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

by Dennis Showalter

  8

  The Province of Chance

  Any weakness in Ludendorff’s nerves during the early evening of August 26 was not reflected in the orders he issued at 9:00 p.m. Eighth Army was to destroy the Russian XV Corps and anything remaining of the 2nd Division before XIII Corps could come to their aid. The decisive sector would be in the south, with François taking Usdau, then advancing eastward on Neidenburg to roll up the Russians facing Scholtz. Since I Corps would have to guard its own right flank against the Russians around Soldau, Ludendorff ordered Scholtz both to detach a half-dozen battalions to reinforce François and to mount a “strong” secondary attack towards Usdau, while at the same time continuing the frontal attack begun on August 26. The 3rd Reserve Division and the garrison troops would remain in position on Scholtz’s left, holding a line extending from Hohenstein to Waplitz.1

  Ludendorff’s orders suggest that he continued to think less in terms of an idealized Cannae than of a more conventional victory. Here again were no subtle operational combinations, no deliberate refusing of the center to lure the Russians deeper into a trap before springing it. Ludendorff was too much the practical soldier not to be aware that an army still depending on muscle power for mobility, with a communications system as shaky as 8th Army’s had proven, was not likely to be successfully brilliant. What was required instead was hard fighting all along the line in the hopes that somewhere the enemy would crack.

  At 10:50 p.m. on the 26th Ludendorff boasted to OHL over the telephone that the success of his attack was as certain as human calculation could make it, even in the face of five enemy corps. He may have been talking as much for his own benefit as Moltke’s. At 10:30 p.m. 8th Army headquarters had finally learned that the 3rd Reserve Division was nowhere near its assigned position. Informed of Morgen’s failure to advance, Scholtz and Hell were relieved. They still expected an attack on their left flank the next day—an attack delivered by the combined strength of XIII and XV Corps. While the main body of XX Corps was attacking towards Usdau, Scholtz, rather than see the 3rd Reserve Division as far north as Hohenstein, wanted it moved south behind the Drewenz to serve as his flank guard. Army command, deferring once more to the commander on the spot, finally accepted this disposition, but only under protest. It seemed the virtual end of any hopes of executing a tactical envelopment against the 2nd Army from the north. Now everything depended on the operational flanks: François around Usdau and Mackensen at Bischofsburg.2

  I

  The night of August 26 remained quiet on I Corps’s front. François had issued his orders at 8:30 p.m. The 1st Division would attack Usdau from the northwest. The 2nd would strike from the south with one brigade, while the 3rd Brigade covered its right flank. The 5th Landwehr Brigade would screen the entire operation against any advance by the Russians around Soldau. In reserve, ready to exploit any success, was the detachment from XX Corps: six battalions, a squadron of cavalry, and a battalion of field artillery. The artillery preparation would begin at 4:00 a.m., with the infantry advancing an hour later.3

  The I Corps was ready. Its infantry had a full night’s sleep; most of them also received a hot breakfast. The corps artillery and the ammunition columns were finally in position. But the Russian position was naturally strong. It offered good fields of fire to front and flanks and ample room to conceal artillery close to the front line. It had been improved by several days of digging. Conta initially held his infantry on the lines of departure to give the guns more time to do their work. Falk’s 2nd Division, which had worked closer to the Russian positions during the previous evening, advanced on schedule. Both divisions were nervous—so nervous that François’s headquarters received a report of Usdau’s capture around 5:00 a.m. He learned the report was false only when his headquarters convoy drove into heavy rifle and machine gun fire along the Usdau road. An enthusiastic junior officer had mistaken an isolated farm west of Usdau for the beginning of the village itself.4

  The arrival of I Corps on his front initially caught François’s Russian counterpart completely by surprise. Artamonov had not used his two cavalry divisions for anything but flank security. Neither of his infantry division commanders bothered to send out patrols to their front. Artamonov regarded himself as a soldier’s general, a front-line commander impatient of modern restraints. Instead of coordinating what little intelligence reached his headquarters, he kept popping up in forward positions, interfering with company officers and “inspiring” enlisted men by asking

  Concentration of the 8th and 2nd Armies

  inane questions about their home lives while an entire German corps detrained within a day’s march of his positions.

