Aarne Juutilainen

Early life Juutilainen was born in Sortavala on 18 October 1904. His parents were railway clerk Tuomas Juutilainen and Helmi Sofia Juutilainen née Kauppinen. His brother was Ilmari Juutilainen, later better known as a flying ace during the wars.

Juutilainen attended school in Sortavala, where he read seven classes at Sortavala Lyceum. He was athletic, and enjoyed skiing, horseback riding, fencing and pesäpallo; he was a member of the Sortavalan Viritys pesäpallo team in 1924.

As a young boy he had his first contact with war in 1918, participating in the Finnish Civil War by loading machine gun belts on the white side.

The war in the Atlas Mountains was long, and in 1931 the Berbers surrendered. Juutilainen served in the Foreign Legion for a full five years and was rewarded with the Legion Cross and French citizenship.

The 6th Company of Infantry Regiment 34, a unit led by Lieutenant Juutilainen, also included the military sniper Simo Häyhä, known as the "White Death."

After the fiercest battles of the Continuation War in Gora in 1942, Juutilainen was transferred to the command of the JR 9 garrison, a position he served in during the period of trench warfare from 1942 to 1944. He served as the regimental commandant for more than a year before he was promoted to 7th Division commandant.

The Lapland War

As the captain of the Lapland War, Aarne Juutilainen took part in the early stages of monitoring the retreat of the German XX Mountain Army together with his regiment, from which the reservists had already been repatriated.

In popular culture Juutilainen appears in the 2024 novel Les Guerriers de l'hiver by Olivier Norek, which is set during the Winter War. According to Norek, his grandfather and Juutilainen served at the same time in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco in the 1930s.