Finland... Good, Bad, or Cursed?

What KJ forgot to mention is that the Swedish contribution to Finland's cause was by far larger than the mentioned volunteers.
Sweden managed to supply a large quantity of ordnance and weapons under cover, and even sendt a Swedish Voluntary Air Force into action in Finland.

There are more numbers to find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_support_in_the_Winter_War

It's pretty safe to say that Sweden participated with more than any other Scandinavian country, but we all did too little, and too late.
 
Actually I sort of disagree.

The single greatest asset the Swedish supplied to the finns were the heart of the volunteers fighting side by side with them.. Planes and guns may be neccesary to do the job but nothing is as strong as the will of someone volunteering to fight and perhaps die for a fellow man.
Many of the volunteers were inexperienced soldiers, especially for the weather on the Salla front but still they went.



This was proven again and again by the Swedish (K)J sharpshooters and their finnish counterparts working deep behind enemy lines creating complete and utter chaos in the supplylines leading to the front again and again.
Still to this day snipers at KJ are reminded of this proud lineage.

The largest help the Airwing and the 8000 men at the Salla front was, were enabeling the finns to move own men and material south and shorten and tighten up their front line.

KJ sends..
 
Menerheim was among the few consistently efficient leaders in WWII. He was the only to be decorated by both sided on both World wars.
The Finnish pilots made outstanding use of mediocre planes and always greatly outnumbered.
Finnish soldiers and generals perform stirling duty, defeating the Soviets, out maneuvering them, etc, time and again.
On one occasion, shortly after Finland received the 10 Ju-88 that they bought, they tagged behing the Soviet planes who were returning from bombing Finland and entered unnoticed all the way to their Base and bombed it.
Late in the war Germany supplied a lot of equipment that Finand used very efficiently.
The Fins must have felt really bad about having to declare war on Germany (Stalin forced them) and fight them after fighting together for several years.
The fact that a few million fins stopped the USSR and cost them extremely high losses for years makes the Finnish armed forces the most efficient in WW II. Their excellent in every field, diplomacy, artillery, infantry, air force, navy, especial forces, snipers, etc,
 
If I remember correctly, Britain was going to side with Finland against the Soviets during their invasion of Finland. Then not long afterwards, declared war on Finland.
 
BritinAfrica said:
If I remember correctly, Britain was going to side with Finland against the Soviets during their invasion of Finland. Then not long afterwards, declared war on Finland.
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I think the official line was that Britain and France were preparing to send 30,000 troops to support Finland but Norway refused to allow them to cross its territory because they felt it would compromise their neutrality especially with the Germans.

In the end those 30,000 troops went to Norway anyway as the Germans invaded.
 
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