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

by Dennis Showalter

  At 9:30 a.m., however, Samsonov’s hopes received a severe jolt when a messenger from VI Corps finally reached him along the Jedwabno road. For the first time Samsonov discovered the dimensions of the defeat that corps had suffered around Bischofsburg. It was hardly remarkable that he described the situation as “serious” when overtaken shortly afterwards by Major-General Knox, the British military attaché. According to that officer, whose acerbic memoirs remain the most familiar summary source of information on the 2nd Army’s fate, Samsonov told him that I Corps was retreating on the left, VI Corps had been defeated on the right, and Samsonov was going to XV Corps headquarters and collect what forces he could to drive the Germans back.

  Writing with the advantage of hindsight, Knox expressed surprise at the relative calmness of Samsonov and his staff. “The enemy has luck one day; we will have luck another,” Knox was told. What he and many subsequent critics interpreted as a mixture of inconsequent insouciance and “Russian fatalism” was probably an almost desperate desire to be rid of a nuisance—an hypothesis reinforced by Samsonov’s suggestion to Knox that he turn back because in case the worst should happen he had the duty to send “valuable reports” to the government in London. Samsonov still hoped to avert the worst as he and his staff switched from autos to horses for the final ride to XV Corps headquarters.39

  III

  Samsonov’s spirits might have lifted, at least temporarily, had he known exactly what was happening to the Germans opposing Martos. Scholtz and Hell prepared their orders for August 28 believing XX Corps faced three full divisions on the sector of its front from Mühlen northwards. But the Russian troops south of Mühlen were not thought to have much power of resistance after their hammering of the previous day. Scholtz decided to take corresponding advantage of what seemed a gap in the Russian line. He ordered the 41st Division to make a night march around Lake Mühlen, its geographic objective being Paulsgut in the enemy rear. As soon as the heights of Paulsgut were taken the Landwehr and reservists in what was now the center of the corps sector, placed for the day under the overall command of von Morgen, would attack to their front. The 37th Division, already on the march north, was to be ready to advance in support of Morgen by 4:00 a.m.

  The actual timing of the latter movements depended on the progress of the 41st Division. Sontag’s men were expected to be in position by 4:00 a.m. By 5:30 a.m., however, no firing was audible from the division’s front. Hindenburg, wanting to get a closer view of the battle, again moved forward to Frögenau. He arrived there about 7:00 a.m. and set up field headquarters in the creamery on Frögenau’s outskirts. Scholtz had previously established his own command post in the village. The only direct communication to 8th Army’s other formations was a field telephone line to I Corps—not too much different from Samsonov’s situation. Scholtz arrived within minutes to explain that fog had delayed Sontag’s advance and was making observation impossible. Fog also played tricks with sounds, but according to Scholtz gunfire had been heard in Frögenau since around 6:00 a.m. That meant the 41st Division was attacking. Now there was nothing to do but wait.40

  The corps orders had been issued late the preceding night, at 10:40 p.m. The 41st Division had not received them until 11:20 p.m.; its own orders reached the forward regiments shortly after midnight. Fresh troops, careful preparation, and aggressive leadership were reasonable prerequisites for infiltrating the lines of an enemy army corps. Sontag’s division lacked all three. Its men were tired. They had spent most of the evening of August 27 entrenching themselves in expectation of Russian counterattacks. At this stage of the war few company or battalion commanders sent out patrols as a matter of course. Reconnaissance was assumed to be the cavalry’s task, and cavalry considered itself next to useless in the dark. By the time the orders to advance reached the division’s forward units, it was the middle of the night—too late to dispatch scouts who would probably do little more than alert the Russians by stumbling around in the woods. Sontag himself questioned the attack’s prospects. He had only nine of his twelve battalions available. Two more were with Schmettau’s Force. A third was cleaning up the battlefield of the 26th, collecting wounded and salvaging equipment. But Sontag’s objections to the attack on Waplitz the day before and his apparent lack of grip during the afternoon had already cost him a sharp reprimand from Scholtz. Rather than risk losing his reputation or his command by another protest, the division commander decided to keep silent and hope for the best.

  Sontag’s attack orders reflected a preference for finesse over force. He divided his attenuated division into three of what a later generation would call battle groups: two or three infantry battalions reinforced by a battalion of field artillery and a detachment of cavalry. He proposed to slip these task forces one after the other in a single column between the Russian positions, cut the high road, swing left and break through Waplitz to the Paulsgut heights. Then the battle groups would take separate positions to block the Russian retreat.

  The plan’s flaws lay less in conception than in execution. The night march to the lines of departure was made in increasingly thick fog. Platoons and companies lost their way time and again. Whole battalions scattered out of control, regrouped, and scattered once more. For security reasons the infantry marched with unloaded rifles, a command decision that did nothing to enhance feelings of confidence in the face of episodic bursts of fire from Russian stragglers and pickets.

