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

by Dennis Showalter

  The relatively limited intelligence on Russian movements in good part reflected the problems faced by 8th Army’s airmen. Flying in 1914 was enough of a risk to strain the least sensitive nerves. Improvised airstrips, bad weather, and the embryonic antiaircraft defense of several thousand Russians shooting into the air at random had reduced the efficiency of the air crews even further. The Russians were also improving their camouflage discipline. At the beginning of the campaign the German airmen had had an almost free hand against an enemy apparently making no effort to conceal his movements. Now, particularly as they advanced into the thick forests along the frontier, the Russians became increasingly difficult to see and count. Add to this the risk, magnified tenfold by rumor, of being massacred by Cossacks should one be forced to land in Russian-held territory, and the increasing vagueness of reconnaissance reports is readily explained.55

  The army’s Flieger Abteilungen nevertheless braved overcast skies and Russian rifle fire throughout August 18 to report that the Russian 1st Army was still advancing slowly, and that a wide gap existed between its left flank and the right flank of the force coming from the Narew. Then at 10:45 a.m. on the 19th, 8th Army headquarters received three separate reports that the Russian Narew army had definitely begun to move. That fact made a quick victory over the 1st Army more urgent than ever, but by this time German radio operators had picked up Rennenkampf’s orders for a halt on the 20th.

  Virtually every account of the Tannenberg campaign mentions the Russian practice of sending radio messages in the clear, and suggests it as another paradigm for the weaknesses of the Tsarist empire. It seems almost a shame to diminish the legend by mentioning that the Germans did not always code their messages either. Like their Russian counterparts, German military codes were simple substitution ciphers—childish by modern standards. Yet German communications officers feared loss of the code books, and were under constant pressure to balance security against speed and accuracy. These concerns were even more significant on the Russian side. Coordinating an advance in enemy country depended heavily on efficient communications. Telephone or telegraph lines were easily tapped. The ether was free, and the danger of using codes their intended recipients might be unable to decipher appeared greater than the possibility that the Germans would monitor every possible frequency. It was a calculated risk, and not an unreasonable one.

  In theory the large permanent stations at places like Posen or Königsberg, manned by well-trained cadres of operators, should have found little difficulty in picking up and passing on the Russian messages. Reality was less impressive. German fortresses were officially responsible for monitoring their neighbors’ broadcasts. Their successes had been mixed, and depended heavily on the availability of interpreters and knowledge of whether or not the broadcasts were in code or clear. From the start of mobilization, moreover, the fortresses and the field signal units had a multiplying number of higher-priority missions. Neither instruments nor operators could be spared to scan empty air. Interception of Rennenkampf’s order was a corresponding piece of luck.56

  The interception may have been a significant intelligence coup. Nevertheless twentieth-century communications technology, the airplane and the radio, had combined to put Prittwitz in a quandary. Dared the Germans continue to wait for the Russian advance to reach the Angerapp? Or was it now necessary to force the issue in the north, abandoning prepared field positions and attacking possibly superior numbers before the Russians from the Narew came within striking range? Prittwitz and Waldersee temporized until once again François made the army commander’s decision for him.

  Around 4:00 p.m. on August 19 François telephoned Prittwitz to inform him that he expected to be attacked in force either that evening or early on the 20th. The corps commander’s proposed countermove reflected his faith both in technology and in the young officers of his reconnaissance squadron. Their reports repeated again and again that the Russians in I Corps’s sector were advancing in force but carelessly, without much apparent regard for march discipline or flank security. François was sure that a spoiling attack, delivered before the Russian deployment could begin, would have an excellent chance of success. He proposed to move Falk’s 2nd Division not into reserve, as Prittwitz had authorized, but right around the corps’s main line, to strike the Russian right flank from the north as it came within range. To support the attack, François begged Prittwitz to order XVII Corps and I Reserve Corps forward.57

