It was an invasion worthy of a massive adversary. On November 30, 1939, half a million Soviet soldiers swarmed north, armed with tanks, bombs, machine guns and an astonishing number of troops. The conflict called the Winter War had begun—but the Soviet Union’s enemy wasn’t the war-mongering Third Reich. It was its relatively tiny Baltic Sea neighbor, Finland.

Outgunned, outnumbered, and taken by surprise, it seemed inevitable that Finland would have to concede to Joseph Stalin’s unpopular attempt to assert the Soviet Union’s power in the region. But for a brief moment, an unlikely ally seemed like it might save the day for Russia’s much smaller foe: sausage.

During a short engagement nicknamed the “Sausage War,” Finland struck back. And that momentary reversal in Soviet fortunes influenced more than empty stomachs—it helped convince Hitler that it might be worthwhile to try to invade Russia during the Second World War.

During 1939, as Europe worried about Germany’s warmongering, an armed conflict between the Soviet Union and its neighbor began to seem inevitable. Stalin resented Finland, which had once been Russian territory and which had long fought back against attempts to assimilate it into Russian culture. Though the nation was relatively small compared to the Soviet Union, its loss—sustained during Russia’s chaotic transition to socialism in 1917—represented the diminishment of the once great Russian Empire.

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