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

by Dennis Showalter

  A few candidates stand out from the pack. Winston Churchill’s history of the “unknown war” in the east was long a standard English account. He especially admired François as a man who knew how to win battles the wrong way while his superiors were losing them the right way. According to Churchill “the glory of Tannenberg must forever go to François” for his “rare combination” of prudence and audacity in his operations in the south. François showed “true soldierly genius” in twice acting on his justly founded convictions and defying Ludendorff to win a victory against orders.19 The validity of the conclusion is, however, called into question by substituting “Churchill” for “François” and “Gallipoli” for “Tannenberg.” The result is an autobiographical statement influenced by wish-fulfillment, as opposed to a detached historian’s analysis.

  Max Hoffmann admired himself. He began modestly, proud that some of his ideas had found approval in the new operations plan. On September 9, 1914, he expressed surprise at getting the Iron Cross for his humble role behind a desk. One year later he was affirming that he deserved all the credit for the victory. By 1919 he told the English journalist Sefton Delmer that he was the sole initiator of the battle, and the savior of East Prussia. He was quoted as saying that after hearing people say that Hindenburg had won the battle of Tannenberg, he had ceased believing in the existence of Caesar and Hannibal. Another time, showing Hindenburg’s bed to some visitors to army headquarters, he allegedly said, “There is where the Field Marshal slept before the battle, that is where he slept after the battle, and that, my friends, is where he slept during the battle.”20

  Max Hoffmann was always good copy. But his aphorisms do not deny the fact that Tannenberg produced only two real public figures. Ludendorff, with an Iron Cross to add to his Blue Max, reinforced his image as an archetype of the army’s “new man.” In general staff circles he was regarded from the beginning as the brains and the driving force behind Hindenburg. To junior staff officers like Adolf Tappen and Max Bauer, Ludendorff was something more. He was a man who understood not only modern war but modern society. Given a chance he could run Germany as efficiently as he did the 8th Army, and dispatch the Socialists as easily as the Russians. To many of his supporters Ludendorff’s image was of a man destined by intellect, character, and personality to a place outside the spotlight, but as the real wielder of power. Twenty years later his successors in uniform would dream of playing similar roles to Adolf Hitler.21

  To some historians of Tannenberg, the battle would have been won had Paul von Hindenburg never been born. Critics suggested that his only contributions were the signing of the orders and the announcing of the victory. Because he was the “official” commander, he received an undeserved share of the glory. Hindenburg, not noted for his sharp wit, nevertheless provided the best answer. Since the battle was won, he once declared, many had won it, but “if it had been lost, I would have lost it alone.”22

  The German people seemed to agree. Newly promoted to field marshal, decorated with the Pour le Mérite, Hindenburg became the subject of a wartime cottage industry. His photo dominated the illustrated press. His moustache was copied in hundreds of barber shops. War loans were promoted by allowing subscribers to drive nails into his wooden statue. The navy named a new battle cruiser after him. The Silesian industrial city of Zabrze was rebaptized in his name, becoming Hindenburg. So much Hindenburg memorabilia found its way onto the market that it remains possible for collectors to specialize in the category.

  Hindenburg’s role as a public figure in part reflected the frustrations of the empire’s war correspondents and the newspapers employing them. The movements of journalists at the front were closely restricted, their reports rigidly and ponderously censored. The army had learned to distrust the press over the previous two decades, but had not yet developed a systematic interest in techniques of manipulating and controlling news. From the chief of staff down, the soldiers’ optimal approach to publicity involved telling the civilians when the war began, when it ended, and who won.23

  As much to the point, World War I proved from its first days at least as confusing to its reporters as to its directors. Since the Crimea, the war correspondent had been an increasingly familiar part of the world’s battlefields. Men like William Howard Russell became public figures by virtue of their eyewitness analyses. The battles and campaigns they reported were on a scale small enough to facilitate overview and observation. One person, if energetic and assertive, could conceivably make sense of what was happening. The pace of events, even in South Africa or Manchuria, was slow enough to enable digestion and absorption.24 In 1914, battles followed each other so rapidly as to be indistinguishable. Casualty lists that would have meant the climax of a campaign became part of the weekly routine. Particularly on the western front, events that would in earlier wars have inspired poets were lost in the shuffle: the heroic and hopeless charge of a Bavarian cavalry brigade in Lorraine, or the hard-won victory of XVIII Reserve Corps over crack French colonial troops at Rossignol.

  Tannenberg, on the contrary, was a natural publicity event. It had a suitably-heroic theme: defense of the homeland against heavy odds. It had a central figure who could be fleeted up to public recognition. And since 8th Army headquarters had no correspondents attached to it during the critical days of August, 1914, the process was not handicapped by any direct knowledge of awkward or uncomfortable facts.

