Then on the morning of August 26, Rennenkampf received new orders from the Northwest Front. Two of his corps were to blockade Königsberg. The rest of the army, two corps and the cavalry, were to pursue the Germans who had not taken refuge in the fortress. Zhilinski and his staff were certain at this point that neither the 1st nor the 2nd Armies had anything to fear from the apparently defeated and demoralized Germans. Dividing Rennenkampf’s army in the fashion ordered meant great strains on the already shaky services of supply. More seriously, however, Zhilinski’s orders created an attitude loop. They reinforced at Rennenkampf’s headquarters an impression largely created at Northwest Front by Rennenkampf’s reports from Gumbinnen: the Germans were retreating in disorder. By emphasizing the blockade of Königsberg, Zhilinski proposed to hold the 1st Army back while the 2nd pushed northwest as Samsonov proposed to do, driving the Germans onto Rennenkampf’s guns.
Rennenkampf, though less than pleased with the division of his forces, responded by ordering his right-flank corps, III and XX, to prepare to turn north, cross the Deime River, and besiege Königsberg. The IV and II Corps were to continue their advance westward. In his army order number 4, Rennenkampf declared that the army must not be halted for lack of bread. Vegetables and potatoes gathered along the line of march would replace the temporarily missing staple. Victory, declared the commander, is in the legs. More or less responding to the exhortation, IV Corps reached the area of Friedland-Allenburg and II Corps Gerdauen-Rastenburg on August 27. Both formations were still a good distance from Samsonov’s operational sector, but close enough, as has been seen, to unnerve the Germans at regular intervals.
Any possibility that the 1st Army might move from the realm of psychological intimidation ended when Rennenkampf received another telegram from Zhilinski on the night of August 27. It declared that the troops defeated on the 1st Army’s front on August 20 had been moved south by rail, and were now attacking the 2nd Army. Rennenkampf was ordered to assist Samsonov by advancing his own left wing as far south as possible. The dispatch reflected, however, little substantive anxiety about the 2nd Army’s position. Had Zhilinski been really concerned, he could have assigned Rennenkampf specific geographic objectives farther south. He could have ordered his subordinate to advance by forced marches—a method whose shortcomings scarcely deterred its regular employment by subordinate Russian generals in the Tannenberg campaign. Instead Zhilinski merely instructed the advance of the 1st Army’s left into the area he also expected the 2nd to reach within the next few days. This was hardly an encouragement for Rennenkampf to move southward with any haste, particularly in the context of a follow-up order from Northwest Front prescribing in great detail the procedures to be followed in besieging Königsberg—still the 1st Army’s principal objective in the mind of the Northwest Front’s commander.
Rennenkampf and Zhilinski have been so universally excoriated for their lack of insight during the Tannenberg campaign that it seems appropriate to stress the fact that neither general had any reason to assume the 2nd Army faced any problems it would be unable to solve with its own resources. The German order of battle was known, and events on the western front precluded any likelihood of significant reinforcements being stamped out of the ground. In a worst-case scenario, four German corps, at least two of them roughly handled at Gumbinnen, plus a mélange of second-line garrison and fortress troops, faced four Russian active corps. The German army might be good, but to accept it as so much better than one’s own that even odds were too great was the kind of mind-set no army can afford at the beginning of a war. Northwest Front’s telegram, intercepted by the Germans as noted above and received by 1st Army at 7:00 a.m. on August 29, did not suggest an emergency, much less a disaster. And when it was cancelled four hours later, Rennenkampf received no information no more specific than the bald fact that the 2nd Army had retreated.32
Ludendorff responded to the morning’s news of Rennenkampf by hedging his bets and taking the field. At 12:20 p.m. he telephoned Koblenz to declare the battle won, with five army corps and three cavalry divisions the victims of German prowess. But, he declared, the predicted encirclement of two Russian corps could not now be expected to succeed. The bag of prisoners was less than it might have been had the extremely “nervous” German corps been properly handled.33
After this blast at his subordinates Ludendorff left for Hohenstein. The mere sight of the crowds of demoralized captives was reassuring, and their surrender could not have been more timely. Ludendorff ordered Staabs’s 37th Division withdrawn from the fighting line as rapidly as possible to reorganize. Below was to concentrate not one division, as the 6:30 a.m. army order stated, but his whole corps on the Osterode-Allenstein road and dig in against the possibility of any sudden move by Rennenkampf. The Goltz Division, badly disorganized from its two-day fight, would pull itself together and provide support. These four divisions would be available against Rennenkampf by the end of the day.34
Below’s rewriting of his direct orders had contributed not a little to Ludendorff’s anxieties. In the event, the whole of I Reserve Corps was not needed around Hohenstein. A division sent to Jedwabno would almost certainly have cut Kluyev’s line of retreat beyond remedy. As it was the two battalions Below actually ordered in that direction got no closer than ten kilometers to the highway, then spent the day destroying captured Russian ammunition—a task safer, if less glorious, than blocking the escape of a presumably desperate enemy.
