AH Challenge: How would you get Finland to join the Allies?

Blair152

Banned
All right, here's another AH challenge: OTL, Finland joined the Axis as security against the Soviet Union. How would you get Finland to join the Allies, and isolate the Soviet Union?
 
All right, here's another AH challenge: OTL, Finland joined the Axis as security against the Soviet Union. How would you get Finland to join the Allies, and isolate the Soviet Union?

The only way I can see it happening is if Britain and France declare war on the USSR after the Soviets invade Poland. Then when then Soviets start the Winter War, the Allies can invite Finland to join them. And even in that case, Finland would still only be part of the Allied war effort against the Soviets.
 
If the allies kicked Germany out of Norway, its possible. having allied troops on their frontier would be a big incentive to stay neutral.

It would help for Stalin to be more rational, and agree to give up some or all the territory he got in the winter war in exchange for a neutrality favouring the allies (maybe an agreement not to notice supplies moving from Norway to Russia via Finland.....)
 

Blair152

Banned
The only way I can see it happening is if Britain and France declare war on the USSR after the Soviets invade Poland. Then when then Soviets start the Winter War, the Allies can invite Finland to join them. And even in that case, Finland would still only be part of the Allied war effort against the Soviets.
Sounds good. Nothing ASB here. It's plausible. Stalin wanted Finland and
Carl Mannerheim, Finland's President, would have to ask Britain, France,
or the United States, for help. The United States was going to send Brewster
F2A Buffaloes to Finland. Unfortunately, for the Finns, the Winter War ended
before they could be send. Then they were headed for France, and France
fell before they could be shipped to France. Wouldn't have made any difference anyway, the Soviet VVS would have cut them to shreds because
they were obsolete.
 

Blair152

Banned
If the allies kicked Germany out of Norway, its possible. having allied troops on their frontier would be a big incentive to stay neutral.

It would help for Stalin to be more rational, and agree to give up some or all the territory he got in the winter war in exchange for a neutrality favouring the allies (maybe an agreement not to notice supplies moving from Norway to Russia via Finland.....)
Another good scenario, Astrodragon. Don't forget Denmark. Stalin's paranoia
could be used to our advantage. Maybe when Hitler invades the Soviet Union
on June 22, 1941, Finnish ski troops could harass both sides.
 
All right, here's another AH challenge: OTL, Finland joined the Axis as security against the Soviet Union. How would you get Finland to join the Allies, and isolate the Soviet Union?

Would be tricky. Finland also has a border with Norway, which after April 1940 was occupied by the Germans, so the Finns would be vulnerable, and NO WAY are they letting the Soviets in to help defend Finland!

However, the following is one way. (Everything below is OTL, not made up by me.) Unfortunately, it probably involves Britain and France losing the war.

At the start of WW2 Churchill was brought back into the government and went to the Admiralty. When the Soviets, who at the time were the nazis notional allies, invaded Finland, Churchill was desperate to launch an operation to assist the Finns.

So he had a brainwave! We couldn't get to Finland or the Soviet Union, but he came up with a plan to seize Sweden's iron ore mines, partly to cut off Nazi Germany's supplies and partly to prevent the Russians getting their hands on them (there's no evidence that the Russians ever considered invading Sweden).

The only way to get to the iron ore mines was to land in Norway. So Churchill planned an operation where the Allies would land on the Norwegian coast, march across country and invade Sweden, seizing the mines.

Because there was so much argument in London about invading two neutral countries, before the operation planning could be finalised, the Finns surrendered. If we had launched the invasion in time, Finland might very well have joined the Allies. But Norway and Sweden, and possibly the Soviet Union, join the Axis.

Which not only makes us look as bad as the Nazis and the Soviets, also means we never get our hands on the Norwegian Merchant Navy, which made a huge difference in the Battle of the Atlantic.

(This to me is the best chance of an ATL that wins Germany the war.)

But it gets better. Once the Finns have surrendered, the planning is so far along that the Allies decide to invade Norway anyway!!!:(:(

On the 8th April, the RAF dropped mines in Norwegian waters. The following day troops were being loaded onto RN ships to sail later that day, when the news came through that the Germans had invaded first. Liddell Hart called the race to invade Norway 'a photo finish'

If the Germans had delayed their invasion by as much as a day, or hadn't felt it necessary, we would have looked as bad as them to the rest of the world, brought half of Scandinavia into the war against us, and lost Churchill from the government only a month before he becomes Prime Minister (it's a huge irony that he became PM after the Chamberlain government fell over the failure of an operation that was Churchill's idea).

Incidentally, I don't see the Allies defeating Germany in Norway in 1940. At that stage of the war, they were simply better at fighting then we were, because they had more experience of how to run a wartime army. Ours was still thinking like a peacetime army.
 
Stalin wanted Finland

Actually, the Soviets only asked for Finland's border region, to move them further back from Leningrad and give Russia Baltic ports (this was before the Soviets marched into the Baltic States in1940), and offered them Karelia in return.

After 1945, the Soviets made no attempt to occupy Finland, although apparently some American history and reference books said that they did.
 
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