Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko

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Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon (1895–1970),Red Army officer who had been a non-commissioned officer in the Tsarist cavalry and commanded a division in Stalin's creation, the First Cavalry Army, during the Civil War. Subsequently he commanded cavalry divisions and corps until the late 1930s, when the military purge brought him rapid advancement to the highest ranks. In September 1939, he commanded the provisional Ukrainian front (army group) in the occupation of eastern Poland during the Polish campaign. After a similar attempt at an unopposed march into Finland failed bloodily in December (see Finnish–Soviet War), he assumed command and mounted a ten-week battle of attrition. In March 1940 this enabled the USSR to secure sufficiently stringent terms to claim a victory and gained Timoshenko a Hero of the Soviet Union award (see decorations), his only one in the war. In May 1940, Stalin appointed him People's Commissar for Defence and advanced him to Marshal of the Soviet Union.

The Finnish–Soviet war, which exposed pervasive weaknesses in the Soviet command system, and the fall of France in June 1940, which left the USSR alone on the continent with a rampant Germany, imposed massive pressure and problems on Timo shenko as defence commissar. He worked manfully to reorganize, retrain, and expand the armed forces, but some intangible requisites, such as initiative and flexibility, were exceedingly difficult to instil under a political system that demanded passive subservience. Moreover, making the same error as the British and French with regard to Poland, he and his staff concluded that blitzkrieg was only possible against a weak and irresolute opponent. Therefore, they believed a German–Soviet war would be prolonged and difficult but devoid of major surprises. In early 1941, they were as well prepared as they needed to be for the kind of war they expected to fight.

When Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), Timoshenko automatically became chairman of the Stavka and therefore titular C-in-C of the armed forces, although Stalin held all the authority. On 10 July Stalin sent him into the field to take command of West Front and five reserve armies in the River Dnieper sector due west of Moscow. There, at the cost of almost all his men and equipment, he managed to keep the battle around Smolensk going into early August. By then, Stalin had become the supreme C-in-C, but Timoshenko stayed on in the Stavka throughout the war as a member without portfolio.

In September, after the disaster at Kiev, he took over the remnants of South-West and South fronts then retreating across the eastern Ukraine. Co-ordinating the two, he regained enough equilibrium by late November to stage a counter-attack that drove two SS panzer divisions back 65 km. (40 mi.) from Rostov-on-Don. As the first Soviet advance of the war, and the first German retreat since September 1939 (see Kutno), this success had a great psychological impact.

In April 1942, while trying to meet Stalin's requirement for ‘pre-emptive blows’ against the German deployment for a summer offensive, Timoshenko lost a quarter of a million men along with their tanks and artillery in an ill-timed thrust towards Kharkov. The losses could not be made good before the German offensive began in June. In the ensuing retreat, which rapidly became a near-rout, he lost control of his armies. On 23 July, Stalin recalled him to Moscow, probably to preserve his reputation, since he was then regarded at home and abroad as the most competent Soviet general.

He returned to the field in October to command North-West front, which had been trying all summer to reduce a German salient at Demyansk. After that succeeded in March 1943, he turned to co-ordinating operations on secondary fronts as a representative of the Stavka, first (March–June) at Leningrad, then (June–November) against a German bridgehead on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and later ( February– June 1944) in the Baltic littoral.

From August 1944 to May 1945, Timoshenko co-ordinated the First, Second, and Third Ukrainian fronts in the drive through the Danube basin towards Vienna. The advance went splendidly for two months but then stalled for three at and around Budapest. Thereafter, Timoshenko's forces took Vienna on 13 April 1945 and made contact with the Americans at Linz on 6 May.

Earl Ziemke

Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko , 1895–1970, Soviet marshal. He served in the civil war of 1918–20 as a cavalry commander and subsequently rose in the Soviet army. He commanded the Soviet troops in their final victorious offensive in the Finnish-Soviet War (1940). In May, 1940, he succeeded General Voroshilov as commissar for defense and held that position until it was assumed by Joseph Stalin in July, 1941. Having replaced Marshal Budenny on the southern front, he led the recapture (Nov., 1941) of Rostov-na-Donu from the Germans and helped in the relief of Moscow. Later he commanded on the northwest front (1942), in the Caucasus (1943), and in Bessarabia (1944). After the war, he served as chief of the Belorussian military.