Sure to make my mother-in-law happy…acknowledgment that the Finns were the first to ice skate.
The world’s first skaters are likely to have taken to the ice about 4,000 years ago on the frozen lakes of Finland, according to a UK-based research team…These early skaters would, he believes, stand on two horse bones and propel themselves with a stick.
I’m really backed up in terms of things I need to post about. Case in point, last summer I was on vacation in Sweden and took a quick side trip to Finland. While there I got to check out two military museums: the Swedish Army Museum and the Finnish Military Museum. The websites aren’t particularly informative (at least the English versions) which is unfortunate because the museums themselves are worth the trip.
As a disclosure I should say that I’m not particularly fond of military museums. I find them kind of stale and lacking in the quality that lets me share (even if in a very small way) the dramatic stories of the people who lived through past conflicts. The National World War II Museum left me unimpressed (although I understand I’m definitely in the minority on that).
These two museums avoided that and were pretty compelling for different reasons.
The Finnish museum understandably focused on the nation-defining event that was the Winter War and the even less well known (to those of us in the U.S. at least) Continuation War. The story is extremely compelling (little Finland held off the Soviet army for almost 4 months and opened up a big can of whoop ass in the process) and recent enough that many families have parents or grandparents with memories of the war. It’s not a big museum (which is another plus, after all, how many rifles and artillery pieces can you stare at in a day?) but you can actually interact with many of the displays. Unlike displays I’ve seen in other museums, everything isn’t hidden behind ropes, plexiglass and tons of signs warning against touching, filming or even thinking about anything on display. You can actually get behind the sights and work the controls of some of the equipment. The highlight of the displays, for me, was a recreation of a bunker from the Winter War. Again, you were free to move about in the bunker, pick up the coffee pot, sit in the chairs, and actually get a feel for living in such a place. I was lucky enough to be escorted through the museum by a relative of my wife who could give me a local perspective of the place. By the way, if you think Americans are patriotic, you haven’t met a Finn.
Sweden hasn’t been in a war since 1814 so it’s a little harder to make a museum which will seem relevant to modern museum attendees. In that regard, they don’t really try. Rather, they attempt to describe the history of warfare going back from pre-history to the modern era. Sweden’s military history is used to highlight trends and themes about warfare and the lives of soldiers through the ages. It’s bigger than the Finnish museum (but to be fair, Finland has only been an independent country since 1917) and spends a lot more time on Sweden’s imperial heyday but they do a decent job. I particularly liked one display where they had rifles used by Swedish forces for (I think) a couple of centuries side by side. You could pick them up, work the mechanisms (no ammo!) and compare them which was quite cool.
Also, since Sweden doesn’t have a recent history of combat, they focus instead on the conscript system in Sweden and how soldiers have served since 1814. One part I thought was surprisingly good were recreations of various living quarters and NCO/Officer clubs throughout the 20th century. Sweden is a pretty regular contributor to UN peacekeeping missions so that allows some discussion of the modern Swedish force as well.
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