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

by Dennis Showalter

  From Conta’s perspective, the situation offered little encouragement for schoolboy analogies. As the morning progressed more and more Russians entered the battle, until the 1st Division was fighting elements of three Russian divisions. That the Russians attacked piecemeal instead of mounting a coordinated blow is hardly surprising. Their tactical doctrine stressed the importance of engaging from the line of march, deploying as soon as possible after making contact. But war is the province of delay and confusion. Fifteen minutes here, an hour there, and soon enough one is talking about entire days.

  There was a deeper question as well, one that involves time measurement. The development of cheap, dependable watches around the middle of the nineteenth century encouraged the diffusion in armies of a knowledge of measured time. The Waltham Watch Company first began showing a profit by selling its bottom-line models to Union soldiers during the American Civil War. At least one Russian colonel subsequently ordered over two hundred watches for his regiment, but rural Russian society in 1914 was still essentially clockless. Peasants caught trains by arriving at stations hours ahead of time, then waiting. Religious and secular officials drew crowds for their ceremonies in the same fashion. Time, like land, was not seen as an individual’s property.45 In such a context, a NCO’s or subaltern’s possession of a watch did not mean that he comprehended, much less internalized, the value system accompanying the timepiece. At company and battalion levels, particularly in the infantry, a time sense was likely to be an artificial product of training and exhortation, rather than the virtually automatic reflex of an industrialized society.

  Whatever the reason, Conta’s division never received the one hammer blow that might have finished it. The I Corps’s heavy howitzers reached the field around noon. Their ninety-pound shells were a welcome supplement to the lighter pieces of the divisional artillery, but they could not prevent the Russians from working around both of Conta’s exposed flanks and probing for gaps in his forward positions. The 43rd Infantry was especially hard pressed. By 11:30 a.m. its last reserves had been engaged; an hour later it was reporting Russians in front, flank, and rear. If the regiment held its ground, it was in good part because no one could think of anywhere safe to run.

  Writing fifteen years later, Conta indignantly denied that he held a council of war with his staff to discuss ways of coping with the threat.46 The vehemence of his protest suggests that something like that probably did take place. It would have been a logical move for a man who had been commanding a division less than a year, and whose appointment reflected the fact that he was junior to François as much as any specific professional qualifications.

  Around midday François found an opportunity to visit his hard-pressed subordinate. The result of the conference was a decision to follow prewar doctrine. The 1st Division was engaged too closely to retreat; it was therefore necessary to buy space by counterattacking. Two battalions of the 3rd Grenadiers went forward, but were stopped in their tracks within minutes by superior Russian forces. They were able to do no more than hold their ground against repeated counterattacks by enemy infantry who once again showed themselves masters of concealment in apparently open terrain.

  Unable to go back or forward, with all four of his regiments in line, Conta by early afternoon was borrowing companies and battalions from everywhere in his sector to shore up weak spots. Trying to protect his flanks, he opened a five-kilometer-wide gap in his center. That the Russians did not turn opportunity to disaster owed something to their failure to spot the opportunity quickly. It owed more to two rifle companies of the 41st Infantry, less than five hundred men. Thrown into the gap like the 20th Maine at Little Round Top, they held their ground against fivefold odds, bought time for the rest of the division to reform its lines, and were completely forgotten by everyone but themselves as the day wore on.47

  Their isolation was not unique. Everywhere on the field orders failed to arrive, or were garbled beyond recognition in transmission. The German army’s inclusion of buglers in its ranks was by no means an anachronistic dream involving heroic attacks to the sound of regimental bands. The musicians were expected to transmit simple situation reports and pass on orders by sounding or repeating the appropriate short calls. It worked well enough in maneuvers, and in the small-scale fire fights on the border. But in the front lines of a modern battle, any bugler foolhardy enough to expose himself was likely to be shot down before the first notes left his instrument. If by chance he did complete a call it was often drowned out, or went unheard by officers whose attention was far more distracted than they had ever expected.

