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

by Dennis Showalter

  Tannenberg, in other words, was by no stretch of the imagination a “battle of annihilation” in any material sense relative to Russia’s numbers. Nor did the losses represent the kind of cost exacted in a later war at Stalingrad and Kursk, where the cutting edge of an already overmatched army was irreparably dulled. Tannenberg’s significance is better sought in the realm of will. At the start of the campaign the Russian Northwest Front was reckoned by its own command as having a two-to-one superiority. The Russians had the further advantage of deploying principally active units, while almost half of the 8th Army was composed of illequipped reserve and fortress troops. The stage seemed set for an overwhelming victory, and the effect of Tannenberg was therefore even more crushing. By 1917 the then war minister A. J. Guchkov, testifying before the provisional government’s commission of inquiry, said that he had decided the war was lost “as early as August, 1914.” He said further that he had been made to feel this way by his “first impressions at the front”—that is, by Samsonov’s defeat.2 If this was the effect of Tannenberg on such a vigorous statesman, what must it have been on weaker spirits?

  Tannenberg affected Russia’s allies as well—particularly Great Britain. In 1914 the British government realized the necessity of cooperating with its entente partners to avert a German victory. But Britain suspected the long-term objectives of her friends almost as much as the immediate intentions of her enemy. Memories of past imperial rivalries, concerns for the future welfare of Britain’s empire and Europe’s balance of power generated a significant body of opinion asserting that Britain could best assist her allies by providing money and arms rather than men.

  This policy of “business as usual” had enough of perfidious Albion about it to have at best limited appeal on the continent. Its success depended on the ability and the willingness of France and Russia to stand against the German onslaught with no more than nominal direct support from their third partner. After Tannenberg neither the British nor the Russian government entertained that kind of faith in the tsar’s empire. Britain’s increasing commitment to a land war in Europe during 1915—16 was to a significant degree instrumental—a gesture that allies were not being left to their own resources, and one meant to show abandonment of Britain’s original strategy for conducting a great European war.3

  If victory has many fathers, defeat too is rarely an orphan. Its roots are sought so assiduously that when the critics are finished, every aspect of the vanquished military system and the socio-political order supporting it have been presented in such a negative context that future generations wonder how such a ramshackle society and such a patchwork army ever dared try conclusions in battle. While the most familiar examples remain France in 1870 and 1940, the France of Zola’s La Débacle and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, Tsarist Russia takes a strong second place in the literature, and Tannenberg plays a key role in that literature.

  Though most of the senior Russian officers involved were re-employed, a number of divisional and regimental commanders had their careers broken early. This gave them ample time to tell their stories with memories sharpened, if not always rendered more accurate, by idleness. The success of the Russian Revolution offered still another reason for concentrating on Tannenberg. A generation of officers forced into exile and poverty found accounts of this great German victory from the other side of the hill were reasonably marketable in central Europe—not exactly best-sellers, but worth a few hundred marks in royalties and publishers’ advances. Postwar Russian writers, the most recent and familiar being Alexander Solzhenitsyn, continue to find Tannenberg a convenient metaphor for the collapse of a doomed system.

  In such a context the initial German response to their victory seems significantly mundane. The first reports of Tannenberg were almost lost in the excitement of the developing western front. To the men in the headquarters and on the fighting lines in Lorraine or Picardy, tales of a whole army destroyed and tens of thousands of prisoners taken seemed exercises in fantasy—not least because such triumphs had eluded them. At OHL the picture was clearer. As early as August 28, Tappen noted in his diary that “victory in the east appears to be an accomplished fact.” By the 31st Wenninger, whose attention had been distracted for several days by an inspection tour of the Bavarian army, was able to write that the results of the victory were growing by the hour, with 60,000 prisoners already counted.4

  For the 8th Army’s staff any desire to relax, whether among the rank and file or on the part of their commanders, was a threat to be fought with every possible moral weapon. The Russian 1st Army was still virtually intact and little more than a day’s forced march from the German rear. Max Hoffmann apologized to his wife for being too busy to write, excusing himself by describing a work schedule that kept him from sleeping more than two hours a night.5 He and Ludendorff were at their professional best during the first days of September in redeploying their weary men to the north against Rennenkampf. Reinforced by the two corps from the western theater, the Germans began their attack on September 7. In many ways it was a reprise of the earlier fighting. Mackensen’s corps once again suffered ruinous casualties in frontal attacks against prepared Russian positions around Lötzen. François repeated his flank maneuver at Gumbinnen from the other direction, the south. This time, as I Corps drove deep into the Russian rear, Mackensen’s divisions finally broke through their front. With five thousand prisoners and sixty guns in German hands, with two veteran corps poised to roll up the Russian flank, another Tannenberg seemed in the making.

  Its failure to materialize indicated once again that great victories depend on the quality of one’s enemies. Rennenkampf’s right and center corps not only held their positions but mounted a series of local counterattacks fierce anough to alarm XI Corps on the German left wing. This formation had not been heavily engaged in the west. Its regiments were still recovering physically from the march into France and the enervating train ride across Germany. Its commanders had not yet taken the measure of their adversaries. But neither Ludendorff nor Hindenburg were any more willing to take risks than they had been at Tannenberg. On September 11, army headquarters ordered Mackensen and François to close towards the north and provide direct support for XI Corps instead of attempting to envelop the Russian left.

