Scandinavia, Italy and the Winter War

A week after the Red Army attacked Finland, the states of Europe were defining their position on the new war. War chronologies record under 7 December 1939 that Italy, Norway and Denmark again declared their neutrality, this time in the Soviet–Finnish war, while Sweden declared that it was not a party to the conflict but was not observing strict neutrality towards it either. This formula, “non-belligerence” (Swedish icke krigförande), allowed Stockholm to send the Finns arms, money and volunteers without formally entering the war. Behind these declarations lay very different attitudes: the caution of small states that feared both Stalin and Hitler, and the open sympathy of Fascist Italy for Finland, even though its German ally was bound by a pact with Moscow.

The second time in three months

The Scandinavian states had practice in declaring neutrality. On 1 September 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland declared their neutrality on the basis of identical rules adopted in 1938. Since the mid-1930s, after the failure of the sanctions against Italy over Ethiopia, these states no longer considered themselves bound to take part in collective action by the League of Nations. In the spring of 1939 Sweden, Norway and Finland rejected Germany’s offer of non-aggression pacts, while Denmark alone accepted it. Neutrality in Germany’s war with Britain and France did not, however, automatically extend to a new conflict in the north. Under international law every new war required a separate declaration, and on 30 November the country at war was no longer distant Poland but a member of the Nordic community.

For Norway and Denmark the matter was simple. The Norwegian government of Johan Nygaardsvold, with Halvdan Koht as Foreign Minister, and the Danish cabinet of Thorvald Stauning, whose foreign policy was conducted by Peter Munch, concluded that the only protection for a small state was absolute impartiality. In the first days of December both countries announced that they would apply to the Soviet–Finnish war the same rules of neutrality as to the war in the west. Denmark, which bordered directly on the Reich and was practically defenceless, could not afford any gesture that Berlin or Moscow might regard as hostile. Norway feared above all that the war in the north would drag it into the rivalry of the Great Powers over Swedish iron ore, which in winter was shipped out through the Norwegian port of Narvik.

Sweden: “non-belligerence” instead of neutrality

The most important position was that of Sweden, the only state that could give Finland real help. To the Swedes Finland was no foreign country: for more than six hundred years it had been part of the Kingdom of Sweden, until Russia took it in 1809. Finland had a large Swedish-speaking minority, and the Finnish officer corps maintained close contacts with the Swedish one. The general staffs of the two countries had for years been secretly discussing the joint defence of the Åland Islands, but the Swedish government had never concluded an alliance with Helsinki. In October 1939, when Moscow presented Finland with its demands, Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson gave the Finns to understand that they could count on arms, food and diplomatic support, but not on Swedish troops. At the beginning of December Stockholm again refused to garrison the Åland Islands jointly.

The Swedish government did not, however, declare neutrality in the Soviet–Finnish war, as it had done on 1 September in the war between Germany and the Western powers. It adopted the stance of a non-belligerent state, already familiar from Italy’s position in September 1939. The difference was fundamental. A neutral state is bound to be impartial and may not support either side; a non-belligerent state takes no part in the fighting but may openly favour one of the parties. Thanks to this formula Sweden could sell and hand over to the Finns weapons from its own army’s stocks, grant credits and allow volunteers to be recruited.

A sharp dispute raged in Stockholm over the form Swedish help should take. The Foreign Minister, Rickard Sandler, a long-standing advocate of cooperation with Finland, wanted more active support, including the defence of the Åland Islands. Most of the government, and Prime Minister Hansson in particular, feared that any step beyond material aid would drag the country into war with the USSR, and perhaps with Germany too. The dispute ended with Sandler’s departure. On 13 December 1939 Hansson formed a coalition government of the four largest parties, in which the foreign affairs portfolio went to a non-party diplomat, Christian Günther. The new cabinet had two aims: to keep Sweden out of the war and to keep the country united.

Volunteers, arms and credits

Public opinion was far more committed than the government. Under the slogan “Finland’s cause is ours” (Finlands sak är vår), collections of money, clothing and food were organised, and thousands of Swedish families later took in Finnish children evacuated from threatened areas. Volunteers came forward, at first without encouragement from the authorities, who did not want recruitment to look like a state undertaking. From them the Swedish Volunteer Corps (Svenska frivilligkåren) was formed. Some 8,000 Swedish volunteers reached Finland (figures range from 8,000 to almost 9,700, depending on whether all volunteers or only Swedes are counted), and at the end of February 1940 the corps, under General Ernst Linder, took over a sector of the front at Salla. In January 1940 the volunteer air wing F 19 went into action, equipped with Gloster Gladiator fighters handed over by the Swedish air force, which made up about a third of its fighter strength.

