In April 1938, when German tanks entered Austria, european countries did not seem to be prepared to react to this act, but felt that it was a Germanic family affair, and very consciously maintained the role of an outsider and a bystander. Compared with the nervous European countries, the Soviets were significantly more sensitive.
In order to ensure the lack of deep security on the Western Front, the Soviet Union made a territorial exchange request to Finland, but it was rejected, and as a result, nothing happened between the Soviet Union and Germany, but the relations between the Soviet Union and Finland quickly deteriorated and led to war, an episode that was particularly dazzling throughout World War II.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > first, the Eastern Front</h1>
Finland is located in the eastern part of Scandinavia, bordering the Soviet Union to the east, Sweden to the west, Norway to the north, and the Baltic Sea to the south. Finland was once incorporated into Russia, but on the express train of the October Revolution, Finland gradually moved towards independence, and after independence maintained consistently friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and even Finland at that time hung a portrait of Lenin.
Although finland was changed from a Red regime to a bourgeois republic in 1919 due to civil war, relations between the two countries did not break down, and the two countries signed the Treaty of Dorpat, which exchanged territories to ensure border security and the Treaty of Non-Aggression and the Treaty of Mutual Assistance between Sufong and Finland.
However, the development of the international trend gradually made Soviet-Finnish relations take another path.
After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, World War II officially broke out. The Soviet Union, which originally wanted to establish an anti-German alliance with Western Europe, never expected that its Western friends wanted to cause trouble from the beginning, and the Soviet Union, in desperation, began to actively negotiate with Germany. On 23 August, the Soviet-German foreign ministers signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact and the Secret Soviet-German Pact, in which Germany pledged to remain neutral in the event of a Soviet-Finnish conflict, leaving Finland isolated.
But as the war situation developed, the Soviet Union found that things were not as simple as imagined, german friends did not seem to intend to divide themselves in the eastern battlefield, coupled with the self-care of Britain and France, the Soviet Union planned to organize its own front against Germany, which included eastern Poland, the Baltic Sea and Finland, and a comprehensive front involving politics, strategy, and diplomacy, the Eastern Front, began to be constructed.
The Soviet Union was not meant to be kind enough to help its neighbors, but to have a strategic buffer zone on its northwestern border in response to the impending Soviet-German war, a role that Finland was well suited for in terms of geography.
Not only Finland was an unlucky egg, at the same time as Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union also sent troops to Poland to bring eastern Poland under its command, and then through diplomatic agreements to obtain the right to garrison troops in the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and took part of the territory from Romania, this series of operations pushed the eastern front to the west nearly 300 kilometers, but there was a loophole, that is, the Baltic Sea in the north.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, domineering</h1>
In order to ensure the security of the northwestern frontier, it was necessary to include Finland in the Eastern Front, not only for The German friends, but also for the whole of Western Europe. Even though Finland had declared that it would remain neutral in a possible future war, Stalin clearly believed that it was necessary to take things into his own hands in order not to panic.
In fact, as early as the beginning of the tension in Europe, the Soviet Union began a diplomatic "effort" with Finland. In 1933 and 1934, the Soviet Union strengthened diplomatic relations with the baltic states, which was a test of Finland.
But when the baltic sea power began to work against the Soviet Union, the Soviet ambassador to Helsinki warned the Finnish prime minister that if the Soviet Union and Germany went to war, the Soviet Union would occupy Finland within a week.
Not only to secure the northwestern frontier, but also to protect Leningrad. Leaving aside the political significance of the city, which at that time was the industrial center of gravity of the Soviet Union, and the general defense industry was concentrated here, if the Germans attacked leningrad in the Soviet Union from the north road, that is, the Baltic Sea, they would be the first to bear it, and if they were stationed in Finland, they could join the garrison in Estonia to attack the invading Germans and complete the pincer offensive.
First, it needed to push the Soviet-Finnish border 40 miles to the northwest and dismantle the relevant regional fortifications to keep Leningrad out of range of Finnish artillery; second, Finland needed to cede some territory and certain islands to the Soviet Union and allow the Soviet army to establish military bases in the Gulf of Finland; third, the Soviet-Finnish treaty was signed, and Finland was to stand with the Soviet Union.
The reason Stalin gave was very true: "We cannot move Leningrad, so we can only move the border. "
In the second half of 1938, the Soviets and Finnish sides held many negotiations, and the Soviet Union threatened and tempted Finland to stand with the Soviet Union in the future Soviet-German war to resist fascism, but Finland refused on the grounds that it violated its policy of neutrality.
In March 1939, the Soviet Union asked for the lease of Finland's four islands of Gogeland, Lavasaray, Shiskari and Čugelsali for 30 years, which were basically meaningless to Finland, and the Soviet Union proposed that economic conditions could be exchanged, and the Soviet Union also considerately considered Finland's neutral policy and proposed that the forests of Karelia could be transferred to Finland, which was essentially equivalent to a territorial exchange, but Finland refused again on the grounds that political economy could not be confused.
