Why didn Russia conquer Finland in WW2?
Russians were not militarily prepared, adequately trained, equipped or competently led. I remember a Naval History article detailing how Russian radio traffic was all sent in clear among other things. To sum up, Russians made a lot of tactical mistakes. I agree with other posts; Stalin’s purges of high military offercers in the 30’s show trials deprived the army of good leadership. Heavy use of tanks, dark uniforms, soldiers who were not acclimated to artic climates, or forest warfare, and Finnish use of small units using snipers, molotov cocktails and light anti tank guns cost the Russians dearly. Ironically the poor performance of the Russian army partially motivated Hiter to attack Russia shortly afterwards.
http://www.finlandforthought.net/2006/12… It was in the interest of the US that Finland stay a Capitalist country.
Russia tried in 1939 and lost over 500,000 men to Finland’s loss of 51,000 men (due to Stalin’s paranoia and purging of his officer’s corps of over 35,000 officers leaving only inept and unskilled leaders in his army)….Finland finally granted Russia some of their land so that Russian had access to the ocean. After the war (in which Finland had sent troops to help fight Russia with the Germans) Russia was just too plain scared of Finnish fighters to go into what remained of Finland to take it over. Russians claim to be the greatest of hard winter soldiers in the world but even they acknowledge the Finns are much better…and the Finns would fight to the utter death to preserve the last of their homeland and the Russians knew that. In the end, a special arraignment was reached with the blessing of the eastern and western world…Finnland would trade with both and agree to be neutral during the cold war that followed WW II. In return, neither east nor west would attempt to violate it’s
Why would they, their beef was with Germany and Hitler, they were a defending themselves, they were on the defence side, The Nazi’s and their allies were the ones trying to capture countries, you are so deluded, the Russians advances on Eastern Europe was nothing to do with World War 2, they wanted to gain control of the Russian speaking countries because they were parts of Russia in the past. Russia couldn’t really attack countries during WW2 because they were under attack themselves.