  For the first time in its history, Imperial Germany had a popular hero independent of the royal house. In any industrialized country the executive performs an important representational role. Individual or collective, president or first secretary, anointed monarch or revolutionary jefe, the leaders function as tribal totems, tutelary deities, symbols of what subjects, citizens, and followers wish to be, wish to see, and can be convinced or constrained to accept. Historically this role in the German states had been played by princes—not least because the small size of most of the traditional sovereign territories offered little scope for rival public figures. The foundation of the empire brought no significant change in this respect. Bismarck or Moltke may have symbolized the new Reich in foreign eyes. Domestically, however, that function was performed by William I, whose projected images of homely virtues and grandfatherly attitudes provided welcome relief to good citizens bewildered and often not a little alienated by the complexities of their new existence. William’s position was further reinforced, not so much by constitutional guarantees of his authority as by Moltke’s and Bismarck’s acceptance and internalization of their roles as the emperor’s faithful servants.

  After 1890 the representational role of the crown grew exponentially. On one hand this was a function of William II’s definition of his role, his determination to push his legal and extralegal powers to their limits, his delight in public display. On the other it reflected a Germany too internally divided to generate alternate public symbols acceptable outside a relatively limited circle. Men like Ludwig Windthorst or August Bebel generated more anathemas than hosannas. An increasingly bureaucratized political structure threw off a succession of faceless men in frock coats, distinguishable even to contemporaries more by tastes in facial hair than by deeds or attitudes. The army, for all its self-proclaimed role as an agency of national integration, developed no heroes after the elder Moltke. The military’s popularity was collective. Its leaders were seen as part of the institution, not above or outside it. Patterns of ultimate submission to political authority combined with an ethic of “be more than you seem” and a pseudo-aristocratic distaste for the masses to produce military men who, literally and figuratively, took a back seat to their posturing supreme warlord. Nor did an emerging popular culture produce athletes or entertainers with a national following. German editors were as willing as their French or British counterparts to boost circulation by featuring the wardrobes and the behavior of public figures. But in a country of home towns and regional loyalties, it was correspondingly difficult to focus those kinds of interest anywhere but on the numerous
royal houses—with the imperial house, of course, at their apex.

  This approach had been increasingly difficult to sustain even before the outbreak of war in 1914. William himself was too much a wax figure to sustain the light cast on him by an expanding network of public information. Germany’s appetite for sensation was negative as well as positive. The kaiser’s public persona and his private personality were virtually identical. On stage or off, he was vain, egotistical, shallow: the kind of man who wore better at a distance, who showed better under softer lights than the new German media provided. The repeated scandals that rocked the imperial entourage further diminished the aura of deference necessary to any successful executive. Nor was William able to compensate for his shortcomings as a representational figure by significant, or even exploitable, triumphs in foreign or domestic policy.25

  A totem unable to deliver that which is demanded of it risks being sacrificed, or at least displaced. The kaiser’s public involvement in World War I peaked with his Burgfrieden address of August 4: “From this date I know no parties, only Germans.” Once he took the field with his armies as supreme warlord, William’s eclipse was as swift as it was inevitable. Had he remained outside the strategic-operational level, as ostensible coordinator of the Reich’s military and diplomatic efforts, the kaiser might have sustained his image for a few months or a few years. His grandfather had been a legitimate soldier-king who commanded respect from the professionals who served him. By the time of William II’s accession, however, the craft of war had become arcane enough, complex enough, to preclude its mastery by even the most gifted of political amateurs. A quarter-century later, Winston Churchill would be the despair of his chiefs of staff because of his penchant for claiming expertise in operational matters. Adolf Hitler’s grand-strategic insights were vitiated by his insistence on acting as an army-group commander. By 1914 the German army had grown significantly intolerant of men from outside the soldiers’ guild. Here as in so many areas, William was unable to bridge the gap. His reluctance to apply himself seriously to anything was most pronounced in his approach to military affairs. His was a mind that wavered consistently towards matters of haberdashery: the cut of a tunic or the spacing of buttons. His concern for identifying the new Imperial army with Prussia and Germany’s military past, in itself praiseworthy, was no substitute for ongoing, systematic involvement in the strategic, technical, and logistic issues that preoccupied Germany’s military planners in the years before war’s outbreak.26

  Added to this was growing resentment within the officer corps at William’s constant occupation of the spotlight, his assumption of undeserved credit for the army’s progress and development. A rising new breed of technocrats, the generation typified by Ludendorff, regarded William as a positive handicap to the conduct of a modern war. Older officers like Hindenburg sustained respect, almost reverence, for the kaiser as an abstraction but at the same time found it easier and easier to disregard his person and his recommendations in practice. By the end of 1914 Bülow and Tirpitz were discussing the possibility of having William II declared insane and hospitalized. His son would become regent, with Hindenburg holding the emergency post of imperial administrator (Reichsverweser). No one doubted who would wield the real power.27

  Quick victories on the western front might have encouraged papering over the situation, allowing the kaiser to posture at stage center while the generals congratulated each other behind his back. Instead as it became increasingly apparent that the Schlieffen Plan was encountering snags, no one of importance at OHL had time to entertain the kaiser. William’s relegation to figurehead status during the first three weeks of August was not a conscious, deliberate process. He was the first to notice what had happened. The kaiser’s almost pathetic appreciation of anyone at headquarters willing to spend time with him was commented on by visitors and observers alike.28 His withdrawal into what amounted to a fantasy world of long lunches and heroic anecdotes fresh from the trenches had begun even before the Battle of the Marne.

