Very close to the Murman road is Finland, which, because of its remoteness from the Russian capital, had always exercised a limited autonomy, and following the Kerensky Revolution of March, 1917, announced by the action of the Finnish Diet, its complete independence.
A civil war between Red Guards and White Guards for the control of the government followed. It was no secret that from the beginning of the European war the sympathies of the Finns were with Germany, and now at the outbreak of this internal conflict in Finland, Germany aligned with the White Guards against the revolutionary Reds who were supported by the Bolsheviks.
At the beginning of April, 1918, three regiments of German rifles, two batteries and three battalions of Jagers, under General von der Goltz, landed at Hanko, and, cooperating with the White Finns, suppressed the revolutionists, took possession of the port Viborg and were in control of railway communication to Petrograd. But this small expeditionary force never left the southern part of Finland, and in August, when every German was needed in France, the greater part of it left for the Western Front.
The campaign in Finland had no effect on the course of the war. Its significance was unduly magnified by both sides.
It was a firm conviction in Allied Councils that the Germans had immense forces in Finland, while the German Imperial Staff thought that the insignificant hundreds that the British landed at Murmansk in April, almost at the same time that the Germans entered the south of Finland, were in large numbers, perhaps several Divisions.
Thus there existed a blindman's buff in Finland; both Commands in startling ignorance of enemy salient facts, which is often the case in the game of war where "uncertainty is the essence"; each supposed the other was actively engaged in "recreating an Eastern Front," which, in concrete application, meant the recruiting of hundreds of thousands of Russians to press on from the East and fill in the war-wasted gaping ranks of Germany or the Allies.
To effect this object and gain access to the interior of Russia, the Murman railway, therefore, assumed a momentous significance; but in truth the "Eastern Front" remained a figment of the military imagination. Russia had poured out the life blood of her sons in the Allied defense till she staggered weak and exhausted, so spent that she swayed in a moral lethargy from which nothing on earth could arouse her, and those Russian soldiers who survived returned to their villages or else were conscripted for the Red army by the amazingly effective methods of Trotsky.
Still, in the spring of the year 1918, the situation in Finland appeared so fraught with grave potentialities of decisive consequence, that on 27th May, the Allied military attaches of Italy, France, England and the United States met at Moscow and unanimously agreed that these nations should intervene in the affairs of Russia.
Shortly after this, the Supreme War Council at Versailles decided in favor of intervention in the northern Russian ports, and the United States gave its consent.
Brigadier General F. C. Poole had been in Petrograd in command of the technical war mission of the British in Russia. Thoroughly familiar with Russian character and Russian conditions, he was chosen to command the Northern Expedition.