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

by Dennis Showalter

  If the Russian soldier was well served by his small arms, the same could not be said of his artillery. Each Russian division included a brigade of 48 field guns, organized in six eight-gun batteries. The gun itself, a Putilov design reflecting strong Krupp influences, was markedly superior to its German rival in range and muzzle velocity, good enough to serve in modified form through World War II in the Red Army and the Wehrmacht alike. The ratio of guns to rifles was three to a thousand—25 percent lower than the Germans’ figure, but not a crucial weakness in an era when artillery’s real strength lay not in the number of barrels, but in ammunition supply and fire control. The Russian artillery had shells enough, at least for the war’s first stages. However, its command and communications structures were significantly below the standards of Western Europe. These shortcomings were exacerbated by branch-of-service arrogance generating a sense of superiority great enough to make artillery officers reluctant to take orders from their superiors in the infantry or the cavalry.

  At least as serious was the absence from Russia’s order of battle of any equivalent to the German howitzers. Debate over the use and cost of this weapon had retarded its adoption. Compared to the forty-eight light and sixteen heavy howitzers of a German corps, in 1914 each Russian corps had only twelve 122-millimeter howitzers, throwing a heavier shell than the German 105-millimeter piece but significantly less mobile. All heavier artillery was concentrated at the army level—a good way of being reasonably sure of its unavailability in an emergency.

  The Russian army put great faith in its cavalry, mobilizing the equivalent of over thirty divisions plus a large number of independent regiments and squadrons. A Russian cavalry or Cossack regiment included six squadrons, around a thousand men, and was correspondingly difficult to control in battle. Four of them made up a division which, with twelve guns and some small supporting units, consisted of around 4,500 men. This gave Rennenkampf over 20,000 of the best horsemen in the Russian army.

  In early August, the Stavka was increasingly concerned with the news from the west. The fall of Liège and the massive German sweep through Belgium, seemed to be confirming the pessimists’ worst fears of having to cope singly with the victorious Central Powers. German behavior in the east, on the other hand, was so passive as to be almost comforting. Discussions of starting uprisings behind Russian lines, in Poland or Lithuania, came to nothing. Suggestions of spreading misinformation, such as rumors of amphibious landings in the Baltic, were squelched by an order from Berlin on August 10 forbidding giving false information to the enemy except of the local variety—an order probably inspired by a belief that one’s own intelligence might become more confused than the enemy’s.50

  On August 10, Stavka also decided that the advance toward East Prussia should begin on August 13. On the next day Rennenkampf’s leading elements crossed the German border.

  In addition to its mass of cavalry, the 1st Army included three infantry corps. They advanced in line abreast. On the right, closest to the Baltic and to Königsberg, was XX Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Smirnov. An infantryman, he was at sixty-five the army’s patriarch, whose last field experience had been in the Russo-Turkish War. He had commanded XX Corps since 1908, establishing a reputation for phlegmatic calm rather than energy, with no signs of being above average in ability. In the center, III Corps took the field under another infantryman, Lieutenant-General Yepantschin. Like Rennenkampf, he moved in high circles. Commissioned into the Preobrazhenski Guards, he had directed the Imperial School of Pages and served as professor of military history at the War Academy before returning to troop duty in 1907, first as a division commander, then succeeding Rennenkampf in III Corps. His reputation was similar to that of General Charles Lanrezac, commanding France’s 5th Army in the developing Battle of the Frontiers. Lanrezac, a difficult personality but a brilliant theoretician, was widely expected to make up for his human shortcomings by his operational performance. Yepantschin too was disliked cordially enough to generate hopes that he might be an undiscovered talent.

  The commander of IV Corps on Rennenkampf’s left was potentially a far more interesting character than either of his counterparts. Lieutenant-General Eris Khan Alieuv was a Caucasian Muslim, a descendant of princes, and an artilleryman by specialization. He had served under Rennenkampf in Manchuria, commanded the II Siberian Corps from 1908 to 1912, and transferred back to his old chief in 1912. In contrast to Yepantschin, his reputation was that of a driving field soldier whose strategic skills were correspondingly limited.

  In terms of backgrounds and careers these men were a reasonable cross-section of the Russian army’s high command: the routinier, the theoretician, and the thruster; the linesmen and the guardsman; the Europeans and the Asian. None stood out as a Napoleon in embryo; none was an obvious disaster waiting to happen. How they would fare depended on an interlocking network of unknowns—not the least of them being the Germans to their front.51

  5

  Taking the Measure of Danger

  I

  On August 1, 1914, the headquarters of the 8th German Army began forming in Königsberg. Its commander, General Max von Prittwitz und Gaffron, has had a consistently bad press. Critics described him as an imperial favorite, self-indulgent and coarse, who held his post over the general staff’s protests because War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn wanted him out of Berlin.1 This judgment incorporates a deal of hindsight. Prittwitz’s was a typical successful military career of the late empire. Scion of one of Prussia’s oldest noble families, he had made an excellent peacetime reputation as a trainer and commander. He was promoted to colonel at the age of forty-four, and to brigadier-general three years later. In 1906, at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, he took over XVI Corps at Metz. Exposed as it was to the first shock of any war with France, this was one of the most demanding and prestigious posts in the peacetime army. Its holder could reasonably expect higher things. In 1913 Prittwitz was promoted to Colonel-General and assigned to command the Königsberg army inspection.