  This put much of the burden of communication on runners. The peacetime army had generated amusement and anger by insisting that soldiers addressed by a superior should give loud, clear, short replies, looking the man they were addressing straight in the eye. For critics of the system, this “military expression” was a means of subordination, an expression of spirit-crushing militarism that reduced the private soldier to the status of a trained animal. Combat quickly demonstrated that the indoctrination had a functional purpose as well as a social one. At platoon or company level, messages and orders were often verbal. If written, they were likely to be cryptic, scrawled on any handy piece of paper, often unsigned. The recipient seldom had time to question carefully a man who might well have delivered the information at substantial risk of his own life. Nor could a platoon commander afford the luxury of meaningful dialogue with his squad leaders while under fire. In the area of personal communications, at least, the Prussian drillmasters knew well what they had been doing.

  The Germans were feeling the limits of peacetime doctrine and peacetime training in other ways. The local counterattacks demanded in the manuals produced limited results, but generated heavy straggling as men were shocked out of the fighting line or became lost in the confusion. Ammunition ran low. Chains of command broke as companies and battalions plugged holes in strange formations. Conta was too good a soldier not to be aware that his division was being squeezed into a pocket. There was still plenty of daylight for the Russians to complete the process; and François’s cheerful assurances that support was on its way from Tollmingkehmen was no substitute for more rifles in the firing line. Then the high command of the 8th Army made a long-distance appearance.

  Early on the morning of August 17, a supply requisition was brought to the army commander’s attention. It came from I Corps, and requested replenishing of ammunition used in skirmishes on August 15—skirmishes whose locations were far east of where the corps was supposed to be. Full generals do not normally concern themselves with routine supply matters. The incident leaves a suspicion that some of Prittwitz’s staff officers used the situation as an excuse to discuss with their chief the rumors about François’s behavior. The army commander telephoned Insterburg, still the official corps headquarters, to demand specific information on I Corps’s positions. Further dissembling was impossible. For the first time Prittwitz discovered that François had posted most of his corps far forward of his assigned position at Gumbinnen, that he was in fact forty kilometers in front of the Angerapp. Eighth Army’s other units had not even reached their assigned positions along the river. If I Corps became heavily engaged, there was no possible way to support it.

  The horrified Prittwitz immediately ordered François to retire at once on Gumbinnen, avoiding battle if possible. To ensure that this order, at least, was delivered, Prittwitz instructed that an officer be sent forward from Insterburg. According to François, the man found him in the bell tower at Stallupönen and shouted, “The commanding general orders you to break off the battle at once and retire on Gumbinnen.” François replied, “Tell General von Prittwitz that General von François will break off the battle when the Russians are beaten.”

  Whether or not François really expressed himself so dramatically matters little. A diplomatic junior staff officer softened the dispatch in transit to read that François was “not at the time able to break off the combat.” In any case it was afte
r 3:00 p.m. before the reply reached Insterburg and was telephoned to Prittwitz. It was the first direct communication of any kind from François in several days. To say that Prittwitz was shocked by it is an understatement. His only reasonable choice at the moment was to hope that I Corps could hold on, and settle accounts with its commander at day’s end.48

  But if army command could do nothing, help was on the way from the south. Major-General von Falk had commanded François’s 2nd Division only since mobilization, replacing an officer promoted to one of the new reserve corps. His last peacetime assignment had been behind a desk, commanding the small arms school. But he knew how a field soldier of the German army was supposed to act in a crisis. From his headquarters at Tollmingkehmen he heard the sound of gunfire in Conta’s sector early in the morning. Without waiting for François’s orders he decided at once to join the battle.

