Greetings. I'm trying to put together a reenactment kit that literately no one else is doing, educate myself, and keep myself motivated to learning horsemanship.
I've seen photos and videos of Finns during WW2 on horseback and horses being used to pull carts. So I'd love to learn more. During this time horses and mounted troops were basically obsolete due to mechanization. However, Finland was primarily untamed forest with little roads and had a tiny standing military. I can see the benefit of horses being used to quickly cross rough terrain, with an added bonus of producing very little noise. I'm assuming mounted troops were primarily used for reconnaissance and communication. Anything else?
I've seen collar tabs for cavalry, dragoons, and mounted Jägers. I understand that cavalry fights mounted, dragoons dismount and fight as normal infantry, but what exactly are mounted Jägers? I've read that a Jägers were light infantry, so are mounted Jägers light cavalry?
Are there any units that heavily used horses? Any battles were mounted troops were used?
Finally, I know the M36 summer tunic is nearly always lacking any rank or collar tabs. However, I've seen a few pictures of the tunic with collar tabs. How historically incorrect would it be to add collar tabs on my summer tunic?
Thanks.
Finland was a poor country prior to the WW II and several of the pre-war governments aimed for the more pacifist style Nordic neutrality placing their trust in to the League of Nations. So as the result the Finnish military was badly equipped. Additionally the fuel storage were rather poor as well - not really expected to last for long. This meant that especially those vehicles on the civilian service - but also fair share in military service as well - were converted to run on wood gas ('puukaasu' or 'häkäpytty') instead which reduced their performance. Scrounging the numbers from various sources it appears that Finnish military had around 35 000 vehicles of all kinds (trucks, buss, cars) - most of these in use by the higher level formations and in the rear areas. Meanwhile Finns had nearly 200 000 horses in service. So it was fairly typical to have a horse pulled carts and travois (purilaat, image from wikipedia) in use especially for the front line troops.
Finns did have mounted units but not cavalry units as such. I mean that the principal mounted units were the Uusimaa Dragoon Regiment (URR) and Häme Cavalry Regiment (HRR) - both were nominally trained to operate as traditional cavalry units and were early on (1939-1941) even issued swords but in practice fought as dismounted cavalry, in other words as roughly battalion strength infantry units. And towards the end of the Continuation War even they started to have their horses replaced with bicycles. Additionally early in the war (up to around 1942) each Finnish division had a 'light detachment' - as sort of a fast response unit - attached to it that would consist of 1 bicycle company, 1 cavalry company, and 1 machine gun platoon. In practice though most had just 2 bicycle companies (+MG platoon) since horses were needed elsewhere - and as you said Finnish terrain is often unsuitable for motorized vehicles. Again, horses were primarily used for mobility so even those units fought dismounted. I recommend that you check the Jaeger platoon website's formation pages for more information. IIRC the mounted jaegers were a unit that operated during the Finnish Civil War and later became the HRR. The 1999 movie 'Ambush' (in Finnish: Rukajärven tie) is a based on actual events involving a bicycle mounted light detachment in flanking movement (of course with plenty of historical inaccuracies, unit sizes being far too small and so on)...
All mounted units viewed themselves as elite so they were adamant that they would keep their special unit designations separate from the infantry. Both persisted with their different rank setups until 2010s - instead of 'private' they had 'dragoon' or 'cavalryman'. For all practical purposes they all were just mounted infantry during the WW II. I'm not aware of any actions were troops would have fought mounted (bicycle or horse). Cavalry Brigade (lit. Horse Brigade, 'Ratsuprikaati', consisting of HRR and URR + additional units) did take part to several engagements during both the Winter War and the Continuation War. In Winter War they fought first in the Karelian Isthmus (including: Terijoki, Vammeljoki, Perkjärvi) but were transferred to Ladoga Karelia in February 1940 and fought several engagements there (incl. clearing the encirclement at Nietjärvi, Itä-Lemetti). In the Continuation War (now really named as Cavalry Brigade, 'Ratsuväkiprikaati') they started as part of the Group 'Oinonen' (Finnish habit of naming temporary formations as 'group' followed with the surname of the commander) and as part of that advanced in 1941 through the Ladoga Karelia towards the lake Onega. Apparently they impressed the Germans (163rd Infantry Division) there with their mobility in the broken & forested terrain. Cavalry Brigade was badly hit in the start of the Soviet 1944 summer offensive (they defended the front closest to the Baltic sea in the Karelian Isthmus) but reorganized and took part to the fighting withdrawal and later participated in the victory the Finns won over the Soviets in the Battle of Ilomantsi at the end of the war.
You can have the uniform with or without collar tabs. The collar tabs were introduced with the m/36 uniform and were still being adapted when the war started - especially outside the actually serving officers and NCOs. Though i have to admit that my knowledge with regards to the uniforms is lacking.