  As the German advance guard passed through the abandoned village of Adamsheide it was greeted by the crowing of a solitary rooster. It was as though the bird gave a signal. By 3:45 a.m. the banging of individual Russian rifles had become a steady rattle. Sontag’s leading regiment, the 59th Infantry, deployed blindly in the fog, overran Russian outposts, and drove forward in what the officers hoped was the general direction of Waplitz. The regiment’s vanguard, its third battalion, was pinned down in minutes by what seemed random firing. In the damp air, every shot sounded as though it came from every direction. The 59th’s heavy loss of officers on August 26 took quick effect. One or two casualties left entire companies leaderless. No one of any rank knew what was happening. Patrols sent into the fog never returned, their men shot, bayoneted, or simply lost in the confusion.

  By 4:15 a.m. the regiment’s second battalion joined the fighting line, its squads and platoons advancing as best they could on their own initiative. Waplitz, a large village rather than a small town, straggled for a kilometer along both sides of the shallow Maranse River. Captain Benecke, commanding the 59th’s 8th Company, led a rush across the bridge west of the village. A Russian officer and a few enlisted men, up to their knees in water, waved handkerchiefs in token of surrender. In Scholtz’s corps, as in Mackensen’s before Gumbinnen, tales were rife of enemy abuses of the white flag. A few shots, a few hoarse screams, and a half-dozen brown-uniformed corpses were left bobbing in the slow-flowing water. But the Germans were unable to advance farther across the open, boggy ground in the face of Russian fire to their front and flank. What began as a bridgehead within minutes became a pocket.

  With his casualties mounting almost faster than his confusion, the colonel of the 59th committed his reserve battalion. By this time, even if the Russian infantry could see no more clearly than the Germans, their artillery was finding the range. Elements of four German companies pushed into Waplitz house by house, seeking cover as much as victory. There the attack stalled. Nowhere in the 59th’s sector could reinforcements or ammunition be brought forward. Every man still on his feet and every round still available must be husbanded, at least until the fog lifted enough to determine who was where.

  As they came up on the 59th’s right flank, the battle groups based on the 148th and the 152nd Infantry stuck fast in their turns. Once the fog began to clear between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m., it was the Russians who took advantage of the changed situation. Batteries of XV Corps opened an increasingly accurate fire from the east. The 2nd Division’s guns, which had survived the previous day’s rout of their infantry, joine
d in from around Frankenau. German counterbattery fire was ineffective, at least in the eyes of infantrymen who already felt all too thoroughly mishandled by their superiors. Instead Waplitz, the most obvious target in the area, came under fire from the 41st Division’s guns.

  As he saw more and more German shells burst in the village Captain Benecke, still holding his bridgehead with a handful of men, decided the situation was serious enough to justify leaving his position to make a personal report. For almost an hour he stumbled blindly in fog and smoke until he found not the poorly directed artillery, not the 59th’s regimental headquarters, but the colonel of the neighboring 148th Infantry. That officer promised to do all he could to help if Benecke was willing to attack. Benecke’s optimism soared further on the way back to his own men when he encountered and commandeered a detachment of pioneers commanded by an Offizierstellvertreter. Within minutes elements of the 148th also reached the Maranse, using the ditches alongside the road as protection from the Russian fire. But they were still on the wrong side of the river. With the fog lifting minute by minute, the young lieutenant commanding the 148th’s leading platoon refused to take his men across a bridge that had become a magnet for concentrated Russian fire. And thereby hung a tale of arms and men.

  The pioneers of the Imperial German Army were specialist troops, whose primary mission of building and overcoming field fortifications set them apart from ordinary infantry. Yet more than Britain’s Royal Engineer field companies or France’s sappers, they were considered a combat arm. On many occasions in their history, particularly in their versions of it, pioneer companies had served as emergency reserves and assault troops. Peacetime maneuver experience had reinforced by default the pioneers’ infantry role. Time and costs forbade much direct practice in construction and demolition. Rather than pay compensation for destroyed fields to angry landowners, troops in field exercises usually marked their entrenchments with flags. Corps commanders correspondingly tended to regard their pioneer battalion as an extra source of manpower. That as much as anything had determined Sontag’s assignment of Company 3, Pioneer Battalion 26, to the 59th Infantry’s combat group. Even if they found nothing technical to do, their 250 rifles would be useful. Now some of them were staring more or less nervously at the fire-swept planks in front of them.

  Their commander was also something of an anomaly. The German army had long recognized in peacetime that it would not have enough commissioned officers to fill all the positions that would open upon mobilization. Expanding the reserve officer corps was unacceptable partly on the familiar social grounds, but also for financial reasons. Instead, as so often, the army turned to its NCOs—specifically its Vizefeldwebels. Best translated as staff sergeant or platoon sergeant, this grade was held in the active army by men promoted beyond ordinary squad and section responsibilities, yet too junior to be considered for Feldwebel or unable to find a vacancy in that grade. In 1866 and 1870/71, Vizefeldwebels frequently and successfully served as platoon commanders in the field. In the intervening forty years, the grade was also increasingly given to those one-year volunteers who for one reason or another, social, economic, or professional, failed to qualify for a reserve officer’s commission.

