Aimo Koivunen: 400 km on Skis After a Pervitin Overdose

Around 10 a.m. on 18 March, Norri's patrol reached the tree line on Kaitatunturi. Koivunen remembered the temperature as roughly minus 15°C. Norri climbed higher with two men to observe a road, leaving the others among the trees. As they prepared tea, gunfire erupted. Soviet skiers were trying to cut off their retreat. The Finns escaped westwards under fire, sometimes with the enemy just a few dozen metres behind. Koivunen took his turn breaking a trail through snow deep enough to swallow his skis to knee level. After hours of effort he was close to collapse. He reached for Pervitin, a powerful methamphetamine-based stimulant carried for the whole patrol, intending to take one tablet. Several stuck to his glove, and he swallowed them all without stopping. At first he felt a sudden rush of strength. Then the landscape seemed to change shape and his memory broke down. His comrades later told him that his behaviour had become dangerous and that they had removed the magazines from his submachine gun. Koivunen eventually calculated that he had swallowed the unit's entire supply, approximately 30 tablets. That number is his retrospective estimate, not an independently confirmed dosage. The map pin uses Gora Kayta, a plausible present-day counterpart of historical Kaitatunturi. Neither the exact tree-line position nor the pill-taking location is verified. The photograph shows Pervitin in a modern museum exhibition, not Koivunen's personal supply.

Before the ambush, Norri had designated the western slope of Koutamotunturi as the emergency meeting point with Lieutenant Ilmari Honkanen's patrol. That name became a lifeline in Koivunen's confused recollections. When he next became aware of his surroundings, he was alone on skis at the Finnish border, without food or ammunition. He could not tell whether it was 19 March, 20 March or another day altogether. He decided that one mountain resembled Koutamotunturi and skied towards it. Remembering smoke in the distance, he hoped to find friendly troops. Instead, he descended towards campfires that he recognised too late as belonging to Soviet soldiers. Another chase followed. At times he thought the pursuers were close behind; a blizzard eventually allowed him to break contact. Koivunen freely admitted that hallucinations and real experiences blurred together during these days. We cannot establish that he actually reached Koutamotunturi. The pin marks the real mountain named in the original rendezvous plan, not a verified point on his route.

For days Koivunen wandered through forests with little sense of direction or time. He boiled pine buds for food. At an abandoned logging camp he lit a fire on the wooden floor, setting the building ablaze while he was too confused to react properly. On another night he skied towards what he believed was the light of a house; it was the North Star. The actual locations of these episodes cannot be identified reliably. He finally saw wire fencing, bunkers and a road, and thought he had found a German outpost. The post was abandoned and mined. A landmine exploded under his left foot as he walked through the entrance. Severely wounded, he crawled towards a dugout, where another blast occurred. Unable to move on, he spent roughly a week in a snow hollow beneath a sack, with temperatures he later described as dropping to minus 20–30°C. In his account, he managed to catch a Siberian jay and eat it raw. When he heard an aircraft, he put his fur cap on a ski pole and waved it. A German reconnaissance aircraft spotted the signal. Finnish soldiers eventually reached him and evacuated him on a sled. Koivunen later said the snow hollow lay approximately 50 kilometres north of Salla. This pin is a broad illustrative centre for that reported region. It does not identify the actual minefield, bunker or rescue position.