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

by Dennis Showalter

  This was in fact what happened. Initially, Conrad’s determination to deal once and for all with Serbia combined with public and political pressures to send the twelve uncommitted divisions towards the Balkans. This led to significant modifications of plans for the Galician offensive—modifications reflected most clearly by changing the debarkation points of the Austrian forward units, pulling them back as much as two hundred miles behind the frontier. Then Conrad changed his mind again. Protests from the Germans and complaints from the politicians reinforced his own common-sense judgment that there was limited logic in sending almost half of Austria’s army into a secondary campaign while the Russians kicked in the Dual Monarchy’s front door. When Conrad asked the general staff’s railway section if the swing divisions could after all be sent eastward, he was informed that it would cost less time to allow them to go on to Serbia, then turn them around. But his real problem was that the troops already moving into Galicia were being unloaded much farther from the frontier than the original war plan intended. This meant wearying foot marches into the intended theater of operations. When this fact was combined with the unexpected speed of Russia’s mobilization, a German offensive in the east suddenly assumed an importance unexpected in prewar Habsburg planning.

  On August 3 Conrad attacked on two fronts. He sent Moltke a letter explaining, not to say whitewashing, his sending twelve divisions to Serbia and reassuring his ally that Austria did intend to fight its decisive battle in Galicia. He accompanied this with a telegram announcing his intention to launch a general offensive on August 20. To support it, Conrad requested that a German attack of nine divisions—the first-line field strength of Ostheer—be made southeast into Russian Poland, in the direction of the town of Siedlice, as soon as possible.

  Moltke’s reaction is unrecorded. Perhaps there flashed through his mind some version of the epigram that Austria was always an idea, an army, and a century too late. Perhaps he was too preoccupied with the execution of the Schlieffen Plan to spare energy for one more Austrian fiasco. His reply of August 5 said nothing about a German offensive against the Narew, in the direction of Siedlice, or in any other direction except towards Paris. It expressed hopes for victory, vague theories about starting a Polish insurrection, and vaguer rumors about Russian troop movements. Its only positive content was its insistence on the necessity of gaining a decisive victory in the west as soon as possible.33

  Conrad spent a week hoping for the best. But his cavalry was unable to penetrate the Russian screen long enough to locate the enemy’s areas of concentration. His infantry was reporting heavy losses from straggling and heat exhaustion as the corps moved forward on foot from their distant unloading points. An uncomfortable number of Russians was out there somewhere, and Conrad continued to insist on the need for a German offensive against Siedlice to relieve the pressure on the Austrians in Galicia. He received his answer on August 15 from his own liaison officer with the 8th Army, Captain Fleischmann. The telegram said that “a decisive blow” was about to be struck, not south but east against the Russian Niemen army. Within a few days this thrust should succeed, but an attack in Conrad’s proposed direction could only be contemplated afterwards. Thus expired, with barely a whimper, the final remnant of a quarter-century’s plans for a concentric German-Austrian offensive into Poland.34

  On August 14 Prittwitz implemented Waldersee’s dispatch of the 9th by ordering XVII Corps, I Reserve Corps, and the 3rd Reserve Division to the Angerapp River as reinforcements for the corps he believed to be already there. A general of an earlier era would have been constrained by lack of information to do one of two things: commit himself fully to defeating one enemy and then take his chances with the other, or fall back and launch a series of ripostes against both. Prittwitz, however, knew just enough to make him nervous. While continuing his original plan to concentrate on the Angerapp, he continued to send his airmen south, patrolling towards the Narew as a tongue explores a hollow tooth, reinforcing XX Corps’s aircraft with those of the army reconnaissance squadron, Flieger Abteilung 16. The pressure at army headquarters increased one more notch when the weather suddenly broke. As clouds and summer storms hindered observation, the few reports that did arrive from the airmen indicated that the Russian 2nd Army was reaching its concentration areas far more rapidly than Prittwitz and Waldersee found comfortable.35

