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

by Dennis Showalter

  This approach, the political science or crisis-management model, is balanced by an historical interpretation presenting World War I as the product of rational calculation. In this argument Imperial Germany is described as believing that a bid for continental hegemony and world empire had a good chance of success in the circumstances of 1914. Her behavior generated entente calculations that Germany must be stopped, and could be stopped at acceptable cost. The result was Clausewitzian: war became the continuance of policy by other means.5

  Neither of these interpretations has much room for “evil empires.” Where that role exists, it is almost universally assigned to Kaiser William’s Germany. Paul Schroeder has aptly pointed out that German foreign policy after Bismarck was dominated by a contradiction. Her vital interests on the continent were best served by preserving the status quo. Yet the dreams of Weltpolitik pursued by William II and his advisors increasingly led the Second Reich into adventures provoking challenges from her rivals and neighbors—challenges from which Germany, for all its warlike rhetoric, was frequently constrained to withdraw because of her own greater need for stability in Europe.6 This Weltpolitik in turn becomes a manifestation of Imperial Germany’s structural malaise. A defensive coalition of capitalists, landowners, and bureaucrats, more or less influenced by grassroots imperialists and militarist pressure groups, is presented as uniting in an uneasy compromise to preserve existing anomalous socio-economic relations by an outward projection of power, whatever the costs to Europe and the world.7

  Scholars who do not dismiss out of hand German fears for her geopolitical position as groundless smokescreens usually focus on Anglo-German relations. The British Empire is presented as Germany’s ultimate objective rival for wealth and status, with Germany cast in the role of the challenger—the aggressor.8 The Second Reich’s repeated claims of being faced with a formidable threat on the other side of the continent is usually dismissed. “Die russische Gefahr” becomes either a figment of generals’ and politicians’ imaginations, or a deliberate invention fostered even by the Weimar Republic as a means of denying Germany’s guilt for the outbreak of war in 1914.9 A government like Russia’s, which collapsed into revolution; an economy like Russia’s, in the early stages of development; a society like Russia’s, lacking in skills and sophistication, surely posed no real danger to the mighty German Empire.10

  This interpretation has a contemporary aspect as well. It reinforces a significant body of literature stressing the weaknesses and shortcomings of Soviet Russia, and attributing those deficiencies to long-term factors that deny eradication by any political system. Well before the political upheavals that began in 1989, German anxieties in 1914 invited comparison with those of the United States and the NATO alliance as the products of exaggeration, when not malice. The USSR inherited Tsarist Russia’s role as a more or less unwitting victim of her neighbors’ paranoia.11

  In such contexts the details of nineteenth-century Russo-German relations seem obsolescent—the stuff at best of doctoral dissertations likely to remain forever unpublished. Yet Germany’s Russian connections lay at the heart of Germany’s foreign policy prior to 1914 in a way wider and more fashionable issues did not. The Gorbachev era has generated increasing discussion of a Russo-German quid pro quo involving a partnership modernizing eastern Europe in return for Germany’s distancing herself from the Atlantic world. This hypothesis frequently incorporates an historical dimension alleging long-standing harmony between Russia and Germany—a harmony fostering willingness to stand together against a West whose values are essentially alien to both of them.

  Tannenberg suggests an alternate set of possibilities by demonstrating the growth and flourishing of Russo-German antagonism over a significantly long period of time. It has been said that nations have neither eternal friends nor eternal enemies—only interests. Certainly in the half-century before 1914 the empires of tsar and kaiser developed interests whose conflict cannot be dismissed as the product of false consciousness or specific misjudgments.

  The association of the two great eastern empires illustrates the growing complexity of power relationships in an industrial, technological era that made international relations increasingly an affair of everyman, everyday. Tannenberg was in good part a product of increased anxieties and diminished alternatives. In particular, an evaluation of perceptions and realities as they developed in Berlin suggests that Germany’s decision for war in 1914 was undertaken in a far more negative context than conventional academic and popular wisdom accept. It is with that development that our story begins.

