WI: Finnish victory in Continuation war?
- Thread starter Michael Wittmann
- Start date
Don't think it's possible. After Red Army has rolled through Nazi Germany, nothing is going to stop them from crushing Finland. Saying this as a Finn. Finland pretty much got the best result it could have.
But the Soviets lost many men in the war, so is there still a possibility of winning?
They lost about 200,000 in Continuation. Red Army had millions left. No possibility.
This is why Finland can win the Continuation war... without German support. Just repeat what they did in the Winter War (And Simo Häyhä!)
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One possibility that springs to mind would be if Finland backstabbed Germany earlier than in OTL after cutting a deal with the Soviets to let them keep their gains from the Continuation War. I could see Stalin possibly agreeing to the loss of Karelia in exchange for turning a German ally into a Soviet one.
Finland didn't win the Winter War either. It had to give ten percent of it's territory and a third of it's economic assets to the Soviet Union. A Soviet Union that was about ten times weaker then the one coming fresh off the Eastern Front. With or without Germany, Finland that continues to fight is going to be crushed.
Saying this as a Finn just like DarkCrawler, we couldn't have won. The Winter War was a miracle (because the Soviet Union didn't concentrate its full power on Finland, used inexperienced military leaders and soldiers, was poorly equipped etc.), but the country wouldn't have lasted much longer if peace hadn't been negotiated and defense lines would have broken pretty soon. The same would eventually go for the Continuation War. The only option is probably to have Germany win World War II, in which case you could probably say that Finland "wins" against the USSR too.
If Finland had done sufficient preparation in 1941, it could have accepted Soviet peace offer to give it back everything it lost from the Winter War. The problem was that 1) Finland had a schizophrenic mind on whether or not it wanted to take all of Karelia and not just the territory it previously lost, and 2) it would somehow need to deal with all the Germans on its territory and somehow protect itself from any German reprisal. Given that it looked like Germany was going to win the war in 1941, that last part is especially hard to deal with.
Finland would have needed to consider this as a scenario and make contingency plans if early German success was enormous, but long term Allied success was still likely, and figure out how to backstab Hitler while keeping Finland safe from reprisal.
This is a huge problem to figure out, and probably beyond the capacity of anyone to do so successfully without benefit of hindsight.
Finland would have needed to consider this as a scenario and make contingency plans if early German success was enormous, but long term Allied success was still likely, and figure out how to backstab Hitler while keeping Finland safe from reprisal.
This is a huge problem to figure out, and probably beyond the capacity of anyone to do so successfully without benefit of hindsight.
One could more or less say this was exactly what Finland did in 1942-44 IOTL. The Finnish leadership anticipated that the Soviets start rolling back the front by main force. They were preparing to jump ship as soon as Germany was weak/cornered enough not to turn Finland into a battlefield.
What Mannerheim et al. did not expect was that the USSR would try to hammer Finland into submission in the summer of 1944, before the main offensive against the Germans that would later be known as Bagration. One could well see that the Finnish leadership held too positive views about the possibility of escaping relatively unscathed. This is why the Finns declined the Soviet peace terms of April 1944 - 1940 borders, loss of Hanko or Petsamo, monetary reparations, expelling the German troops and demobilisation - as too punitive.
But the writing was on the wall: by the winter 1943-1944 Stalin felt the Soviet position was strong enough not to compromise with the Finns anymore. The most lenient Soviet terms to be offered to Finland were already set in the Tehran Conference, and they were exactly those listed above.
But on the other hand, before mid-1944 Germany was too strong for Finland to try and detach itself from the alliance/co-belligerence with Hitler. In, say, late 1942 Finland might have managed to regain most of the land lost in 1940 - only to see the interior turned into a battleground between Finnish troops and Germans. In the worst case scenario, add various militias - and the Red Army.
Thus, I agree with my Finnish compatriots above - what Finland got IOTL was very likely the best it could realistically hope for.