Finns. Talvisota, Jatkosota & Lapisota, three wars during WW2.
Finnish, German, and Soviet troops at the start of the Continuation War in June/July 1941. The Germans began their assault on 29 June from Petsamo area, and the Finns attacked on 1 July from Suomussalmi and Kuusamo area.
In the interwar period Finland maintained an uneasy
neutrality. In 1939-1940 it fought the defensive Finnish-Soviet War
(1939-1940). Its territorial losses as a result of that conflict were an
outcome foreordained by the demographic reality that just 4 million Finns faced
a population of 171 million in the pre-1941 Soviet Union, and that the Red Army
was the largest armed force in the world. Finland did not have German support
while fighting the Soviets in 1939. Adolf Hitler began to view Finland
differently as he prepared to launch Operation BARBAROSSA, starting as early as
July 1940.
German arms were delivered to the Finns, transit agreements were
signed permitting German troops to move across Finnish territory to and from
conquered Norway, and full military staff conversations began in December.
Moscow did not know the full extent of Finish-German military coordination, but
even its fear of Germany's unabated appetite for ever more territory was finally
aroused. Hitler's creeping influence in a country that Joseph Stalin viewed as
within his sphere of influence, as previously agreed between Moscow and Berlin,
raised anger and fear in the Kremlin. The question of which Great Power would
exercise ultimate hegemony over Finland thus became a critical diplomatic issue
in the year between the fall of France in June 1940 and the Axis invasion of
the Soviet Union in June 1941. Finland joined the Axis attack on the Soviet
Union after a strictly operational delay of a few days, but Finland was never a
full Axis state in spirit or intent. For the Finns, resumption of active
hostilities with the Soviet Union was solely an effort to reverse their loss of
1940, a strictly limited war aim reflected in their term for the conflict:
"Continuation War."
The Finnish Army of 1941 was greatly expanded from its
dispositions of 1939: it fielded 16 excellent divisions equipped with modern
German weapons. Wehrmacht land, air, and naval forces took up attack positions
in northern Finland in April-June, 1941. Preparatory to BARBAROSSA, four German
divisions were allowed into Lapland to open a high Arctic front. On the opening
day of the campaign, June 22, the Finnish Navy occupied the Aland Islands
without interference by the Soviet Navy. German troops also attacked out of
Lapland toward Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula. Finnish troops opened a
southern front in Karelia a few days later. Once the Finns reached their old
1939 boundary they stopped, encouraged to do so by heavy pressure from the
United States, but not before Great Britain declared war on Finland in
solidarity with the Soviet Union. In that desperate hour for London, any enemy
of Hitler was Britain's ally, and any ally of Germany was necessarily Britain's
enemy. The Finns did not advance farther during the rest of the war. Trying to
take Leningrad and Moscow were German, not Finnish, war aims. Even so, the
effort to recover lost territory by swimming with the turn of the geopolitical
tide in 1941 engaged the Finns in a long war on what became the northernmost
section of the Eastern Front: fighting against the Red Army lasted from June
1941 to September 1944, with more limited fighting against the Germans after
that.
Over the course of the naval war, the Finnish Navy lost one
monitor, six minesweepers, and 50 merchantmen and coastal patrol ships. Finland
lost far more men in land combat, as Hitler's BARBAROSSA operation failed by
the end of November 1941. The Red Army counterattacked in the Moscow offensive
operation (December 5, 1941-January 7, 1942) and the Rzhev-Viazma strategic
operation (January 8-April 20, 1942). The Finnish front thereafter stretched
from German positions outside Leningrad, across southern Karelia and along the
forest zone of the eastern frontier, to a distant fight by mainly German troops
in the high Arctic Circle. The Finns again held back from advancing toward
Leningrad, but their presence in southern Karelia completed a three-sided
German lock on that starving city throughout the 900-day siege of Leningrad.
The Finns also placed restrictions on permitted Wehrmacht operations in their
high Arctic territory, including during Operation LACHSFANG. By the end of 1942
the Finns were in the increasingly difficult position of waiting to see which
of their vastly more powerful neighbors would win the war along the Eastern
Front. They were also influenced by pressure from Washington not to exceed
recovery of their national territory, on pain of incurring American displeasure
or even a declaration of war to match Britain's.
Germany was clearly losing the war at the start of 1943, a
fact brought home to the Finns by German defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad.
The Finns opened secret talks with Moscow in an effort to withdraw from the war
by negotiating a limited frontier settlement. But Moscow and Helsinki could not
agree on where to draw the border in Karelia, the mutual casus belli in 1939
and again in 1941. The Red Army went over to the permanent offensive all along
the Eastern Front in the late summer of 1943, following another great victory
at Kursk and follow-on counteroffensives in the north and in Ukraine.
