Sixth Thursday Things of Interest

Today we take a quick look on Lapland War (Lapin sota in Finnish). This is a series of events from September 1944 to April 1945. After the Continuation War Soviets wanted German forces out of Finland. Germans and Finns were brothers in arms and this started in co-operation - Germans using their ready made plan, if this kind of scenario would happen. At the same time Soviets were fighting Germans on the Northern areas and Germans didn't want to get trapped, but wanted to get to Norway (which they still occupied).

After some time, at the end of September, Soviets discovered that there were not really fights or war, and demanded that the Germans need to be fought off and their equipment taken and delivered to Allies. Finns didn't like this, but since other option was occupation by Soviets the actual war started. It was a classic fighting retreat with scorched earth tactics by Germans. In the end Germans were fought off and the last of them left Finland in April, majority much sooner in November. There were real fights, but also some fake operations just to keep Soviets happy.

The outcome of the war was mainly a unified Finland. While there was quite strong parties before the WW2, one leaning to Soviets and one leaning to Germans, the Winter War and Continuation War took off much of the interest to support Soviet Union (mainly the faked shots of Mainila and the area losses), the Lapland War left especially the people living in the burnt north bitter with Germans (whole towns were burned during the retreat). Ironically Stalin hoped to exploit the diversion of Finland to capture the land, but in the end the nation got more unified than ever, all starting to be Finns. If you see a connection to the modern day Ukraine, you are not the only one.

Other indirect result of the WW2 was the economic rise. Finnish war reparations to the Soviet Union were quite large, and required lots of factories, pretty much everyone was employed and families had lots of children. The last reparation train left Finland in 1952, and Finland is still the only country to fully pay the reparations. After the WW2 Finland remained neutral and managed to be quite good at it, only joining NATO when Russia attacked Ukraine and it was made clear, that our Eastern neighbour could not be trusted at all.

City of Rovaniemi after Lapland War

--- In Other News ---

Weather is around zero, sometimes a bit below, sometimes a bit above, meaning that there is some snow to melt every now and then and it is slippery everywhere. Our Thursday crew has lots of different entries today, as usual.