Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  Eighteen months of debate fueled by personal as well as professional disagreements resulted in a compromise. In May, 1912, Russian plans were changed again, this time to provide for two possible concentrations. Case G was based on facing the main armies of both Germany and Austria. It provided for forty-three divisions to be sent against Germany and thirty-one against Austria. Case A presumed that Russia would face the full strength of Austria, plus whatever forces Germany could spare after completing its concentration against France. It provided for the commitment of forty-five divisions in an all-out blow against Austria, leaving approximately thirty divisions for the German theater.

  The question was what those thirty divisions were to do. At its most insouciant the Russian general staff never envisioned dividing their forces into roughly equal parts, then mounting two major offensives along divergent lines of advance, west into Germany and southwest into Austria. Case G initially projected three Russian armies driving into East Prussia along interior lines to cut off and destroy German forces in the province, while the Austrian sector remained passive. Though this might be the less likely strategic contingency, it continued to engage a certain undercurrent of pessimism regarding Russia’s actual prospects in a war with the Central Powers.

  Russian military planners, whatever their other differences, agreed that under no circumstances could Russia successfully fight Germany and Austria by herself. They were correspondingly dubious regarding the capacity of Russia’s foreign office to keep Germany out of any Russo-Austrian conflict. Under these circumstances, might not Russia’s most prudent course be to accept risks at the beginning of a conflict in order to ensure that France would not be crippled or overrun? Like its counterparts everywhere in Europe, the Russian army accepted the offensive as the strongest form of war at all levels, strategic, operational, and tactical. Particuarly against the Germans, with their powerful, flexible army, losing the initiative anywhere could be the first step to disaster. A war game held in April, 1914, even evaluated the possibility of a partially mobilized Russian army attacking a superior German force. But this was presented as the result of a German pre-emptive strike into Russia—a response, in other words, to the kind of contingency that Plans G and A were supposed to avoid.

  The distribution of forces under Case A in the 1912 plan also enhanced pressure for an offensive in the north. While the latter plan officially provided for no more than a holding action against Germany, the most pessimistic general staffer was reluctant to act on the assumption that thirty divisions, almost five hundred battalions, with full complements of cavalry and artillery, could not be risked against what amounted to Germany’s military leftovers, particularly in the context of a mobilization plan and a railway system sufficiently improved by 1913 to provide eight or nine corps facing Prussia by the fifteenth day of mobilization, and the impressive total of twenty-four corps ready for deployment against the Central Powers by M + 20.

  Russia’s promise, made in August, 1913, of an offensive against Germany beginning on M + 15, and the tsar’s accompanying assurance that France could have absolute confidence in the Russian army, were ultimately the product of internal decisions rather than external pressure whatever its reasons.40 French encouragement, moral and financial, to improve the strategic railway network was incorporated into Russia’s own changing war plans. The government cheerfully used French loans to build tracks and sidings on the Austrian frontier as well as the German. French military and political leaders, increasingly convinced of the likelihood of war in the years before 1914, were aware of this, but convinced of the need to maintain Russian good will at virtually any cost—as long as the tsar’s army crossed the German frontier at the outbreak of war.

  In August, 1914, the Germans in East Prussia faced many fewer battalions than the five hundred originally projected. Three active corps were diverted on mobilization to Warsaw as the core of an improvised army, which was to make a direct attack into Silesia once the victories on the flanks, in Galicia and East Prussia, were secured. Russian commanders also left large garrisons in fortresses far behind the frontier. Most of these were reserve formations, but in their absence the Russian active corps were forced to shed an ever-increasing number of companies and battalions for local security duties as they moved towards the frontier.41

  This attrition of first-line combat strength was not unjustified. The Russians were concentrating in an area whose dominant civil populations, Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews, might well prove hostile given the opportunity. Strong guards on bridges, railroad junctions, and power stations were an insurance policy rather than an indulgence.42 Russian reserve formations in 1914, unlike their German counterparts, were not particularly efficient. Limiting them to garrison roles was more a recognition of fact than an exercise in fecklessness. Several reserve divisions intended to take over security in the field armies’ rear were being formed in the interior of Russia. Their arrival in the theater of operations would, however, take time—and time was something the Russians did not have.

  Russia’s performance in the Tannenberg campaign has been so universally excoriated that it is easy to forget that Russia’s front and army commanders were not deliberately trying to lose. The senior officers assigned to the northern theater of operations were familiar enough with their adversary’s probable behavior. Apart from the logic suggested by the terrain, twenty years of German maneuvers and war games had played variations on the same scenario of defeating the Russians in detail. This made the Russians’ task significantly easier. Reasonable perception of an enemy’s intentions is the first step in their frustration, and there appeared no reason why the newly formed Northwest Front should not have an excellent chance to win a set of victors’ laurels.

  As early as August 3, when it was plain that Germany’s main effort was in fact being made in the west, the Russian high command, the Stavka, began debating whether more troops should be sent against East Prussia. But even with detachments and shortages, the theater seemed to have all the men and guns it needed. Only four active German corps, the three in East Prussia and V Corps from Posen, remained in the east, and V Corps was expected—accurately—to leave within days. Against them the Russian 1st Army, six active infantry divisions, a rifle brigade, and five and a half cavalry divisions, would advance westward from the Niemen. The 2nd Army, with an initial assigned strength of eight and a half active divisions, a rifle brigade, and four divisions of cavalry, would move northwest from the Warsaw salient and the Narew River.