  Falk had six battalions and thirty-six guns available. He left two battalions and six guns at Tollmingkehmen with orders to hold at all costs. By 11:30 a.m., the rest of his brigade was on its march north; by 2:00 p.m. it had reached the village of Todszuhnen, just south of Conta’s line. Falk deployed his riflemen off the line of march and began advancing northeast. The Russians had been probing for an open flank all day; it was the Germans who found one. Suddenly the men of the Russian 27th Division found themselves under German fire from two directions. They saw long lines of men in field grey, elements of Falk’s 33rd Fusiliers and 45th Infantry, moving towards them from the south. Simultaneously Conta’s 3rd Grenadiers and part of the 43rd Infantry launched one last counterattack to their front. For men thirsty and bewildered, already stunned by a day’s hard fighting, the combined pressure was too much to withstand. The 27th Division dissolved in panic; the Russians fell back all along the line. Over three thousand of them remained as prisoners in German hands. At least as many were dead or wounded.

  The neat local success owed much to the initiative of von Falk. His march to the sound of the guns was in the best textbook traditions of the German army—a calculated risk to restore a dangerous situation. Three German brigades had fought three Russian divisions to a standstill, holding the field both materially and morally. This was war the way it was supposed to be: victory at the end of a day’s hard fighting, with the enemy in full retreat, prisoners on their way to the rear, colonels and majors shaking hands in the midst of a stricken field. But it was an empty triumph. Strong Russian forces were advancing on both sides of the immediate battlefield. To the north, Russian cavalry patrols had been reported around Pilkallen. To the south, a full division was pressing towards Goldap. Another division was threatening Falk’s original position, and that the two battalions left there suffered only two fatal casualties all afternoon did not diminish the imminent danger of a breakthrough in that sector.

  François had decided to retreat even before he arrived at his corps headquarters and found both a direct order to withdraw to Gumbinnen and a sharp demand for an explanation of his reasons for advancing and engaging the enemy in defiance of Prittwitz’s plans. François immediately telephoned army headquarters. With understandable exaggeration he informed his chief that “two enemy corps” had been decisively defeated and forced back over the frontier.49

  More important to Prittwitz was the information Stallupönen gave about the overall enemy deployment. The strong forces engaged there indicated that the main Russian axis of advance was significantly farther north than he had believed—a useful confirmation of his decision to concentrate 8th Army along the Angerapp. A general made of sterner stuff or flushed with the rectitude of certitude might have relieved, or at least severely reprimanded, I Corps’s unruly commander. But by that evening Hermann von François possessed more direct experience of modern war than anyone of his rank in the 8th Army. Who, moreover, would take his place? Conta and Falk were new in their current assignments; no spare senior officers were in the theater. And once his corps was safely back on the Angerapp, François would be under Prittwitz’s direct supervision. The army commander decided, faute de mieux, to overlook the circumstances.

  François used up a career’s worth of luck on August 17. His sovereign contempt for the enemy may have been justified by events, but it was not a good spirit with which to begin operations against superior numbers. The fact that he escaped disaster—and even won a striking little victory—cannot conceal the danger of the premises underlying his “rock soup” deployment. It can be readily admitted, particularly in view of later events, that his military ability was superior to that of Prittwitz. It is possible to justify his concept of attacking the Russians as far to the east as possible. But deliberately jeopardizing a corps to prove a point is quite another matter. As it was, François escaped unscathed, justified in his own mind by events, and firmly convinced that he alone was able to conduct the campaign in East Prussia. His pride was to play a major role in the subsequent development of events.

  Yepantschin, whose III Corps did most of the Russian fighting at Stallupönen, originally proposed to renew the attack all along the line at 4:00 a.m. on August 18. During the night, however, his patrols discovered that the Germans were gone. Only the two companies of the 41st Infantry, who had held the center of the line by themselves for so much of the day, remained in their hastily dug trenches in front of the village of Bilderweitschen. It grew darker and darker. Strawstacks were set on fire to provide improvised illumination. Nothing was visible far and wide but Russians, some dead and too many very much alive. The senior German captain insisted that he had no orders to retreat, and as a soldier he was accustomed to fight where he was put. When the Russians sent forward a white flag and a request to surrender, he reacted by ordering his men to resume firing their scarce ammunition at invisible targets. The other company commander responded to a subaltern’s hint that such heroics were misplaced by declaring that he could not leave a comrade in the lurch, and had promised to fight to the finish.

