Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabbygab | Hacker News Reader

They aren't two separate wars. They are two campaigns within the same war.

You wouldn't divide ww2 into two separate wars because the germans and the soviets were allied in the first half of ww2 ( when they invaded poland and divided europe in half between them ) and then they fought a war against each other in the 2nd half.

The "continuation war" doesn't get much attention because of political reasons. Just like much of europe ( including france, most of scandinavia, netherlands, belgium, ukraine, etc ) underplays their cooperation with nazi germany for much of ww2 when nazi germany was on the ascent.

As they say, the first casualty of war is the truth. This applies not only during the war, but post-war as well.

View on HN

I've been of the opinion that it's simply easier to analyze the era from ~1914-1945 as one long era of war with ill-defined boundaries of conflicts, rather than looking at WW1, Russian Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, WW2, and a host of other smaller conflicts (including Continuation War and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War).

As a practical matter, the European/African theater against Germany/Italy and the Pacific theater against Japan are two separate wars that happened contemporaneously and with some powers fighting the two wars at the same time. The Continuation War was in large part pushed by the Germans to extend the front of the USSR, and as such is essentially part of the Eurafrican WW2, although the Finns did not entirely cooperate in actually pursuing Axis objectives.

This does show the difficulty of drawing firm boundaries around the wars in this era.

With 1.5 years and a formal peace treaty between the two "campaigns", they are separate wars by all measures.

Well, the Winter war was concluded with the Moscow Peace Treaty. I think peace is a natural delimiter of war.

Sort of, but even in Finland, the Moscow treaty was called "interim peace" (välirauha) already before 1941, indicating that it was obvious that the European war will again spread to Finland's borders again.

The Soviets occupied Baltic countries, and continued and increased the political and military pressure against Finland already by late 1940, so that Finns did not believe it really is "peace".

Many unfortunate incidents worsened the situation; for instance, the day when the new Soviet ambassador arrived in Finland after the Moscow peace treaty, Finland had a national day of remembrance for the fallen soldiers (akin to Memorial Day in US). With about 25 000 men lost just few months before, this was of course done with flags in half-mast throughout the country and the mood was solemn and grave.

But the new ambassador did not know this, and he thought Finns are just demonstrating against his arrival. A wiser ambassador would have known better, but Stalin preferred ideological purity and refusal to listen to facts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com