#1348 – The Expat Files: Cultural Norms, Finnish Identity, and the Winter War

Automatically transcribed from the original recording; names and wording may contain errors.

[00:00] South of the border down Mexico way That's where I fell in love when the stars above came up to play and now I wonder Hello there all you ex-pad wannabes I'm Johnny Mueller and you're listening to the expat files living in Latin America The show that tells you just what it's like to live work play and or retire down here in Latin America It's a mix of the good the bad the ugly and the great and it's all right here. So let's get started Speaking of things that happened out here in Latin America that just don't happen up in the States Things that sometimes don't make sense. I'm talking about things that when they happen you do a double take Until you don't do a double take anymore because you realize it's just the way things are you get used to it

[00:51] For example a couple of months ago. I was at a neighborhood party and I was introduced to a guy He said what's your name? I said Johnny now I already heard two other people in the room call him a doctor. So I thought good Maybe I can have a decent conversation with this guy So as people came up to him, it was doctor this and doctor that and as you longtime listeners heard me say in other shows They really take titles seriously down here in Latin America, man Which and the focus of Finland's national pride and identity Finland's national epic poem the Cala Valla Holds an even bigger place in Finland's national consciousness than do the plays of Shakespeare for English speakers To outsiders Finnish is not only a beautiful language with a singing quality

[01:39] But also a very difficult one to learn One thing that makes it difficult is its vocabulary Because its words don't have familiar endo-european roots Instead most Finnish words have to be memorized one by one The other things that make Finnish difficult are its sounds and its grammar The letter K is very common in Finnish of the 200 pages of my Finnish to English dictionary 31 pages are for words beginning with K Try savoring these lines from the Cala Valla cool level color of own boika

[02:26] Sennies ukka. I ain't lopsie He was killed Tainan Correa kingen kalto Konokainen I Have nothing against K is but alas finish unlike English Has double consonants like K K pronounced differently from single consonants like K That was the feature of Finnish pronunciation that made it hardest for my tolerant Finnish hosts to understand me on the few occasions when I gave short speeches in Finnish The consequences of failing to pronounce single and double consonants distinctly can be serious

[03:13] For instance, the Finnish verb meaning to meet is tapa'a With a single P while the verb to kill is tapa'a With a double P. Hence if you ask a fin to meet you, but you mistakenly double the P You may end up dead Finnish also has what are called short vowels and long vowels For instance, the word for border is ra'a with a short first a but the word for leg or arm is Ra'a with a long first a and that caused me to be misunderstood when I was near the border of a Finnish national park and

[04:00] Mistakenly lengthened the first a in my attempt to talk again. The guy's got a bachelor's degree in something or other I just can't bring myself to follow that custom even though all Latin Americans do it they'll say hello, La Sensiado or La Sensiada or Ingenero or Ingenera if one has an engineering degree down here, they follow the same rule as with architecture Hello architect. Oh, so then you might ask is it Disrespectful then for me not to follow the protocol Well again, remember you got the gringo advantage going for you and they don't hold it against us They don't expect us to use their titles or at least they never seem to mind Even though you'll hear all the Latinos around you use those proper terms gringos on the other hand. We'll get a pass

[04:47] Actually when I first got down here many years ago and I was stuck in that situation watching people use those terms all the time I said to myself is this for real? They're using bachelor's degree titles in front of their names I'm not gonna do that. It doesn't feel right at all. In fact for a gringo, that would be way too cringy The fact is I've had a couple of Latino friends over the years When they find out that I've got a couple of bachelor's degree of master's and a doctorate They say how come you don't tell people don't you want them to address you by your proper name? I respond. No, it just seems ridiculous And of course, they just don't get it because there are so few people with degrees down here It seems necessary in the Latin culture that the people around you know To treat you with the necessary respect at all times down here

[05:35] They put all people with any kind of a degree on a pedestal kind of like it was back in the states in 50s 60s even 70s when it really was rare for anyone in the average American family to have a degree to me It's bullshit, but those are the unwritten rules of the culture So anyway, I was at this get-together and being introduced to a particular guy I knew was a doctor because I heard people addressing him that way. I said I'm Johnny and you're and he said Dr. Balthazar Well, we spoke a while and I realized quickly this guy was not much of a conversationalist In fact, he seemed a little thick not much of an intellect or much of a talker at all Yeah, right like I'd be one of the greatest composers of the 20th century Finnish architects and interior designers are renowned worldwide

