The battle began as a White Guard battalion from Vyborg attacked Kämärä on its march to the White-controlled side of the Karelian Isthmus.

After taking the village, the Whites ambushed a Red train carrying a large cargo of weapons from Saint Petersburg, but were finally forced to leave the scene as they ran out of ammunition.

[1] As the violence between the Whites and the Reds escalated in early 1918, one the first fatal clashes occurred in Vyborg, at the time the second largest town in Finland, on 19 January.

A unit of 500 men, led by the Jäger officer Woldemar Hägglund, marched across the ice of Vyborg Bay to the small island of Venäjänsaari and settled there for a couple of days.

After a short gunfight, the Whites took the station, but soon a trainload of discharged Russian sailors steamed into Säiniö on its way to Saint Petersburg.

[2] On 27 January, the Whites made a new effort to cross the railway, this time in the village of Kämärä which was located 28 kilometres east of Vyborg.

It was carrying a cargo of 15,000 rifles, 30 machine guns, 10 artillery pieces and 2 million cartridges which the Red Guard commander-in-chief, Ali Aaltonen, had purchased from the Bolsheviks two weeks previously.

Jukka Rahja met some Reds who had fled from Kämärä at the Leypyasuo railway station and was informed of the situation.

It was never erected at the Kämärä railway station as the village became a part of the Soviet Union after World War II.