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

by Dennis Showalter

  In many ways this was a second-best solution. In World War I a combat division was seldom able to operate without the support of arms and services pooled at corps level. As much to the point, morale and efficiency were fostered when divisions were familiar with their neighbors, and with the higher headquarters under which they operated. Until 1918 most French divisions were permanently assigned to a specific army corps. In the British Expeditionary Force, the vaunted efficiency of the Australian and Canadian divisions owed much to their concentration in the separate army corps of the respective dominions. The commander of a German active corps in 1914 was supposed to fight his formation as a single entity, not two divisions side by side. He controlled a major source of intelligence: a squadron of six aircraft. He had at his disposal one of the single strongest element of fire support in any of Europe’s armies: a battalion of sixteen 150-millimeter howitzers, the best medium guns in the world. And he had his personality. His eccentricities, real or calculated, were familiar to his subordinates. Unlike his modern counterparts, shadowy figures to the divisions shuttling in and out of their control, a German corps commander expected to be known and recognized throughout his formation.

  A German division commander’s task was in some ways more complex than his superior’s. Like most continental armies, Germany organized its higher formations by twos: two divisions to a corps, two brigades to a division, two regiments to a brigade. The four regiments were not a problem. A division with four regiments could simultaneously perform a principal and a secondary mission while retaining a reserve. This capacity was desirable during maneuvers, where seldom more than a corps or two were involved on either side and where formations did not have to worry so much about getting in each others’ way. The brigade, however, seemed by 1914 an increasingly unnecessary link. The telephone and the automobile enabled a division commander to control his four regiments directly. On the other hand, abolishing the brigade would mean eliminating a large number of command positions for general officers in an army already concerned about the limitations of promotion to senior ranks. It was not quite an accident that such a widely respected military theorist as Friedrich von Bernhardi, when proposing an internal reorganization of the army corps, left the brigade structure intact. The high command’s desire to create a strategic reserve quickly, rather than any obvious tactical considerations, motivated Germany’s move to a three-regiment division in 1915. Even then, one brigade headquarters remained in each division, usually performing the role of a combat command.23

  The two infantry brigades were supported by a regiment of cavalry—four squadrons, each around 170 “sabers” in official parlance. Since 1916 it has been militarily and academically fashionable to deride the cult of the horse. Critics overlook the fact that before World War I, cavalry was the only operationally mobile arm in existence. The internal-combustion engine was unreliable under operational conditions. The spectacular success of individual reconnaissance and combat operations by improvised mechanized units in 1914 should not obscure the fact that the early armored cars were essentially roadbound. Properly used in the kind of open warfare made possible by the geography of Eastern Europe, cavalry was seen as vital for successful offensive operations. The German army, however, was relatively weak in this arm, particularly when compared to the Russians. The military budget, despite its size, could not be stretched to accommodate larger mounted forces without sacrificing even more important elements.

  This tended to foster caution among both the formers of German cavalry doctrine and the officers who implemented it. Cavalry could not be improvised. As both the Union’s experience in the American Civil War and Great Britain’s in South Africa indicated, it took upwards of three years to turn a man on a horse into a fighting trooper. Given the general expectations of a short war, it is hardly surprising that the cavalry regarded itself as a one-shot instrument, to be used and expended only at the decisive moment of a campaign. This attitude had at least as much to do with the arm’s continued acceptance of shock tactics as did any nostalgic longings for the glory days of the arme blanche. For all their swagger, few German troopers really believed their arm could operate effectively against infantry or artillery under modern conditions. Instead they perceived their combat role as fighting other cavalry: the military equivalent of an exchange of knights in a chess game.

  This mind-set had an unfortunate effect on those regiments unlucky enough—from their perspective—to be assigned as divisional cavalry instead of being massed in the mounted divisions and corps. Their principal mission of close-range reconnaissance, tended to be at best indifferently performed by horsemen seeking opportunities for mounted action even on a troop or squadron level. Nor did the divisional cavalry seek to develop its potential as a mobile reserve of firepower.24

  Far more important to a German divisional commander was his artillery brigade. It had two regiments, each with two eighteen-gun battalions: a total of seventy-two pieces. Fifty-four of them, three battalions, were flat-trajectory 77-millimeter cannon. Their design represented one of the major examples of premature rearmament in the modern era. The German field artillery of the early 1890s was equipped with a gun whose basic design dated back to 1873, so clearly obsolete that the war ministry ignored the protests of technicians and introduced the C/96 field gun just a year before France revolutionized field artillery with the famous French 75. Its steel shield, long range, and hydropneumatic recoil rendered all existing guns obsolescent. Russia in 1902 and Great Britain in 1904 introduced their own version of the quick-firing cannon. Germany was unable to afford the cost of two complete rearmaments in less than a decade. While pundits found fault with the 75, technicians fussed over the C/96, giving it a shield, an improved recoil mechanism, better sights, and redesigned ammunition. The resulting FK 96 nA (Modified Field Gun 96), introduced after 1905, had neither the range, the accuracy, nor the rate of fire of its entente counterparts. Its high wheels gave it a vaguely antique appearance compared to the sleek, deadly soixante-quinze or the businesslike 18-pounder. The German gun had one advantage that would prove useful in the eastern theater: it was mobile. Its light weight and large wheels made it less likely than any of its rivals to bog down in mud or sand, or to exhaust horses pulling it on short rations. But when it came to fighting, professionalism would have to compensate for material in three-fourths of Germany’s field artillery.

