Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9503861:


Be careful what you say 14 7, 5:49am

@real-cool-cat
There seems to be some misrepresentations of history in your comment. Britain, France and USA indeed gave no help, unless you count all those fighter planes, bombers, anti-tank rifles and other assorted weapons they supplied us with, as well as financial aid. It also discounts the Franco-British expeditionary force of about 100,000 troops that the French and British were planning to send to our aid if we asked them. Granted, they might have tried to use that as an excuse for occupying northern Sweden to deny Swedish iron to the Germans, but at least some troops would have eventually made it to Finland and negotiations with the Soviet Union were helped by Stalin's reluctance to risk a war with the western allies. Oddly enough, France, Britain and USA were not afraid of angering Stalin, seeing as they hated communism and didn't have that much dealings with the Soviets anyway. Remember, the Soviets were not at war with Germany yet so they were not seen as part of the allies.

Now, there has been a lot of discussion going on about whether or not Finland was allied with Germany during the Second World War. Personally, I think that if you allow Germany to deploy over 200,000 troops in your country and let them use your territory as a staging ground for an attack on third party with which you yourself are also fighting, you are indeed allied with Germany whether you attack Leningrad or not. We also took the Russian city of Petrozavodsk (Petroskoi) which was not a place we had lost in the Winter War but one that had indeed always been situated in Russian territory.

In continuation war Finland was the one to attack, not the Russians. I have my doubts on Stalin thinking they could conquer us in five days considering Operation Barbarossa was already in full swing and the Soviets were taking a severe beating around Ukraine and eastern Poland by the time the Continuation war began. Oddly enough, they managed to force us into accepting a harsh treaty after a rather brief period of fighting in summer 1944, when they finally turned their attention towards us after two years of uneventful static warfare, during which they had been busy fighting for their existence against the Germans. We did manage to halt their offensive and score some victories against superior forces, but like in the Winter War our forces were very much spent by the time peace came and we couldn't have survived against another major offensive. The war also took only about three years from 1941 to 1944 and no, I'm not counting the Winter War when you specifically said Continuation War. Winter War, by the way, took a little over three months and ended with Finnish forces at their very limit, with front lines about to break and no reserves left. You know, just so none could say we had it easy. We did manage to botch their plans of completely annexing our country and instead have them settle for a big chunk of our land in the Eastern border, so much better than anyone expected. There was also about a year of peace between these two wars, so it's not like we were in war nonstop for five years either.

And when talking about the Lapland War one must always remember to mention that the Germans didn't intend on staying there anyway. They were already on the process of withdrawing to Norway when hostilities started, and they fought a delaying action against our forces. The way you put it would imply our troops drove them off despite numerical inferiority, when in actuality they were already going and we only managed to piss them off into burning Lapland to the ground as they went. I'm not sure we even managed to make them pick up the pace.

So yeah, it didn't go exactly like you told.