The I Reserve Corps’s failure to perform part of its assigned mission was highlighted by the behavior of the 41st Division. That unfortunate unit had advanced at 7:15 a.m., also with Jedwabno as its objective—the southern half, in other words, of a possible tactical pincers. But its officers and men were a bit too conscious of previous defeats and previous casualties. A weak screening force of XV Corps held them almost on their start lines from 8:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Even after these Russians had retired, Sontag’s pursuit was slow and cautious. His division made a total of only fifteen kilometers during the day, getting no further than Orlau by 5:00 p.m.
Below’s insubordination and Sontag’s slowness meant that Morgen’s 3rd Reserve Division found itself pushing the Russians through an open bottleneck. By nightfall Kurken was in German hands, but the men were too tired to advance further. Once again their kitchens had failed to keep pace. Men unable to grub potatoes from abandoned fields or liberate chickens from abandoned farmyards fell asleep with empty stomachs. Some battalions compensated with music, the Leuthen Chorale being an obvious choice for the division’s Pomeranian Protestants.35
Below was also more pleased with himself than he might have been. Captain Borowski, commanding a battalion of the 1st Reserve Field Artillery, had spent the afternoon and most of the evening inching his guns along the Kurken road through masses of prisoners and wagons. Around 10:00 p.m. he met no less a personage than his corps commander, who asked Borowski what he was doing. “Hunting Russians, your excellency,” was the reply. “Not at all necessary. They’re in the pot. A great victory. Plenty of prisoners. Find a nice place to bivouac and let your people relax properly.” It was not exactly a Napoleonic recommendation, however welcome it might have been to the weary gunners, but it admirably fit the mood of soldiers conditioned to think in terms of wars ending with one decisive victory.36
On the German right flank, I Corps faced two problems. Hermann von François was under orders to bar the thirty-five-kilometer gap from Neidenburg to Willenberg. He also had to expect a serious Russian attempt to break through at Neidenburg, since the only major road to the frontier ran through the town. In preparing his orders for August 29, the corps commander decided to send his 1st Division along the Neidenburg-Willenburg road behind Schmettau, while the 2nd took position at Grünfliess to cover Neidenburg against any counterattacks by the 2nd Army’s center corps.
