OK, let me list which has similar claim among it's official history: Finland, Czechoslovakia, Poland. And it does not change basic facts of life: everybody who was anybody in Finland knew that without German intervention it wouldn't be the way it was (was it good or bad is irrelevant in this case). Army from mid-level up was staffed (should I say stuffed) with officers who were fighting WWI on German side against Russia. Would you claim that such a country didn't have a very strong pro-German and anti-Soviet pull, you would lose my trust.
I did not put the point about the republic in merely as a boast, as also as an important aspect to understand about Finland in 1939. While a big part of the officer corps and political elite were pro-German, that is only one side of the issue. Like Jukra already pointed out, Finland also had a very strong moderate left: in the '39 elections the SDP got almost 40% of the popular vote and was far and above the biggest single party in parliament. In comparison, the radical nationalists, IKL, polled under 7%.
The Cajander government was the first incarnation of the "Red Earth Coalition", the strategic alliance of the SDP and the centrist Agrarians, a middle-of-the-road setup that was used both before and after the war to marginalize the extreme left and right. And quite successfully so. [As a side note, the government originally included, frex, people like Foreign Minister Holsti, who actually became a subject of controversy after mouthing off against the Nazis in a diplomatic shindig (I believe the legend goes he called Hitler a "mad dog")].
What this boils down to, well, is that the strongly German-influenced officer corps, the Civil Guards leaders or conservative, pro-German politicians were not the only power brokers in 1939 Finland. The left, for the most part, had been successfully rehabilitated and readmitted into the political system since 1918. Even the right was divided internally into Germanophiles, Anglophiles and other groups besides. Famously, two of the war-time political heavies, Mannerheim and Ryti, favoured Britain and France over Germany. While anti-Bolshevik sentiments were strong, the political reality in Finland also included very strong counter-forces to a crusading "White" agenda. See, for example, the inept "Mäntsälä revolt" for a confirmation of the strength of the moderate forces.
Forgive me, but I don't think a lot of peoples in the region thought in terms of "Pro-German versus Pro-Nazi versus Anti-Soviet" those days. If you were anti-Soviet, it didn't take long to sign you up for Anti-Bolshevist crusade, as numerous volunteer Waffen SS units proved (most of rank and file, I believe, weren't Nazi; just rabid anti-communists).
Anti-Communism and signing up for a crusade were still often two different things. Just last weekend, the Helsingin Sanomat ran a story about a former Finnish officer who worked for the Non-Intervention Committee in Spain during the Civil War, inspecting ships for smuggled weapons. The man was -and is- a staunch anti-Communist, but he searched all ships as rigorously as he could (with limited means) whether they were bound for Nationalist or Republican ports: despite his sentiments, that was the job he was paid to do. Reading that, I thought that was a quite Finnish way to look at it. Extinguishing Bolshevism in Russia was not the job for Finland, not in 1939, and it this was quite well understood here. Extinguishing the revolutionary left in Finland itself was a whole another thing.
I remember thread not a month ago where either you or Jukra said that Finns didn't try to enter Leningrad street fighting due to lack of ways (manpower, equipment, supplies), not due to a lack of will.
While I would concur with Jukra's assessment that the offensive force of the Finnish army was spent after the attack phase of 1941 was over, I myself would say that Leningrad simply was not a target for Finnish military planners in the 30s and 40s. The question was both political and economic: it is quite well documented that Mannerheim and the political leadership thought taking the city would rather hurt than help Finnish war aims. One thing was the possibility of the USSR rebounding and taking its revenge on Finland; another the fact that Finland would in no way be able to feed the population of a conquered Leningrad. Small nations, with the resources of small nations (and a more or less sane leadership), tend to have war aims most well fitting to their actual capabilities.
OK, could you show me a war an average grunt loves? May be initial stages of German invasion of Poland, but even Poles proved to be a tougher adversary than Germans expected.
Your average Finnish soldier did not
love the Winter War, but responded to the situation with grim determination. In 1941, however, several units mutinied against their officers and refused to cross the 1920 border because they did not see this as a just war. Without the morally and politically devastating loss of Karelia, the morale and battle readiness of the Finnish army (and the civilian population) would be very low if a invasion of the USSR was ordered. Protests would be commonplace. The military leadership might have to resort to draconian measures, and that could in turn lead to all sorts of nastiness.