Unwelcome Surprise

In Helsinki last week a surprise guest crashed a birthday party. It was Adolf Hitler. He appeared at a celebration in honor of Finland's hard-bitten Field Marshal, Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, now a well-preserved 75, who was probably less surprised than most of his countrymen.

To his host the uninvited guest brought the Great Cross of the German Order of the Eagle,* one of the Third Reich's most dazzling decorations. Mannerheim, reciprocating, buttered up the Nazis by calling them brothers in arms, hoped this year might "see the end of Bolshevist barbarism." Afterward he held what Berlin called "lengthy conversations" with Hitler and other Nazi surprise guests: Chief of Staff General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and newly promoted Colonel General Eduard ("Bull") Dietl.

The visit sent a ripple of alarm through United Nations capitals. What Hitler almost certainly wanted from Mannerheim was joint German-Finnish offensive action soon, probably against the Murmansk railroad, perhaps also against Leningrad. Stockholm sources predicted both offensives in a matter of days. But the Finnish radio, broadcasting the details of the birthday celebration, failed even to whisper the name of Mannerheim's exalted guest, and a Finnish spokesman, the day after Hitler's visit, said Finland would "continue to steer a strictly independent course."

Nonetheless, the Russian Air Force stepped up bombings of Finnish ports, where Nazi reinforcements were pouring in. In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, recalling that U.S. Lend-Lease supplies are now rolling toward the Russian front over the Murmansk railroad, gave Finland a thin-lipped warning. "We are watching the situation," he said, "most closely."

In other words, if Hitler's surprise visit was as successful as Hitler planned, the war-weary Finns could count on another, unwelcome surprise: war with their onetime best friend, the U.S.

* Other non-Germans who have received various classes of Order of the German Eagle: Benito Mussolini, General Francisco Franco, Tsar Boris of Bulgaria, Henry Ford, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines. Watson sent his back in 1940.

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