by Hew Strachan
The upshot was compromise: a revised plan 19, adopted in June 1912. It possessed two variants, A and G. Case A rested on Alekseev’s assumption, a major offensive against Austria-Hungary. The 1st and 2nd Russian armies would face Germany; the 3rd, 4th, and 5th would go south-west to Galicia. Case G assumed a major concentration against Germany, directing the 1st, 2nd, and 4th armies towards East Prussia, and leaving the 3rd and 5th to face Austria-Hungary. In both cases the 6th and 7th armies were to be kept in reserve. The decision as to which variant was to be adopted could be left until the seventh day of mobilization.58 The assumption was that Case A would be implemented unless orders to the contrary were issued.
The competing pressures of cases A and G produced fluctuations between 1912 and 1914. In 1912 Alekseev argued that the Germans would not achieve the early success in the west for which they were striving. But the chance of Russia being able to exploit this opportunity by an easy victory in East Prussia was limited by the terrain and by the probability that the Germans would fall back behind the Vistula. Therefore, Russia should go over to the defensive in East Prussia, and seize the opportunity to crush Austria-Hungary. Alekseev talked of crossing the Dniester, pushing west to Cracow, and so creating the conditions for an advance on Budapest and Belgrade. But, even with case A dominant, Russian planning restricted the chances of a rapid and decisive victory. The natural defences of north-west Russia, the river lines of the Niemen, Narew, and Bug, suggested that the barest minimum of troops needed to be left to face Germany. In fact case A still kept twenty-nine divisions on the German front. Thus, only just over half the available Russian divisions would implement case A. In particular, the forces in southern Poland, which could have been designed to envelop the Austro-Hungarian left in Galicia, were kept weak. Therefore, the practical implications of case A were not as dangerous for France as Alekseev’s ambitions suggested—particularly since victory in Galicia would still threaten Germany, albeit by way of Silesia rather than East Prussia.
In 1913 Zhilinskii’s agreement with the French took the planning initiative away from the military districts and gave it back to Danilov and the general staff. Danilov’s pessimism now took the form of an increasing worry that Germany would achieve its quick defeat of France, and that Russia would find itself alone in the battle with Germany. The strong defensive in East Prussia inherent in the 1912 Alekseev version was not enough; case G became a hasty and ill-prepared attack, making speed of execution its prime virtue. The Russians in the north planned to attack before their concentration was complete. The defensive slant of Danilov’s thought presented these plans, not as a precipitate offensive, but as a counter to a German pre-emptive attack. Their effect, however, was to make Danilov, despite his respect for German military prowess, the author of a plan of extraordinary recklessness.
MAP 10. RUSSIA AND EASTN PRUSSIA
The efficiency and mounting pace of Russian mobilization by 1914, since it was the key which would enable Danilov’s plan to be implemented, was thus in some respects a liability. Immense problems had been overcome in order to meet the French timetable. Each Russian reservist had at least three times as far to travel as his equivalent in Germany or Austria-Hungary, and probably had a slower start because of the empire’s communication problems.59 In 1892 mobilization had been reckoned to take sixty days.60 By 1914 the first three to four days were taken up in transferring stock, but half of the infantry was mobilised by the fifteenth day and three-quarters by the twentieth.61 Because the mobilization plan dated from 1910 and was actually due for revision later in 1914 its contents were familiar and well rehearsed. All was executed remarkably smoothly and often ahead of schedule. But two problems persisted. First, Sukhomlinov’s determination to co-ordinate mobilization and concentration was undermined. Partly in response to French demands, but principally as a result of the revisions to plan 19, Russia’s concentration was staggered. Twenty-seven divisions were ready in the west by the fifteenth day and fifty-two by the twenty-third. Then there was a long pause, while units from Siberia and the east crossed Asia: the total of 90.5 divisions was not reached until the sixtieth day and 94.5 by the eighty-fifth. The balance of the 114.5 was allocated to the Caucasus and elsewhere. Secondly, Russia’s attention to strategic railway construction had come too late to offset its earlier neglect of railways in European Russia and western Poland. Eight major railway lines were available, but none that ran laterally along the front, connecting the two major zones of operation. By 1914 Russia had a mobilization plan focused on Austria-Hungary, but a grand strategy directed towards Germany. However, it lacked the railways to enable this flexibility to be maintained once deployment had begun.