  Outline Order of Battle German 8th Army

  ICORPS

  1st Infantry Division

  1st Brigade—1st Grenadiers, 41st Infantry

  2nd Brigade—3rd Grenadiers, 43rd Infantry

  1st Field Artillery Brigade—16th, 52nd Field Artillery 8th Uhlans

  2nd Infantry Division

  3rd Brigade—4th Grenadiers, 44th Infantry

  4th Brigade—33rd Fusiliers, 45th Infantry

  2nd Field Artillery Brigade—1st, 37th Field Artillery 10th Jäger zu Pferde

  XVII CORPS

  35th Infantry Division

  70th Brigade—21st, 61st Infantry

  87th Brigade—174th, 176th Infantry

  35th Field Artillery Brigade—36th, 72nd Field Artillery 4th Jäger zu Pferde

  36th Infantry Division

  69th Brigade—129th, 175th Infantry

  71st Brigade—5th Grenadiers, 128th Infantry

  36th Field Artillery Brigade—36th, 72nd Field Artillery 5th Hussars

  XX CORPS

  37th Infantry Division

  73rd Brigade—147th, 151st Infantry, 1st Jäger Bn.

  75th Brigade—146th, 150th Infantry

  37th Field Artillery Brigade—73rd, 82nd Field Artillery 11th Dragoons

  41st Infantry Division

  72nd Brigade—18th, 59th Infantry

  74th Brigade—148th, 152nd Infantry

  41st Field Artillery Brigade—35th, 79th Field Artillery 10th Dragoons

  I RESERVE CORPS

  1st Reserve Division

  1st Reserve Brigade—1st, 3rd Reserve Infantry

  72nd Reserve Brigade—18th, 59th Reserve Infantry, 1st Reserve Jäger Bn.

  1st Reserve Field Artillery

  1st Reserve Uhlans

  36th Reserve Division

  69th Reserve Brigade—21st, 61st Reserve Infantry, 2nd Reserve Jäger Bn.

  70th Reserve Brigade—5th Reserve Infantry,

  54th Infantry (transferred from 3rd Division at outbreak of war)

  36th Reserve Field Artillery

  1st Reserve Hussars

  3rd Reserve Division

  5th Reserve Brigade—2nd, 9th Reserve Infantry

  6th Reserve Brigade—34th, 49th Reserve Infantry

  3rd Reserve Field Artillery

  5th Reserve Dragoons

  Höherer Landwehr-Kommando No. 1

  33rd Landwehr Brigade—75th, 76th Landwehr Infantry

  34th Landwehr Brigade—31st, 84th Landwehr Infantry Landwehr Cavalry Rgt.

  1st Cavalry Division

  1st Cavalry Brigade—3d Cuirassers, 1st Dragoons

  2nd Cavalry Brigade—12th Uhlans, 9th Jäger zu Pferde

  41st Cavalry Brigade—4th Uhlans, 5th Cuirassers

  PRINCIPAL GARRISON AND LANDWEHR FORCES MENTIONED IN TEXT

  Hauptreserve Graudenz

  69th Provisional Brigade—Ersatz Bns. of 5th Grenadiers, 34th Fusiliers, 59th, 129th, 141st, 175th Infantry

  Hauptreserve Thorn

  35th Reserve Division

  5th Landwehr Brigade—2nd, 9th Landwehr Infantry

  20th Landwehr Brigade—19th, 107th Landwehr Infantry

  3rd Reserve Heavy Cavalry

  6th Landwehr Brigade—34th, 49th Landwehr Infantry

  70th Landwehr Brigade—5th, 18th Landwehr Infantry

  Hauptreserve Königsberg (engaged at Gumbinnen)

  Ersatz Brigade—1st, 2nd Ersatz Rgts
. (Ersatz bns. of 4th Grenadiers, 33rd Fusiliers, 41st, 44th, 45th Infantry)

