St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

international conflict history. This paper was not written to be accessible to those not already familiar with the subject matter, and as such provided more substance and specifics. Raftsjø backed his conclusion with research by Pasi Tuunainen, who I felt would be interesting to investigate in order to gain further insight into why Raftsjø came to his judgement. Pasi Tuunainen is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland and has published several journal articles as well as seven books (along with many book chapters) regarding the Vietnam War, Finnish art of war, military innovation and arctic warfare. From his journal article ‘Motti Tactics in Finnish Military Historiography since World War II’, Volume 33(2) of the International Bibliography of Military History, I gleaned further details on the applications of motti as well as other Finnish guerilla tactics. Moving on from the motti and other guerilla tactics, I decided to contact the Finnish Embassy in London, to see if I could possibly email the Cultural Attaché or any other specialist in Finnish military history about this essay. My initial email was responded to quickly by Pirjo Pellinen, Special Advisor for Culture and Public Diplomacy. My email had requested any information, war memoirs or any other primary sources related to the Winter War, or the contact details of someone that the embassy recommended I write to. Pellinen gave me two resources supplied by the Defence Attaché – a link to the National Defence University Library, and the link to ‘Exploding Wilderness: Guerilla-type activities in the Finnish art of war’, Volume 20 of Finnish Defence Studies, written by Marko Palokangas. This journal was 350 pages long and was essentially a study of the history and development of Finnish guerilla tactics, spanning time from the youth of Finland’s independence through to the early 2000s. The information on the Winter War was highly detailed, but there was little more to be gained on the effect of guerilla tactics on the war from this text, considering the research I had done beforehand. The text was mainly focused on how guerilla tactics had progressed and evolved – an interesting topic, but not fully relevant to my dissertation. Moving on from military tactics, my research for the diplomacy and foreign involvement section of my essay was similarly based on academic reports and books. Volume II of Grand Strategy , written by J R M Butler (with contributions from N H Gibbs, J Gywer, J Ehrman, and M E Howard), published in 1976, is a 706-page book on the history of the Second World

War. This is a highly comprehensive, highly academic book that proved useful only in the sense that its section on the Winter War contained surprisingly rare information regarding foreign aid to Finland, for example, how many planes Britain sold to Finland, or the details of the planned full-scale intervention (that never actually took place). This book is clearly reliable, primarily for the reason that there were four significant contributors, meaning the views expressed in Grand Strategy were not that of a single person but the result of discussion between academics, each with their own judgements, and that information could be moderated between authors. However, outside of the examples listed above, this book had limited value because its focus was not on the Winter War, but on WWII as a whole. Dispute, 1939–1940’ is an article in the Journal of Baltic Studies , written by Peter J Beck. It provided the bulk of my research into how diplomacy was used in the Winter War and how effective it was, with a focus on the League of Nations. This article was useful in providing the narrative of the League of Nations’ actions during the war, as well as the names of key figures. This was an interesting read, which gave a helpful overview of where the international community stood whilst watching this war, as well as expressing Beck’s view that this war was a prime example of the League’s inability to deal with aggression. I used this as the central source for the diplomacy section of this essay, and its views on the effectiveness of the League of Nations, whilst clearly subjective, give an interesting viewpoint to consider about the international view of the war at the time. The judgement was subjective, but the names, dates ‘The Winter War in the International Context: Britain and the League of Nations’ Role in the Russo-Finnish ‘ Though a clichéd one, the idea that “history is written by the victors” does bear some truth. Finding completely objective sources for any topic is impossible ’

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