[06:23] American readers will think of the st. Louis arch Dulles Airport outside, Washington and the TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy Airport All of them designed by the Finnish-born architect Errol Särinen After World War one when many new countries including Finland were created by the victorious allies Finland stood out because of Sibelius and Finland's most famous record-setting long-distance runner Havel Noormi nicknamed the Flying Finn and The 1924 Olympic Games he won and set an Olympic record in the 1500 meter race Then again in the 5,000 meter race an hour later

[07:12] Then he won the 10,000 meter cross-country race two days later Then he won the 3,000 meter race on the next day He held the world record in the mile for eight years That gave rise to the saying that Noormi and other Finnish runners Ran Finland onto the world map All of those achievements also contributed to Finn's awareness of their distinctiveness Their national identity and their willingness to fight the Soviets against overwhelming odds speakers of a proto-finnish language arrived in Finland in prehistorical times several thousand years ago in

[08:00] historical times That is after the first detailed written accounts of Finland began to be recorded around AD 1100 Possession of Finland was contested between Sweden and Russia Finland remained mostly under Swedish control until it was annexed by Russia in 1809 for most of the 19th century Russia's czars let Finland have much autonomy its own Parliament its own administration and Its own currency and they didn't impose the Russian language But after Nicholas II became czar in 1894 and appointed as governor a nasty man called Bobrikov

[08:47] assassinated by a Finn in 1904 Russian rule became oppressive Hence towards the end of World War one when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in late 1917 Finland declared its independence The result was a bitter Finnish Civil War in which conservative Finns called whites consisting of Finnish troops trained in Germany and assisted by German troops who landed in Finland fought against communist Finns called Reds as well as against Russian troops still stationed in Finland When the whites consolidated their victory in May 1918 they shot about

[09:32] 8,000 Reds and a further 20,000 Reds died of starvation and disease while rounded up in concentration camps as Measured by percentage of a national population killed per month the Finnish Civil War remained the world's most deadly civil conflict until the Rwandan genocide of 1994 That could have poisoned and divided the new country Except that there was quick reconciliation the surviving leftists received back their full political rights and by 1926 a leftist had become Finland's prime minister But the memories of the Civil War did stoke Finland's fear of Russia and of communism

[10:23] With consequences for Finland's subsequent attitude towards the Soviet Union During the 1920s and 1930s Finland continued to be fearful of Russia now reconstituted as the Soviet Union Ideologically the two countries were opposite Finland a liberal capitalist democracy the Soviet Union a repressive communist dictatorship Finns remembered oppression by Russia under the last czar They were afraid that the Soviet Union would seek to reacquire Finland for example by supporting Finnish communists to subvert the Finnish government They watched with concern Stalin's reign of terror and paranoid purges of the 1930s of

[11:13] Most direct concern to Finland the Soviets were constructing airfields and railroad lines in Sparsely populated areas of the Soviet Union east of the Finnish border Those railroad lines included ones running towards Finland Ending in the middle of forest short of the border and serving no conceivable purpose except to facilitate an invasion of Finland in The 1930s Finland began to strengthen its army and its defenses under its general Mannerheim Who had led the victorious white troops during the Civil War? Many Finns volunteered to spend the summer of 1939 at work strengthening Finland's main defense line

[11:59] Called the Mannerheim line across the Karelian Isthmus Which separated southeastern Finland from Leningrad the nearest and second largest Soviet city as? Germany re-armed under Hitler and became increasingly antagonistic to the Soviet Union Finland tried to maintain a foreign policy based on neutrality To ignore the Soviet Union and to hope that no threat would materialize from that direction The Soviet Union in turn remained suspicious of its bourgeois neighbor that had defeated the Communist side during the Finnish Civil War with the aid of German troops Justice Finland had strong geographic and historical reasons for being concerned about the Soviet Union the Soviet Union also had strong

[12:51] Geographic and historical reasons for being concerned about Finland The pre-World War two border between Finland and the Soviet Union lay only 30 miles north of Leningrad German troops had already fought in Finland against Communists in 1918 British and French troops had already entered the Gulf of Finland to blockade or attack Leningrad Formerly and now again known as st. Petersburg during the Crimean War of the 1850s France had built a big fortress in Helsinki Harbor in the 1700s to prepare for an attack on st. Petersburg in the late 1930s