  Artamonov might have been taken unaware; he had no intention of merely holding his ground. On the night of the 25th/26th he reported to Samsonov that he expected to be attacked by superior forces from the northwest. But to Artamonov, as to most of his contemporaries everywhere in Europe, the best defense was a determined offense. The Russian corps commander decided that he could best fulfil his role as flank guard by attacking the only enemy whose position he definitely knew: the 5th Landwehr Brigade at Lautenberg. To get the strength to do this he withdrew a brigade from his right, thereby increasing the already wide gap between I Russian Corps and the 2nd Division in Samsonov’s center. A first result of this unfortunate maneuver came on August 26, when Scholtz was able to outflank and scatter the 2nd Division without interference. Yet the next morning Artamonov had no thoughts beyond overwhelming the Germans at Lautenberg.5

  For all its shortcomings, Artamonov’s plan appears more feckless in retrospect than it might have been with better luck or better execution. The Russian advance collided head-on with the Landwehr, who had been advancing since early morning and were feeling quite pleased with themselves. The forward elements of the brigade came under Russian fire just west of Skurpien and suffered heavy casualties in the first few minutes, some of them from German artillery, which once again fired too short. At the same time the brigade was flanked from the south by a strong force of Russian cavalry. Word swept through the ranks that they had been ordered to halt. Officers who tried to get the lines moving again were shot down by Russian sharpshooters. The situation seemed serious enough to justify a prompt retreat and an immediate appeal to François for reinforcements.

  The Landwehr were well off compared to the 2nd Division. Falk’s 4th Brigade reached the Usdau road by 5:00 a.m., but its commander was a tidy-minded officer who preferred to keep his casualties low and his flanks well covered while other units did the dirty work. Not until 11:15 a.m. did the 33rd Fusiliers occupy the high ground behind Usdau, and by that time the town was already in the hands of the 1st Division. The 3rd Brigade had worse fortune. Reinforced for its role as flank guard by two battalions of the 45th Infantry, it was ordered toward the village of Gross-Tauersee. Though one colonel with a taste for melodrama ordered his men to “advance towards the rising sun,” early-morning fog combined with broken ground to disorganize the forward elements before they encountered the first Russian positions. The line of advance had not been reconnoitered during the night, nor was it well screened by skirmishers. Two kilometers short of its objective, the brigade was advancing across open ground when it came under rifle and machine-gun fire from what seemed every point of the compass. Within minutes Russian artillery joined in—first the field guns, then the 122-millimeter howitzers of I Corps artillery, which found Falk’s men a welcome target of opportunity.

  The transition from peace to war is a never-ending process of adjusting doctrine and practice to technology and methods. Strategic studies of the Tannenberg campaign frequently criticize both the Germans and the Russians for their apparently exaggerated concern with flank security. Time and again during World War I a few automatic weapons proved able to defeat or delay attacks from any direction, particularly in the crowded conditions of the western front, with its high ratio of bodies to space. But in August, 1914, neither troop commanders nor the men in the ranks had any way of kno
wing precisely how effective firepower was. The 45th Infantry’s machine-gun company, detached from its parent regiment to support the 3rd Brigade, dug its six Maxims into a gravel pit. For awhile they anchored part of the line. But decades of prewar training had deeply inculcated sensitivity to one’s flanks in officers. The rank-and-file infantryman of 1914 also needed time and experience before he would accept the rattle of his own machine guns as security for an exposed flank or a threatened rear. Even for veteran troops a sudden burst of fire from an unexpected direction can be disconcerting.