It was not until the official start of World War II in September that the Soviet Union again proposed to lease the Hanko Peninsula to establish a naval base, but the conditions proposed basically ignored Finland's own national security, even if Finland had tried its best to meet the Soviet Union's demands, after all, the national interest was above all else. Whoever let Finland be ruled by Russia for a long time would associate a series of Soviet demands, and Finland's national feelings were reluctant to let Finland return to the past.
So at the end of 1939, the Soviet Union unilaterally tore up the Soviet-Finnish Non-Aggression Pact on the grounds that the Finnish army was provocative on the border, and the Soviet-Finnish War officially broke out.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > third, kill chickens with a cattle slaughtering knife</h1>
Finland's total population at that time was about 4 million, the standing army of more than 30,000 people, if the wartime mobilization can use a total of more than 200,000 people to participate in the war, in addition to the militia, coast guard 200,000, there are 100,000 women's logistics team, a total of 500,000 combat troops can be invested.
In terms of weapons and equipment, Finnish light weapons have a certain advantage, in addition to the earlier Soviet aid mosin nagant 30 rifle, there are new Finnish submachine guns, in the jungle and close combat has a great advantage, and those mosin nagants have also been improved by the Finnish military industry, the accuracy is higher than the Soviet soldiers.
But the heavy equipment is gone. By the start of the war, two-thirds of Finland's 60 tanks were veteran Renault FT-17 and Cardenroyd tanks phased out by Britain and France. Most of the 900 guns are field guns from thirty years ago, and even old cannons produced at the end of the 19th century can be used as a soldier's grandfather. The Navy has 29 ships, less than 100 Air Force aircraft, and basically zero anti-tank weapons.
In contrast, the Soviet Union, the number of people involved in the war reached more than 500,000, nearly 3,000 tanks, 1,800 artillery, thousands of aircraft, this is only the Soviet Union after the partial mobilization of the force invested, and do not count the troops and equipment invested after the war began, Finland although after the war also bought more than 400 aircraft, but most of them only received goods after the end of the war, and the war materials, including fuel and ammunition, were only enough for the front line to consume for a month.
The Soviet high command planned to attack Finland in four ways.
The main attack was the 7th Army, attacked by the Karelian Isthmus in southern Finland, cutting off the Finnish army's retreat and pointing directly at the Finnish capital Helsinki, aiming to reconnoiter Finnish territory and rear areas and establish an offensive bridgehead.
The 8th Army advanced northwest from Petrozavodsk from the northeast flank of the 7th Army, and after rendezvousing with the 7th Army, jointly attacked Helsinki and detoured to backstabbing the Finnish line.
The 9th Army penetrated directly into the Finnish hinterland and advanced toward Sweden, cutting off Finland while cutting off Finland's ties with Sweden.
The 14th Army, together with the Northern Fleet, launched an offensive at Murmansk, cutting off Norwegian and Western European support for Finland.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > four, both lose</h1>
Finland responded as follows: 7 of the 9 divisions plus a regiment formed the Second and Third Armies to form the Karelian Isthmus Army to take on the heavy responsibility of defending the area, the Fourth Army in white Ilomanster south to Lake Ladoga, several battalions to protect the lines of communication, while the more than 600 km of border line from Karelia to the Arctic Ocean was defended by only 9 battalions, mostly militia, and one division remaining as a reserve.
It was clearly not enough to deal with the Soviet Behemoth by military defense, and diplomatically Finland sought extensive diplomatic assistance and reorganized its government politically to better deal with the war.
But to everyone's surprise, Finland beat the Soviet Union with a stick.
From the beginning of the war until February 1940, the Finnish army took advantage of the terrain and meteorological conditions and adopted flexible tactics to continuously consume the Soviet Union in an attempt to force the Soviet Union to stop fighting, and the 7th Army, which was the main attacker, was forced to stop the attack after losing more than 200 tanks, more than 20 aircraft and more than 10,000 aircraft. The rest of the armies collapsed without fighting in the face of hunger and cold after the logistics forces were continuously attacked, ambushed, and surrounded by night attacks.
The Victory of Finland shocked the Soviet High Command, and appointed Marshal Timoshenko as the new commander-in-chief, taking the newly formed Northwest Army to tear apart the Finnish defenses under the carpet bombardment of artillery, while the front bombers built roads in the rear to ensure the logistics supply to the front.
After breaking through the Finnish line, it detoured on both sides of the Finnish defensive line, dividing and encircling the Finnish defenders, because a large amount of living forces were consumed in the early defenses, and the Finnish sleds were obviously inferior to the Soviet tanks in the hard-hitting battle, so surrender became the only final way out for Finland. The Soviet Union also wanted to get out of the quagmire of war as soon as possible, providing a breathing space for dealing with possible Soviet-German wars in the future.
On March 12, 1940, the Soviet union and Finnish signed a contract in Moscow, and after paying a price of nearly hundreds of thousands of people, the Soviet Union defeated Finland and built a complete eastern front as desired, and relations with Finland reached a freezing point, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union never publicly recognized the Soviet-Finnish War as an act of aggression.