  Prittwitz initially said that he could decide only when he had a better view of the situation farther south. But by the evening of the 19th, that view was rapidly taking shape. The Russian 2nd Army’s vanguards were across the border and advancing on Ortelsburg. As for the Russian 1st Army, air reconnaissance reported no enemy anywhere near the Angerapp. Instead, up to two divisions were advancing from the south and east towards Darkehmen, a few miles south of Gumbinnen. This combined with François’s earlier report to convince Prittwitz that his subordinate had been right: the Russians were advancing in force on I Corps’s position. At 4:50 p.m. Prittwitz informed François that XVII Corps would attack the next morning in support of I Corps’s offensive. François said that “this joyful message took a weight from my soul.” He summoned his division commanders immediately and began issuing orders for his own attack.58

  Once again François’s determination overcame the caution of his superior. This time, however, he had received assistance from the Russian advance in the south. Prittwitz saw that if he waited much longer, the 2nd Army might be in his rear before he could even attack the 1st Army, much less destroy it. Whether he perceived the coming action as a decisive battle is debatable. One of his aides referred to a Gefecht, or combat, in German military terminology an action of lesser magnitude.59 Prittwitz’s orders, moreover, did not allow for the simultaneous use of his entire available force. Instead the 8th Army would enter battle in echelon from the left, with I Corps opening the battle against the Russians around Gumbinnen. The XVII Corps would then advance against the left and rear of an enemy facing, and, pinned in place by François, Prittwitz believed a single corps alone was strong enough to force a decision in that sector. The rest of the 8th Army would have to do no more than act as a flank guard. The I Reserve Corps would attack and fix any Russians to its front; the 3rd Reserve Division, on the army’s far right, was in turn to cover I Reserve Corps.60

  Engaging the enemy a corps at a time was not taught in the War Academy, or anywhere else. Klotzen, nicht Kleckern, “kick, don’t tickle,” was a German army rule of thumb long before Heinz Guderian. Perhaps unconsciously, Prittwitz and Waldersee had set the stage for François. If I Corps’s commander had correctly read the situation, if his troops could do what he expected, the next day’s prospects were good. Otherwise, Germany’s main force in the east ran the risk of being defeated in detail and rolled up like a rug.

  6

  First Contact Gumbinnen

  François’ plan mixed pragmatism and audacity. The increasing size of armies in the latter nineteenth century had made flank attacks increasingly difficult to deliver even in maneuvers. Some German generals had adjusted their thinking towards the concept of breakthrough. For François, however, war’s tactical challenge continued to be in creating flanks where none existed. At Stallupönen he had come close to being enveloped from the north. Now he proposed to turn the tables by pulling Falk’s 2nd Division out of its position on I Corps’s right and sending it on a night march across the rear of the 1st Division and around the open Russian flank. Falk was to attack at 4:00 a.m. and drive the Russians onto the 1st Division’s guns.

  The prospect of a fifteen-kilometer night march ending in a dawn attack against a superior enemy did little to soothe anyone’s nerves. No sooner were his men on the move than Falk received a report that the Russians had broken through the 1st Division. Falk promptly halted his men to meet the supposed threat. What had happened was one of those incidents which generals in any war usually de-emphasize or omit from their memoirs. With dusk
turning to night, someone in the wagon lines of the 1st Division had shouted that the Russians were coming. Given the marches and countermarches of the past few days, anything seemed possible. Tired men groped for rifles and packs. Others started from the half-sleep of exhaustion and began to run. Equally tired officers sought to bring some order out of confusion slipping into chaos. By the time discipline was restored, I Corps’s rumor mill had spread the story of the supposed breakthrough everywhere in the sector.

