AHC: Finland to the Allies?

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Britain and France send them significant aid, including troops, during the Winter War.

Of course, there's then the question of how Britain & France being at war with Russia works if they're at war with Germany too and then Germany attacks Russia... :confused:
 
Russians are really concerned only for defensibility of Leningrad and somehow work out deal with Finland to move border away from Leningrad for some for Finland interesting concession somewhere else. Finish army as a part of deal recieve equipment from SU and buy planes in England. Winter war and continuation war are avoided. Later on, let say after Stalingrad or Leningrad Finland join the war In campaign to liberate Norway. ;)
 
Russians are really concerned only for defensibility of Leningrad

of course they are - everyone fears those moveable finish bunkers, dugouts and fixed positions ;)

there's no land exchange deal possible - murmansk needs a railway, one on russian ground.
 
Any way Finland could have joined the Allied Powers with a POD after 1934?

This could happend during 1939 but before winter war if the allies give Finland similar guarantees as for Poland. It would most likely butterfly away winter war and thus keep Finland out of the war for some time but probably not forever.

Second option would be during winter war if the allies were able to give heavier support. Winter war would end really soon as Stalin was not so keen to fight UK and France (at least before fall of France) and Finland would probably be counted as being part of allies from this point.

Third window of opportunity is the Norwegian campaign. If the allies win this campaign or are even able to occupy the northern part of the country they could actually value Finland as an ally and after winter war I do not see how the finns would not join when given chance.

But after Norway was occupied I do not see such a window opening.
 
I remember reading that the Western Allies almost did help Finland directly in the Winter War. Had they done this, WWII would be a 3-way clusterfuck should Operation Barbarossa still be carried out.
 
If there's no Winter War at all, due to Stalin believing that there will be an Anglo-French intervention of some kind, would there be any substantive effect the Soviet response to either Khalkin Gol or Barbarossa? I confess to a shameful lack of knowledge on my part on such things.
 
I remember reading that the Western Allies almost did help Finland directly in the Winter War. Had they done this, WWII would be a 3-way clusterfuck should Operation Barbarossa still be carried out.
Or Nazis and Soviets will go forward together. :eek:
 
of course they are - everyone fears those moveable finish bunkers, dugouts and fixed positions ;)

there's no land exchange deal possible - murmansk needs a railway, one on russian ground.

We are talkin ATL. So let say they are really only concerned with close Finish border to major Soviet city and offer Finland concession somewhere in Karelia. But anyway. As history teach us, moveable bunkers are very dangerous to peace loving people. For example that's why France and Britain in 1938 decided in Muich to make CLzechoslokia to abandone theirs moveable bunkers on Czech German and later Slovak Hungarian border. You never know what can happen... :p
 
Or Nazis and Soviets will go forward together. :eek:

Not a chance. Remember, Hitler didn't view the Soviets as equal enemies like he did the British. He saw the inhabitants of the USSR as inferior and sub-human. He had to go to war with the Soviets at some point.
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
At the time they were sueing for peace in March 1940, Finland approached Sweden & Norway regarding the formation of a defensive alliance; Stalin (via Molotov) vetoed the idea. If this had taken place, Hitler may not have launched his attack upon Norway, given the German war industry's reliance upon Swedish iron ore & Finnish nickel. If the Fuhrer had ignored the implications then Finland (along with Norway & Sweden) would have found allies in Britain & France, assuming everyone stuck to their word:p As the Finns found out in 1939, a 10-year non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union renewed in 1934 meant very little.

On a similar note Sweden agreed to a defensive alliance & political union with Finland in October 1940, on the proviso that the Finns agreed not to wage a war of revenge against the Soviet Union. Again Stalin made his opposition known - as did Germany this time - when an opposite approach may have removed Finland from the co-belligerency with Germany the following year.

"Finland's War of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Coalition in WWII" by Henrik Lunde
 
Or Nazis and Soviets will go forward together. :eek:

For the time up until Hitler's build-up on the Soviet border leads to a new variant of Barbarossa. The Nazis and Soviets literally cannot build a joint totalitarian bloc against the democracies. It's that aspect of Nazism that was always self-destructive. Fortunately for the world, as we did not need to see the demented and horrific products of Hitler's ego put to work on the nightmarish scales it would have been.
 
I remember reading that the Western Allies almost did help Finland directly in the Winter War. Had they done this, WWII would be a 3-way clusterfuck should Operation Barbarossa still be carried out.