  On the surface the transfer seemed a waste of his expertise. The waste seemed compounded when I Corps’s long-time commander, Alexander von Kluck, a man with extensive knowledge of the East Prussian theater, was also promoted and transferred to Berlin.2 Kluck’s new post was the army inspection destined on mobilization to form the army that would sweep through Belgium and northern France on the right wing of the Schlieffen Plan. Both assignments reflected the German army’s longstanding concern with providing a broad spectrum of professional experience for its upwardly mobile officers. A regimental commander in Posen was likely to be assigned on promotion to command a brigade in Kassel or Frankfurt, to move from there to a division in Pomerania or East Prussia, and then back to an army corps in Magdeburg or Schleswig-Holstein. Any temporary sacrifice of specialized knowledge was an acceptable risk in an army that may have accepted the next war as a given, but never expected it to break out next year.

  Had the 1912 crown council, or any of its later successors, actually implemented the sinister plans subsequently attributed to them, one excellent and unobtrusive measure would have been to alter these transfer patterns by leaving Kluck in place. In fact, no reason existed to modify standard procedure in 1913 when the assignments were made. Nor did there seem any reason to consider any drastic changes as the July Crisis developed. Despite a collection of nicknames attesting to his corpulence, Prittwitz was a man of marked self-confidence and apparent physical and emotional vigor. His reputation for harshness, while in sharp contrast to Kluck’s more easy-going image, was hardly unique in the German army and was likely to be a help in getting the last possible exertions from officers and men in the demanding situation facing his army. His staff was first-rate. Its chief, Brigadier-General Georg von Waldersee, was one of the general staff’s bright young men, a favorite of incumbent chief Helmuth von Moltke. He had been quartermaster-general until mobilization, a post generally and legitimately regarded as giving its occupant an inside track to become chief of
the general staff itself. Waldersee had undergone major surgery earlier in the year, but he had performed effectively on returning to duty in July. He insisted on his fitness. There seemed no reason to deprive him of his mobilization appointment, particularly since conventional wisdom suggested that simple animal vitality would be far less important for senior commanders in modern war than had been the case when generals led their troops in person from horseback.3

  Of Waldersee’s two principal subordinates, the quartermaster, Colonel Grünert, gave the lie to jokes about the cavalry officer who was so stupid all the other cavalry officers noticed it. Grünert’s last peacetime assignment had been commanding a cavalry brigade, but he was also a highly regarded administrator, a man who understood that logistics and traffic problems had become major elements of modern war. The army’s First General Staff Officer (G.S.O.I.), responsible for intelligence, plans, and operations, was a more complex character. In his photographs Lieutenant-Colonel Max Hoffmann appears a caricature of the typical Prussian officer: a stern face set in a close-cropped bullet head with almost no neck separating it from a barrel-shaped body. In point of fact he was Hessian by birth, the son of a county court judge. Though the German army never made quite as much of field sports and physical fitness as its British counterpart, Hoffmann was remarkable for his indifference to exercise. At forty-five, he was equally familiar in general staff circles for his brilliant mind, his caustic wit, and his immense appetite.

  The fat around Hoffmann’s middle did not extend above his ears. Widely regarded as the best man in the general staff’s Russian section, he

  The Northern Sector

  had travelled extensively in that country. He knew the language and the military system. As military attaché to Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, he had had ample opportunity to study the tsar’s army in action from an enemy’s perspective. Hoffmann, in sum, was a logical candidate for the post he held, a man of whom great things could be expected, but at the same time a bit of an eccentric, the sort of man whose proper utilization might put serious strains on a commander’s patience.4

  The importance of the staff in the German army of August, 1914, should not be exaggerated. The image of command exercised for all practical purposes by general staff officers, with some elderly excellency as a convenient figurehead, is at best a product of the war’s later years. In peacetime the commanding generals of Germany’s corps districts and army inspections exercised a broad spectrum of authority. They were jealous of their prerogatives, and correspondingly suspicious of the “demigods” who wore the carmine stripes of the general staff on their trousers. After over forty years of peace, these men had enough of an image as pen-pushers and paper-shufflers that they would not command automatic deference in a field headquarters, particularly since most senior generals had themselves served terms on the general staff. Respect would have to be earned, as it had been in 1866 and 1870–71.5

  When fully mobilized, the German 8th Army was hardly a cohesive body of neighbors fighting for homes and firesides. At its core were the six active divisions of I, XVII, and XX Corps. The two divisions of I Reserve Corps were supplemented by the independent 3rd Reserve Division from Pomerania, whose parent II Corps was assigned to the western front. There was one cavalry division—hardly a comfort when balanced against the clouds of horsemen available in Russia. The 8th Army’s commander could also call on the rough equivalent of four more infantry divisions, for what they might be worth. These were a mixed bag of second- and third-line battalions, some composed of middle-aged Landwehr with their active service far behind them, others formed from surplus personnel at regimental depots. Most were intended as garrisons for the eastern fortresses. Königsberg, Thorn, and Posen each had approximately a division; Graudenz and Breslau had a mixed brigade apiece. These garrisons were relatively strong in heavy artillery, but lacked almost everything else. Kitchens, communications equipment, trains, medical services, field maps were not part of their normal equipment. And the guns frequently lacked enough teams and vehicles to be useful for field operations.

