What if Finland won the Winter War?

Since Finland won a Phyrric Victory based on Soviet Casualties, let's say they were able to achieve white peace instead of giving up Karelia. I believe this will put them in a better position to help Germany take Leningrad (Because why not slam at your old enemy again?)

Do you think this is possible. Discuss and Debate.

I don't believe it would have made a huge difference. Any victory for either side would have come at tremendous cost to the victor, and the Soviets were content to starve their people before surrendering. Finland may have had a better chance at helping take Leningrad, but if the odds sat at a 5% chance of success before, they aren't going to get much higher with a similar trail of damage wrought leading up to the second conflict.

I think it just means that the Soviets wouldn't try a second time to take Karelia during the Continuation War. Karelia would be Finnish to this day.

I think it depends how the course of World War 2 would take had the Finnish won.

Personally, I think it wouldn't have hindered the USSR that much. Unless it was a truly devastating victory, I think they would just get more troops and the industry wouldn't be hurt too much either. And chances are, after the war ended, the Soviet Union would want much more revenge on Finland after the war, possibly turning them into a puppet state as well as taking Karelia like they initially wanted. Had the USSR lost though, I think they would definitely keep their land and take some more, and of course the Axis winning would severly change the course of history, but I'm talking about solely Finland.

Finland would have had to killed millions upon millions of Red soldiers to do any significant damage to the Soviets. And that kind of conflict would have bled Finland even worse. A white peace would have been possible, but the Soviets would still have been able to give it the old college try for a second time, and they would have had a much better chance at succeeding.

If they kept Karelia, they would have had a better chance at taking Leningrad, but even if they did, the Axis cause was still thoroughly doomed.

If they won the Winter War, I think Finland would never have joined the Axis (after all, it was the Hitler-Stalin Pact that on paper gave Finland to Stalin, so what common cause would Finland have felt with Hitler?). I think if Finland stayed neutral through the whole war that followed Operation Barbarosa (as Sweden did), then the 1939 borders of Finland would have stood to this day.

BUT, I can't see how they could have won the Winter War in the first place. Maybe if Sweden had come to their rescue... but even Sweden and Finland together were not strong enough to hold off a determined, repeated assault by a country with the massive population and resources of Stalin's Soviet Union.

Well... now that I'm thinking about it... the Red Army leadership was still badly depleted from the purges three years earlier... with the occupations of the Baltic states and Poland to support, and maybe a simmering conflict with Romania over Bessarabia (which, in our timeline, Stalin waited to annex until peace was concluded with Finland)... If Sweden and Finland (and maybe Romania) combined could have held off the invaders for another 12 months, then possibly the looming prospect of a war with Hitler would have motivated Stalin to sue for peace just to free up his forces. It's possible. But barely. In our timeline, the degree to which Finland enjoyed initial success was directly correlated with the degree to which Stalin initially underestimated the amount of force he would need to deploy to crush them.

ScarletHistorian wrote:Since Finland won a Phyrric Victory based on Soviet Casualties, let's say they were able to achieve white peace instead of giving up Karelia. I believe this will put them in a better position to help Germany take Leningrad (Because why not slam at your old enemy again?)

Do you think this is possible. Discuss and Debate.

Have you ever read this: http://www.alternativefinland.com/alternative-history/