More Successful Soviet Bombing in Finland

The Red Air Force was cut to pieces during the winter war by Finland's rag tag assortment of fighters. Their attempt at strategic bombing on Helsinki was a total failure and managed only minimal damage despite employing a huge number of bombers. This is really incredibly surprising given that on paper, the Russians, with their overwhelming numbers of aircraft, huge supply of fuel and proximity to Finland, should have been able to devastate Finnish targets, including airfields, yet they never seemed able to find them and destroy them, even when the target was a city. Could the Soviet bombers have conceivably done a more effective job against the Finns, perhaps even effective enough to affect the course of the winter war?
 
The purges hit the Soviet airforces so hard that they were just barely beginning to recover when Hitler commenced Operation Barbarossa.

With competent and more professional leadership they might do better, and utilize the experiences gained from Spanish Civil War more efficiently when developing their tactics and bombing accuracy in general.

Then again a lot would depend on what they're aiming to achieve with bombings in the first place?

Destroying the infra with military value, such as railway depots, was initially deemed counterproductive when the official plan estimated that the whole campaign would end to total annexation of the target country within few months at max.

And when the first ground offensive stalled in Isthmus and northern shores of Laatokka, the Soviet air forces switched to desultory attacks against civilian settlements through the country in an attempt to terror bomb Finns to submission. Conducting this more efficiently is rather hard, actually - Finnish towns were small and her national civilian protection service was rather efficient in sounding the alarm in time so that the population could flee to air raid shelters.

There are no major industrial regions to destroy either, and bombing Helsinki to ruins wouldn't be enough to knock Finland out of the war either. The air campaign in Winter War was all about diminishing gains, since a massive air war in the heart of winter against a rural sparcely populated country with more land area than Italy wasn't so smart idea in the first place.
 
Brutal as it is, I think that destroying Helsinki (or perhaps first a smaller city as a demonstration) would have a massive psychological effect. Strategically, while there was limited industry to knock out, there would still be chaos and confusion from all the destruction and displaced people.

The physical size of Finland should not be a significant obstacle. All cities are well within range of bombers and most of the big targets are kind of in the southern part of the country anyway.
 
Could the Soviet bombers have conceivably done a more effective job against the Finns, perhaps even effective enough to affect the course of the winter war?

As for terror bombing I would not expect much efficiency. Finnish adminstration was capable of handling huge influx of refugees as proved by OTL. As for bombing operational targets I'd expect that concentrating on the most important targets would have more effect. In addition to rail hubs (such as Luumäki and Kouvola) and port of Turku (through which the foreign arms imports came) there's really just the northern rail hubs such as Kemi, Tornio and Oulu (through which significant amount of arms imports came) which should be hit more heavier. Also the pin prick raids could be eliminated and train busting effort could be organized.
 
But that's only going to be due after December, assuming that the frontline situation proceeds as OTL.

As I noted earlier, the Soviets didin't start their bombing campaign against the railroad network because they initially estimated that it would soon be needed for transferring "the enemies of the Finnish workers" eastwards and Soviet garrison troops westwards...

Another lost chance of the Soviet strategic air campaigns against Finland was in the ending phase of the Continuation War. Again the Finnish railway network was left surprisingly intact, and this enabled the Finnish government to evacuate the civilian population from the combat zones well in adcance, as well as transfer troops to the critical sectors.

In summer 1944 hitting the Laatokka coastal rail lines with all the VSS had available would have certainly led to a situation where Finnish lines in the Isthmus would have broken and the country would have been occupied.
 
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