Thursday, March 14, 1940

FINNS ACCEPT A BITTER PEACE DEAL. Soviet Premier Molotov and Finnish Premier Ryti signed a peace agreement yesterday in Moscow. So, after 105 days, the Russo-Finnish war ends, on terms highly favorable to Soviet Russia -- and significantly harsher than what the Russians demanded last autumn. In effect, the Finnish government has agreed to hand over the bulk of her natural defenses to the invaders, leaving the country open to full Soviet conquest at a later time of Stalin’s choosing. An Associated Press report lists the terms as follows --

(1) all of the Karelian Isthmus, including the major city of Viipuri;

(2) possession of Lake Ladoga, including territory on the lake’s northwestern shores;

(3) a huge slice of territory in northeastern Finland, including the city of Kuolajarvi, located about 35 miles west of the old border;

(4) a thirty-year lease on the naval base at Hanko in the Baltic, part of the Sredni and Rybachi peninsulas in the far north, and selected islands in the Gulf of Finland.

The Finns are allowed to keep their arctic port of Petsamo -- as long as they don’t keep any warships, warplanes, or submarines in the area. They also must allow the Russians to build a railroad across Finland’s “waist” and grant Russia duty-free access to Norway. Harold Callender writes in Wednesday’s New York Times that it’s “a terrific blow to Finland and to the Allies,” and he’s right.

DICTATORS ARE HAPPY, DEMOCRATS GLOOMY. In London, according to the United Press, “it was widely felt that the heroic Finnish struggle had been for nothing.” The Chicago Tribune’s man in Helsinki, Donald Day, says the people there are “shocked and bewildered” at the news -- as well as angry at the Allies and the U.S. for being slow to rally to the Finnish side these past three months. James Reston of the New York Times reports that British officials believe “this peace...is almost certain to increase the Russo-German domination over Scandinavia and close Germany’s northern flank to the Allies and have political repercussions detrimental to Great Britain and France in Russia and the Balkans whereto emphasis in the war is now likely to turn.”

C. Brooks Peters writes in another Times story that the Germans see plenty of benefit in the peace agreement, in that it will “free the warring Third Reich from the imminent danger of a second front...and discredit Franco-British diplomacy.” An official comment by the German foreign ministry taunted the Allies -- “Neutrals will undoubtedly take notice of the Finnish example as well as the bad faith demonstrated in Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s recent speeches. The Finns had three months to think it over while waiting for Allied help which never came, just as it failed to materialize in Abyssinia, Czecho-Slovakia, Albania, and Poland.”

COULD THE FINNS HAVE FOUGHT ON? An Associated Press story carries Premier Daladier’s claims that the Anglo-French had 50,000 soldiers “ready to sail on a moment’s notice” to fight the Russians if Finland had decided to continue the war. All Finland had to do was make a formal request for them. Naturally that raises the question -- where were Daladier and Chamberlain two months ago, when such a dramatic intervention could have made a difference? Why didn’t the Allies, as the Chicago Tribune asks, threaten to bomb the Baku oilfields in response to the Soviet aggression? Instead it might be recalled, painfully for those of us who sympathize with the Allied cause, that British officials told the press in early December of their desire to not let the Finnish war rupture Anglo-Soviet relations.

Additionally, the Finns can be forgiven if they note bitterly that Daladier mentioned sending 50,000 troops only after the peace agreement had been signed. A pretty safe pledge, that, and typical of the oh-so-cautious Allied approach to the northern war.

THE TIMES WISHES UPON A STAR. Have the editors of the New York Times been taking their cues from Walt Disney’s new Pinnochio picture? Their editorial on Finland’s capitulation is chock-full of wishful thinking and straw-grasping (“Hard as the terms are, at least they call for a truce to fighting.”). The Times rejects arguments that the peace deal is necessarily another Munich, and that the Russians will bolshevize the rest of Finland within a few months --

“At least Russia now knows the sort of resistance she will face if ever she attempts another invasion of Finland. She knows, also, that another such attempt will in all likelihood involve her in war not only with Finland but with France and Britain. For it is now clear, from M. Daladier’s remarkable disclosures to the French Chamber yesterday, how far the Allies were ready to go to bring help to Finland.”

The lack of logic is dumfounding. The Times editors surely know, or should know, that the reason Finland was able to offer the “sort of resistance” she did had much to do with fighting from well-fortified defensive positions. All of those defensive positions are now in Soviet hands. Like the Czechs, the Finns have been pushed back into defending territory where it is much harder to make a stand. And they do so with over 100,000 of their soldiers having been killed or wounded in the Karelian battles. And as far as Allied help goes -- if it took Britain and France three months to offer significant help when the Finns fought like lions, and often successfully, how much more would the Allies hesitate when the Russians break through the new, weakened Finnish lines quickly and are well on their way to Helsinki within a couple of weeks of a new invasion?

Sadly, there can be no doubt about it -- Finland will be Red before the end of this year. Stalin will probably not wait that long to find a pretext for starting up the war again. This “peace” is merely a pause.