[13:36] Stalin's fear of Germany under Hitler was growing for good reason Communists and Nazis exchanged virulent propaganda Hitler had written in his autobiography Mein Kampf of his vision of Germany expanding to the east that is into the Soviet Union Stalin had watched Hitler's Germany absorb Austria in March 1938 Takeover Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and began to threaten Poland France Britain and Poland Rejected Stalin's proposal to cooperate in the defense of Poland against the growing German threat in August 1939 Finland and the rest of the world was stunned to learn that Hitler and Stalin had abruptly called off their propaganda war and

[14:30] signed the German Soviet non-aggression pact also termed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact The Finn suspected correctly that the pact included secret agreements dividing up spheres of influence with Germany acknowledging that Finland belonged to the Soviet sphere The signing of the pact was quickly followed by Germany's Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland Followed within a few weeks by the Soviet Union's invasion of eastern Poland Stalin understandably wanted to push the Soviet Union's border as far westwards as possible in order to anticipate the growing German threat In October 1939 the Soviet Union, still fearful of an eventual German attack,

[15:18] was eager to push even more of its western border back as far westwards as possible With the temporary security offered by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the Soviet Union issued ultimater to its four Baltic neighbors the so-called Baltic Republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, plus Finland From the Baltic Republics the Soviet Union demanded Soviet military bases on their soil plus right of transit of Soviet troops to those bases Although the stationing of Soviet troops obviously left the republic's defenseless the republics were so small that they saw resistance as hopeless accepted the Soviet demands and were unable to avoid annexation by the Soviet Union in June of 1940

[16:10] Encouraged by that success, in early October 1939, the Soviet Union made two demands upon Finland One demand was that the Soviet-Finnish border on the Karelian Isthmus be moved back farther from Leningrad So that Leningrad could not be bombarded or quickly captured That is by German troops stationed again in Finland as they already had been in 1918 While there was no risk of Finland itself attacking the Soviet Union it was realistic to fear some major European power attacking the Soviet Union through Finland The second Soviet demand was that Finland let the Soviet Union establish a naval base on Finland's south coast

[16:59] near the capital of Helsinki and cede some small islands in the Gulf of Finland Secret negotiations between Finland and the Soviet Union continued through the months of October and November of 1939 The Finns were willing to make some concessions, but not nearly as many as the Soviets wanted even though Finland's General Mannerheim urged the Finnish government to make more concessions because he knew the weakness of the Finnish army and, as a former Lieutenant General in Tsarist Russia's army understood the geographic reasons for the Soviet demands from the Soviet point of view But Finns from all parts of the Finnish political spectrum

[17:45] leftists and rightists, reds and whites in the civil war were unanimous in refusing to compromise further All Finnish political parties agreed with that refusal by their government Whereas in Britain in July 1940 there were leading British politicians in favor of compromising with Hitler in order to buy peace One reason for Finns' unanimity was their fear that Stalin's real goal was to take over all of Finland They were afraid that giving in to supposedly modest Soviet demands today would make it impossible for Finland to resist bigger Soviet demands in the future Finland's giving up its land defenses on the Karelian Isthmus

[18:32] would make it easy for the Soviet Union to invade Finland overland while the Soviet naval base near Helsinki would allow the Soviet Union to bombard Finland's capital by land and by sea The Finns had drawn a lesson from the fate of Czechoslovakia, which had been pressured in 1938 into ceding to Germany its Sudeten borderland with its strongest defense line leaving Czechoslovakia defenseless against total occupation by Germany in March 1939 Finns' second reason for not compromising was their miscalculation that Stalin was only bluffing and would settle for less than what he was demanding Correspondingly, Stalin also miscalculated and thought that the Finns too were only bluffing

[19:24] Stalin could not imagine that a tiny country would be so crazy as to fight against a country with a population almost 50 times larger Soviet war plans expected to capture Helsinki within less than two weeks A third reason for Finns' refusal to make further concessions was their miscalculation that countries traditionally friendly to Finland would help defend Finland Finally, some Finnish political leaders calculated that Finland's army could resist a Soviet invasion for at least six months even though General Monnerheim warned them that that was impossible On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland

