Re: Mänttä-Vilppula January 20th 1940 Mänttä was bombed by 23 Ilyushin DB-3s.
The story is usually told that they largely missed, with most bombs hitting lakes (and that may be technically true).
But records show it was pretty bad. 3 died, further injured, 5 buildings were destroyed and some 20 more damaged.
It's shocking to see in the map that several damaged buildings were just two buildings away from my home. One of the destroyed buildings was where now is a school I went to for six years.
And there's at least one person still living in Mänttä who was injured by the bombs as child.
The time this happened is closer to my birth than today.
Re: Mänttä-Vilppula Excuse my French, but this town is fucked.
Allow me to elaborate. For a while now there's been an ambitious plan called "Lakeside Airpark".
And not long ago the city council approved the plan, including funding arranged by an Italian company. We're talking about a project of 200 million € and over.
The Italian company has capital of about one million. Better yet, for the project they created a Finnish branch company owned 51% by the main firm and rest by a related British company... which officially holds funds of less than 4000£.
This shady business has branches in various (mostly third world) countries. But there's not really any evidence they would've ever gotten anything done anywhere beyond paper.
Now, it's not like they're claiming to put in the money themselves; it's supposed to come from some unspecified fund in Luxembourg (with notably high interest) and other "confidential" sources.
Our local government is confident that as the money would eventually have to go through Finnish banks, they'd do legally required tracking to make sure the origin is legitimate.
1. I wouldn't bet and 2. if they do and it isn't... see start of the post.
Re: The good news is, someone was able to file a complaint due some formality, invalidating city council decision to accept this project.
So in best case this amounts to nothing but biggest embarrassment in the history of this town - we have been laughed at about this in couple talk shows.