Nor were the Germans particularly sophisticated in protecting their agents. In the spring of 1914 an insurance salesman in Poltava was recruited by unspecified means. His normal peacetime contacts were in Berlin and East Prussia and explainable as business connections. Then on July 26, the agent was ordered to send his reports to “Mademoiselle Robert” in Copenhagen. In a small city deep in Russia, it was hardly likely to escape notice when a man with a record of business relationships in Germany, but none in Denmark, suddenly began corresponding with a lady in Copenhagen at a time of acute international crisis! To make things worse, the unfortunate spy was sent on August 26 or 27 two hundred rubles through a Königsberg bank. Under the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Germans heard nothing further from their Poltava connection.
In an attempt to answer the increasingly pointed questions from Berlin about Russian dispositions, 8th Army issued on August 13 a general order that anyone declaring they had any kind of information was to be brought before designated intelligence officers. But the German intelligence structure had been badly disrupted by mobilization. An experienced captain in Königsberg was ordered to his regiment on mobilization; his replacement got the job because he was seen reading a Russian newspaper. The 8th Army’s senior intelligence officer, Captain Frantz, was assigned from Berlin and viewed as the high command’s spy by the rest of the army staff. Wherever possible he was ignored or overlooked, to the point of being deliberately kept away from situation maps. Frantz’s situation was even worse because he was junior in rank to the corps intelligence officers. Frustrated by the lack of useful information, they responded by dismissing Frantz as incompetent.21
Intelligence was not the only possible source of military information. Strategic reconnaissance had historically been a major responsibility of the cavalry, but the 8th Army’s horsemen were inhibited by a mix of doctrinal and practical considerations. Odds of one division against ten encouraged keeping the German troopers under wraps. Aggressive leadership might have compensated for numerical weakness, but Major-General Brecht, 1st Cavalry Division’s commander, was no Murat.
Experience indicated that more than any combat arm, cavalry depended on youthful leaders, men able to make and seize the fleeting opportunities that were all that remained for cavalry in modern war. Napoleon’s horsemen knew their greatest days with leaders in their early thirties. The cavalry of the American Civil War by 1865 was serving under generals a decade younger than that. The Imperial German Army’s pensions were not enticing enough, the civilian second-career opportunities not sufficiently attractive, to encourage general officers to retire while they could still sit a saddle. Brecht had entered the Prussian army in 1867, and his primary extra-regimental duty had been in various riding schools—hardly an indication of unusual professional gifts. Two of his brigadiers were well into their fifties.
The German cavalry of 1914 was primarily trained to function as a screen for offensive operations.22 On the defensive, it was not quite certain whether its mission was to fight for information or keep the Russians at bay. It had difficulty doing either, at least from horseback. For forty years cavalrymen everywhere in Europe had debated the deadliest form of the arme blanche. Germany had settled on the lance. It might be cumbersome, but it was long enough to reach even a prone man. In mounted combat, moreover, the lancer was able to deliver only a thrust, which was much deadlier than a cut with a saber. Every trooper in the German army had spent hours in peacetime practicing with the weapon. But once in the field, excitement tended to overcome instruction. The lance was attached to the trooper’s shoulder by a sling—useful in preventing the weapon’s loss, but also restricting the arc of a thrust. When the initial shock was past, the Germans found themselves jabbing at their opponents with no more force than that generated by arms and torsos, and with accuracy impaired by excited horses. One lucky Cossack of Rennenkampf’s army survived eleven lance wounds and won the George Cross. His horse was successfully treated for no fewer than twenty-one stabs.
