Radio War Nerd EP #630 — Soviet-Finnish Wars, Pt. 1: Introduction + Nuclear Bunker Busters, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Guest: AnnibaleRecorded: August 18, 2026

Annibale launches his series on the two wars fought between Finland and the Soviet Union during World War II: the Winter War (1939-1940), which covered underdog Finland in glory; and Finland's Nazi-allied war on the Soviet Union (1941-45), which has been buried and obfuscated under the misleading "Continuation War" designation. We also discuss America's nuclear bunker busters - B61-11/12/13s - and what might happen if Trump should use them.

First - we discuss nuclear bunker bustersAt 48:55 - Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out music from his group Mountains hereAt 51:15 - Annibale introduces the Soviet-Finnish Wars

Annibale's Bibliography

Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimäki (eds.), Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2012). The standard English-language reference on the subject: twenty-odd specialists covering the military and political narrative, the home front, and the way Finns have remembered the war since 1945. Kivimäki's opening essay, "Three Wars and Their Epitaphs", is the single best short introduction to how the scholarship has changed. 

Kimmo Rentola, How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War, 1939–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023). Rentola worked in the FSB, the Russian Foreign Ministry, and the former Communist Party archives. He argues that the 1939 invasion followed not from an intelligence failure but from a political misjudgment, as Stalin expected a rapid collapse and a change of regime, not a war. Most useful recent account of the Soviet side. 

Olli Vehviläinen, Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). The clearest English treatment of how Finland moved from the Soviet sphere to the German one between 1940 and 1941, and of what "co-belligerent" actually meant in practice. Useful for understanding why historians no longer accept the post-war claim that Finland fought a war entirely separate from Germany's.

Antti Kujala, "Illegal Killing of Soviet Prisoners of War by Finns during the Finno-Soviet Continuation War of 1941–44", The Slavonic and East European Review 87, no. 3 (2009): 429–451. Reconstructed from the records of trials held in Finland between 1945 and 1949. Kujala's work established that roughly a third of the Soviet prisoners taken by Finland died in captivity, most of them in a single winter, and that around 1,200 were shot outside any legal procedure.

Oula Silvennoinen, "Periphery of a Genocide: Finland and the Holocaust", Holocaust and Genocide Studies 37, no. 2 (2023): 312–330. Open access. The best current synthesis, and the source for much of what the episode says on this subject: the treatment of Jewish refugees who were not Finnish citizens, the twelve handed to the German security police between 1941 and 1942, and the cooperation between Finnish and German security services. Silvennoinen is also the historian who uncovered the existence of Einsatzkommando Finnland.

*Also freely available and worth knowing about: Lars Westerlund's The Finnish SS-Volunteers and Atrocities against Jews, Civilians and Prisoners of War in Ukraine and the Caucasus Region 1941–1943 (National Archives of Finland, 2019), the official report commissioned by the Finnish government, downloadable from kansallisarkisto.fi.

Total time: 1:41:47Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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