  9th Landwehr Brigade—24th, 48th Landwehr Infantry

  1st Reserve Dragoons

  Outline Order of Battle Russian Northwest Front

  1ST ARMY

  II Corps—26th, 43rd Infantry Divisions

  III Corps—25th, 27th Infantry Divisions

  IV Corps—30th, 40th Infantry Divisions

  XX Corps—28th, 29th Infantry Divisions 56th Infantry Division

  1st Guard Cavalry Division

  2nd Guard Cavalry Division

  1st Cavalry Division

  2nd Cavalry Division

  5th Rifle Brigade

  1st Independent Cavalry Brigade

  1st Heavy Artillery Brigade

  2ND ARMY

  I Corps—22nd, 24th Infantry Divisions

  VI Corps—4th, 16th Infantry Divisions

  XIII Corps—1st, 36th Infantry Divisions

  XV Corps—6th, 8th Infantry Divisions

  XXIII Corps—3rd Guard, 2nd Infantry Divisions

  4th Cavalry Division

  6th Cavalry Division

  15 th Cavalry Division

  1st Rifle Brigade

  2nd Heavy Artillery Brigade

  Note: A Russian rifle brigade had four two-battalion rifle regiments.

  PART I

  THE FASHION TO MAKE WAR

  1

  The Circus Rider of Europe

  The relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia before 1914 was a complex mixture of attraction and repulsion. Anarchist Michael Bakunin’s statement that nothing united Slavs like their hatred of Germans can be balanced by the German impact on Russia’s Westernization. France might provide inspiration, but it was a long road from Paris to St. Petersburg. German professors filled most of the posts at the University of Moscow and the Academy of Sciences. German pietism shaped Russian religious thought. German concepts of natural law and philosophy prepared Russian ground not for individualism and empiricism but for Aufklärung, with its sensibility, its religiosity, its collectivism.1

  The assimilation of this quasi-German heritage was at best incomplete. Nevertheless in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars a bilingual, bicultural elite developed, an elite consciously seeking to fuse the best of Russian and German.2 An emerging Russian intelligentsia, initially self-absorbed and isolated, turned eagerly to Germany for cultural and intellectual models. The philosophy of Hegel and the literature of the Romantics were uncritically imitated east of the Vistula. Students were regularly sent to Germany for advanced education even in the darkest days of Nicholas I. Under Nicholas, too, a system of secondary schools on the German model was established for the entire empire. German scholars and artists basked in the admiration of their Russian counterparts. In turn they praised the spiritual depths of the Slavic soul and the unlimited promise of the Russian people.3

  The relationship was by no means one-sided. Restoration and Vormärz Prussia accepted the Russia of Alexander and Nicholas as a bulwark against Austrian dominance, French revanchism, and popular revolution.4 Militarily too the traditional positions of Prussia and Russia reversed themselves during the Napoleonic Era. Prussia’s martial arrogance was humbled at Jena and Auerstädt. After 1813 the war-hardened Russian army, with its long-service peasant conscripts, compared all too favorably in all too many respects with the improvised Prussian forces. The shortcomings of the postwar Prussian army seemed even more glaring when compared with the situation in Russia. Officers facing limited budgets periodically turned longing eyes to Russia, where the soldier-tsar Nicholas I appeared to stint his military establishment of nothing, where elaborate maneuvers were staged regardless of cost, where developments in weapons, organization, and tactics could be tested on an army-corps scale.5

  The Prussian foreign office recognized that Russia’s diplomatic position in Europe, particularly after 1849, was less solid than it seemed. It also recognized Prussia’s geographic, economic, and military weaknesses vis-à-vis both Western and Eastern Europe. Commitment to Russia meant the corresponding risk of becoming the Tsar’s battering ram against liberalism in general and France in particular. Prussia’s “active neutrality” during the Crimean crisis of 1853–55 was deliberately designed to sustain good relations with Russia at the lowest possible price. The policy’s initial success is indicated by Russian foreign minister K. R. Nesselrode’s belief that the Prussian connection must become the cornerstone of Russia’s relations with France in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Ultimately, however, Russia remained more concerned until 1866 with mending French fences than with supporting the aims of a Prussia whose good will was often taken for granted and whose capacities to implement an independent foreign policy seemed derisory.6