  Even more disconcerting can be finding empty space in an ammunition pouch when reaching for a fresh clip of cartridges. The reluctance of nineteenth-century armies to adopt rapid-firing weapons on the grounds that they used too much ammunition has also been the subject of decades of ridicule. The men of the 3rd Brigade were not laughing. Under the impact of surprise, fire discipline vanished. Within minutes men, companies, and battalions were running out of ammunition, seeking supply wagons that had lost their way in the confusion, trying to borrow from more timorous or more provident neighbors. Orderly officers, sent forward now laden not with dispatches but with cartridges, often lost their way. A battalion of field howitzers from the 37th Artillery attempted to silence the Russian guns, but was itself outshot and overpowered. The regiment’s other battalion was pushed almost into the firing lines as a visible support and rallying point for the infantry. One battery became stuck in the boggy ground. The other two fired off their ammunition and then discovered the impossibility of bringing caissons forward across soft ground that the Russians by this time had perfectly ranged.

  Shouts of “We’re surrounded!” and “Let’s get out!” drowned the orders and the whistles of the company officers. The brigadier rode forward to rally his command, found himself invisible and inaudible, and promptly rode back out of the melee. In the American Civil War it might have been called a skedaddle. Korean veterans would have spoken of bugout. German histories describe an “orderly retrograde movement.” In fact the 4th Grenadiers and the 44th Infantry fled for their lives to the woods north and east of Heinrichsdorf—a good mile from the first point of contact with the Russians. A good half of Falk’s division was temporarily out of action.6

  The 3rd Brigade’s behavior on the morning of August 27 invites discussion of a more general point. Throughout the Tannenberg campaign, an unexpected fact recurred: active German formations, not reservists, did most of the serious running. This seems a paradox. While not composed of long-service professionals, the active regiments incorporated the cream of the German army: its youngest, fittest, best-trained rank and file. They were virgin soldiers, but so were the volunteer regiments of Dixmude and Langemarck or the British at the Somme. None of François’s regiments faced a challenge as stern as the 235th Reserve Infantry Regiment on October 21, 1914, or the Tyneside Irish Brigade on July 1, 1916. They broke under for lighter losses and far less immediate threats.

  Part of the answer lies in the irrationality, at least in materialist terms, of the factors that make soldiers fight. War is essentially a network of conventionally defined actions. Even if human aggression is genetically determined, there is nothing natural about organized violence. The commitment of any soldier correspondingly depends on standards and attitudes that are cultivated and inculcated. Discipline, patriotism, comradeship, fear of alternatives—all involve arbitrary belief systems. All involve behavior undertaken for its own reasons. That behavior incorporates an implied contract. Military institutions stress the importance of honor, not for archaic, caste-determined reasons, but because ultimately any soldier will perform only to the point where his personal honor is satisfied. That point in turn depends heavily on his sense of the rules of the game, on his expectations. Completely inexperienced men, with no frame of reference for their situation, could and often did fight harder and longer than veterans because of their ignorance. Men with peacetime military service, on the other hand, had some idea of what they would be doing, which contributed to a sense of what they should be doing. When that sense was exceeded, the contract was broken and the soldiers went on strike.7

  The 1st Division benefited from better luck and better management, despite the German artillery’s by now familiar tendency to drop shells on any likely looking target. One battalion escaped heavy casualties only when a bugler stood upright and walked forward into Russian rifle fire to signal the batteries of their mistake. He survived to wear his Iron Cross. Initially Russian small arms fire was heavy enough that the men in the German ranks nervously reminded each other that not every round finds a target. But Conta’s guns and the corps heavy howitzers, reinforced by an additional battalion from Thorn, made such good practice against the Russian trenches around Usdau that the infantry tended to hang back and let the gunners.

  As the Germans slowly closed in on Usdau from the north and west, more and more Russian batteries, anxious for their own local security, limbered up and withdrew. The infantry followed—those who did not wave handkerchiefs or stick their bayonetted rifles in the sand as token of surrender. When the Germans entered Usdau around 11:00 a.m., they found only dead and dying Russians heaped in trenches destroyed by howitzer shells. The village was in flames, its streets littered with corpses of men and horses, their eyes bulging, then bursting from the heat. Anyone questioning the fate of Russian stragglers found his answer as the wind spread the smell of burning flesh from collapsed walls and blocked cellars.8