  The decision reflected a general belief at 8th Army headquarters that the Russians were preparing to fight it out as Samsonov had done two weeks earlier. Zhilinski, at least, had intended Rennenkampf to stand his ground and deter German pursuit of the 2nd Army’s remnants. Rennenkampf for his part was worried about both his flanks. The prospects of a sortie from Königsberg, perhaps reinforced from the sea, initially concerned him almost as much as any threat from 8th Army. Once François’s move against the Russian left became clear Rennenkampf acted decisively if unheroically. He ordered a general retreat. In the context of Samsonov’s disaster, discretion seemed by far the better part of valor. His corps and division commanders, eager to avoid the German buzz saw, forced the pace. Withdrawing as far as twenty-five miles a day, the Russians literally ran faster than the Germans could chase them. Eighth Army’s men, footsore and exhausted, lagged behind on the sandy roads. Periodic efforts to send the army’s two cavalry divisions forward in independent pursuit proved vain because of the troopers’ inability to get forward along roads blocked for miles by abandoned carts and wagons. No one in the Russian supply services wanted to be the last man on German soil. Instead teamsters cut traces and rode to safety on their draft horses. Others simply took to the forests. Pushing through the mess they left behind was well-nigh impossible even for fresh troops.6

  By mid-September, only rear guards and stragglers remained of the great Russian invasion. If Rennenkampf’s army had managed to escape with its structure intact, it had lost 150 guns and all its transport. Its units would need a good deal of work before they would again amount to much as combat troops. But an indication that this double victory was to be something other than an immediately recognized world-historical event came on Septem
ber 14, when 8th Army’s signal troops opened lines of communication from the new headquarters in Insterburg to OHL and to the Austrian high command. Since arriving in the east, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been too preoccupied with their own problems to pay systematic attention to developments on other fronts. Now they learned the details of the Schlieffen Plan’s failure, of the French counterattacks and the German withdrawal that constituted the Battle of the Marne.7

  More seriously and more immediately, the German commanders also discovered that the Austrian advance into the Polish salient had been a high road to disaster. Conrad had sent four armies marching into Galicia. Successful small-scale battles along the frontier obscured the fact that the Austrian lines of advance were extrinsic, with their armies actually marching away from each other. On August 23 the Russians counterattacked at Lemberg. Within a week the Austrians were in a retreat that by mid-September turned to a rout bringing the Russians almost to the frontier of Hungary. In the process the Austrian army lost a third of its fighting strength—a quarter-million dead and wounded, over 100,000 prisoners. Included in the casualties were a disproportionate number of career officers and NCOs, the cadres on which a polyglot army depended heavily for its cohesion.8 While Austria-Hungary was far from the military cipher of legend in the war’s later years, Winston Churchill’s judgment that Conrad broke his army’s heart and used it up in less than a month nevertheless stands as an epitaph for the Habsburg Empire’s status as a great power.9

  The Austrian collapse ended any hope of exploiting the German victories in East Prussia. Instead Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the bulk of 8th Army—now renumbered the 9th—were transferred south, into Silesia, to support their ally directly and secure their own frontier from invasion. In an operation facilitated by clumsy Russian efforts at redeployment, the Germans drove to the Vistula River by October 6, threatening Warsaw itself. But the Russians were too strong, the Germans too weak, the Austrians too crippled, to sustain the offensive’s momentum. By the end of October the Germans had retreated almost to their original start lines. And within days the Russian army in turn mounted its best-coordinated offensive of the war to date, rolling through Poland almost to the Silesian border. Once again Ludendorff used the railroads to shift his Tannenberg veterans, this time northward into Posen on the right flank of the Russian advance. But the German counterthrust into the Russian rear, towards the city of Łodz, provided an object lesson in the risks of consistently underestimating an adversary. This time the Russians held, rallied, and counterattacked, isolating an entire corps. With memories of Tannenberg and fears of a Tannenberg in reverse throbbing at all levels of command, the Germans fought their way out of the encirclement.10

  As winter set in and fronts stabilized, evaluations began. Tannenberg was the first battle between two great empires in what was expected to be an off-the-shelf, come-as-you-are war. Such a conflict is a corresponding test of professionalism. How well did the adversaries prepare for the contingencies they expected? More importantly, how successful were they in maintaining the initiative? This question is particularly important in a war’s first stages. As the Army of Northern Virginia demonstrated after Gettysburg and the Wehrmacht after Kursk, an experienced, worked-in army can damage even a significantly superior adversary to the point of exhaustion by ripostes. An army first taking the field after a long period of peace can put no such trust in either its fighting power or its powers of improvisation. It is impossible to determine precisely which officers and units will perform up to their responsibilities, which will prove hopeless, and which will develop with seasoning—if seasoning is an affordable luxury. This fact enhances the importance of taking a first battle to the enemy, not necessarily by incessant offensive action, but by constraining him to fight your way.11

  In this context the discrepancies between the German and the Russian armies in East Prussia were by no means as great as myth and history suggest. Both fought about as they expected to fight, and faced no major surprises. Tactically the adversaries were reasonably well matched. The fighting was on terms even enough that the Russians’ consistent hopes of turning around the campaign by winning the next day’s action were by no means ill-founded, especially since the Germans’ flexibility at platoon and company levels was accompanied by a corresponding instability. The Germans’ proneness to panic when surprised, or to break unpredictably and all at once after a day’s hard fighting, offered significant opportunities for an enemy able to take advantage of them. The repeated successes of German officers in rallying their men and bringing them back into the firing line owed much to their being left undisturbed in their work.