They almost did, plans did include a bombing raid against Soviet petroleum facilities in Baku which would have quite seriously harmed their fuel production capabilities.

If it had gone through Stalin likely would have made the fastest possible peace with Finland and backed out.

The man did not want war with the Western Allies, he realized that even if the USSR actually won it would only do so in a highly pyrrhic and costly manner.

Still, this would be one of the worst possible Allied choices and would only encourage further Nazi-Soviet cooperation...

And subsequently a similar, and likely quite devastating, betrayal by one side or the other.
 
They almost did, plans did include a bombing raid against Soviet petroleum facilities in Baku which would have quite seriously harmed their fuel production capabilities.

If it had gone through Stalin likely would have made the fastest possible peace with Finland and backed out.

The man did not want war with the Western Allies, he realized that even if the USSR actually won it would only do so in a highly pyrrhic and costly manner.

Still, this would be one of the worst possible Allied choices and would only encourage further Nazi-Soviet cooperation...

And subsequently a similar, and likely quite devastating, betrayal by one side or the other.

Only if we credit Bomber Command at that phase with the capability to do to Baku what it never did to Germany at this time or for some years yet to be. What probably happens is the bombs fall mostly everywhere other than Baku, the damage is grotesquely exaggerated, and this is another in the Butt Report's list of failures of the Strategic Bombing Offensive.

The ability of bombers to even hit the right country in 1940 didn't exist to anything near the degree that Air Force propagandists made it out to be. And I'm actually not as harsh on this as the WWII generation itself was (but the Bomber Barons were too incapable of letting mere reality dictate their adhering to the needs of the real war). And before you say Soviet-wank in regard to this comment, I said very little about the Soviet Union and a great deal about Bomber Command here. The failure is all the responsibility of the Bomber Barons and Churchill's promising what he was never going to deliver. The Soviets' actions mean relatively little. The limits of equipment and the actual reality involved in implementing those raids, OTOH......

To be absolutely crystal clear: I'm not in the least saying the USSR would actually be able to stop the raids. I'm saying that given the limits of technology relative to what it was promised to deliver the attempts to bomb would be a waste of time and money and give relatively little results, and that the effectiveness of strategic bombing in general and precision bombing in particular has always relied primarily on blatant lies and wishful thinking, noted as early in this regard as 1943.
 

Rubicon

Banned
Any way Finland could have joined the Allied Powers with a POD after 1934?
Short answer: No

Longer answer: No, Finland was prior to Talvisota (winter war) committed to neutrality (like the rest of the Nordic countries). To get Finland to join the Allies you'd have to have Germany invade it.
 
Any way Finland could have joined the Allied Powers with a POD after 1934?

Easy peasy.

The Allies re-break Enigma a month earlier in 1940. Enigma decrypts provide clear warning of the invasion of Norway, which the Allies defeat.

France falls anyway. BoB, etc.

With only Allied forces sitting on their Arctic borders, Finland decides against the Continuation War (i.e. joining BARBAROSSA).

Finland allows civilians from Leningrad to evacuate via Finnish territory, and food supplies in.

Finland gets benefits of imports via Sweden and Norway, allowed by Allies in return for increasing cooperation and boycott of Germany.

In 1942, Hitler orders invasion of Finland by airborne and amphibious forces. He is somehow persuaded that Finns want to repudiate the
"corrupt" government, join the Axis, and get revenge on the USSR. Some do, but only a few.

Bingo! Finland is an Ally.
 
Despite desperate pleas from the Swedish government, the Finnish Parliament approves the request of aid on March 1940, hoping that the promised 50 000 troops French and British governments claimed to deliver by a mandate from the League of Nations on March 1940 on few weeks could somehow force Stalin to offer better terms. Instead, the Soviet dictator urges his generals forward to Helsinki.

While Allied bombers from Syria try to raid Baku oil fields and a token presence of Allied troops actually arrives to Lappland and enters to combat against the Red Army, most of them firmly entrench themselves to northern Norway and to the iron mining areas of northern Sweden. Hitler, dismayed, invades Denmark, Norway - and Sweden, officially to liberate the latter two from Allied occupation. As the Soviet forces crush the exhausted remrants of the Finnish Army, the country falls to guerrilla war and the few surviving Finnish units withdraw towards the Swedish border along with the surviving British and French forces.

And there you have it, Finland in the Allies.
 
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