ABSTRACT
Poland’s tragic demise, in September 1939, was followed by a relatively uneventful seven months, the so-called Phony War between Great Britain and France, on the one hand, and Germany, on the other. The astonishingly quiet international scene was disturbed only by the Soviet Red Army’s attack on Finland, which was motivated by the desire to extend Soviet power all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Between November 1939 and March 1940, in the so-called Winter War, a country of 4 million stood up to a country of 170 million with, at first, nothing but Finnish successes. At last, after suffering terrible losses due to bad leadership and poor morale, the Soviets prevailed, forcing a peace treaty and some territorial concessions on Finland. The latter had won the admiration of both warring camps. * What the public tended to overlook was that no Scandinavian country hastened to the aid of their Finnish neighbor, not even in diplomacy, mainly because Nazi Germany was at that time an ally of the Soviet Union and no Scandinavian government wished to aggravate Hitler. Within a year and a half of the Winter War, Denmark and Norway suffered German occupation; Finland became embroiled in an even more savage second war with the Soviet Union; and Sweden alone remained neutral, at the price of acting as Nazi Germany’s indispensable supplier of iron ore, steel, and machinery.
