The Wings of Pohjola

War memoirs of a Finnish fighter pilot

According to Finnish mythology, the roots of the world tree lie in Pohjola — a distant, frozen and dangerous land, the archetype of the mythical North where national memory, wild nature and the legacy of the Kalevala intertwine.

This is the story of the aerial clashes between the Finnish David — a small, ill-equipped air force — and its Goliath, the immeasurably more powerful Soviet air forces, told through the autobiographical account of one of Finland's greatest fighter aces, Lieutenant-Colonel Eino Luukkanen. The youngest squadron commander in the Finnish Air Force, Luukkanen logged 620 hours of combat flying over 440 missions at the controls of Fokker D.XXI, Brewster Buffalo and Messerschmitt Bf 109G fighters, and took part in 162 aerial engagements, being credited with 51 victories.

This is the story of talented and determined pilots who flew and fought in weather conditions that would have grounded any other air force, operating under the most rudimentary circumstances, invariably outnumbered, and often at the controls of obsolete aircraft. This is a saga whose heroism and intensity rival the greatest air battles ever fought — a first-person account, a testimony of years of war in which the eternal serenity of the northern forests and lakes was torn apart by the fire of combat during two distinct conflicts between Finland and Stalin's USSR: the Winter War and the Continuation War, both subsumed within the great conflagration that was the Second World War.