  The division’s fourth artillery battalion was far better off. Since the Franco-Prussian War, German gunners had been committed to support a doctrine of the offensive. This involved developing a capacity to shoot over the hill, to search out trenches and covered positions with high explosive. Around the turn of the century the German army had adopted a 105-millimeter field howitzer, a state-of-the-art design unsurpassed by anything in Europe. By 1914 each division had a full battalion of them. So while one artillery regiment had two battalions of conventional 77-millimeter field guns, the other had one gun and one howitzer battalion. The problems this posed for both decentralized and direct fire support are obvious. Assigning a howitzer battery to each gun battalion was rejected as diminishing the effect of their high-angle fire. Kept in the chain of command, the howitzer battalion had a deplorable tendency never to be where it was needed. Placing it under the direct control of the division commander, on the other hand, left one artillery colonel with nothing to do except supervise his remaining battalion—a waste of a senior officer and his staff. But shortcomings in the artillery’s command structure were more than balanced by the multiple uses of howitzers in a war that even in the east tended almost immediately to become a war of entrenchments.25

  For all of the emphasis on World War I as a war of machines, the dirty work was still done by the foot soldier. A German infantry regiment included just over three thousand of them, distributed among three four-company battalions. The regiment was likely to be the highest formation of which the soldier was directly aware. It was the regimental flag before which he swore his oaths of loyalty. It was the regiment’
s number painted on the canvas cover of his helmet. It was the regiment’s history he heard in the rainy-day lectures. But as a cult object the regiment was more likely to engage the identities of the officers. For the rank and file, loyalty was more likely to be developed at the levels British sociologist Anthony Sampson describes as the “pack” and the “tribe.” The German soldier’s “pack” in 1914 was his squad or Gruppe: eight men and a lance-corporal. Still more of an administrative unit and an affinity group than the tactical formation of later years, the squad was correspondingly less significant than the individual’s “tribe,” his company. The company was the private soldier’s primary source of promotions and punishments, reprimands and soft jobs. It was also something more. In theory the battalion had long been considered the basic tactical unit, the largest formation a single officer can control in combat. In practice, modern firepower meant prior to 1914 that role devolved on the company, with its 250 rifles commanded by a captain. Within weeks in the field even platoons of eighty men proved far too large for one man to command as a unit; the German infantry began that articulation into squads and sections under NCOs with independent responsibilities that contributed so much to its combat efficiency in both world wars.26

  The German infantryman went to war carrying a rifle that was just a cut below the best available. The Gewehr 98 was a Mauser design. Sturdy and reliable enough, it was bulkier and clumsier than the British Lee-Enfield and the U.S. M1903 Springfield, neither as rapid firing as the British weapon nor as accurate as the American. These points were, however, less significant in an army much less interested in individual aimed shots than in producing concentrated, controlled bursts at the right time. This was not merely a manifestation of skepticism at the prospect of turning the average German conscript into a Daniel Boone. Field tests, even under artificial peacetime conditions, demonstrated time after time that an exaggerated emphasis on individual marksmanship, the approach fostered by imperial awards to the army’s best shots, was less important than volume of fire, with the first round placed somewhere near the target and the rest more or less in the same place.27

  Another clear indication of the German army’s appreciation of the potential of massed small-caliber fire was the new organization most German regiments were taking into the field: a thirteenth company, manning six water-cooled Maxim automatic machine guns. The German army had introduced this weapon not for its defensive potential, but for its perceived uses in preparing and supporting the offensive. After the turn of the century an increasing number of voices suggested that this “concentrated essence of infantry” be massed as a reserve of firepower at the disposal of higher commanders, either to enable riflemen to be massed for an attack or to support that attack by concentrated fire on selected positions. They particularly stressed the value of the extremely accurate Maxim-model guns once the artillery had to cease fire for fear of destroying its own men. Given suitable enfilade positions, machine guns could play on an objective until the very moment an assault was pushed home. Other military futurologists foreshadowed the use of machine guns for offensive barrages in the way best developed in the British army of 1917/ 18: firing indirectly on ranged lines, borrowing techniques of observation and control from the artillery.28

  Emphasis on the tactical offensive was in no sense an unconsidered decision. The difficulties accompanying attack under modern conditions were recognized and accepted in Germany long before the first rounds were fired from the guns of August. But no army, however confident in its generals’ abilities, could afford to base its doctrines on the assumption that enemies would be obliging enough to dash themselves to pieces on one’s own rifles, artillery, and machine guns. Some time, somehow, it would be necessary to go forward—to go through.