  As the Germans fixed bayonets for a last stand, the Russians worked around their main positions and into Bilderweitschen. Not until their reserve platoons reported house-to-house fighting did the fire-eating captains agree that it was time to go. And once again peacetime discipline proved its value. The men of the 41st not only succeeded in withdrawing through Bilderweitschen in pitch darkness with almost no straggling, they brought with them thirty prisoners when they rejoined a regiment by this time convinced their comrades were well on their way to Siberia.50

  The incident did nothing to encourage vigorous pursuit. Not until late in the afternoon of August 18 did the Russians resume their advance. The ferocity of Falk’s counterattack had concealed its weakness. Its direction, south to north, suggested to Rennenkampf that the main German concentration was somewhere south of Stallupönen. This in turn meant the enemy’s contact with Königsberg was correspondingly weak. For an army commander with no desire to bog down in a siege of that strong fortress the next logical move seemed to be a right hook, moving between the 8th Army and Königsberg to drive the Germans south and west. They might stand and fight on the Angerapp; they might keep going towards the Vistula. The Russian advance continued on August 19, and met no resistance severe enough to change the army commander’s mind about German intentions.

  Rennenkampf decided to give his infantry a day of rest on August 20. This decision reflected both logistic and operational considerations. The 1st Army had been moving forward for six days. Its first march had been forced; all the others had been accompanied by fighting. Straggling was becoming endemic. Supply columns lagged far behind the troops they were supposed to be feeding. The East Prussian countryside offered limited possibilities for inexperienced foragers. By a combination of design and accident most large stores of grain and fodder had been set on fire as the Russians advanced. In a deeper sense the Russian army’s strength lay in its steadiness, not its glitter. Brilliant operational strokes were not the empire’s forte. To attempt them, Rennenkampf reasoned, was to compete with the Germans at their strongest point. Wher
ever it might be fought, the next battle was more likely to be lost through excessive haste, and the resulting disorder, than by taking a bit of time to restore his army’s balance.

  His commanders obeyed the order to halt with more alacrity than expected. Before the war German observers at Russian maneuvers had noted the cavalry’s inability to keep touch with a moving enemy even under peacetime conditions. Now the Cavalry Corps went into bivouac after a few skirmishes with German Landwehr. All along the 1st Army’s front troopers stacked their lances, unsaddled their horses, and stoked their campfires. The Germans were allowed to disappear into the middle distance. This loss of contact was to cost the Russians dearly the next day.51

  In the aftermath of Stallupönen, Prittwitz had feared an immediate Russian pursuit of I Corps. On learning that the Russians were not following François closely, however, the army commander decided to await the Russians behind the Angerapp. But he also ordered I Corps to remain concentrated around Gumbinnen, somewhat in advance of the main position.52 Why Prittwitz still left this corps in such an isolated position is not clear. Perhaps he simply disliked giving François another order to retreat.53 It is more probable that Prittwitz still underestimated the northward extension of the 1st Army’s right flank. He expected that the Russians could not avoid attacking the line of the Angerapp head-on. By the evening of August 18 the position was strongly held by XVII Corps, I Reserve Corps, and the independent 3rd Reserve Division. These formations should be well able to hold their ground while François struck the Russian right and rear. But just in case the Russians might after all be in a position to do the outflanking, just in case their line extended farther north than expected, François was authorized to move his southern division, the 2nd, into reserve behind his left flank. To fill the resulting gap in his line, he was assigned the field reserve of the fortress of Königsberg, a division’s worth of Landwehr and Ersatz troops with thirty-six guns and a dozen heavy howitzers. They might not be able to take ground; they could reasonably be expected to hold it.54