Hello there! One more unemployed history master here, from the chair of back-pain.
Indy covered the Winter war extremely well, and the Continuation war… well it is mostly a story of hopping one place to next. However there is an interesting political sub-story.
When Winter war begun in 1939, most of the finnish communists or socialist were at that point disillusioned about soviet "worker’s paradise and knew Stalin’s atrocities. Almost nobody questioned the right to defend Finland. Loss of land in spring 1940 was a devastating blow and Inrerim peace was called a peace of shame.
Im not going to talk about para bellum period here, just jump right into it. When Continuation war begun, many were more than eager to take back what was lost. However, after the old border was reached, and Finnish troops entered Soviet Karelia, many refused to go any further. There was talk about how Finnish army is now on rosvoretki (thiefing expedition). This activated some old communists and many pacifists to oppose this war, an excellent spot for Soviet to feed propaganda. Albeit communists were not very keen about co-operation with nazi-Germany either. On the other side, the success in war rose an utopia of Greater-Finland, a defeat of “inferior” slav by the hands of mightier Finn. Those far right dreams slowly faded away after Finns dug out in trenches after December 1941, and mostly stayed that way until spring 1944. Now we know that it was strategically necessary to gain as much as possible to have some leverage for possible peace negotiations. Mannerheim had no fantasies about Greater-Finland and he knew that with only meagre amount of soldiers Finland would not be able to conquer more that it has already gained. This hindsight is easy, our soldiers and rest of the population didn’t know, or were not allowed to know the situation. Imagine our self as a soldier, stepping over the “old” border. Some would be against it, some would go over with gung-ho, and most would simply thought “what ever!”.