  When Falk learned that the Russian threat was imaginary, he took advantage of a peacetime amenity, the excellent and still-functioning East Prussian telephone network, to ask François directly if the planned movement was still possible. His division had lost over two vital hours forming a front against nightmares. François replied with a direct order to move immediately. Falk knew better than to argue. At 10:00 p.m. he reported that his division would be in position to attack by the assigned time. He had six hours to make good his assurances.1

  The 2nd Division’s deployment was complicated by fog heavy enough to cause a thirty-minute delay in the attack. Nevertheless the first rush caught the men of Smirnov’s XX Corps in their blankets. As Falk’s artillery poured shrapnel into the Russian bivouac areas, his infantry stormed forward. The village of Mallwischken fell to the first charge of the 33rd Fusiliers. A squad of the 4th Grenadiers was able to get close enough to the Russian gun lines to shoot a field battery out of its position, taking two guns and fifty dazed prisoners. Everywhere men in flat caps and brown uniforms seemed to be throwing down their rifles and calling for quarter: “We are Christians too, brothers!” Then almost in minutes the situation changed. As the German infantry outran their supporting batteries, Russian rifles and machine guns took toll of the advancing troops. Losses were almost absurdly light by the standards of 1916 or 1918, but as men began to drop, their comrades went to earth and stayed there for two hours.

  Around 8:00 a.m. two battalion commanders of the 45th Infantry tried to mount a bayonet charge. The relatively low casualty lists of their formations for the day indicate that their soldiers melted away behind them. Not until German artillery worked forward and apparently silenced the last of the machine-gun nests did German bugles get any response when they sounded the advance.

  As the German riflemen stood hesitantly upright they learned another harsh lesson of twentieth-century war: some defenders always survive. A battalion of the 45th Infantry was stopped in its tracks by fire from a barn as yet unnoticed by the artillery observers. Lance Corporal Otto Reusteck rushed the barn, reached the dead ground beneath the wall, and took out his matches. He needed only moments to ignite the dry wood of a building full of ripe grain. The barn burst into flames. Its Russian occupants, unable to find a way out or unwilling to face the German rifles, burned alive. Reusteck’s good fortune ran out on the way back to his company. He was killed—probably by a shot from the burning barn.

  These were not the same Russians who had been so easily scattered by the flank attack at Stallupönen. Their artillery ranged German batteries and German skirmish lines with equal facility. Once over the initial surprise their infantry fought desperately from improvised trenches and foxholes, shooting at everything that moved, fighting to the last man against Germans who were as confused as their enemies. Not until 11:30 a.m. were men of the 45th Infantry able to rush what had become the key to the Russian position, the strongly defended village of Uszballen.

  Since the introduction of firearms, Europe’s armies had utilized farms and villages to anchor defensive positions, nightmares to the attacker. For every Blenheim, with a garrison massed too closely either to move or to shoot, there were a dozen Hougoumonts or Le Bourgets to act as bones in the throat of a regiment, a division, sometimes an army corps. Clearing them usually meant street-by-street, house-by-house brawling that could leave the victors as disorganized as the vanquished, and correspondingly vulnerable to counterattack.

  Logic suggests that street fighting should have formed a major element of any European army’s peacetime training—particularly one as offensive-minded as Germany’s. Yet while Europe grew more densely settled after 1871, maneuvers were held on open ground. No annual budgets included money to construct dummy villages, or to purchase farmsteads for practice assaults. Instead doctrine prescribed avoiding built-up areas wherever possible, bypassing them and leaving their neutralization to the artillery.2

  However sound might be the principle, its execution proved impossible on the 2nd Division’s front. There were enough Russians in Uszballen to pin down any clever flanking movements, and no time to wait for the guns. Lieutenants took their platoons into the village outskirts, a subaltern of the 45th’s 9th Company showing the way by capturing two dug-in machine guns one after the other. By the time the fighting reached the center of town, sergeants and corporals were setting the pace. As yet the German infantry had no grenades, that subsequently indispensable weapon in house-to-house fighting. The magazines of their rifles held only five rounds. Not all of the peacetime training in gymnastics and bayonet drill had been wasted. Cold steel and rifle butts took the men of the 45th forward against desperate resistance. It was noon when the Russians broke, the few survivors seeking shelter in the basements and outbuildings of a village ablaze from end to end.