  In theory each active army corps was expected to draw its recruits from its assigned district. However, the population shifts accompanying industrialization had combined with the demands of frontier security to modify this pattern in the years between 1871 and 1914. Five of the eight corps raised after the Franco-Prussian War were stationed on the empire’s borders, three in the west and two, XVII and XX, in the east. Even in peacetime large numbers of men from more heavily populated areas were drafted to their ranks. Over two-thirds of the men in I Corps came from Westphalia and Brandenburg. The 5th Grenadiers of XVII Corps drew a third of its recruits from northwest Germany: industrial Westphalia and the Hanseatic cities. The active regiments thus depended heavily on the prompt arrival of reservists from Berlin and points farther west at a time when most German trains were moving in the opposite directions. In Germany proper, most active corps were able to duplicate themselves on mobilization, or at least furnish a reserve division. The three eastern corps districts combined could produce only a single reserve corps, and many of its regiments too had to fill their ranks with men from elsewhere in the Reich. The 3rd Reserve Infantry, mobilizing in the regional metropolis of Königsberg, drew half of its enlisted men from Berlin and Hanover. The 36th Reserve Field Artillery incorporated a similar mix—a core of East Prussians completed by Berliners, Westphalians, and Hanoverians.6

  Shortly before the outbreak of war, Prittwitz was summoned to Berlin for a verbal briefing. He came away convinced that the chief of staff wished him to maintain contact with the Vistula River at all costs. But Moltke refused to concede that the situation would ever become that serious. Superior leadership, spirit, and tactics should enable the 8th Army to keep the Russians at bay for a long time. In fact, he insisted that the 8th Army should by no means conduct merely a passive defense. “When the Russians come,” he wrote to Waldersee, “not defense only, but offensive, offensive, offensive.”7

  Moltke was thinking in tactical and operational, rather than strategic, terms. On August 1, the German military attaché in Vienna telegraphed Waldersee, still acting in his capacity as quartermaster-general, and appealed for coordinated plans to be developed as soon as possible. Everyone, declared this frustrated officer, assumed that the chiefs of staff had personally worked out appropriate agreements that only needed removing from appropriate pigeonholes.8 Instead the allies behaved like a long-married couple embarking on a vacation with each assuming the other has turned off the stove.

  German confidence in Habsburg security and Habsburg judgment had most recently been shaken by the Redl scandal of 1913, involving the exposure of one of Austria’s principal intelligence officers as a homosexual who had concealed and supported his life-style by hawking the Dual Monarchy’s military secrets all over the continent. Austrian intelligence services for their part knew enough about Russia’s mobilization plans to be well aware of the strong forces earmarked for the East Prussian theater, and the correspondingly limited prospects of a German offensive in support of Austria.9 But the Austrian general staff saw no reason to depend on Germany’s behavior. Its revised war plan of March, 1914, continued to be based on an immediate attack northwards from Galicia, aimed at overrunning and destroying a substantial part of the Russian forces in that sector before they could complete their concentration. Hypotheses that a more Fabian approach would have better suited both the general nature of modern war and Austria’s specific circumstances are in good part the product of hindsight. Given Russia’s immense potential numerical superiority, combined with the steady improvements in the speed and efficiency of her mobilization, a defensive strategy seemed an open invitation to disaster—particularly on the open plains of Galicia. To resign the initiative to Russia, to allow her armies to complete their concentration and choose their axis of advance, meant a risk approaching certainty of being overrun in the field or trapped in the fortress complexes of Lemberg or Przemysl.

  The Austro-Hunga
rian army’s very shortcomings invited a motto of toujours Vaudace. Taking a blow, then attempting to counterpunch, had brought disaster to France in 1870 and, on a smaller scale, to Spain in 1898. The Japanese experience in Manchuria, on the other hand, suggested that Russia was a foe best beaten early. If Austria successfully maintained the initiative, she could reasonably expect support from an ally victorious in the west before her own limited military resources were exhausted. Direct German participation in this strategy would be welcome. It was neither essential nor at bottom expected, at least in the campaign’s initial period.10

  Moltke for his part believed that Austria’s offensive could best be supported not by charging blindly into the Russian wasteland, but by drawing as many Russian troops as possible into East Prussia. Every Russian on Prittwitz’s front was one less to check the Austrian drive. At the same time, the 8th Army must be preserved as a nucleus for future operations. Under no circumstances was Prittwitz either to risk its destruction in the open field or to let himself be besieged in the fortress of Königsberg in the pattern of Bazaine at Metz in 1870. As a last alternative, Moltke authorized Prittwitz instead to retreat behind the Vistula River and there await reinforcements from the west.11