This was a far cry from prewar expectations that a single lance thrust would be enough to decide most man-to-man combats. Responding to the limitations of cold steel, patrol and troop leaders increasingly dismounted their men to engage Russian scouting parties. German troopers were by no means helpless with firearms. A corporal of the 1st Dragoons, cut off and surrounded by forty Russians, used his dead horse as cover and by his own account at least, shot eight of them out of their saddles before the rest drew off. He rejoined his squadron afoot and unhurt, proudly showing the bullet holes in his helmet and cartridge pouch.23
Such scenes from a Frederick Remington painting did little to enhance specific knowledge of Russian movements and intentions. The shortcomings of the intelligence service and the cavalry threw by default an increasing responsibility for securing information on the newest branch of the kaiser’s army. Prussian technical agencies and the German general staff had paid increasing attention to balloons and airships since the 1890s, and to aircraft development since the Wright Brothers’ first flight. The initial purchase of airplanes in 1911 was followed by the establishment of a provisional, then a permanent, air service. By 1913 this had been elevated to its own inspectorate, organized in four battalions. Germany’s eastern frontier was the home of Flieger-Bataillon 2, with companies in Posen, Graudenz, and Königsberg. There were no Red Barons in its ranks, and few barons of any sort. The battalion was a mix of enthusiasts, dilettantes, and a few hard cases, drinkers or womanizers encouraged by their previous commanders to volunteer for the new branch of service.
Prior to 1914, the development of air reconnaissance was handicapped by problems of terrain recognition and information transmission. Critics suggested even the limited successes achieved in peacetime were gained when air crews were able to familiarize themselves with the exercise areas. Aircraft had participated in maneuvers in East Prussia for the first time in August, 1913. They attracted a proportionate amount of military and journalistic attention. But they proved significantly unsuccessful in actually finding troops on the march, much less identifying the side to which they belonged. One unfortunate pilot even mistook the Russian town of Tauroggen for the German town of Tilsit, discovering his error only when Cossack bullets began whistling past his wings.
On the outbreak of war the 2nd Battalion, like its counterparts, was divided into detachments. Each active corps and 8th Army headquarters was assigned a six-plane Feld Flieger Abteilung. The fortresses of Königsberg, Thorn, Graudenz, and Posen each received a separate detachment of four aircraft. They were equipped with a mixed bag of monoplanes—the famous Tauben, or doves, so called from the shape of their wings—and biplanes manufactured by a half-dozen firms. A three-hour flight at speeds from fifty to eighty miles per hour when tail winds were obliging was reckoned as a good performance from a new machine. A particularly belligerent crew might take a rifle aloft to supplement their service pistols. Occasionally light bombs or hand grenades would be added, to be tossed over the side in the hopes of frightening a few horses. But aircraft were supposed to provide information—a task so important that the observer, not the pilot, was in command of the two-seater aircraft equipping the detachments.24
By the standards of 1916, to say nothing of later years, it was an unpromising matrix. But the German pilots and observers were eager to show what they could do. By August 2 and 3, aircraft from XVII and XX Corps were taking advantage of the good weather to cross the frontier. A week of random missions ended when Prittwitz’s staff gave each field and fortress squadron a specific zone to patrol. By August 9, German airmen had observed and photographed as far east as Kovno, Novogeorgievsk, and Lodz. In particular, observers of I Corps’s Flieger Abteilung 14 reported brigade-strength camps, long columns of wagons and massive troop movements between Suwalki and the frontier. On the other hand reports described the area from Warsaw to the border as free of any large Russian forces.
Zeppelin flights confirmed the information. The fortresses of Posen and König
sberg each had one of these awkward gasbags, slow, vulnerable to a wide variety of threats, but with a long range which made them invaluable for strategic reconnaissance. The Z V took off from Posen on the evening of August 7 and spent the night cruising over Russian territory and throwing out propaganda leaflets. The crew reported no sign of troop movements or concentrations. Three days later Königsberg’s Z IV flew south to the Russian border town of Mlawa, deposited a few bombs, but saw no large camps or any significant movement on the railways in the area.25
Balancing the information from the two sectors, army command made its decision. In his August 9 report to OHL, Waldersee declared that the checks administered to Russian cavalry patrols on the southern frontier, combined with the damage done by German screening forces to the railroads and bridges in this area, made a rapid advance from the Narew unlikely. The 8th Army would therefore concentrate along the Angerapp with the equivalent of nine divisions and a cavalry division and prepare to meet an attack from the Niemen. The XX Corps, reinforced by garrison and Landwehr troops, would remain in position against any surprise movements from the south.