  The Seven Weeks’ War of 1866 came as a corresponding surprise. Austria’s unexpected collapse confronted Russia with a fait accompli. Should she intervene, it would be not to preserve a structure but to restore one—with proportionately increased risks. Four years later, on October 31, 1870, Russia collected a price for her abstention by unilaterally repudiating those clauses of the Crimean settlement that provided for neutralization of the Black Sea.

  Bismarck was long in forgetting the minicrisis this generated. With Germany’s armies too deeply stuck in the French tar baby to give him much freedom of action, the furious protests of Austria and Britain against Russia’s action bade fair to escalate into an European war. It took all of the chancellor’s skill to get the involved powers to a conference table, where Russia’s action was eventually legitimated—at significant cost to Bismarck’s nerves and with significant impact on his subsequent policies.7

  The new German empire inherited other liabilities in relating to its Tsarist neighbor. A rising generation of Russian intellectuals blamed fifty years of playing safe, of hiding behind piles of paper, on Teutonic influences that stifled Slavic warmth and spontaneity. Pedantry and pettifogging were common hallmarks of the German in Russian literature. Among the least sympathetic minor characters of War and Peace is Captain Berg, who knows the army regulations better than the Lord’s Prayer, yet sees nothing beyond them. Goncharov’s Oblomov depends essentially for its comic effect on the contrast between Oblomov, the lazy, slovenly, ultimately lovable Russian and the dignified, efficient, ultimately sterile German Stoltz.

  Literary Germanophobia was reinforced by economic changes. In a Russia historically lacking a middle class, opportunities for emigrants and migrants of all ethnic backgrounds had been extensive. The upper levels of the economy and the higher ranks of the bureaucracy were by no means dominated numerically by men of German ancestry. Germans, however, particularly from the Baltic lands, constituted a highly visible element, one perceived as having a strong group identity. The Russian author who dubbed the Baltic Germans “the Mamelukes of the Empire” did not intend to pay them a compliment.8

  Russian nationalism in midcentury was also acquiring a sharp edge. A growing band of zealots, soldiers and bureaucrats, journalists and academicians, was developing a reasonably coherent set of visions conveniently grouped under the concept of Panslavism. These Panslavs increasingly agreed on Russia’s natural fitness for leadership of the Slavic communities. Works like Yuri Samarin’s Borderlands of Russia, published in 1868, went farther and demanded the Russification of frontier minorities: Baits, Jews, and especially Germans.9

  Germany provided a focus for other anxieties as well. Even the limited constitutionalism of Bismarck’s Reich seemed revolution incarnate to conservatives east of the Vistula. Russian liberals, on the other hand, saw a Germany abandoning her traditional role of mentor and model, falling prey instead to a militarism that threatened every form of human progress.

  The impact of these attitudes was enhanced by a growing perception in the foreign office of a relative decline in Russian power and status. Paul Schroeder has argued that within nineteenth-century Europe’s diplomatic structure Russia was restrained less by any internal moderate impulses than by the
behavior of her friends and allies. Hostile coalitions, on the other hand, merely encouraged Russia to strike back by applying pressure in one of the many areas vulnerable to her.10 The point is reasonable as far as it goes. No successful statesman can afford to forget the fable of the wager between the north wind and the sun on who could first convince a man to remove his coat. But as George Lichtheim observes, Russians, never converted to Protestantism or liberalism, find it difficult to divorce politics from either ethics or metaphysics.11 The geopolitics of Peter the Great and the metapolitics of Alexander I had left a heritage—a sense of mission, of destiny, of purpose that generated in Russian statesmen a determination at least as great as Bismarck’s to conduct Europe’s orchestra, if not necessarily to drown out the other players.