  In the context of William’s shortcomings, Hindenburg’s wartime image was psychologically specific. It focussed on mature male virility. This image seems incongruous in a war that demonstrated more clearly with every passing day that combat was a young man’s province. The Germans, the French, and to a lesser extent the British learned painfully the risks of having forty-year-olds commanding battalions and men in their fifties riding at the heads of regiments. A high proportion of the men Limogé by Joffre in the fall of 1914 were victims not of incompetence, but of fatigue and stress, which sapped their judgment to the point where they made stupid mistakes.29 While the kaiser’s army had no equivalent systematic purge, its front-line units experienced a steady erosion of senior officers rendered dangerous by age. In 1915 the image of youth would be further served by the emergence of the airman as a public, almost a folk, hero. It is worth noting that the Pour le Mérite, historically awarded only to senior, aristocratic, and victorious generals, became by war’s end increasingly common currency among pilots scarcely out of their teens.30

  World War I became a conflict between generations. The contrast drawn by so many participants between the old men who made wars and the young men who fought them was rendered even sharper in Germany by the youth movement. Well before 1914 the Wandervögel had challenged the verities and the virility of the older generation publicly and systematically. The outburst of enthusiasm that characterized young Germany’s response to war’s outbreak reflected a desire to establish their generation’s own parameters, to have something distinctively theirs, unclaimable and unsharable by their elders. In this context, Hindenburg was the answer to Langemarck. Typical was the cartoon published in Lustige Blätter in March, 1915. It featured a powerful field-marshal at the point of throwing a caricatured Russian officer bodily across the frontier. Hindenburg’s short-cropped gray hair and prominent stomach suggest not advancing age but a man “in the best years,” unaffected by the inroads of time in anything that mattered. The two symbols would coexist uneasily through the Weimar era until officially united in Adolf Hitler’s carefully staged 1933 Potsdam extravaganza fusing “the Marshal and the PFC.”31

  Ludendorff and Hindenburg were more than simple media creations. Institutionally the German army badly needed heroes by mid-September. Its commitment to a quick decisive victory made it correspondingly vulnerable to even slight checks in its announced program. Nor were its peacetime stars playing their intended roles very well. Moltke all but collapsed from stress. Kluck, among the darlings of the army’s new men, was unable to execute the programmed sweep through Belgium. Crown Prince William bogged his army down in a series of costly encounter battles. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria checked an invasion of Lorraine, but then sacrificed thousands of men in a vain effort to break through the French frontier defenses. Their respective staff officers proved correspondingly unable to work miracles—a fact highlighted by the fiasco of the Hentsch mission. The spectacle of a mere lieutenant-colonel deciding the movement of whole armies would have been hard enough to swallow in the context of total victory. As German troops fell back from the Marne, as Schlieffen’s grand design degenerated into a series of thwarted flanking movements, friction between staff and command, between higher and lower headquarters, flared far beyond the parameters of command accepted since the days of Moltke the Elder.

  Ludendorff’s contemporaries and Hindenburg’s acquaintances knew that these men had not suddenly been apotheosized into military geniuses. Even in mid-September, voices at OHL suggested that the Russians had been easy meat, that the defensive had ever been the strongest form of warfare, even that the victors had slipped into ein gemachtes Bett: a “made bed,” a situation in which it was impossible to lose. But such comments bore the unmistakable tang of sour grapes—particularly when the booty of Tannenberg was compared with the relatively meager spoils of the French campaign.

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff also had the advantages of isolation, of being separated from the tensions and rivalrie
s proliferating in a high command forced in the aftermath of the Marne not merely to replan a campaign, but to rethink its basic views of war.32 Erich von Falkenhayn, Prussia’s war minister, also assumed for all practical purposes the post of chief of staff on September 14. In the next weeks he brought order from the broken-down Schlieffen-Moltke visions for the West. He developed practical, if not necessarily optimal, proposals for the conduct of a war that had suddenly taken on a life of its own. Yet his credibility suffered precisely because he was the symbolic bearer of bad news. Falkenhayn’s presence as chief of staff was a reminder of failed hopes and opportunities that would never come again. Hindenburg and Ludendorff correspondingly symbolized both the success of the old military order and the hopes for greater achievements in new contexts.

  II

  The fata morgana of Tannenberg above all strengthened the moral position of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in their arguments for an “eastern” solution to Germany’s strategic dilemma in the aftermath of the Marne and First Ypres. In the years before 1914 the idea of concentrating Germany’s primary military effort against Russia had virtually no defenders. Its reappearance was a function of personal ambition combined with professional reappraisals. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their staff officers had without exception entered the war as committed “Westerners.” Yet they could hardly avoid asking what might have been achieved in the east with slightly stronger forces. Ludendorff regarded reinforcements as unnecessary to win an immediate victory at Tannenberg. But add three or four fresh corps to the operational equation at the Masurian Lakes, on the plains of Poland, or in front of Łodz, and was it so far-fetched to speak of decisive victory? Was Russia’s surrender, or at least her seeking a negotiated peace, merely the stuff of late-night fantasies?