Soviet Union still faced the threat of war with Germany and Japan, Stalin asked
Marshal Shaposhnikov to present the general staff’s views on plans for war with
Finland. Shaposhnikov noted the difficulties involved in penetrating the deeply
echeloned defences of the Mannerheim Line on the isthmus and proposed the
concentration of significant forces and means in the theatre and specific training
and preparations for assaults on fortified positions before launching operations.
He stated that the campaign itself would involve several months of heavy fighting.
Stalin accused Shaposhnikov of being over-cautious and rejected his recommen-
dations. Instead, he ordered General Meretskov, commander of the Leningrad
Military District, to prepare his own war plan for Finland, giving him three weeks
to accomplish the task. 31 In his memoirs, Meretskov does not discuss the details
of these plans, confining his remarks to cryptic comments about Shaposhnikov’s
plan and its wisdom. In July, when he presented his own plan to Stalin and
Voroshilov, they approved it and said that the war should be ‘short and swift’.
When Meretskov objected, they promised the full resources of the Soviet Union
to achieve rapid victory. 32
The Leningrad Military District was transformed into the North-Western Front
and the Baltic and Northern Fleets were subordinated to that front. The command
arrangements took no account of the vastness of the theatre or the problems of
exercising strategic-operational command of control over diverse forces operating
on distant axes. The North-Western Front under General Meretskov sent four
armies—the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 14th—into the attack. The 7th Army, which was
under Meretskov’s direct command, represented the primary effort. It was to
advance up the Karelian Isthmus, penetrate the Mannerheim Line, and, with the
8th Army advancing around the western and northern shore of Lake Ladoga,
surround the Finnish defenders and then advance on Helsinki. The 9th Army was
supposed to advance across central Finland to the Swedish border and cut north-
ern Finland off from the south. The 14th Army, with the assistance of the Northern
Fleet, was to advance and take the Finnish port of Petsamo and cut northern
Finland off from foreign assistance. This was to be a preventive war with the
outcome being the removal of the current Finnish government and its replacement
by a pro-Communist one, which would make the territorial concessions Moscow
had demanded and be a dependable ally in the future. 33
Soviet accounts of the Winter War divide the conflict into two periods. The
first, which was noteworthy for Soviet maximalist war aims, including the
creation of a Finnish People’s Republic under Soviet sponsorship to govern
post-war Finland, can rightly be called a series of tactical defeats adding up to
operational failure that lasted from December to early February 1940. The 7th
Army, with an overwhelming superiority in men, tanks, and artillery, mounted a
broad advance up the isthmus. Its initial attacks did not focus on one sector of its
frontage and did not create a solid concentration of forces against any one point.
In two weeks of fighting, it failed to penetrate the Mannerheim Line and suffered
heavy losses. Soviet troops went forward without good intelligence and ran into
barbed-wire entanglements, tank traps, and dense minefields which inflicted
serious losses and stopped the attack until mine-detection devices could be
74 The Evolution of Operational Art