  In contrast to the German situation, the Russian soldiers were appreciably better than their officers. In attack they overran positions by weight of numbers; in defense they were likely to die before they ran. But they tended, for good and ill, to stay where they were placed. The men of both Samsonov’s and Rennenkampf’s armies were easier to outmaneuver than to outfight. And that fact in turn reflected the Russians’ essential command failure: commitment to a strategy of maneuver, a strategy that paid more attention to lines on a map than to the enemy’s presence in the field.

  In making this commitment, the Russian command at all levels was guilty of misunderstanding the essential nature of its tool. The Russian army was a broadsword. It could not be used like a rapier. It could not fight like even a blurred carbon copy of the German. And as a result of the friction generated by false expectations, it sacrificed too many of its concrete advantages. Rennenkampf’s often-cited diliatoriness was less significant in this respect than the misplaced focus on operational flexibility of Samsonov and his corps commanders, who consistently gave their German opposite numbers the thing they most needed: time to recover from shocks and surprises.

  German performances in the Tannenberg campaign are best described as professional. The 8th Army operated within expected frameworks, and sustained a command structure that in turn made sustainable demands on subordinates’ capabilities. At corps and army levels the Germans’ reaction time was consistently within the Russians’ loop of initiative. The German conduct of operations also showed the importance of will power at a period when the availability of information far outweighed the capacity to act on that information. The real importance of the often-cited radio interceptions was as a security blanket, helping army and corps staffs to execute decisions already made. For the Germans as much as for the Russians, attempts to change plans too often resulted in dangerous levels of confusion. And when a German corps commander was left altogether on his own, like François at Stallupönen or Mackensen at Gumbinnen, the results were not much more impressive than those achieved by their Russian counterparts.

  Administratively the Germans were far more successful than the Russians in keeping their troops supplied. Logistics are particularly important to citizen armies in their first weeks of war—and only partly because the men in the ranks have not yet learned to look after themselves. War brings with it a basic uncertainty, an ongoing fear that can be at least be reduced by everyday proof that the system works well enough to deliver the rations.

  Tannenberg’s significance, however, transcended the operational level. Above all the victory lent domestic credence to Germany’s definition of her war as fundamentally defensive. Prewar advocates of militia systems or citizen armies justified them largely on the grounds that citizen soldiers could not be mobilized for participation in aggressive wars as readily as professionals or mercenaries.12 Their position was partly validated by the deliberate, not to say desperate, efforts of the continental combatants to present the war of 1914 as a defensive measure. The sense of protecting home and hearth was an important element of morale in all of the conscript armies. Its waning or overshadowing prefigured collapse, whether in 1916 Russia, 1917 France, or 1918 Germany.

  This was a sense particularly difficult to sustain in a Germany whose main armies stood deep in enemy territory from the war’s first days. The letters and diaries of the
reservists, draftees, and war volunteers who made up the vast bulk of the fighting forces indicate a significant dichotomy between an intellectual conviction of Germany’s righteous cause and the pragmatic reality that it was French and Belgian towns that were being destroyed, French and Belgian civilians coping with the burdens of military occupation.13 Tannenberg, however, was fought on German soil. The destruction accompanying the Russian invasion, mild enough by the standards of 1632, 1812, or 1945, served as an early warning of what the Fatherland might expect if its defenders faltered.

  By September 1, Germany’s media began to react. Tannenberg made headlines in every corner of the Reich. It inspired speeches, parades, and votes of thanks. Such a mystique developed about no other battles of World War I. One of the most enduring legends pictured an old general who spent the years of his retirement devising a gigantic trap for a Russian invasion, exploring paths and sounding the bottoms of marshes in which the enemy was to be engulfed and then fulfilling his dream in 1914.14 Another, this one slightly more plausible, developed as the shadow of Ludendorff grew behind Hindenburg. It described a masterly plan for a second Cannae, improvised and dictated by Ludendorff as the train bore him eastward.15 Ludendorff, never a man to be modest about his own achievements, himself denied this by recounting in his memoirs a conversation which he had in October 1914 with the Spanish military attaché. That officer asked if Tannenberg had been fought according to a set plan, and was extremely surprised when Ludendorff told him it had not.16 But the myth defied suppression.

  Tannenberg also created heroes. A German military historian once said that it would be possible to fill a room with generals who claimed the credit, particularly after 1918 when there was so little credit to go around.17 Even Prittwitz suggested that he was the real architect of victory by his decision to break off the retreat and turn south against Samsonov.18