  The Russian plan depended more on finesse and less on brute force than is generally conceded. The two armies were expected to coordinate their movements, one moving north of the Masurian Lakes, the other south and west of them. The Northwest Front’s optimal strategic goal was a double envelopment, with one army pinning the Germans in place and extending around their flank while the other struck their rear. Should the Germans stand and fight anywhere, a single envelopment seemed certain given the Russian numbers. And should they retreat towards the Vistula, a vastly superior Russian cavalry would have its chance to turn the movement into a rout.43

  The Russian army, like all of its European counterparts, had spent a century grappling with the challenge of institutionalizing competence. Through the Napoleonic Era the craft of war had been mastered, particularly at the higher levels, by apprenticeship. Every campaign involved a process of shaking loose the generals who had exceeded their level of ability and replacing them with men better able to learn from experience. A scientifically minded nineteenth century encouraged the alternate approach of forming leaders by a process of continuing training, schooling, and tests. Birth and connections were still vitally important, particularly in Russia. They were, however, no longer the ne plus ultra of major command and staff assignments.

  In this context Yakov Zhilinski, commanding the Northwest Front, was in many ways the model of a modern Russian general. Commissioned into the cavalry, he later attended the staff academy, graduating in 1883. Most of his duty over the next tw
enty years was in staff and liaison assignments. During the Russo-Japanese War, his efficient service as chief of staff in Manchuria marked him as a comer. A series of escalating staff and command responsibilities brought him to the post of chief of staff of the whole army in 1911. He established a reputation as a firm Francophile—at least to his French opposite numbers. He also became identified as a supporter of Sukhomlinov by his acceptance of the latter’s drive to assert the war ministry’s control over the general staff.

  Zhilinski’s assignment in 1914 to command the Warsaw military district was not a routine transfer, but neither was it a demotion. Given the chronically disturbed state of Russo-Polish relations, the Warsaw assignment had a significant domestic political dimension. The previous incumbent, appointed during the revolution of 1905, had been reasonably effective in conciliating the Poles but was not highly regarded as a soldier. His sudden death cleared the way for a new emphasis. Rumor in St. Petersburg even had Sukhomlinov taking that post, with Zhilinski succeeding him as war minister—a miscalculation of the balance of power between the two men that nevertheless indicated Warsaw’s importance.

  Mobilization plans designated the Warsaw district’s commander as commander of the Northwest Front, Russia’s main effort against Germany. Zhilinski’s appointment made excellent sense in terms of coalition politics. As chief of staff he had repeatedly promised the French that Russia would undertake a prompt offensive against Germany. His presence in Warsaw was a reassurance that Russia would in fact turn words to deeds should war break out. In professional terms Zhilinski was clearly identified as a soldier, as opposed to an administrator in uniform. His extensive staff experience was expected to be vital in coordinating the movements of his two armies in executing a complex plan. It was true that he had shown no signs of possessing a great commander’s talents. On the other hand, neither did his career indicate that he did not possess such talents. It did reflect a reasonable capacity for rising to occasions, and this was about as much as any army making the transition to a general war could expect from its senior leaders.

  Zhilinski’s principal subordinates were slightly better-known quantities. Pavel Rennenkampf became chief of the 1st Army when his Vilna Military District mobilized. A Baltic German by birth, he was a staff academy graduate who had made his reputation in the cavalry, seeing action in China in 1900, commanding a division in Manchuria in 1904–05, and most recently suppressing revolutionaries in Russia itself. Rennenkampf was socially well-connected and a known figure at court, but he did not owe his command entirely to favoritism. His performance in Manchuria had been steady rather than brilliant, but he had established himself as a man with at least some sense of how to conduct mobile operations under modern conditions. He was acquainted personally with many of his prospective opponents, having represented his government at official functions in East Prussia—most recently, ironically, at celebrations of the Russo-German Convention of Tauroggen against Napoleon in 1812.

  Rennenkampf’s counterpart with the Russian 2nd Army was also a cavalryman. Like Rennenkampf, Alexander Vasilevich Samsonov was a staff academy graduate who had done reasonably well in the field—notably commanding a cavalry division during the Russo-Japanese War. Since 1909 he had been governor-general of Turkestan and commander of the Turkestan military district. The distance, physical and mental, between this post and Samsonov’s assignment on mobilization, has been described as symbolizing the insouciance with which Russia went to war in 1914. In fact Samsonov was by no means an unconsidered choice. The 2nd Army’s logical commander would have been the peacetime head of the Warsaw military district, but that officer, as we have seen, was designated for front command. Samsonov, for his part, had also been chief of staff of the Warsaw district, from 1905 to 1907. In difficult revolutionary and postre-volutionary circumstances he had been calm and successful—so successful, indeed, that in early 1914 he too was considered a viable candidate for the district command that eventually went to Zhilinski. As a soldier, the German military attaché had declared, Samsonov certainly appeared to be well qualified for the post. There is no indication that the Germans believed he had gone into a decline in the intervening six months. There is, indeed, no indication that the Germans regarded any of their principal Russian adversaries as obvious military lightweights.44