  François’s pleasure at his victory was marred when at 10:55 a.m. he received a report of the 3rd Brigade’s retreat—a report that had been exaggerated into a rout of the whole 2nd Division. Simultaneously, the 5th Landwehr Brigade’s request for support arrived at corps headquarters. It seemed impossible to advance on Neidenburg until his flank was cleared. At 11:20 a.m., François informed 8th Army of his decision to turn the weight of his attack south and southeast. Ten minutes later Hindenburg and Ludendorff confirmed his decision.9

  Conta had already begun responding to the new threat by swinging his division south. The 2nd Division also rallied and pushed forward, without one battalion that was pursuing its own as yet unnoticed odyssey to the German rear. François’s coordinating orders, issued at 3:45 p.m., proposed to secure by nightfall a position from which I Corps could on the 28th cut off the Russian line of retreat entirely by a wide flanking move. The 1st Division was to take Fylitz. The detachment from XX Corps, called Schmettau’s Force after its commander, was to advance south of Klentzkau. The 2nd Division would occupy the heights south of Gross-Tauersee. All available cavalry would pursue as opportunity offered.10

  The Russians were not there to be attacked. I Corps had begun falling back immediately after routing the 3rd Brigade. Its presence on the field surprised the Russians even more than the Russians surprised the Germans. A series of contradictory orders from Artamonov’s headquarters combined with the increasingly heavy fire of the German artillery around Usdau to turn what began as an orderly withdrawal into a rout. Instead of retreating eastward toward Samsonov’s main body, the Russians followed their original line of advance, now become the line of least resistance, and fell back beyond Soldau. By nightfall all of I Corps that remained in the battle zone was a weak rear guard, fragments of a half-dozen regiments, strung out along the railway north of Soldau. Not only had the Russians lost any contact with the rest of the 2nd Army; they seemed to have small chance of stopping the Germans should they choose to push south instead of east the next day.11

  In XX Corps’s sector Scholtz’s preparations were influenced by experience. On the 26th he had received verbal orders to delay his attack until I Corps’s movements were well under way. Given the course of events that day, Scholtz felt he had been put in a potentially dangerous position operationally and professionally by I Corps’s failure to advance. He was determined to avoid a repetition of the situation. When the army order of 9:00 p.m., August 26, specified an attack “with the greatest energy,” Scholtz and his staff turned to the telephone.
A brief conversation with army headquarters settled the matter. Scholtz issued his corps orders at 11:00 p.m. The 3rd Reserve Division, now definitely committed to Scholtz’s left, was to make a feint to draw Russian strength from the south. In the center the garrison and Landwehr troops would hold their positions along the Drewenz River. The XX Corps’s two active divisions were to attack south, but Scholtz’s orders conveyed the impression of an advance in support of I Corps, rather than of a vigorous attack pursued independently. François’s reputation as a general who went his own way did nothing to encourage Scholtz to take extreme risks in aiding his hard-headed associate.

  This was also the case for the 41st Division on the right of Scholtz’s line. Its riflemen were reluctant to repeat the dashing advances of their first day’s combat, despite an almost complete initial lack of opposition. One company even captured the abandoned instruments of a Russian regimental band, but the division commander became unnerved by his very success. Though gunfire was audible from the direction of Usdau, there were no other signs of I Corps. Nor was there any word from the 37th Division on his left. Rather than risk isolation, Brigadier-General Sontag ordered a halt to await developments.

  Staabs’s 37th Division was having its own troubles. Its four strongest battalions had been sent south with Schmettau’s Force. Its commander was, if anything, more concerned than Scholtz about the possibility of a Russian breakthrough on the corps’s left flank—particularly since no one in Staabs’s headquarters was sure whether the 3rd Reserve Division had received or obeyed XX Corps’ orders to support the threatened northern sector. Staabs therefore hedged his bet. He left his 73rd Brigade in position to cover his rear and attacked only with the 75th. That formation made good progress against little opposition until around 9:00 a.m. Then Brigadier-General Bockmann ordered a thirty-minute halt to rest his forward elements and give stragglers time to rejoin.12