Timoshenko takes command in Finland

On 7 January 1940 the Headquarters of the Main Military Council of the Red Army formed the North-Western Front from the troops fighting on the Karelian Isthmus. Its commander was Komandarm 1st Rank Semyon Timoshenko, until then commander of the Kiev Special Military District, who in September 1939 had led the Ukrainian Front in the invasion of Poland. The member of the front’s military council was the Leningrad party secretary Andrei Zhdanov, and its chief of staff was Komandarm 2nd Rank Ivan Smorodinov (PL). The new command was given a single task: to break through the Mannerheim Line, on which Soviet attacks had foundered throughout December, and to open the road to Viipuri (Vyborg). This time there was to be no haste. Stalin gave Timoshenko a month, huge reinforcements and heavy artillery, and in return Timoshenko promised to win the war.

What changed on 7 January

War chronologies usually state that on this day Timoshenko “took command of the Soviet forces in Finland” or that he “replaced Voroshilov”. Both formulations are inaccurate. Kliment Voroshilov remained People’s Commissar for Defence until May 1940 and continued to sit in the Headquarters in Moscow, which had been directing the war since 9 December 1939. Nor did Timoshenko command all the forces sent against Finland. The North-Western Front comprised the two armies on the Karelian Isthmus: the 7th Army of Komandarm 2nd Rank Kirill Meretskov in the west, on the Viipuri axis, and the 13th Army of Komkor Vladimir Grendal, formed in the last days of December from the troops at the eastern end of the Isthmus, on the Vuoksi River and Lake Suvanto. The armies fighting north of Lake Ladoga and further north – the 8th, 9th and 14th – were not placed under him. It was on them that the January defeats fell, at Suomussalmi, on the Raate road and in the encirclements north of Ladoga, and their commanders were replaced by separate decisions in Moscow.

The change, however, went deeper than a mere replacement of a commander. Until then the troops on the Isthmus had in practice been directed by the Leningrad Military District – the very staff that had drawn up the plan for a swift two-week campaign and was responsible for it. Now a front command, a body designed to conduct a major war, stood between Moscow and the armies. The main effort was concentrated on the Isthmus, as the Chief of the General Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, had proposed back in the autumn, a proposal Stalin had then rejected. Meretskov, who in December had commanded both the district and the 7th Army, was subordinated to Timoshenko and could now concentrate solely on his army.

The lessons of December

The decision came after a month that had been a string of humiliations for the Red Army. The assault on the Mannerheim Line at Taipale and Summa had cost thousands of dead and dozens of tanks and had gained nothing. North of Lake Ladoga, Finnish units had routed a Soviet division at Tolvajärvi and halted the 8th Army on the Kollaa. In central Finland the Battle of Suomussalmi, in which the Soviet 163rd Rifle Division was destroyed, was drawing to a close. On 26 December the 7th Army broke off its attack and began to dig in. Stalemate settled over the whole Isthmus.

At the end of December the Headquarters ordered a halt to unprepared frontal attacks and the start of careful preparations for a new operation. Shaposhnikov was given wider powers in planning operations against Finland. The circumstances in which the commander was chosen are known mainly from later accounts. According to the memoirs of Aleksandr Vasilevsky, then an officer of the General Staff, at a session of the Main Military Council Stalin asked outright who would undertake to command the troops on the Isthmus. There was a long silence. At last Timoshenko stood up and said that if he were given everything that had been discussed, he was ready to take command and hoped he would not let them down. Some Western studies date this scene to 28 December, Russian biographies to the beginning of January. What is certain is that Timoshenko set a condition: the war was to be fought according to the plan of a concentrated blow on the Isthmus, with all the forces and means he would demand.

The choice was not accidental. Timoshenko, a Ukrainian peasant from Bessarabia and a cavalryman of the Civil War, had known Stalin and Voroshilov since the defence of Tsaritsyn in 1918 and had survived the Great Purge, which removed most of the commanders of his generation. He had a reputation as a stern, demanding commander, independent of the political commissars. He was not tainted by the December defeat, and as commander of the largest military district in the west of the country he had experience of directing great masses of troops.

A race against time

Stalin could not afford a long war. After the expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations in mid-December, Western public opinion stood behind the Finns, and arms, money and volunteers were flowing to Helsinki. In London and Paris there was open talk of sending troops to help Finland through Norway and Sweden, cutting Germany off from Swedish iron ore in the process. The Kremlin had to reckon with the possibility that a drawn-out war would drag the Soviet Union into a conflict with Britain and France – something Stalin, bound by his pact with Hitler but distrustful of both sides, wanted to avoid. Spring, moreover, was approaching: the April thaw would turn the Isthmus into a swamp on which a great offensive would be impossible. The new operation therefore had to succeed at the first attempt and decide the war in February or March. That is why Timoshenko received as many men and as much equipment as he asked for, and why no one pressed him to attack before his preparations were complete.

Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo and master of Leningrad, was responsible on the front’s military council for the rear: for mobilising the city’s industrial plants, for transport, supply and propaganda. Leningrad’s factories worked for the front, producing and repairing equipment, including tanks from the Kirov Works. His presence alongside Timoshenko was also a signal that the party leadership bore personal responsibility for the success of the operation.

A month of preparation

Timoshenko began with what had been missing in December: reconnaissance and training. Aircraft photographed the Finnish positions, and reconnaissance in force established the location of bunkers and firing points. In the rear, on ground taken in December, sappers built mock-ups of the Finnish fortifications: trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, rows of anti-tank boulders and bunkers. On them regiments and battalions practised the assault that had gone so badly in December: the infantry learned to advance close behind their own artillery fire and behind the tanks, the sappers to blow up wire and bunkers, and assault groups were formed from infantry, sappers, tanks, flamethrowers and direct-fire guns to take individual bunkers. The gunners discovered in exercises that the concrete of a bunker could not be broken by ordinary area fire, but that it could be silenced by firing directly into its embrasures.

Reinforcements were brought to the Isthmus from all over the Soviet Union. The number of divisions there rose from about ten to more than twenty. Heavy 203 mm howitzers and 280 mm mortars capable of destroying concrete bunkers were brought up, along with new tanks and additional air regiments. Ski battalions were formed, partly from volunteers drawn from students and sportsmen. The soldiers received white camouflage suits, sheepskin coats, felt boots, tents with stoves and field kitchens. The frosts, which in December had not yet been severe, reached several tens of degrees below zero in the second half of January. Roads and railway lines along which supplies for hundreds of thousands of men were to travel were rebuilt or newly built. By mid-February, according to Finnish estimates, the Red Army had some 460,000 men on the Isthmus. Across the whole Finnish front, according to Russian studies, it had more than 760,000.

The new commander also insisted on discipline and on commanders not blindly repeating failed attacks. The operational plan, prepared at front headquarters and approved at the beginning of February, called for a breakthrough on the Summa–Lähde sector, where Meretskov had attacked in December, but this time after days of methodical destruction of the Finnish bunkers by direct artillery fire and from the air. The neighbouring 13th Army was to attack simultaneously in the east of the Isthmus, so as to prevent the Finns from shifting their reserves.

On the other side of the front

The Finns used the January lull on the Isthmus to rest and repair their fortifications, but they had nothing with which to fill the gaps. They were short of artillery shells, anti-tank guns and above all men: the same divisions had been in the line since the beginning of December, and there were almost no reserves. Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim understood that the quiet on the Isthmus was the calm before the storm. Soviet preparations were watched with alarm, and already in January enemy artillery was shelling the Finnish positions every day. The victories in the forests of the north, which held the attention of all Finland and the world’s press, did not change the reckoning on the main axis.

Place in the war

The formation of the North-Western Front closed the first stage of the Winter War, in which Stalin had counted on a swift march to Helsinki and on the “people’s government” of Otto Kuusinen. At the end of January Moscow let it be known through Swedish intermediaries that it was prepared to negotiate with the lawful government of Finland, and the puppet government in Terijoki was quietly set aside. On the Isthmus the war entered a phase of methodical breakthrough. On 1 February 1940 the Soviet artillery began a preparation lasting many days, combined with probing attacks, and on 11 February the general offensive began. That same day the Soviet 123rd Rifle Division broke through the Mannerheim Line at Lähde, where the December attack had failed. The Finns fell back to the intermediate position and then to the rear position, and at the beginning of March the Red Army stood before Viipuri and crossed the ice of the Bay of Viipuri. On 12 March 1940 Finland signed peace in Moscow, ceding to the USSR the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri and other territories.

For his command of the front Timoshenko was made a Hero of the Soviet Union on 21 March 1940. On 7 May he replaced Voroshilov as People’s Commissar for Defence and became a Marshal of the Soviet Union. As commissar he carried out a reform of the army intended to learn the lessons of the Finnish fiasco: he restored general officers’ ranks and single command, tightened discipline, ordered the troops to be trained in what war actually demands, and began rebuilding the mechanised corps. The reforms, however, had not been completed by 22 June 1941, and the lesson drawn from Finland – that a breakthrough requires above all massed artillery and careful preparation – did not prepare the Red Army for the German war of manoeuvre. Observers in Berlin remembered the December defeats of this war rather than the February victory. The judgement that the Red Army had been weakened by the purges strengthened Adolf Hitler in his conviction that the USSR could be defeated in a single short campaign.