  A persistent legend of 1914 is that of bitter personal enmity between Rennenkampf and Samsonov—a feud beginning during the Russo-Japanese War and culminating in a physical altercation between the two generals in a Mukden railway station. The anecdote’s viability reflects its usefulness as a symbol of prewar Russia’s structural inefficiency. What other system could entrust to two men who hated each other a campaign depending upon close cooperation for its success? The only flaw in the scenario is that the incident never occurred. Rennenkampf’s principal biographer takes pains to demonstrate that his protagonist was hospitalized with a wound at the time of the alleged scuffle. To reach the railway station, he would need to have been carried on a stretcher. Alternative possibilities for encounters generating personal antagonism between the generals are even more far-fetched. In any case, Jean Savant asks, why should Rennenkampf, with his brilliant prospects and his network of connections in high places, under any provocation engage in undignified fisticuffs with a relative nobody like Samsonov?45

  Savant’s common sense question highlights the fact, mentioned earlier in this text, that the Russian army was clique- and faction-ridden. On August 9, the French ambassador described the rivalries of court and drawing room over command appointments as resembling a chapter of War and Peace.46 Senior command and staff assignments to the Northwest Front did reflect a balance among interests and viewpoints. Thus Samsonov was considered Sukhomlinov’s man, while Rennenkampf was identified with the opposition to the war ministry headed by the Grand Duke Nicholas. In turn Samsonov’s own chief of staff was an anti-Sukhomlinov-ite, while Rennenkampf’s supported the war minister.47

  Taken at face value, this becomes a recipe for disaster before the first shots were fired. Yet no peacetime officer corps ever remotely resembles a band of brothers. Personal and professional antagonisms, networks of sponsorship and protection, patterns of political influence, are norms, not exceptions. The Royal Navy’s “Fishpond,” George C. Marshall’s lists of promising officers, the interlocking directorate of paratroop generals in the U.S. army of the 1950s and 1960s—examples can be multiplied indefinitely. Victory tends to soften, or at least to blur, the existence of these divisions. And the Russian army expected to win.

  The image of the Russian soldier of World War I as a uniformed primitive is so strongly established that challenging it seems an act of perversity. Yet the army which took the field in 1914 was by no means ignorant of reading and writing. This in large part reflected collective wisdom that “among the soldiers the illiterate is a doomed man.” Until 1906, a school certificate had meant four instead of five years’ active service. Literacy remained of obvious and increasing value in learning regulations, performing ordinary duties, and, last but hardly least, competing for soft assignments in orderly rooms and offices. Sixty-eight percent of the conscript class of 1913 met government standards of literacy. A significant number of the rest were likely to acquire at least its rudiments during their first months of service, if for no better reason than to avoid being victimized by the system and their fellow soldiers.

  These points hardly suggest the Russian private took the field with a copy of Dostoyevsky in his knapsack. Official definitions of literacy were generous; recruits able to do more than sign their names and spell their way through a chapbook were likely to be assigned to one of the technical arms rather than the infantry. But it is worth noting that when the United States raised a conscript army from scratch during World War II, its manpower allocation programs also sent a disproportionate number of men in the lowest two categories of “usable” intelligence to the infantry. An infantry division was held to require fewer leaders and specialists than other, more technically o
riented formations, and many of those they did receive were eventually transferred to special programs.48

  Most accounts of Russia’s initial defeat stress material, rather than human, factors. N. N. Golovine published in 1926 the first edition of the most familiar general book on Tannenberg from a Russian perspective. In this and later works he devotes paragraph after paragraph to demonstrating Russia’s inferiority at the point of contact—in shells, in guns, even in riflemen. He inspired a virtual cottage industry of affirmation and refutation, to the point where number crunching has seriously obscured the presentation of events.49 The following pages accept the risks of omission by eschewing precise calculation of formations and gun barrels except when they appear actually to influence the course of events—an occurrence that proved far less usual than the author expected.

  A Russian army corps essentially resembled its German counterpart. The infantry was organized into two divisions, each of two brigades and four regiments. The regiments had four battalions instead of three and were numbered sequentially within their divisions. The 1st Division included the lst-4th Regiments, the 36th, the 141st-144th, and so on. Regiments, however, were far more frequently known by their titles, usually geographic: Reval, Viborg, Orel. Like the Germans, the Russian army stressed the regiment as the focal point of loyalty, using religious as well as patriotic exhortations to bind the men to their colors. But under conditions of modern war morale was likely to depend heavily on material factors. The Russian infantryman carried the Mosin-Nagant rifle, a sturdy and simple design whose five-shot magazine was often considered less important than the wicked eighteen-inch bayonet always carried fixed on active service. He was supported at regimental level by a company of eight heavy machine guns whose modified Maxim design survived through two world wars and continued to soldier on in other hands on the other side of the world, in Korea and Indochina.