To a certain extent the element of improvisation in Russian war planning— the choice between case A and case G, the rush into East Prussia—was an unavoidable consequence of the vagaries of diplomacy. But in other ways much that could and should have been resolved before the July crisis was not.
Still open when war was declared was the question of who would be commander-in-chief. The Tsar clearly had himself in mind. Only the argument that it was a colonial conflict had restrained him from taking command in the Russo-Japanese War; it was implicit in his handling—and in the failure—of the Council for State Defence; he was to have acted as referee in the war games proposed for 1911. The regulations for the field administration of the army in wartime, still in draft in July 1914 and hurriedly approved, implied that the Tsar would act as commander-in-chief, if not in the operational sense at least as a supreme political and military co-ordinator. All Russia west of the line from St Petersburg to Smolensk, and along the Dnieper to the Black Sea, was placed under the direct authority of Stavka, the field headquarters. The commander-in-chief was thus vested with absolute powers, including direction of the navy. However, at their meeting of 31 July 1914 the Council of Ministers vigorously opposed the suggestion that Nicholas assume the command, arguing that defeat would threaten his personal position. The following day the post was offered to Sukhomlinov, who refused on two grounds. First, he was mindful of the legacy of Kuropatkin in the Russo-Japanese War, who had made just such a shift with disastrous consequences. Secondly, he was anxious to minimize the disruption to existing arrangements in a time of crisis. Finally, on 2 August, Grand Duke Nicholas accepted the command, albeit with the implication that he was no more than the Tsar’s proxy.62
The appointment at least had the merit of popularity. The Grand Duke was seen as sympathetic to reform, a reputation based on little more than his opposition to Sukhomlinov, and his consequent following in the Duma. Physically, his height evoked the idea of leadership. But, as inspector-general of cavalry, he had had no direct experience of the war in Manchuria. Since 1908 he had been on the sidelines, and was not conversant with plan 19 and its variants. In 1910–11 he had successfully thwarted the only major command exercise planned before April 1914, a war game devised by Sukhomlinov.63 ‘He appeared’, Polivanov recorded, ‘to be a man entirely unequipped for the task, and in accordance with his own statement, on the receipt of the Imperial order, he spent much of his time crying because he did not know how to approach his new duties.’64
The Grand Duke is variously regarded as wanting either Alekseev or Palitsyn (chief of the general staff from 1905 to 1908) as his chief of staff.65 He got neither. On the insistence of the Tsar, N. Yanuskevitch, a youthful general who owed his rise to service at court but had never commanded a formation larger than a company, became chief of staff. Yanuskevitch, like the Grand Duke, knew his own limitations: his solution, understandable but hardly appropriate, was not to interfere. Thus Danilov, who as quartermaster-general was head of operations, became the key figure at Stavka. He, furthermore, was a protégé of Sukhomlinov.
Although the Grand Duke was then saddled with the pre-war split between himself and Sukhomlinov, he did not let it interfere with the internal workings of Stavka. However, it was institutionalized in another way. Stavka possessed no section to administer supply. The regulati
ons for field administration had assumed that the minister of war would be subordinated to the commander-in-chief by virtue of that office being held by the Tsar. The effect of the Tsar not assuming the command was therefore to divorce supply from operations. An army group organization was established, the North-West Front for East Prussia and the South-West for Galicia. With regard to supply, the Fronts dealt directly with the ministry of war, bypassing Stavka. Thus Stavka could plan operations while remaining totally oblivious to logistic considerations. Already, in his pre-war planning for East Prussia, Danilov had shown scant regard for the question of supply. This tendency was now confirmed by the command structure. Palitsyn commented of Stavka in May 1915:
They devote themselves mostly to operational matters, to strategy, to drawing maps. Believe you me, all this strategy is playing in comparison with the problems with which they should occupy themselves before all other things: with the Etappen, the supply and provisioning of the army. This is the fundamental in the war.66
And when Stavka’s designs were confounded by supply problems, it could blame the minister of war. Thus, even during the war itself the animosity between the Grand Duke and Sukhomlinov continued to cut across the search for constructive solutions.
