On June 18, 1942, Mannerheim agreed to an exchange of command by the end of June as long as the 14th Finnish Regiment and elements of the 3rd Finnish Division were returned to his control. This agreement allowed XVIII Mountain Corps under General Franz Böhme to take command of the Kestenga front on July 3. One Finnish regiment remained in its sector pending the arrival of the last elements of the 7th Mountain Division. This did not happen until the middle of September 1942.
Although the Soviets reportedly had 20,000 replacements at Loukhi, they did not resume their attacks and the front remained relatively quiet. The Germans and Finns had achieved a clear defensive victory although it had been a close call. The Soviets had paid a heavy price in casualties in their attacks in the Kestenga area and this may have led them to break off the offensive. III Finnish Corps claimed to have counted 15,000 dead enemy soldiers in its area. To this can be added substantial losses in the Soviet rear area from artillery and air strikes. The 85th Soviet Brigade, for example, was decimated by German air strikes before it reached the front. The German and Finnish casualties were relatively light—2,500.
The only event that broke the relative quietness that followed in central Finland was an attack by the XVIII Mountain Corps in July to seize a key piece of terrain that had not been secured when General Siilasvuo stopped the advance of III Corps.
The transfer of the 163rd German Infantry Division to the XXXVI Mountain Corps was completed in June and SS Division Nord was renamed SS Mountain Division Nord. Another in the series of unit redesignations without any apparent purpose took place at the end of June when the Army of Lapland was renamed the 20th Mountain Army. It may have been a way to honor Dietl who Hitler promoted to full general (generaloberst) when he visited Finland on June 4, 1942.
A new boundary between the Finnish Army and the 20th Mountain Army came into being as a result of the Finns taking over the Ukhta sector. The 20th Mountain Army still retained responsibility for the rest of the front in central Finland and it was organized into two sectors:
1. Loukhi sector was the responsibility of the XVIII Mountain Corps with two divisions assigned—7th Mountain Division and SS Mountain Division Nord. The preponderance of the XVIII Corps was located between Lakes Top and Kovd.
2. Kandalaksha sector was the responsibility of the XXXVI Corps. It had two infantry divisions assigned—the 163rd and 169th
The Soviet offensive in the Mountain Corps Norway sector began three days after the Soviet offensive in the Kestenga area. The situation in this area also became very serious for the Germans but did not reach a crisis point as it had in central Finland.
The Soviets launched two divisions and several brigades against the 6th Mountain Division bridgehead on the Litsa on April 27, 1942. The 10th Guards Division—along with the 8th and 6th Ski Brigades—attacked the German right flank while the Soviet 14th Rifle Division attacked the left flank. The Soviets also carried out an amphibious operation with the 12th Naval Brigade on the west shore of Litsa Bay. This unit moved against the German open left flank. The amphibious operation caught the Germans by surprise and it may have succeeded in rolling up the German line if the Soviets had committed more troops.
The fighting in the vicinity of the Arctic Ocean took place under very severe weather conditions. The worst snowstorm of the year hit the area at the end of April and raged with incredible force, stalling operations by both the Germans and the Soviets for several days. The troops on both sides suffered tremendous hardships. Both attacks and counterattacks required superhuman efforts.
The initial Soviet attacks made penetrations in the German lines and the Germans were required to counterattack to restore the cohesiveness of the front. Generals Dietl and Schörner decided on 9 May to gamble on a quick decision by moving the entire 2nd Mountain Division to the front and stripping all available forces in the region from their defensive missions and adding them to the counterattack force. Parts of the 2nd Mountain Division had already moved to the front before the decision. Both generals knew they were taking personal risks by reducing the defensive forces between Tanafjord in Norway and Pechenga Bay to only four battalions since it was an area of great concern to Hitler.
The Luftwaffe also committed all its available forces in the arctic and achieved considerable success. The Soviets contested the German air assault but came out on the short end despite their superiority in numbers in the hotly contested air battles that took place. In one action on May 11 German fighters downed 27 Soviet planes, losing only one of their own. German bombers were also active against Murmansk, the Murmansk Railroad, and against Soviet shipping, particularly in Motovskiy Bay.
The German air offensive convinced the Soviets that the situation for the 12th Naval Brigade, which had landed in Litsa Bay and posed a threat to the German left flank, was untenable. Its sea supply lines had for all practical purposes been severed by the German air offensive and the Soviets ordered its withdrawal.
While the Soviets had reinforced the arctic front with a fresh division—the 152nd “Ural” Division—they halted their attacks after they decided to withdraw the 12th Naval Brigade. The condition of the 152nd Division after it finally reached the front may have played a role in the decision to end the offensive. The division had not received its winter equipment in time and entire companies froze to death on the tundra on their way to the front. Of the 6,000 troops of this division only about 500 reached the front.28
The German counterattack was meanwhile underway but it also ground to a halt as the troops were totally exhausted. The vicious fighting ended on May 15, 1942, with the Germans having restored the original front all along the line. The fighting in the north was a clear German defensive victory. Mountain Corps Norway claimed that 8,000 Soviet troops had been killed in the fighting, not counting Soviet rear area casualties or the losses in the 152nd division underway to the front. The price was also heavy for the Germans since they listed their losses on the Litsa front as 3,200.
The Army of Lapland had informed OKW before the start of the Soviet spring offensive that it considered offensive operations during the summer unfeasible since the promised reinforcements would not arrive in time. The OKW accepted Dietl’s assessment and gave the Army of Lapland two tasks to be completed during the summer. One involved operations in the Kestenga area to restore the old front. After that was accomplished, all units that could be spared were to be moved to the Mountain Corps Norway area where the army would make its main effort. The Mountain Corps Norway was assigned two missions:
1. Defend against any British and US invasion attempts. This was to be the primary mission.
2. Prepare to seize the Rybachiy Peninsula that the OKW considered key to operations in the far north. The date for that operation—code-named Wiesengrund (Meadowland)—was left open and to be determined by the availability of forces and the supply situation.