On Suomenlinna, a complex of islands in the bay of Helsinki, lies the
Military Museum of Finland.
With photographs (all taken on the Lumix GF1):
cc-by-sa on
everything.
It's all in one room, and rather darker than these pictures make
it look. (Good camera. Have a camera-biscuit.)
Licence-built 4.7" Armstrong naval gun; Russia bought it from Japan,
Finland got it during independence, and it was used at Ladoga.
S/36 submarine-launched mine, of the type deployed from Vetehinen-class
submarines in the 1940s.
Horse-drawn field kitchen, WWII era.
Flak 37, a classic "88" anti-aircraft gun.
Breech lock from 12" naval gun (used in the Imperial Black Sea Fleet's
Imperator Alexander III).
Vickers-Armstrong 6-tonner.
Ford M40, with wood-gas generator and anti-aircraft machine gun array;
does this count as an early "technical"?
81mm mortar, 1970s.
Fibreglass boat used by Somali pirates, captured in 2011.
Valmet Terri 30 - a prototype motor-track for infantry.
And a commercial quad-bike evaluated at the same time.
Military motorcycle - from Husqvarna of course.
P-15 Termit anti-shipping missile.
Heavy rocket launcher from the 1950s, for close-up anti-armour work.
T/46 Soviet-built compressed air/water/kerosene torpedo, 1960s-1970s.
Torpedo tube from torpedo boat S-2 - sunk by a mine in 1917. These
would have been compressed air/steam torpedoes.
Russian M/12 naval mine, mostly abandoned in Finland at independence
and the end of the Civil War.
76K/02 76mm field gun - primary weapon of the Finnish artillery until
the end of WWII, and for training for fifty years after that.
This is clearly a "greatest hits" museum – there are some uniforms but
no small arms – but it's rather more convenient than most of the
Finnish military museums further north. Your ticket also gets you into
the submarine Vesikko (blog post coming soon).
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