[20:11] claiming that Finnish artillery shells had landed in the Soviet Union and killed some Soviet soldiers. Khrushchev later admitted that those shells had actually been fired by Soviet guns from inside the Soviet Union, under orders from a Soviet general who wanted to provoke war The war that followed is known as the Winter War Soviet armies attacked along the whole length of the Finnish-Soviet border and Soviet planes bombed Helsinki and other Finnish cities The Finnish civilian casualties in that first night of bombing accounted for 10% of Finland's total civilian war casualties during the entire five years of World War II

[20:57] When Soviet troops crossed the Finnish border and captured the nearest Finnish village, Stalin immediately recognized a Finnish communist leader named Kucinen as head of a so-called Democratic Finnish government In order to give the Soviet Union the excuse that it was not invading Finland but just coming to the defense of THE Finnish government The establishment of that puppet government helped convince any still-doubting Finns that Stalin really did want to take over their country At the time that war broke out on November 30, 1939, the details of this absurd military mismatch were as follows

[21:43] The Soviet Union had a population of 170 million compared to Finland's population of 3,700,000 The Soviet Union attacked Finland with only four of its armies totaling 500,000 men and keeping many other armies in reserve or for other military purposes Finland defended itself with its entire army consisting of nine divisions totaling only 120,000 men The Soviet Union supported its attacking infantry with thousands of tanks, modern warplanes, and modern artillery Finland was almost without tanks, modern warplanes, modern artillery, anti-tank guns, and anti-aircraft defenses

[22:33] Worst of all, though the Finnish army did have good rifles and machine guns, it had very limited stocks of ammunition Soldiers were told to save ammunition by holding fire until Soviet attackers were close All of those disparities made Finland's chances of defeating the Soviet Union zero if Stalin were determined to win The world had already seen how quickly Poland, with a population 10 times that of Finland and far more modern military equipment, had been defeated within a few weeks by German armies half the size of the Soviet Union's armies And Finns were not so insane as to imagine that they could achieve a military victory

[23:20] Instead, as a Finnish friend expressed it to me, our aim was instead to make Russia's victory as slow, as painful, and as costly for the Russians as possible Specifically, Finland's goal was to resist for long enough that the Finnish government would have time to recruit military help from friendly countries and that Stalin would tire of the military costs to the Soviet Union To the great surprise of the Soviet Union and of the rest of the world, Finland's defenses held The Soviet's military plan of attacking Finland along the entire length of their shared border included attacks on the Mannerheim line across the Karelian Isthmus Plus attempts to cut Finland at the waist by driving all the way across the middle of

[24:11] Finland at the country's narrowest point Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called Molotov cocktails, which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank Other Finnish soldiers waited in a foxhole for a tank to come by, then jammed a log into the tank's tracks to bring it to a stop Daredevil individual Finnish soldiers then ran up to the crippled tanks, pointed their rifles into the cannon barrels and observation slits, and shot Soviet soldiers inside the tanks

[24:58] Naturally, the casualty rate among Finland's anti-tank crews was up to 70 percent What most won the admiration of world observers for the Finnish defenders was their success in destroying the two Soviet divisions that attacked Finland at its waist The Soviets advanced with motor vehicles and tanks along the few roads leading from the Soviet Union into Finland. Small groups of Finnish soldiers mounted on skis, wearing white uniforms for camouflage against the snow, moved through the roadless forest, cut the Soviet columns into segments, and then annihilated one segment after another A Finnish veteran described to me in 1959 the tactics that he and his fellow soldiers had

[25:46] used in those winter battles. At night, Soviet soldiers, who had parked their vehicles in a long column along a narrow one-lane forest road, gathered around big bonfires to keep themselves warm. Finnish soldiers instead stayed warm at night with small heaters inside their tents, invisible from the outside. My friend and his platoon skied through the forest, invisible in their white camouflage uniforms, to within firing range of a Soviet column. They then climbed nearby trees while carrying their rifles, waited until they could identify the Soviet officers in the light of the bonfire, shot and killed the officers, and then skied off, leaving the Soviets frightened,

[26:35] demoralized, and leaderless. Why did the Finnish army prevail for so long in defending itself against the Soviet army's overwhelming advantages of numbers and of equipment? One reason was motivation. Finnish soldiers understood that they were fighting for their goals. For example, when Soviet forces were advancing across the frozen Gulf of Finland, which was defended only by small groups of Finnish soldiers on islands in the Gulf, the Finnish defenders were told that there would be no means of rescuing them. They should stay

