Kingdom of Sweden

History

The Lion of the North and the Story of the Vasa

The Kingdom of Sweden took shape as an independent realm in 1523 when Gustav Vasa broke free of the Danish-led Kalmar Union. Though its population of little more than a million was modest by European standards, Sweden possessed rich iron and copper mines to forge its own artillery and an early system of peasant conscription. In the early 17th century, King Gustavus Adolphus revolutionized European warfare with thinner, wider linear formations and mobile light artillery, intervening in the Thirty Years' War and turning the Baltic into 'a Swedish lake.' A famous episode from this era occurred in 1628, when the king's magnificent new warship Vasa—top-heavy with two gun decks of bronze cannon—heeled over in a gust of wind and sank just 1,300 meters into her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbor, only to be raised almost intact more than three centuries later.

Armed Neutrality and the White Buses in World War II

Having pursued a policy of non-alignment since 1814, Sweden proclaimed armed neutrality when World War II broke out. Encircled after the German occupation of Denmark and Norway in 1940, Sweden avoided invasion by combining rapid rearmament with pragmatic concessions, continuing iron-ore exports from Kiruna and briefly permitting German transit by rail. At the same time, Sweden became a crucial haven for refugees and humanitarian operations across Northern Europe. It sent volunteers and supplies to Finland - A Nordic republic of thousands of lakes and forests that defended its independence through the Winter War and Continuation War during World War II. during the Winter War, welcomed tens of thousands of Norwegian refugees, and in October 1943 granted sanctuary to more than 7,200 Danish Jews ferried across the Øresund Strait. In the final stage of the war, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg issued protective passports in Budapest to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, while Count Folke Bernadotte led the Swedish Red Cross 'White Buses' expedition to rescue over 15,000 prisoners from German concentration camps.