finland.¹⁹

How many fought, and how many died?

Neither army's size is certain. For the Swedish side, Lapshov, counting from the Swedish historian Uddgren, gives about 5,700 men, among them some 1,100 militia; Syrjö gives about 5,200; Yrjö Koskinen at most 4,500 soldiers and 1,500 militia; and the Russian military encyclopedia of 1914 a much higher 8,000 regulars and 4,000 to 6,000 militia. For the Russians, Syrjö and the encyclopedia give about 8,500, Lapshov about 10,000, and Yrjö Koskinen about 12,000. Older Swedish writers spoke of threefold odds.²⁰

The loss figures are just as far apart. Golitsyn reported 5,134 enemy killed (in Lapshov's reading of his report; the encyclopedia gives 5,133 killed and wounded) and 535 prisoners, with seven or eight guns and 20 standards taken; his own loss he put at 421 killed and 1,014 or 1,047 wounded. Modern estimates of the Swedish loss are much lower. Syrjö writes that each army lost about 2,000 men, Sarkamo, citing Finnish studies, puts the Finnish dead at about 2,000, and Lapshov, comparing the army's strength before and after with the burials and the officers' casualty lists, arrives at 2,500 to 2,700 killed, wounded and captured. For the Russian side the gap runs the other way: Syrjö's estimate of about 2,000 is higher than the roughly 1,450 killed and wounded in Golitsyn's own report.²¹

The Great Wrath

Armfelt escaped from the field and gathered what was left of his army. Golitsyn occupied Vaasa, but in March he drew his main force back out of Ostrobothnia. Later in 1714 Armfelt led the remnants of the Finnish army round the Gulf of Bothnia by way of Torneå to Västerbotten in Sweden, and Finland was left to the enemy.²²

With the Russians on the Gulf of Bothnia, Sweden itself now lay open to raids and landings. The Swedish museum service notes that the Russian foothold on the gulf threatened Sweden proper, and the historian Kustaa Vilkuna points out that the Russians did go on to burn and plunder the Swedish coast. Syrjö adds that it soon became clear, however, that Peter did not mean to carry the main attack across to the western shore.²³

Napue left Finland without an army. The years from 1714 to 1721, when Russia held almost the whole country, are called isoviha, the Great Wrath. Russian soldiers robbed, tortured and killed, and the violence was worst in Ostrobothnia and on Åland. Finns were carried off to Russia as slaves, many people hid for years in the forests, and many fled to Sweden.²⁴

The memory lasted a long time. A study of oral tradition in Isokyrö at the University of Jyväskylä found that stories of Cossacks who robbed, tortured and killed in the district were still told well into the twentieth century, and the historian Kustaa Vilkuna has described how the tales of those years were handed down from generation to generation and fed a lasting hostility toward Russia.²⁵

The occupation ended only with the Peace of Nystad in 1721, when Russia gave most of Finland back to Sweden. Armfelt and his Finnish regiments served on in Sweden: in 1718 he led an army against Trondheim in Norway, and on the retreat over the mountains after the death of Charles XII thousands of his men froze to death. Armfelt himself was made a baron and a general of infantry and died in Finland in 1736.²⁶