Finnish-Soviet talks broke down in February 1944, even as German Army Group
North was pushed back from Leningrad to the Panther Line section of the
Ostwall. The Red Army attacked the main Finnish position on the Mannerheim Line
on June 10, 1944, achieving complete operational surprise. Soviet tanks and
mobile infantry broke through the next day. The Finns now discovered how
greatly improved in combat performance the Red Army was since the winter of
1939-1940. Soviet forces were far superior in weapons, veteran troops, and
proven commanders. General Leonid A. Govorov's Karelian Front took Vyborg
within two weeks, a triumph for which he was promoted to "Marshal of the
Soviet Union." The Stavka launched the second phase of the
"Svir-Petrozavodsk operation," a full-scale invasion of lower
Finland, through the southern forests on June 21. At first, Hitler sent German
reinforcements to Finland in exchange for agreement that Helsinki would not
accept a separate peace with Moscow. But the combat pressure from Karelian
Front was relentless, while the Germans were themselves knocked backward 300
miles by the stunning Soviet achievement of Operation BAGRATION in Belorussia.
That marked the start of a cascading series of Soviet victories and
catastrophic German defeats in the center of the Eastern Front, which left the
more northern German and Finnish flank hanging.
Compared to its performance in Finland in 1939-1940, the Red
Army's second campaign in Karelia was a superior example of combined arms
warfare, or Blitzkrieg. Yet, Moscow did not pursue total war against Finland
the way it did against all other Axis states. Stalin was prepared to offer
terms to the Finns partly in response to intervention by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt and the wider issues of alliance politics that might be adversely
affected. Nevertheless, events on the ground had a life of their own. Elements
of the powerful Karelian Front crossed the Svir River, forcing the Finnish Army
back under great pressure. The Soviets took the provincial capital of
Petrozavodsk on June 28. Other Red Army Fronts simultaneously attacked in
central and northern Finland, at Salla and Petsamo, where they battered German
20th Mountain Army. That isolated 200,000 Axis troops, left guarding a
peripheral position by Hitler, while the center and south of the entire Eastern
Front were collapsing for want of men. By August 9, the Red Army achieved all
goals set by the Stavka for the summer campaign in the north. Events outside
Finland also conduced to lessened Soviet operations. German resistance in
Estonia and Latvia collapsed during late July, in tandem with a general
military crisis for the Germans attendant on the devastation of Army Group
Center in BAGRATION. That defeat signaled to Helsinki that it needed to get out
of the war before Finland, too, was wholly overrun.
Mannerheim was brought back
to the presidency on August 4, tasked to negotiate an exit from the war. On
August 24 the cabinet agreed to seek a ceasefire and armistice with Moscow. Soviet
troops stopped advancing five days later. On September 2 the Finns formally
severed alliance ties to Germany. A ceasefire was agreed with the Soviets three
days after that. Retreating Germans tried to seize the critical Finnish island
of Suursaan (or Hogland) in the Gulf of Finland. The attempt was beaten off by
Soviets and Finns fighting in tandem against the Germans for the first time.
Finland signed a formal armistice with Moscow on September
19, 1944. The agreement restored the expanded Soviet border of 1940, confirming
that Finland had lost the "Continuation War" as well as the earlier
Finnish-Soviet War. Helsinki surrendered rights to a Soviet naval base at
Petsamo and to a Red Army and VVS air base outside Helsinki. The key to the
armistice was that it required Finland to declare war on Germany and the
Finnish Army to actively expel all Wehrmacht and SS troops from the country.
But Finnish soldiers proved lax about enforcing that clause against men who
were comrades-in-arms just days earlier. Instead, the Finnish Army simply
watched German troops flee the country. In some cases, the Finns peacefully
escorted rather than harried German troops on their way out during the
Wehrmacht's BIRKE withdrawal operation (September 3-29, 1944). There was only
one serious armed clash during September between Finnish and German troops.
More serious clashes between Finns and Germans marked the later Lapland War,
fought during the winter of 1944-1945 with the last German troops in the high
Arctic. Under great Soviet pressure, Finland formally declared war on Germany
on March 3, 1945. The last German troops left the high north a month later.
American support for Finland's independence helped prevent
its incorporation into the Soviet Union as another lost tsarist province and
kept it outside the quickly forming bloc of Soviet client states. In 1947 a
formal peace treaty was signed between Finland and those Allied states with
which it had been formally at war. Helsinki permanently surrendered its
disputed Karelian territory to the Soviet Union. It was thereafter compelled to
adopt the Soviet foreign policy line throughout the Cold War, but it was not
forced to host Soviet armed forces beyond a single base at Porkkala. That base
was later exchanged for a Soviet lease on Hangö, which was in turn given up by
Moscow in 1955. Unlike Czechs, Poles, or Rumanians, the Finns did not have to
adopt Soviet domestic policies and were never ruled by a puppet Communist
Party. Similar Cold War arrangements in which foreign policy obeisance to a
Great Power was combined with domestic independence became known
internationally as "Finlandization."
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