  The generals of Imperial Germany were not particularly blood-thirsty. They perceived that the best way for them to maintain and enhance their class position was to win any future war decisively, while sacrificing as few German lives as possible. The best way to do this was to produce infantrymen able and willing to advance on the modern battlefield. Since the seventeenth century a concept of battle had been developing in Europe and in Germany—a concept too often submerged under vitalist rhetoric about battles of annihilation and the mystique of cold steel. The deficiencies of drawing up masses of men to mow each other down had been plain since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. Even at its most effective the process resembled a duel at ten paces with submachine guns. Victory was meaningless if its price became too high; even Napoleon’s conscripts were not an infinitely self-renewing force.

  Instead of killing an enemy in place, the essential craft of war involved convincing him to run and then killing him. To achieve this, it was necessary to concentrate superior force at one point. “Force” in this context meant to the German army a combination of firepower, numbers, and moral superiority. Experience indicated that all three were required. Fire action by itself was not decisive. Infantry skirmishes could wear down an enemy but were as a rule unable to do more for a very human reason. Once an advance stopped and men spread out to fire their weapons, it was difficult if not impossible to get them moving again. Yet move they would have to. A line of skirmishers doing no more than blazing away at defenders increasingly likely to be concealed behind improvised fieldworks, was an open invitation to attrition on the wrong side of the balance sheet—and to the drawn-out, murderous, indecisive battles characteristic of the Napoleonic Era or the American Civil War. The problem was exacerbated as improved weapons made traditional maneuvers like the cavalry charge, or the concentration of masses of guns to blow apart an enemy’s front at close range, less and less feasible alternatives to the forward movement of the infantryman.29

  That movement posed a comprehensive challenge to all levels, from commanding general to rear-rank private. It required preparation: precisely coordinating infantry movements and artillery support, timing attacks to the minute, providing adequate reserves to exploit success. But the attack demanded above all striking an exact balance between dispersion and control in order to maintain momentum.

  The industrial revolution, with its unique challenges to human flexibility, offered grounds for optimism in all of these areas. If the sons of men conditioned for generations to the peasant’s plow or the artisan’s bench could be socialized by the hundreds of thousands into mills and factories, then surely civilians could be taught in two or three years of peacetime active service how to use terrain, act independently, and respond to orders even on the empty modern battlefield. Images of the nineteenth-century industrial worker frequently suggest or imply that factory routine itself dulled the mind. The reverse was far more likely to be the case. Participation in a modern industrial plant demanded degrees of alertness and cooperation that were mentally and physically exhausting. The miner, the mill hand, the iron worker, could rarely afford the luxury of detaching his mind from what his hands did, or from what his workmates were doing.30

  What civilian employers could do, the German army saw itself able to do even better. Far from being stagnant or retrograde, the German army recognized more clearly than most of its critics the single most difficult problem of modern warfare: getting soldiers not only to advance under fire, but to accomplish something by advancing. In war, as in so many other human endeavors, the necessary tends to become the possible. But in fact nothing in the small wars of the twentieth century indicated that infantrymen could no longer attack successfully against modern firepower. No one in Germany argued that the process of advancing was easy—only that it was still feasible under the right conditions. The revised drill regulations of 1906 recommended in paragraph after paragraph the need to develop “inner assertiveness,” a compulsion to reach the objective before one’s neighbors, to charge to the music of bugles and to shouts of “Hurrah!” But German tactics also reflected growing appreciation of the lessons of the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the two Balkan Wars. Inadequate preparation, clumsy formations, and one-sided reliance on enthusiasm brought de
feat to British and Japanese, to Bulgars, Serbs, and Greeks indiscriminately.31

  The craft of war in the twentieth century, at least as practiced in the Western world, has increasingly focussed on substituting the internal-combustion engine for men’s muscles and will power. In the absence of such technology it was not romanticism but hard, practical considerations that led the kaiser’s army to concentrate as heavily as it did on human factors.

  These were particularly important in an army of mobilized civilians. Almost half the men in every active infantry regiment at war strength were reservists; the proportion in the artillery was only slightly lower. Entire regiments, divisions, and army corps were composed of these hostilities-only soldiers. The German army is frequently credited with being far ahead of its continental contemporaries in recognizing the martial virtues of the citizen in uniform. Unlike the French and Russians, who treated their reserve formations as second-line troops suited only for garrison duty or subsidiary missions, the Germans used their reserve units alongside the active ones, giving them the same tasks and assuming the same levels of proficiency.

  A military system increasingly committed to the concept of a short war, sandwiched between two powerful and determined enemies, saw little advantage in maintaining a large pool of individual replacements. Keeping combat units up to strength was not seen as a significant problem by German planners in the years before 1914. What was important was putting the largest possible organized force in the field in the shortest possible time. From the 1890s, the German army earmarked an increasing number of reservists for separate formations. These, unlike the Honvéd and Landwehr of Austria, or the Russian reserve units before the Russo-Japanese War, existed entirely on paper, with no peacetime cadre. A small number of active officers would be transferred to them on mobilization, primarily as staff officers or company and battalion commanders. The rest of the command positions would be filled by men from civilian life: NCOs who had completed their twelve years of service, officers retired into the reserve, or commissioned and promoted as reservists. For them, and even more for the men they led, faith in the system as a whole and confidence in its component parts were all-important, particularly in the first days of war.32