[27:20] on those islands and kill as many Soviets as possible before they themselves were killed. And they did. Second, Finnish soldiers were accustomed to living and skiing in Finnish forests in the winter, and they were familiar with the terrain on which they were fighting. Third, Finnish soldiers were equipped with clothing, boots, tents, and guns suitable for Finnish winters. But Soviet soldiers were not. Finally, the Finnish army, like the Israeli army today, was effective far out of proportion to its numbers, because of its informality that emphasized soldiers taking initiative and making their own decisions rather than blindly obeying orders. But the tenacity and temporary successes of the Finnish army were

[28:10] just buying time. With the expected melting of the winter ice and snow in the spring, the Soviet Union could finally put its numerical and equipment superiority to use in advancing across the Karelian Isthmus and across the Gulf of Finland. Finland's hopes depended upon receiving assistance of volunteers, equipment, and army units from other countries. What was happening on that diplomatic front? Widespread sympathy for little Finland bravely fighting, the big Soviet aggressor inspired 12,000 foreign volunteers, mostly from Sweden, to come to Finland to fight. But most of those volunteers had not yet completed their military

[28:55] training by the time that the war ended. Some countries sent military equipment of varying degrees of usefulness. For example, one Finnish veteran told me of old artillery pieces dating from World War I that were sent from Italy. When one shoots a projectile from an artillery piece, the gun recoils backwards, so it must be secured on a strong mounting. Each artillery piece requires not only a gunner at the gun itself, but also someone called a spotter stationed some distance in front of the gun in order to spot where the shell lands, and thereby to correct the range setting for the next shot. But according to my veteran friend, those old Italian artillery pieces were so poorly designed

[29:44] for absorbing recoil that each gun required two spotters—one, the usual spotter in front of the gun to watch where the shell landed, plus another spotter behind the gun to see where the gun landed. Realistically, the only countries from which Finland had any hopes of receiving many troops and or supplies were Sweden, Germany, Britain, France, and the U.S. Neighboring Sweden, although closely connected to Finland through long shared history and shared culture, refused to send troops out of fear of becoming embroiled in war with the Soviet Union, while Germany had sent troops to support Finnish independence and had long-standing ties of culture and friendship with Finland, Hitler was unwilling

[30:34] to violate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by helping Finland. The U.S. was far away, and President Roosevelt's hands were tied by U.S. neutrality rules resulting from decades of American isolationist policies. That left only Britain and France as realistic sources of help. Britain and France did eventually offer to send troops, but both were already at war with Germany and that war was the overwhelming preoccupation of the British and French governments, which could not permit anything else to interfere with that goal. Germany was importing much of its iron ore from neutral Sweden. Much of that ore was being exported from Sweden across Norway by

[31:20] railroad to the ice-free Norwegian port of Narvik and then by ship to Germany. What Britain and France really wanted was to gain control of these Swedish iron fields and to interrupt the ship traffic from Narvik. Their offer to send troops across neutral Norway and Sweden to help Finland was just a pretext for achieving those true aims. Hence, while the British and French governments offered help to Finland in a form of tens of thousands of troops, it turned out that most of those troops would be stationed at Narvik and along the Narvik railroad and in the Swedish iron fields. Only a tiny fraction of those troops would actually reach

[32:05] Finland. Even those stationings of troops would of course require the permission of the Norwegian and Swedish governments, which were remaining neutral and refused permission. In January 1940, the Soviet Union finally began to digest the lessons of its horrifying troop losses and military defeats in December. Stalin disowned the puppet Finnish government that he had set up under the Finnish Communist leader Kucinan. That meant that Stalin was no longer refusing to acknowledge the real Finnish government, which sent out peace-feelers. The Soviets stopped wasting effort on their attempts to cut Finland at the waist, and instead assembled huge

[32:52] concentrations of troops and artillery and tanks on the Karelian Isthmus, where the open terrain favored the Soviets. Finnish soldiers had been fighting continually at the fronts for two months and were exhausted, while the Soviet Union could throw in unlimited fresh reserves. Early in February, Soviet attacks finally broke through the Mannerheim line, forcing the Finns to retreat to the next and much weaker defense line. Although the other Finnish generals under Mannerheim begged him to retreat even further to a better defensive position, Mannerheim had iron nerves. Despite the heavy casualties now being inflicted on the Finnish army, he refused to pull back further, because he knew that it was essential for Finland still

[33:43] to be occupying as much of its territory as possible at the time of the inevitable peace negotiations. In late February 1940, when the exhausted Finns were finally ready for peace, the British and French still urged the Finns to hold out. The French prime minister, Aladeh, urgently wired Finland that he would send 50,000 troops by the end of March, that he had 100 bomber planes that were ready to take off, and that he guaranteed to arrange the passage of those troops by land across Norway and Sweden. That offer induced the Finns to keep fighting for another week, during which several thousand more Finns were killed.