Material aid was even more important. According to Swedish tallies, Sweden gave Finland more than 135,000 rifles, several hundred machine guns, about 150 field guns, 100 anti-aircraft guns and several dozen anti-tank guns, with tens of millions of cartridges and hundreds of thousands of shells, as well as naval mines and aircraft. This was a substantial part of the stocks of what was then a poorly armed Swedish army. Aircraft bought by the Finns in other countries were assembled in Swedish factories. According to Finnish calculations, Sweden supplied more equipment than any other state. Even so, what Finland long remembered above all was what the Swedes did not do: the government in Stockholm three times rejected formal requests from Helsinki to send regular troops, and on 19 February 1940 King Gustaf V publicly confirmed this refusal.

Norway and Denmark gave smaller but significant help, despite their formal neutrality. About a thousand volunteers came forward from Denmark and about 725 from Norway, although the Norwegian government forbade active-service officers and NCOs to take part in the war. A nationwide collection for Finland raised some 2 million kroner in Norway, the largest in the country’s history. Danish and Norwegian volunteers joined the Swedish corps, whose emblem, four clasped hands, symbolised the community of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Among the volunteers were men whose names would later go down in the history of the war on opposite sides: the future Norwegian resistance hero Max Manus and the Danish captain Christian Frederik von Schalburg, who in 1941 took command of the Danish volunteer legion fighting alongside the Germans.

Italy: “non-belligerence” and sympathy for the Finns

Italy did not declare a new neutrality on 7 December, but reaffirmed its stance of September. That day the Grand Council of Fascism met in Rome, for the last time until July 1943. The Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, increasingly distrustful of Germany, presented the policy of “non-belligerence” (non belligeranza) announced by the government on 1 September and won the support of, among others, Italo Balbo, Giuseppe Bottai and Dino Grandi. The Council confirmed that Italy would remain outside the war, and its communiqué stressed Italy’s interest in tranquillity in the Danube basin and the Balkans. On 16 December, in a long speech to the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, Ciano presented the history of the Pact of Steel in a way that Berlin read as a marked coolness towards the alliance.

Behind the formal declaration lay an attitude that was anything but neutral. Benito Mussolini regarded Bolshevism as the chief enemy of Fascism and had taken badly the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which had allowed the Soviet Union to seize eastern Poland and the Baltic states. The attack on Finland set off a wave of sympathy for the Finns in Italy, with student demonstrations and a favourable press, which the authorities did nothing to restrain. The Italian government allowed the Finns to buy 35 Fiat G.50 fighters, ordered before the war, tens of thousands of rifles and other equipment. According to Finnish calculations, Italy was Finland’s largest supplier of arms after Sweden. A few Italian pilots and volunteers went to Finland in person.

This help exposed a contradiction in the Axis camp. The Third Reich, which in the secret protocol of 23 August had recognised Finland as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, maintained a neutrality benevolent to Moscow. When it came to light at the end of 1939 that shipments of arms for the Finns were passing through German territory, Berlin blocked the transit. The dismantled Fiats had to be sent by sea: in January 1940 a Norwegian ship carried them from La Spezia to Turku. The first aircraft reached the Finnish unit only in February, and by the end of the war the Finns had received about 30 of them.

The same day at the front

The diplomats’ declarations were made just as the war was entering a new phase. On 7 December the Soviet 163rd Rifle Division reached the village of Suomussalmi in central Finland, where a battle began that would end in the destruction of two Soviet divisions. The same day, north of Lake Ladoga, fighting began on the Kollaa river, where the Finns were to hold out until the end of the war. On the Karelian Isthmus Soviet troops were closing up to the Mannerheim Line. To observers in Stockholm, Oslo and Rome it was not yet clear whether Finland would survive a few weeks or a few months.

Place in the war

The declarations of early December set the limits of the help Finland could receive. Sweden gave a great deal of equipment and many volunteers, but consistently refused to send troops or to allow foreign armies passage. When in January, February and March 1940 Britain and France demanded passage for an expeditionary force through Narvik and the Swedish mines at Kiruna to Finland, both Oslo and Stockholm refused. Germany made it clear that the presence of Allied troops on Swedish soil would mean immediate German intervention. Without Swedish and Norwegian consent, Western help could not arrive in time, and in March 1940 Finland had to accept the Soviet peace terms.

Strict neutrality did not save Norway and Denmark. Allied plans for Scandinavia drew Hitler’s attention to northern Europe, and on 9 April 1940 Germany attacked both countries. Denmark capitulated within a few hours; Norway resisted for two months in the Norwegian campaign. Sweden, which during the Winter War had declined to go to war in defence of Finland, was all the less willing to do so in defence of Norway. It kept its independence, but at the price of concessions to Germany, including the transit of German troops across its territory from 1940. Hansson’s coalition government, formed in December 1939, lasted until July 1945.

Italian “non-belligerence” lasted until 10 June 1940, when Mussolini, seeing France’s defeat, declared war on Britain and France. As late as the beginning of January 1940 he wrote to Hitler that Germany should not abandon the struggle against Bolshevism and that its living space lay in Russia. A year and a half later Italy, Germany and Finland found themselves in the same war against the USSR. Finland entered it in June 1941, beginning the Continuation War to recover the territory lost in 1940, and the G.50 fighters ordered back in December were then flying against the Soviet air force once more.