Lotta Svärd — Luukkonen and mobilisation

The Lotta Svärd Union is Finland's paramilitary women's organisation, founded on 9 September 1921 and named in tribute to the character of Lotta Svärd in the national poem The Tales of Ensign Stål by Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1848) — the figure of a wife who followed her soldier husband into combat and tended the wounded. On the eve of the war, in November 1939, the Union counts 105,000 active members (100,000 of them assigned to military auxiliary service), divided into seven service branches: medical, food, equipment, signals, propaganda, anti-aircraft (Aune) and canine. It is the largest women's paramilitary organisation in the free world in 1939, in proportion to population (Finland: 3.7 million inhabitants).

On mobilisation on 30 November 1939 the Finnish military command (Mannerheim) folds the Lotta Svärd straight into the operational chain. President Fanni Luukkonen, 57, a former schoolteacher, has run the organisation since 1929. She has negotiated a clear status with Mannerheim: the Lottas serve in auxiliary roles (no direct combat, no personal weapons) but under military discipline (regular uniform, ranks, hierarchy). The age range of service runs from 16 to 65.

Strength deployed at the front in December 1939: 22,000 Lottas embedded with the units, 40,000 in the rear (hospitals, depots, workshops). Tasks: care of the wounded on the battlefield, food distribution, anti-aircraft operations (the 3rd AA Battalion at Tikkurila in Helsinki is wholly composed of Lottas), translation of captured documents from Russian.

Luukkonen must settle the question of the Lottas in direct combat.