When the 2nd Division began its advance on the morning of the 29th, Falk’s forward units demonstrated the truth of the adage that there are old soldiers and bold soldier
s, but no old and bold soldiers. Its opponents, elements of that same Russian 2nd Division so severely handled on August 26, withdrew slowly towards Orlau. But in the minds of Falk’s two-week veterans, every furrow and every rooftop posed a potential threat. Instead of leading gallant and costly rushes, officers waited for the machine guns, using them to blast real or suspected Russian positions. Entire companies and battalions deployed to clear out a few snipers, often demanding help from the artillery. By day’s end the 2nd Division was no more than five kilometers north of Neidenburg.37
Other detachments of the Russian 2nd Division also delayed François’s 1st Division for several hours. Conta had received reports of enemy columns marching on Neidenburg from the north, and his subordinates were sufficiently concerned about the possibility of surprise to deploy their men in the face of anything resembling a threat. The German cavalry was initially more active than their infantry. At 5:00 a.m. the 8th Uhlans, reinforced by three squadrons from XX Corps and a battery of the 16th Field Artillery with a platoon of the 3rd Grenadiers perched on its caissons, rode southward out of Neidenburg towards the Russian border. The countryside seemed empty of life until midafternoon, when the troopers overtook what remained of the trains of XV Corps and the 2nd Division. The escorts were scattered and dispirited. The drivers were middle-aged family men, many of them unarmed. German trumpets shrilled the charge. Amid scenes reminiscent of Tilly, Murat, and Nathan Bedford Forest, the German horsemen rounded up over a thousand wagons and almost five thousand prisoners—including a disconsolate and exhausted pilot routed from his bed in the border village of Roggen by two artillerymen. His aircraft was destroyed on the ground; another Russian machine barely managed to take off in time to avoid a similar fate.38
The I Corps’ second cavalry regiment, the 10th Jäger zu Pferde, also left Neidenburg around 5:00 a.m., but in a different direction, northeast along the high road to Willenberg. On the way they overtook the infantry of Schmettau’s Force. That energetic commander had his battalions on the march by 8:00 a.m., most of the men with less than four hours’ sleep. Again and again Schmettau’s vanguards deployed under rifle and artillery fire, but Russian resistance was light and poorly coordinated. Here and there the main body marched past a gray-uniformed corpse or a man twisting with pain on a litter. A more common scene was a knot of walking wounded glad enough to be out of it, waving to and cheering on their comrades still in the ranks. As they advanced the Germans began overrunning Russian supply trains. Kitchens, wagons, and war chests fell to the East Prussians. Silverware and underwear, top hats and feather beds—the pitiful plunder of the Russian advance was now reclaimed, though contemporary accounts say little about how much of it eventually reached its rightful owners.
Schmettau was not the kind of tidy-minded officer who worried about securing either his rear or his booty. Keeping his columns closed as tightly as possible, he drove them toward Willenberg as fast as the men could march or limp. Enterprising riflemen loaded their packs on liberated horses. Others impressed Russian prisoners to carry their gear. One company converted itself into mounted infantry with the aid of Cossack ponies. At 8:00 p.m. on August 29, after twelve hours on the road, Schmettau’s vanguard entered Willenberg. The Russians had done nothing worse than break a few store windows. There was plenty of beer and wine on hand, and Willenberg’s citizens were not slow to show appreciation of their liberation.
In a campaign of hard marches, that of Schmettau’s Force stands out. Since early morning on August 28 it had covered sixty-five kilometers, most of them under combat conditions in August heat. Willenberg was the last major road junction in the Russian line of retreat. Regimental historians describe it as fitting that these troops, who had fought the 2nd Army from the beginning, should be the ones to close the trap. The rank and file, so exhausted that they fell asleep standing in ranks, may have been less enthusiastic, but they too were catching victory fever. A captain of the III/151st Infantry, the first battalion into Willenberg, received a report that a detachment of Russians was to be found four kilometers outside the town. Inspired by a sense of duty mixed with dreams of the Iron Cross, he called for volunteers. At the head of forty men he marched out and returned with over eight hundred prisoners. Most of them had been glad enough to trade their rifles for a drink of water. The 151st’s colonel, not to be outdone, led a lieutenant and twenty men to a farm whose owner declared that his buildings were full of Russians who wanted to surrender. When he ordered them to come out and lie down on the ground, 150 men emerged and stretched out under the German rifles. By the time that column reached Willenberg it had grown to almost two thousand hungry, confused Russians willing to obey anyone willing to give orders in any language.39
The human trophies collected by Schmettau’s Force indicated growing Russian demoralization. The detachment, however, had been too weak even to consider picketing its route of advance with its own resources. That was Conta’s job. By early afternoon the 1st Division had shaken itself loose from its tormentors. Conta drove towards Willenberg as fast as the men could march, scattering detachments along the highway like beads on a string. By midnight I Corps’s share of the encirclement was complete, with the 1st Division providing a cordon anchored at one end by Schmettau’s Force in Willenberg and at the other by the 2nd Division covering Neidenburg. It remained to be seen how seriously the Russians would test the barrier. Singly and in detachments, Russians sought to break through the slowly tightening cordon. Some were taken prisoner. Others, particularly Cossacks, were shot down by Germans seeking to avenge the devastation of their home province, or seeking easier targets than they had found so far in the war.
