Encyclopaedia Fennica

Finnish Air Forces monument

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Finnish Air Forces monument is located by the road to Vaskiluoto Island in the city of Vaasa, West Finland, overlooking the Eteläinen Kaupunginselkä (Finn. South City Expanse) bay. It is built in a shape of a sea eagle, and was put there in 1969. The picture above is taken in March 2018.

The location of the monument is no accident. Finnish Air Forces (Suomen ilmavoimat) are considered to have been born on 6.3.1918, when Count Eric vos Rosen, a Swedish aristocrat, gave the young Finnish state its first airplane. Finland was in the middle of the bloody civil war at the moment, and Vaasa was the place of the White Guards command. The plane in question was a Morane-Saulnier Parasol. It was flown from Umeå (on the Swedish side of the Gulf of Bothnia across Vaasa) to Vaasa by Nils Kindberg, with Count von Rosen as a passenger, and landed on the waters of Eteläinen Kaupunginselkä not far from the present location of the monument. The airplane was indeed taken into use by the White Guards, but did not have a long life; it crashed on 16.4.1918 near Tampere already. 6.3 has since been declared the official Finnish Air Forces day, and the replica of the airplane is currently on display in the aviation museum in Tikkakoski near Jyväskylä:

Picture from Wikipedia
Picture from Wikipedia

Count von Rosen's personal insignia was a swastika, and the blue swastika was adopted as the official insignia of the Finnish Air Forces. This swastika bears a lot more similarity to the Nazi one than the design used e. g. in the flag of the President of Finland or in the Finnish Order of the Cross of Liberty. Nonetheless its origin, of course, is completely unrelated to the Nazis, who didn't even exist in 1918. (Curiously enough, Count von Rosen eventually did indeed became one of the biggest Swedish Nazi supporters and the best pal of Goering, but naturally that happened much later too.) Still, after the war the Finnish Air Forces switched to a more neutral-looking insignia, but the old swastika is still used in some of its flags (e. g. of the Air Force Academy), as can be seen in the picture from the parade in Vaasa in February 2018:

Parade commemorating the 100 years anniversary of the return of Jaegers into Finland, Vaasa, 24.2.2018
Parade commemorating the 100 years anniversary of the return of Jaegers into Finland, Vaasa, 24.2.2018


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