  As the firing died down Uszballen’s conquerors became suddenly and uncomfortably conscious of the stench of charring bodies, the screams of trapped Russians suffocating or burning alive. For not a few of the 2nd Division’s young men the taste of victory was a mouthful of vomit as company officers and NCOs tried to collect prisoners and organize rescue parties. Majors and colonels, more concerned than their juniors with pursuing a beaten enemy, ordered bugles sounded and colors unfurled as rallying points, but it took a half hour to round up enough exhausted, nauseated rank and file to launch a halfhearted movement forward towards the next cluster of villages.3

  At 5:30 a.m. Conta had ordered the 1st Division forward into a nightmarish network of fortified farms and villages, connected by hastily dug trenches. Conta deployed his four regiments abreast, retaining only local reserves. The front-line battalions advanced under flying colors, to the beat of drums and the sound of bugles. Almost immediately they began taking heavy casualties from sharpshooters concealed in the trees or firing from roofs and cellars. A lieutenant of the 1st Grenadiers kept

  Gumbinnen 3:00–4:00 PM

  shouting that the Russians could hit nothing until he dropped with a bullet in his chest. The same regiment’s fusilier battalion worked to within a hundred meters of another Russian position to be confronted with white flags, shirt-tails, and handkerchiefs. The unwary who moved forward to take the presumed surrender were met with a burst of fire at point-blank range.

  Time after time in the early days of World War I, combatants accused each other of deliberate misuse of the white flag. Apart from the obvious chances of confusion, with troops unaware of the flag’s presence responding to an apparent enemy advance, German junior officers and enlisted men seem to have been generally ignorant of two facts about a white flag. It signifies no more than a desire to parley, and it is not necessarily a sign of surrender. Moreover, the hoister of the flag is expected to take the initiative in making contact. The Germans were not required to expose themselves in response to the Russian gesture; they did so at their own risk. But few rifle platoons contained experts in the fine points of the laws of war. The Grenadiers overran the trenches and shot or bayonetted every man in them. Their regimental history records the deed with pride.

  Like Falk’s 2nd Division, Conta’s men fell into increasing confusion as they pushed forward. For every enemy position cleared, every trench rushed, two more seemed to appear. Regimental and battalion staffs discovered that remaining mounted within range of the Russian rifles was suicidal; even led horses offered too inviting a target. This in turn reduced the speed of order transmission to the strength of a man’s legs and the soundness of his lungs. In peacetime adjutants and orderly officers, well reste
d and well mounted, carried fresh instructions to rifle companies advancing against blank cartridges or marked enemies. Now they ran desperately from place to place, cursing every glass of beer and every cigar consumed so casually before August 1.

  By 11:00 a.m. the village of Brakuponen, key to the Russian position on Conta’s front, fell in another vicious seesaw dogfight. The 28th Division, which had thus far provided most of the opposition to François’s corps, began to crumble. Its men retreated in all directions, one regimental color party getting as far as the fortress of Kovno almost fifty miles inside Russia, where it turned over its symbolic burden to a bemused commandant. But the division’s seven thousand casualties, half its infantry strength, gave proof of its hard fight. Five thousand were prisoners, but most of them had been too closely engaged for retreat to be practical. When they surrendered it was with their rifles in their hands, and every German account from the fighting line pays tribute to their valor and endurance.4

  Any chance for François to achieve his mini-Cannae ended shortly after noon.5 Conta’s men were already overmarched and underfed by the standards of peacetime maneuvers. The 28th Division might be broken, but its sister formations were mounting fierce local counterattacks. Then Falk’s artillery took a hand. The 2nd Division’s batteries, out of a generalized sense that something must be done to stop the Russian attacks, began blasting the landscape in front of them almost at random. They found their targets in the ranks of Conta’s infantry. Men stood upright in a hail of shrapnel, waving their arms, swinging helmets on the points of their bayonets. One colonel ordered his bugles to sound the signal to cease fire, in the desperate hope that the gunners might hear. Two months later at Langemarck, uniformed adolescents would sing patriotic songs to identify themselves to their equally raw comrades of the artillery. The men of I Corps took the direct approach and ran for their lives.