Stavka’s weaknesses—in personnel and in structure—created the opportunity for the Fronts to develop as autonomous commands. Rather than an overall scheme with variants, plan 19 spawned two separate theatres, the north-west and the south-west. Each became independent in the disposition of the resources under its command, and in the objectives which it pursued. Grand Duke Nicholas established his headquarters at Baranovitchi, too removed to exercise any direct influence had he cared to do so. His staff possessed a train, but usually it remained in a siding, the commander-in-chief being anxious not to clog the railway lines. Danilov’s communications were restricted to one Hughes telegraph.67
The independence vouchsafed to the Front commanders was reproduced down the chain of command. This could have been a strength, had the Russian army been spared the clashes of personality and the deep divisions on doctrine characteristic of the pre-war years. But, with differing ideas as to how to fight, independence in command spelt loss of co-ordination. Moreover, training in the exercise of command had been virtually non-existent. Peacetime needs had meant that promotion had gone to the bureaucrats in offices rather than those in regimental command: Zhilinskii and Yanuskevitch were typical of the results. A map exercise in the Kiev district in April 1914 had been Sukhomlinov’s only success in his effort to institute war games, and even that had been undermined by its neglect of the supply question and by the tendency of officers to see it, not as a testing ground, but as a direct challenge to their professional competence. When the army did mobilize the peacetime command structure was disrupted. Staffs were immediately needed for Stavka, for the chief commands (the two Fronts and the Caucasus), and for eleven armies. The existing district staffs were due to supervise the mobilization and to stay with their corps. Thus, front-line units lost their senior officers to the new staff appointments. Men were appointed to posts for which peacetime training (manoeuvres centred on the division, not any higher formation) had not prepared them. And even those designated for a particular command frequently found themselves unable to take it up: A. A. Brusilov was due to command the 2nd army on the North-West Front, but his peacetime command (a corps) was in the Kiev region and he therefore took over the newly designated 8th army on the South-West Front.68
The Russo-French discussions and plan 19 concerned themselves with initial preparations; they were not, as the German plan tried to be, a complete war plan. Danilov had recognized this deficiency. Therefore, for him, plan 19 derived its unity not from its attention to case A and case G, both of which were conceived as preliminaries, but from the second stage of operations. The purpose of the campaigns in both East Prussia and Galicia was to secure Russia’s flanks, so that the army could then go on to exploit the geographical advantage of the Polish salient. A decisive victory in East Prussia would, for example, shorten the Russian front by 300 kilometres, and would open the path—once Austria-Hungary had also been defeated—to Posen and Silesia. Beyond them lay Berlin.
This unifying concept, which had remained shadowy before the war, gained substance during August itself. Reassured by the fact that Germany was concentrating against France, on 6 August the Grand Duke allocated the 4th army to the South-West Front. But then, reflecting Danilov’s attention to the second stage of the war, and responding to French pressure for direct and immediate aid, he set about the creation of two further armies, drawn from troops from the Finnish and East Asiatic frontiers, first the 9th around Ivangorod, and then the 10th around Warsaw, to operate on the line Thorn-Posen-Breslau. The Grand Duke saw the armies in Poland as the follow-up to victories on the flanks. But those victories had yet to be won. Alekseev, now chief of staff to the South-West Front, protested bitterly at the division of resources. The Grand Duke, insufficiently intimate with recent staff developments and too anxious to please the French, had not welded case A and case G into a whole but had added a third variant. The effect was to dissipate Russia’s absolute supremacy in manpower, and to divide yet again its direction of the war.
