Assessment of the Winter War — 13 March

The Peace of Moscow, signed on 12 March 1940 and effective on 13 March at 11:00 am, brought the Soviet-Finnish Winter War to an end after 105 days of combat. The official balance sheet, published at the end of the 20th century once the Soviet figures opened up after 1991, is damning on both sides.

Finland counted 25,904 dead — or 10 per thousand of the soldiers committed —, 43,557 wounded, 1,029 missing and 875 prisoners, repatriated in May 1940; it lost 167 aircraft and 30 tanks.

Soviet losses were of a wholly different order: 131,476 confirmed dead, 264,908 wounded, 5,600 prisoners, 957 aircraft shot down and 3,543 tanks destroyed — the equivalent of seven armoured divisions. At that price, the USSR wrested 11% of Finnish territory, or 35,000 km², and threw 422,000 Karelian refugees onto the roads. The casualty ratio reached 5.07 Soviet dead for every Finnish dead, one of the most lopsided of modern war.

The strategic consequences played out on three levels. Finland survived as an independent state, kept its democratic regime and would retain its Western ties. The USSR, for its part, exposed a major military weakness, from which Hitler drew the — mistaken — conclusion that Barbarossa would be easy. As for the Allies, they had shown their inability to intervene militarily among the Scandinavian neutrals — a diplomatic humiliation that helped bring down the Chamberlain government in May 1940 and the Daladier government in March 1940.

It now falls to historians to characterise the overall result.