[34:31] But the British then admitted that Aladeh's offer was a deceitful bluff, that those troops and planes were not ready, that Norway and Sweden were still refusing passage to the offered troops, and that the French offer was being made merely to advance the Allies' own aims and to save face for Deladeh. Hence, Finland's prime minister led a Finnish delegation to Moscow for peace negotiations. At the same time, the Soviet Union maintained its military pressure on Finland by advancing upon Finland's second largest city of Viipuri, capital of the Finnish province of Karelia. That fighting accounts for all those gravestones labeled Viipuri, February or March 1940, that you'll see in Hietanyemi Cemetery.

[35:21] The conditions that the Soviet Union imposed in March 1940 were much harsher than the conditions that the Finns had rejected in October of 1939. The Soviets now demanded the entire province of Karelia, other territory farther north along the Finland-Soviet border, and use of the British port of Hanko near Helsinki as a Soviet naval base. Rather than remain in their homes under Soviet occupation, the entire population of Karelia, amounting to ten percent of Finland's population, chose to evacuate Karelia and withdrew into the rest of Finland. There, they were squeezed into rooms and apartments and houses of other Finns, until almost all of them

[36:07] could be provided with their own homes by 1945. Uniquely among the many European countries with large internally displaced populations, Finland never housed its displaced citizens in refugee camps. Nineteen years later, my Finnish host, during my visit, still remembered the huge drain of finding housing and support for all of those Karelians. Why, in March 1940, did Stalin not order the Soviet army to keep advancing and to occupy all of Finland? One reason was that the fierce Finnish resistance had made clear that a further advance would continue to be slow and painful and costly to the Soviet Union,

[36:54] which now had much bigger problems to deal with, namely the problems of reorganizing its army and rearming to prepare for a German attack. The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union. About eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British-French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. Some authors concluded that the harsh March 1940 peace terms demonstrate that the Finns

[37:40] should indeed have accepted the milder terms demanded by Stalin in October 1939. But Russian archives opened in the 1990s confirmed Finn's wartime suspicion. The Soviet Union would have taken advantage of those milder territorial gains and the resulting breaching of the Finnish defense line in October 1939 in order to achieve its intent of taking over all of Finland, just as it did to the three Baltic republics in 1940. It took the Finns fierce resistance and willingness to die and the slowness and cost of the war against Finland to convince the Soviet Union not to try to conquer all of Finland in March 1940. After the March 1940 armistice, the Soviet Union

[38:35] reorganized its army and annexed the three Baltic republics. Germany occupied Norway and Denmark in April 1940 and then defeated France in June 1940, so that Finland was now cut off from any possible outside help except from Germany. Finland rebuilt its own army, especially with German equipment. Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union in the following year, 1941. At some point, German military planners began discussions with Finnish military planners about hypothetical joint operations against the Soviet Union. While Finland had no sympathy with Hitler and Nazism, the Finns understood the cruel reality that it would be impossible for them to

[39:26] avoid choosing sides and to preserve their neutrality in a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Otherwise, one or both of those countries would seek to occupy Finland. Finland's bitter experience of having to fight the Soviet Union alone in the winter war made the prospect of repeating that experience worse than the alternative of an alliance of expedience with Nazi Germany. The least awful of several very bad options. To quote from Stephen Zaloga's biography of Mannerheim, the poor performance of the Soviet army in the winter war had convinced all observers, not only Finland, but also in Germany, Britain, and the U.S., that a war between Germany and the Soviet Union would end with a German victory.

