Assume that Soviet doesn't attack Finland in 1939. Is it possible that Germany or anybody else use it as a launchingpad for attacks against Soviet?
- Can Germany make som sort of invasion and use it as a a launching pad?
- Can Germany make some kind of political deal and gain support?
- Any other possibility, involving the allies?
IMHO the OTL alliance with Nazi Germany needed that extra little bit that was the Winter War. Finnish policy in the interwar years had consistently been to seek a defensive alliance with the Scandinavians, the Baltics and Poland: the realization of the Soviet threat was what pushed Finland over the edge and made the country agree to support an offensive war against the USSR.
Without the war, you would still have to fulfill the same conditions for the Finnish acquiescense, the Soviets putting Finland into a serious squeeze politically and making the Finnish people as well as the national leadership believe the country faces an existential threat if they do not ally with Germany/other foreign power. Having the country in a (quasi) state of war on the outset would be needed too: IOTL, it was the president and the army high command who decided on joining the Germans in Barbarossa. IIRC the parliament was not consulted on the decision, only notified of Soviet air attacks to confirm that the country is again at war.
The mobilization for war and the extra powers the army and the top political leaders gained through the national emergency created a different kind of beast. They were vital for this OTL situation to emerge; in peace time, without a perceived immediate threat of war (and national extinction), bypassing the parliament would have caused a political crisis and uproar. The parliament, being nearly half Social Democrat, would scoff at any alliance with a great foreign power, especially Germany.
The highest leadership, especially Mannerheim, favoured the British, so I'd say the most likely possibility would be a defensive deal with the Allies that by some quirk of fate turns into an offensive one. If the above terms are fulfilled, that is.
CanadianGoose said:
Picture is much more nuanced. I'm still awaiting DrakonFin in this thread, but I remember him saying that significant part of Finnish society was supporting an alliance with Germany even before Winter War.
It is nice being missed, CG.
In many ways, Finland in the 20s and 30s was a country of Germanophiles. Many army leaders, being Jägers, had received their training in Germany and many German officers helped in building up the Finnish military capacity in the 20s. Finland had extensive secret deals with the Germans to build the navy, helping both Finland to gain our modest fleet of subs as well as Germany to circumvent Versailles restrictions. German was the most popular foreign language at schools well into the 40s.
Finnish Germanophilia was mostly of the cultural and economic-industrial sort: the Germans were admired for their accomplishments well before the Nazi era. Finnish friends of Germany were mostly your run of the mill- conservatives, schoolteachers, industrialists and so forth. Germany, circa 1880-1930, indeed was the model for Finnish life across the political divide. Even the Social Democratic Party had been modelled after its German counterpart and based much of its basic tenets on the Erfurt program (this somewhat explains why they made such poor revolutionaries in 1918).
There were few Nazis here and the ultranationalist Facist movement, such as it was, took its cues from Italy. There were people in the Greater Finland crowd that would have liked to ally with Germany to conquer Karelia, certainly, but they were a minority even within the conservatives.
The political trend since the 20s had been to rehabilitate the moderate left to increase national cohesion, and same laws that were passed to curtail Communist activity were employed against the far right. In the mid-30s, Finland was already politically a consensus democracy run by the middle groups and as afraid of a general war as any other European country with a responsible leadership.
While one could say that many people, a slight majority even, could have supported a defensive alliance with a Weimar Germany, it is altogether different to say they would think the same about an offensive pact with the Nazis. The SDP knew quite well how their friends were being treated by the new lords of Germany, so there we have already a huge obstacle to such an alliance. Many conservatives also considered Hitler odious, even if a part of them did not know the excesses of the Nazi state fully and swayed by the German "economic miracle" to praise his leadership.
CanadianGoose said:
BTW, your statement that Finns didn't fight outside of 1939 border is wrong. They did. It is open to discussion, though, did they fight outside of 1939 as far as they could or as far as they wanted.
Lets say one could make a passable case for both options, depending on the viewpoint. Personally, I think this was one of those times when military goals and actual capabilities proved to be a pretty close match. While the line reached by the Finnish troops was the most advantageous militarily and, outside the very north, the one outlined in Finnish communiques to the Germans as the area that was planned to be incorporated into the Finnish state (being inhabited by Finnic tribes since time immemorial, blah, blah), both in terms of military reach, logistics and morale it was on the limits of feasibility. Then there were the political considerations about Leningrad and the Murmansk railway, of course.
That this was only a temporary defensive line rather than the new national border was very possible and overextending the available limited resources would have been idiotic. This was rough terrain, with poor roads and few railway lines, and it had to be managed with conscript troops with a questionable zeal for the undertaking. Already in 1941 many units were close to mutiny when the old 1920 border was crossed, a big part of the men declining at first to take any part in an invasion of foreign soil. While order was restored by strict discipline, the leadership knew quite well the limits set by the soldiers' sentiments about the war.
Without the "spirit of Winter War", that shared understanding of national danger and necessity of war, the Finnish army would have never managed an invasion of USSR on this scale; desertion rates would have been high and discipline would have had to be maintained at gunpoint, eventually leading to a collapse of some sort.
Of course, if the Finnish war effort was led by an irresponsible kook like Hitler, an all-out attack would have gained more ground - initially. Eventually the tide would have turned, and overextension would have likely made a coordinated defense on the isthmus that much harder than it was IOTL. In the end, Red Army would have paraded in Helsinki.