Mackensen’s XVII Corps formed the other arm of the 8th Army’s operational pincers. Initially he proposed to move the 36th Division into position along a north-south axis from Passenheim to Jedwabno. The 35th, less the detachments around Ortelsburg, would continue south, deploying below the 36th’s area of operations and cutting the roads through the woods north of Neidenburg. At 11:00 a.m. he informed army headquarters of this decision from his headquarters at Passenheim.
Mackensen’s advancing divisions pushed their way through Russian supply columns and past abandoned field hospitals. At Jedwabno the 129th Infantry liberated several hundred prisoners. Most of them were from the battalion of the 59th Infantry that had crossed the Maranse on the 28th and been cut off there. Rearmed and re-equipped, they were a welcome reinforcement for the weakened and exhausted regiment of XVII Corps—not least because of their embarrassment at having surrendered to an enemy now on the verge of collapse. The men of XVII Corps were almost at the end of their strength. Only the encouragement of the officers and the lashing tongues of their NCOs kept them going, but a battalion of the 21st Infantry got almost to Kannweisen, only four kilometers from the Neidenburg-Willenberg road and François’s 1st Division, before its legs gave out. Even deeper in the woods, the 5th Hussars dismounted and skirmished into the key road junction of Kaltenborn. The XVII corps had accomplished its mission—if its men could hold the ground they had reached.40
Ludendorff’s midday pessimism dissipated as the tally of prisoners and booty increased. By the evening of August 29 at least 10,000 Russians had surrendered. Between 20,000 and 30,000 men, individual stragglers and fragments of battalions and companies from XIII and XV Corps, were still in the woods north of Neidenburg, but the army staff no longer considered them a real threat. The 2nd Army seemed for all practical purposes destroyed as a fighting force. The problems for the 30th, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were sure, would involve securing prisoners, collecting those Russians still free, and establishing a front against Rennenkampf.
The army orders for August 30, issued at 10:00 p.m., confirmed that I Reserve Corps and the 37th Division were to form a line facing northwest on both sides of Allenstein and begin constructing field fortifications. The Goltz Division would secure the left of this position; the 1st Cavalry Division would move to Ortelsburg and cover its right. Unger’s troops and the 41st a
nd 3rd Reserve Divisions were to withdraw from the front, rest, and reorganize. The XVII Corps would continue barring the 2nd Army’s way to the east, while the 5th Landwehr Brigade provided security against any attempt to break through to Neidenburg from the south. This last was not considered very likely, as the Russians in this sector were supposed to be in full retreat.41
There was also time for boasting. At 7:45 p.m. on August 29, Hindenburg reported to William II the destruction of the Russian 2nd Army. Flags, guns, and machine guns; paymasters’ chests and an airplane, over 10,000 prisoners, testified to the magnitude of 8th Army’s victory. He received in return imperial thanks in the name of the Fatherland.42 A subsequent dispatch referred to the “victory at Allenstein.” Von Stein’s official announcement spoke of a battle “in the area of Gilgenburg and Ortelsburg.” Hindenburg, however, asked the kaiser to permit it to be known as the Battle of Tannenberg. Wilhelm was pleased with the idea; Hoffmann’s suggestion of the 28th became official.43
At 11:30 p.m. Ludendorff telephoned a slightly more sober message to OHL. Bad connections made him difficult to understand, but the thrust of his message was clear: victory. Three and a half Russian corps had been completely defeated; twenty or thirty thousand survivors and hundreds of abandoned cannon were there for the collecting. Eighth Army needed no more than two or three days’ rest, then would be ready to repeat its performance against Rennenkampf.44 Ten minutes later a coded dispatch was on its way to Austrian GHQ from the liaison officer at Hindenburg’s headquarters. It too described whole corps surrounded by the Germans, with Russians surrendering in masses.45
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 47