ABSTRACT
On 25 June 1941, Finland re-entered the Second World War. It declared war on the Soviet Union, which had already started to bombard some key Finnish cities, and there began the so-called ‘Continuation War’, or the War of 1941-1944. Officially Finland fought this war as a ‘co-belligerent’ of Germany, fighting a separate war against Russian Bolshevism, and to reconquer the areas that had been lost in the Winter War. Finnish leaders had made a conscious decision to seek German assistance and to relaunch their own war, for after Great Britain had lost Norway and was ejected from all of Scandinavia, these leaders had concluded that only Germany could defend them against the communist threat. For a while Finnish leaders allowed themselves to believe that Finland and Germany, acting together, could finally destroy the Soviet communist regime. Things did not go that way, and by 1942 Finnish leaders began to conclude that the desired outcome was an impossibility. In the meantime they had, however, lost most of the sympathy of Great Britain and the United States, and they found it ever more difficult to maintain the fiction of a separate war, or to live with the fact that Finland had sided with a Nazi power with which it was not in ideological, moral or political agreement. Surrender to the Soviet Union came in late September 1944, but was preceded by a British declaration of war against Finland and almost three years of hostilities between these two countries.