  Recognizing that some of these men would from the beginning of mobilization be performing officers’ duties, the army created for them the rank of deputy officer (Offizierstellvertreter). The concept was not unique to Germany. During World War II the British army experimented with something similar, the warrant rank of platoon sergeant major, to remedy a shortage of lieutenants. More recently, the U.S. army spared itself the institutional and economic costs of a permanently expanded officer corps by deciding to have most of its helicopters flown by warrant officers.

  In a short war the German compromise might have worked. Most of the OSV’s would have been returned to civilian life too quickly for serious friction to develop with the career officer corps. Discrepancies in benefits and status would have been obscured by common enthusiasm for the national cause. The actual result during World War I was to create a class of men whose status and problems were similar to enlisted pilots in the U.S. Navy or Britain’s Royal Air Force three decades later: neither fish nor fowl, with harmony depending so heavily on mutual good will and mutual common sense that both the latter services ultimately ended the anomaly by commissioning all their pilots. But if in August, 1914, a lieutenant of infantry would not lead his men across a bridge under fire, an Offizierstellvertreter of pioneers had two reasons for doing so: the honor of his rank and the honor of his branch of service.

  The men of Company 3 rose to their leader’s whistle and charged. No one got more than halfway across. As bodies piled up on the road and the planking, even the fire-eating Benecke conceded that any more attempts with the resources at hand would be an irresponsible waste of life. With no reinforcements in sight more and more of the Germans in Waplitz abandoned the fighting line, seeking shelter from artillery and snipers in cellars or in the rubble of destroyed buildings. The explanation of being out of ammunition was so commonly offered and accepted that it suggests a more or less unconscious collusion. If no one had anything left to shoot, everyone was spared from making a heroic last stand. Around noon, as Russian patrols drew closer, the Germans smashed their rifles, broke their swords, and hoisted the white flag. A private committed suicide with one of the few remaining cartridges in Waplitz. Over three hundred of his comrades marched into Russian captivity.

  The 148th and 152nd also began to dissolve. Men shouted that they were out of ammunition. Others sought the chance to assist slightly wounded comrades out of the line. One officer rallied a batch of stragglers, put them through a few minutes of close-order drill, then led them back to the front. Sontag, however, did not regard the situation as salvageable by Frederician heroics. Instead of shoving open the door to the Russian rear as intended, his battalions were being squeezed into a pocket. Russian company and battalion commanders were mounting increasingly aggressive local counterattacks into the gaps between Sontag’s units. The 41st Division seemed uncomfortably on the point of being trapped, faced with the task of turning about and cutting its way out. Rather than accept the risk, Sontag ordered his men back to their original lines of departure.41

  This meant squeezing through a two-and-a-half-kilometer gap between the Mühlen Lake and the Russians—a gap that narrowed as more and more Russian infantry learned what was happening, a gap that threatened to become a killing ground. Before 1914 Europe’s artillerymen had hotly debated the relative advantages of covered and open firing positions. The British, responding to their experiences against Boer marksmen, tended to favor concealment. The French advocated seeking the best field of fire and silencing any opposition with rafales from Mademoiselle Soixante-Quinze. The Germans, as was so often the case, were somewhere in the middle. Germany’s artillery theorists recognized that dead gunners and knocked-out pieces could support nothing, but they also accepted the argument that at certain crucial points, even in a modern battle, the infantry needed tangible proof that it was not fighting alone. Whether to support the last stages of an attack, to screen the beginning of a retreat, or just to attract enemy attention, the guns would sometimes have to break cover.42

  Now, as the Germans fell back from Waplitz, the batteries of Sontag’s 35th Field Artillery offered themselves as an alternative target. Taking positions in the open, they drew Russian fire while intimidating Russian infantry with their own shrapnel. Their sacrifice enabled the infantry to survive as a more or less organized force. In only three hours the 41st Division had lost over 2,400 men as casualties or stragglers.

  At first neither XX Corps nor army headquarters knew anything about this defeat. The sounds of heavy firing from around Waplitz were not accompanied by the kind of movement in the Russian positions, suggesting a German breakthrough in the south. Sontag, however, was in no hurry to report the details of his embarrassing situation. Then at 8:00 a.m. Scholtz received an unexpected message. The Germans around Mühlen we
re attacking on their own initiative.43

  Kurt von Morgen was another of 8th Army’s atypical generals. A picture taken four years later shows a thick-set, jowly man, the ribbon of the Iron Cross in his buttonhole and the Pour le Mérite at his throat, staring into the middle distance with an expression more determined than sympathetic. Born in 1858, his peacetime career suggested a taste for the exotic. He had varied routine garrison duty with a period as chief of a research expedition to the Cameroons, and also served briefly as a military attaché in Turkey. Ennobled only in 1904, he was eager for further honors and confident in the men he led—the equivalent by now of over two divisions. The 70th Landwehr Brigade was deployed east of Mühlen. Two active battalions of the 37th Division held the town itself; the 69th Garrison Brigade extended the line to the north. Morgen’s own 3rd Reserve Division was echeloned north and west behind the main front.