[40:15] Naturally, too, the Finns wanted to regain their lost province of Karelia. On June 21, 1941, Germany did attack the Soviet Union. Finland declared that it would remain neutral, but on June 25, Soviet planes bombed Finnish cities, giving the Finnish government the excuse that night to declare that Finland was once again at war with the Soviet Union. The second war against the Soviet Union following the first winter war is called the Continuation War. This time, Finland mobilized one-sixth of its entire population to serve in or work directly for the army, the largest percentage of any country during World War II. That's as if

[41:05] the U.S. today were to re-institute the draft and to build up an army of over fifty million. Serving directly in the armed forces were males from age sixteen to their early fifties, plus some women near the front lines. All Finns of both sexes not actually in the armed forces, ages fifteen to sixty-four, had to work in a war industry, agriculture, forestry, or other sector necessary for defense. Teenage children worked in the fields, sawmills, and anti-aircraft. With the Soviet army preoccupied in defending itself against the German attack, the Finns quickly reoccupied Finnish Karelia, and, more controversially,

[41:51] also advanced beyond their former borders into Soviet Karelia. But Finland's war aims remained strictly limited, and the Finns described themselves not as allies, but as co-belligerents with Nazi Germany. In particular, Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things, to round up Finland's Jews, although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo, and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south. That latter refusal of the Finns saved Leningrad, enabled it to survive the long German siege, and contributed to Stalin's later decision that it was unnecessary to invade Finland beyond

[42:42] Karelia. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Finland was fighting alongside Nazi Germany. The distinction between ally and co-belligerent was lost on outsiders who did not understand Finland's situation. When I was growing up in the US during World War II, I just thought of Finland as the fourth Axis power, along with Germany and Italy and Japan. Under pressure from Stalin, Britain declared war on Finland. But the only action that Britain took was to stand one bombing raid against the Finnish city of Turku, where the British pilots intentionally dropped their bombs offshore into the ocean, rather than hit Turku itself. After early December 1941, the Finnish army ceased its advance, and nothing further happened in the

[43:36] continuation war between the Soviet Union and Finland for almost three years. On the one hand, Finland had no other goals after occupying Karelia. On the other hand, the Soviet army was too busy fighting the German army to be able to spare troops against Finland. Finally, after the Soviet Union had made sufficient progress in pushing German troops out of the Soviet Union that it felt able to divert attention to Finland, in June 1944 it launched a big offensive against the Karelian Isthmus. Soviet troops quickly broke through the Mannerheim line, but just as in February 1941, the Finns succeeded in stabilizing the front. The Soviet advance then petered out partly because Stalin set a higher priority on using

[44:28] his army to reach Berlin from the east ahead of American and British armies advancing from the west, and partly because of the dilemmas already faced during the Winter War. The expected high cost of overcoming further Finnish resistance, of guerrilla warfare in Finland's forests, and of figuring out what to do with Finland if and when the Soviet Union did succeed in conquering it. Thus in 1944, as in 1941, Finnish resistance achieved the realistic goal expressed by my Finnish friend, not of defeating the Soviet Union, but of making further Soviet victories prohibitively costly, slow, and painful. As a result, Finland became the sole continental

[45:17] European country fighting in World War II to avoid enemy occupation. Once the battlefront restabilized in July 1944, Finland's leaders again flew to Moscow to sue for peace and signed a new treaty. This time, Soviet territorial demands were almost the same as they had been in 1941. The Soviet Union took back Finnish Karelia and a naval base on the south coast of Finland. The Soviet Union's only additional territorial acquisition was to annex Finland's port and nickel mines on the Arctic Ocean. Finland did have to agree to drive out the 200,000 German troops stationed in northern Finland, in order to avoid having to admit Soviet troops into Finland

[46:04] to do that. It took Finland many months, in the course of which the retreating Germans destroyed virtually everything of value in the whole Finnish province of Lapland. When I visited Finland in 1959, my Finnish host was still bitter that their former German allies had turned on Finland and laid waste to Lapland. Finland's total losses against the Soviets and the Germans in the two wars—the Winter War and the Continuation War—were about 100,000 men killed. In proportion to Finland's population then, that's as if nine million Americans were killed in a war today. Another 94,000 Finns were crippled, 30,000 Finnish women were widowed, 55,000 Finnish children