Prittwitz and Waldersee were taking a calculated risk. By waiting for the Russian 1st Army to approach the Angerapp line, they virtually committed 8th Army to winning a decisive victory in the north. If the 1st Army was only checked, it would be difficult or impossible to bring forces against any Russian offensive from the Narew without in turn risking exposure to an overwhelming blow from the rear—a Königgrätz in reverse, with Germany playing Austria’s role.26
The anxieties accompanying such a decision were suddenly exacerbated by the same force that encouraged making the decision in the first place. A stream of reports from I Corps’s pilots continued to confirm the Russians’ forward movement from the Niemen. Whole divisions and corps were on their way to the border. Then on August 13, Prittwitz’s airmen also began reporting the roads and railroads to the southeast full of Russian troops—the vanguards of the advance from the Narew.27
Since the dawn of time, commanders have bewailed their inability to see what lies on the other side of the hill. After leading an army-sized force in the maneuvers of 1911, Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz mused that developments in communications technology had made possible a much looser deployment of large forces than had been the case forty years earlier. Reports on the enemy situation that once took days and hours to arrive now could reach higher headquarters in minutes. This fact, Goltz argued, gave the modern commander much more freedom to maneuver against an enemy’s constantly changing weaknesses.28
Theory and practice did not quite overlap. Intelligence information can readily become a two-edged sword. It is possible to know too much, to be so aware of an enemy’s circumstances that command decisions are postponed indefinitely or implemented halfheartedly. Even in the days of the helicopter and the communications satellite, operational plans can be modified into confusion as troops are shifted here and there to counter an adversary’s moves as presented by one’s own intelligence sources, human or technical.
This problem was even more acute in the military circumstances of 1914. Generals and staff officers were psychologically unprepared to deal with the instant intelligence provided by air reconnaissance and, as will be shown later, radio interception. Being able to read the enemy’s dispatches, receiving information from hundreds of miles behind his lines in a matter of hours, as opposed to the days required by cavalry scouts and messengers, could generate stress as well as comfort because of a technological paradox. Tactical mobility had if anything declined since the Napoleonic era. A modern field army, or even an army corps, with its masses of artillery and its long supply trains, was unable to respond quickly to either challenges or opportunities. Once committed to an axis of advance it could not easily be switched to another. Strategic mobility was limited by the time it took to load and unload trains under operational conditions. Below division levels communications and control tended towards the haphazard, even in the German army. The risks of “order, counter-order, disorder” were drummed into officers from their subaltern days. Ignorance may not be bliss, but the gap between knowledge of a situation and ability to influence responses certainly was an unexpected addition to an already high stress level. Even Max Hoffmann, who prided himself on his imperturbability, confided to his diary on August 13 that the responsibility was “gigantic, and more of a strain on the nerves than I expected,” and informed his wife that “if things go well, Prittwitz will be a great captain; if things do not go well, they will blame us.”29
An alternative strategy had been loudly proposed by the commander of I Corps. At 58, Lieutenant-General Hermann von François was another Prussian officer who fit only some of the usual stereotypes. Descended from a Huguenot family, emigrants to Prussia in the seventeenth century, he began his service in the Prussian Guard in 1874, graduated from the War Academy, and reached the apparent peak of his career in September, 1913, when he was assigned to command I Corps. In the course of his service François, like Hoffmann, had established something of a reputation as a maverick, but on professional rather than personal grounds. He was considered a difficult subordinate, a man who liked to go his own way in making and executing decisions. This trait had limited his usefulness during his periodic staff assignments. It also plagued him as a commander. François’s predecessor at I Corps, von Kluck, was the kind of popular, respected general who is always a difficult act to follow. François compounded the inevitable difficulties of his position by overreaching himself, seeking to be everywhere at once, supervising his subordinates too closely for their comfort. The question was whether I Corps’s prickly commander would be able to justify his temperament by his performance in the field.30