EAST PRUSSIA
For the general staffs of both Russia and Germany East Prussia in 1914 was a secondary theatre.69 The Germans allocated to it eleven infantry divisions and one cavalry division, or just over a tenth of their total strength. Therefore, the Russians, although by 1914 their alliance commitments had made Germany their major enemy, were free to follow their underlying preference for a war with Austria-Hungary. To all intents and purposes Stavka’s decision on 6 August, the seventh day of the Russian mobilization, was to implement case A. For the time being only the 1st and 2nd armies were to face Germany. But that was still sufficient to enable offensive operations in support of France. Between them the two armies mustered thirty infantry divisions and eight cavalry divisions. Since a Russian division comprised sixteen battalions (not twelve, as in a German division), the manpower superiority of the Russians in the northern theatre was even more marked than the divisional balance suggested.
The command of the North-West Front was vested in Zhilinskii, the former chief of the general staff, unpopular and ‘an official of the cut-and-dried type’.70 Zhilinskii had the merit of being familiar both with recent staff thinking and with France’s needs. There was logic too in the appointment of Paul Rennenkampf, commander of the 1st army, who had spent seven years as a corps commander on the potential German front, and since 1913 had been in charge of the Vilna district. Less appropriate was the recent experience of Alexander Samsonov, to whom the 2nd army was entrusted. Like Rennenkampf, he had acquired his reputation in the Russo-Japanese War. The story that the two had come to blows on Mukden Station in 1904 was probably apocryphal; but the differences between them were real enough. Rennenkampf was a protégé of the Grand Duke Nicholas, Samsonov of Sukhomlinov. By 1914 Samsonov was physically unfit and professionally out of touch. He had spent the preceding seven years as governor of Turkestan. His return to active duty was not eased by Zhilinskii: the 2nd army’s best staff officers were purloined by Front headquarters, and P. I. Postovskii, appointed 2nd army’s chief of staff, was sufficiently highly strung to be nicknamed the ‘Mad Mullah’.71
The operational possibilities open to the Russians in East Prussia were rendered relatively predictable by its geography. To the north, Königsberg was a heavily fortified zone, capable of supply from the Baltic, and a potential threat to the flank of any advance from east to west. The Insterburg gap extended 69 kilometres south and east from the Königsberg perimeter to Angerburg, at the top of the northernmost of the Masurian lakes, Lake Mauer. The gap was screened by the River Angerapp, whose west bank commanded its eastern. Along the south-eastern frontier the Masurian lakes presented a formidable barrier. In the south, the front from Johannisburg to Soldau had been deliberately neglected by the Russians, so as not to facilitate any German
invasion. On the Russian side no major road or railway approached the frontier; both were available on the German.
A war game, devised by Zhilinskii and played in May, had rehearsed the permutations which the theatre offered. Because the German mobilization was anticipated to be thirteen days ahead of the Russian, and the Austrian ten days, nothing would be gained by haste. Instead, both concentration and deployment were to be completed before any advance. Zhilinskii put great stress on logistic order—although ironically the rear services did not constitute part of the exercise. It was assumed that the Germans would fall back on the Angerapp. The fact that the 2nd army was to use the unroaded Johannisburg-Soldau sector not for defence but as the base for an advance meant that its pace would be slower than that of the 1st army. Thus, when the offensive began Rennenkampf’s responsibility, as the war game made clear only months before the event, was restraint.72
At the war’s outbreak Zhilinskii’s emphasis on the completion of the Front’s concentration and on its methodical advance was immediately put under pressure by Stavka. This was a relationship which the May 1914 war game had not rehearsed. Stavka’s instructions on 6 August had the North-West Front mount an energetic offensive as soon as possible in order to ease the position of the French in the west. Accordingly, Zhilinskii now proposed that the 1st army should begin its advance towards the River Angerapp on 13 August. It was to march in echelon, so that its refused left wing would not cross the frontier until 17 August. On the same day the 2nd army was to advance from the south, west of the Masurian lakes but close in behind them, aiming north in the direction of Rothfliess and Rastenburg. Zhilinskii’s aims were both local in conception and limited in geographical scope. He was preoccupied with the German attention to envelopment, so much emphasized in their published manuals and in their manoeuvres before 1914. His plan aimed to answer the Germans in kind, by enveloping them from north and south to the west of the Masurian lakes. It met the spirit of Russia’s commitment to France by beginning operations as soon as possible, but it accepted the subordinate nature of the northern front by not aiming deep into East Prussia. Above all, it treated the theatre as self-contained.