[46:58] were orphaned, and 615,000 Finns lost their homes. That's as if a war resulted in eight million Americans being crippled, two and a half million American women being widowed, half a million American children being orphaned, and 50 million Americans losing their homes. In addition, in one of the largest child evacuations in history, 80,000 Finnish children were evacuated, mainly to Sweden, with long-lasting traumatic consequences extending to the next generation. Today, daughters of those Finnish mothers evacuated as children are twice as likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness as are their female cousins born to non-evacuated

[47:47] mothers. The Soviet Union's much heavier combat losses against Finland were estimated at about half a million dead and a quarter of a million wounded. That Soviet death toll includes the 5,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Finns and repatriated after the armistice to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately shocked for having surrendered. The armistice treaty treated Finland to collaborate with the Allied powers in the apprehension of persons accused of war crimes. The Allied interpretation of Finnish war criminal was the leaders of Finland's government during Finland's wars against the Soviet Union.

[48:35] If Finland hadn't prosecuted its own government leaders, the Soviets would have done so, and imposed harsh sentences, probably death sentences. Hence, Finland felt compelled to do something that in any other circumstance would have been considered disgraceful. It passed a retroactive law, declaring it illegal for its government leaders to have defended Finland by adopting policies that were legal and widely supported under Finnish law at the time that those policies were adopted. Finnish courts sentenced to prison Finland's wartime President Ruti, its wartime prime ministers Rangel and Lincomius, its wartime foreign minister,

[49:21] and four other ministers plus its ambassador to Berlin. After those leaders had served after sentences in comfortable special Finnish prisons, most of them were voted or appointed back into high public positions. The peace treaty required Finland to pay heavy reparations to the Soviet Union—$300 million to be paid within six years. Even after the Soviet Union extended the term to eight years and reduced the amount to $226 million, that was still a huge burden for the small and unindustrialized Finnish economy. Paradoxically, though, those reparations proved to be an economic stimulus by forcing Finland

[50:10] to develop heavy industries such as building ships and factories for export. The reparations thereby exemplify the etymology of the Chinese word weiji, meaning crisis, which consists of the two characters wei, meaning danger, and ji, meaning opportunity. That industrialization contributed to the economic growth of Finland after the war to the point where Finland became a modern industrial country, and now a high-tech country, rather than, as formerly, a poor agricultural country. In addition to paying those reparations, Finland had to agree to carry out much trade with the Soviet Union, amounting to 20 percent of total Finnish trade. From the Soviet Union, Finland imported especially

[51:00] oil. That proved to be a big advantage for Finland, because it didn't share the dependence of the rest of the West on Middle Eastern oil supplies. But as part of its trade agreement, Finland also had to import inferior Soviet manufactured goods, such as locomotives, nuclear power plants, and automobiles, which could otherwise have been obtained more cheaply and with much higher quality from the West. Finns coped with their frustration through black humor, just as they had in dealing with the antiquated Italian artillery that I mentioned earlier. For instance, at the time of my 1959 visit, many Finns had Soviet cars of the Moskvić model, which frequently broke down. Many European and

[51:49] American car models then had sunroofs, sliding panels that one could use to open the roof, and let in the sun during beautiful weather. According to a widespread Finnish joke, new models of Moskvić's were going to have not just a sunroof, but also a sun floor. Another sliding panel, this one in the floor. Question. What's the advantage of having a sun floor which can't let in the sun? Answer. Whenever your Moskvić breaks down, which will happen often, you can put your feet through the opening in the sun floor, stand up on the ground inside your Moskvić, and push it forwards. Finns refer to the years 1945-1948 as the years of danger. In retrospect, we know that Finland

[52:42] survived. But during those years, that happy outcome seemed uncertain. The foremost danger was that of a communist takeover, through domestic communist subversion supported by the Soviet Union, paradoxically for a democratic country that had been fighting for its survival against the communist Soviet Union, Finland's Communist Party and its allies won a quarter of the seats in the March 1945 free elections for Finland's parliament, and they tried to take over the police force. The Soviet Union had already occupied East Germany, was in the process of engineering communist takeovers of four Eastern European countries, Poland, Hungary,

[53:27] Bulgaria, and Romania, engineered a successful coup in Czechoslovakia, and supported an unsuccessful guerrilla war in Greece. Would Finland be next? The cost of reparations to the Soviet Union represented a heavy burden on the still largely agricultural, not yet industrialized Finnish economy. War had destroyed Finland's infrastructure. Farms had been neglected. Manufacturing facilities had fallen into disrepair. Two-thirds of Finland's