This in turn involved the question of I Corps’s role in the German battle plans. On evaluating the mobilization mission of his new command, François was disturbed to find that the corps was expected to withdraw towards the Angerapp no matter what the Russians did. From a general staff perspective this made sense. The I Corps was more useful as part of an army concentrated in the middle of East Prussia than as an isolated force extended along the border. François disagreed, but his unwillingness to abandon even temporarily half of his corps district reflected more than a single officer’s personal vanity or professional pride. A major element of nineteenth-century social contracts implied the protection of civilians by the state—not their exposure to war’s horrors. The concept of populations as hostages and targets awaited a later era. Nevertheless the days when merchants would remain in their stores and peasants in their fields while armies marched and countermarched were long past, particularly in an area increasingly terrorized at the expected behavior of an invader so often described in their newspapers as Asiatic barbarians.
In November, 1913, the general staff had requested François’s opinion on the prospects of a more aggressive local defense of East Prussia. By using improved reconnaissance methods, Zeppelins and aircraft, by taking advantage of the clumsy Russian command structure, might not a series of limited, spoiling attacks across the border preserve large areas of the province from invasion? François liked the idea, and replied by asking permission to deploy more infantry and machine guns closer to the frontier. The general staff authorized assignment of an extra battalion and a machine-gun company to the garrison of Goldap, directly on the frontier. This was not a large force, but it was enough of a concession to encourage François to develop in peacetime his own plans for striking across the border as soon as the I Corps mobilization should be completed. Boldly handled, he reasoned, even a single corps might disrupt the Russian concentrations.
When ordered instead to concentrate his corps on the Angerapp line, leaving the screening of the area east of the river to the cavalry, François strongly protested. A chance existed, he argued, for a major success against the assembling Russians if I Corps attacked immediately and was supported by the rest of the 8th Army.31
Given the encouragement he had previously received from
the general staff for a forward policy, François was not without grounds for wondering if the army’s right hand quite knew what its left was doing. Prittwitz and Waldersee for their parts reasoned that François’s proposed attack would risk I Corps losing contact with the rest of the army. The maneuver might even mean that the entire army would be drawn into a battle on the “wrong” side of the Masurian Lakes. Fighting far to the east was the last thing that Prittwitz wanted. If the risks attending battle on the Angerapp were obvious, those accompanying even a decisive victory on the frontier were greater. Given ordinarily competent leadership, under such circumstances the Russian 2nd Army could be expected to drive hard past the lakes, to strike the German lines of communication and catch 8th Army on the flank and rear before it could redeploy.
François remained unconvinced. Fighting on the Angerapp to him meant surrendering too much German territory. As days passed without any major Russian initiative, François began pushing forward in the way General Patton would later describe as “making rock soup”—a reconnaissance in force supported first with a battalion, then a regiment, then the whole corps. By August 13, most of I Corps had reached the line Goldap-Stallupönon, about twenty miles east of the Angerapp River.32
Prittwitz was concerned by now with his ally as well as his subordinates. Conrad’s optimism of August 3 had been modified by ten days of reality. Austria’s final mobilization plan had divided the army into three sections. Eight divisions were designated for the Balkans; twenty-eight would move into Galicia. The remaining twelve were, depending on one’s perspective, a swing force or a strategic reserve. Should Russia remain neutral, they would move against Serbia. Should Russia enter the war, they would reinforce the troops in Galicia. Unless Austria’s enemies were unusually obliging, or Austria’s diplomats unusually gifted, chances were good that they would be nowhere at the right time.
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 24