deployed and the fields cleared. Finnish pillboxes and bunkers proved resistant to
indirect fire. Finnish guns had excellent fields of fire against the advancing troops.
Progress was measured in hundreds of metres and thousands of killed and
wounded. No major breakthrough could be achieved and a stalemate ensued. 34
The attack around Lake Ladoga by the 8th Army turned into battles of
annihilation against isolated road-bound Red Army columns of mounted infan-
try and tanks. They were cut off by Finnish ski troops attacking in small units
from the surrounding forests. The Finns were equally successful in stopping the
attack of the 9th Army in Central Finland where Red Army units found them-
selves encircled by numerically inferior Finnish forces.
By late December, the Soviet political and military leadership were embar-
rassed by the initial failures and increasingly nervous about the growing prospects
for foreign intervention by Anglo-French forces. Stalin responded to the initial
failures by asking the general staff to assess the situation and recommend
measures to ensure victory. 35 Speaking to the military council, Shaposhnikov
presented the same recommendations the general staff had offered a month
before. Stalin had responded to the crisis by shaking up the command structure,
sacking corps and division commanders. Now he asked the council who should
replace Meretskov as front commander. Semen Konstantinovich Timoshenko,
then the commander of the Ukrainian Military District, responded by saying he
would accept the post on condition that the measures recommended by Sha-
poshnikov were adopted. 36
On 7 January 1940, Stalin officially replaced Meretskov as commander of the
North-Western Front, leaving him as commander of the 7th Army, and appointed
Timoshenko to command that front, which now consisted of the 7th and 8th
Armies. Timoshenko spent a month preparing his forces for the offensive, which
began on 11 February and continued into early March. This time, the Soviet 7th
Army focused its assault forces on specific strong points, brought combined arms
into play, and broke through the final defensive positions of the Mannerheim Line
by using heavy artillery in direct fire on pillboxes and bunkers. It then took Vyborg
and was poised to advance on Helsinki itself. Soviet losses in men and material
were still heavy, but the momentum of the attack convinced Mannerheim that the
time had come to end hostilities. In the end, the Finns agreed to new terms and an
armistice was signed on 13 March 1940. Finland had to give up more territory with
over a tenth of its population fleeing areas now under Soviet control.
As Carl Van Dyke has pointed out, the Soviet–Finnish War was followed by a
vigorous programme of military reforms aimed at improving the tactical and
operational capabilities of the Red Army. These reforms had not yet transformed
the Red Army when the Wehrmacht struck in June 1941, but they did lay the
foundation for the recovery of the forces in the course of that war. 37
But interested outside observers drew their own conclusions about the Red
Army’s combat capabilities. On 1 January 1941, as plans for the German invasion
of the USSR were proceeding, Fremde Heere Ost of the German general staff
offered an assessment of the morale and combat power of the Red Army. It
stated that on the basis of its poor performance in Finland, the Red Army was
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 75