  Eighth Army headquarters was in for yet another rude surprise. Prittwitz may have intended to fight on the Angerapp, but François proposed to await attack where he stood. He was confident that his corps, which he regarded as the best in Germany, could defeat any number of Russians—or at least hold them in check until Prittwitz was forced to move the rest of the army forward to its support. He found justification in precedent as well as strategy. The Prussian/German command system stressed allowing subordinates maximum liberty within the limits of a mission. An officer who stuck too closely to textbook solutions in war games or maneuvers was likely to be informed that His Majesty the King of Prussia and German Emperor needed neither parrots nor phonographs.36 The difficulty of maintaining contact with the far-flung units of a modern army made such initiative more important than ever. In 1866 and again in 1870/71, corps commanders had acted on their perceptions of the operational situation, bringing on general actions at times and places not expected by the high command. Victory had been their justisfication. François expected no less, and no desk general was going to interfere, whether at army levels or in I Corps itself.

  François’s chief of staff, Colonel Schmidt von Schmidtseck, was shocked by his chief’s blithe disregard for plans and orders. Schmidtseck, a holdover from the Kluck years, had not been particularly impressed by François’s frenetic and splenetic behavior in peacetime. He had no intention of risking his own career and the 8th Army’s fate by underwriting his mercurial chief now. General staff officers had the right and the duty to submit independent reports to their superiors—the familiar Generalstabs-dienstweg. Intended more as a backup system than secret chain of command, the structure depended for effective functioning on a reasonable degree of harmony between a commanding general and his chief of staff. François, however, did not propose to be bypassed. Instead he developed a solution that seems in retrospect to have been almost tongue-in-cheek. He maintained his official corps headquarters at its peacetime station of Insterburg, on the Angerapp River. He left his chief of staff there, miles behind the troops but in a good position to sustain the deception by his presence. To prevent any awkward revelations, François came as close as he dared to confining Schmidtseck to his quarters and forbidding him access to a telephone or telegraph. Reports were doctored to conceal the limits of I Corps’s advance. François himself took pains to be out of touch whenever direct questions might be raised about the location of his troops. Hints dropped at army headquarters by young staff officers with an idea of what was happening were not enough to generate serious investigation of the situation.37

  The I Corps had a good opinion of itself. It included some of the oldest regiments of the Prussian army, survivors of the debacle of 1806, victors on a dozen fields of battle from Leipzig in 1813 to Paris in 1871. After ten days in the field the war seemed like nothing so much as maneuvers with live ammunition. Foot soldiers lanced their blisters and overhauled their uniforms, dulling their buttons, sewing plain gray cloth on the braided cuffs and shoulder straps. Gunners instructed reservists in the mysteries of new optical equipment. Only the reports of German victories in the west and the eerie emptiness of the villages set the days apart from the familiar fall maneuvers.

  Not all was peaceful. The I Corps’s cavalry squadrons scattered unwary Russian scouting parties, now and then even raiding across the frontier. Infantry detachments exchanged shots with Cossacks. Improvised motor and cyclist patrols, often composed of local reservists familiar with the countryside, scoured the roads. Volunteers eager for action brought back lurid tales of burned houses and plundered farms, accounts substantiated by the clouds of smoke that rose daily al
ong the frontier. Other horror stories also began circulating in I Corps’s bivouacs: stories of women raped, mutilated, and murdered or left to die; stories that lost nothing in the telling, yet always seemed to come from another company or battalion.38

  This was the beginning of the myth of East Prussia’s harrowing at the hands of Cossack hordes—a myth kept alive during and long after the war for political, ethnic, and ideological reasons. Reality was significantly less dramatic. A committee despatched to East Prussia in the aftermath of Tannenberg began its work primed with stories of gang rapes and severed organs. It was ultimately constrained to report that descriptions of the occupation’s horrors had been greatly exaggerated. The large-scale destruction of towns and villages owed more to artillery fire than arson. Several Landräte weighed in with the information that much of the looting attributed to Russians in their districts was in fact the work of German civilians—a point consistent with the relatively high peacetime crime rate in the border districts. The haphazard nature of evacuation in many communities enhanced the possibilities of loss and destruction. Abandoned stoves started fires. Open doors attracted the greedy and the malicious. Geese and chickens left unpenned were not likely to be found once their owners returned.39

  The invading Russians pursued an official policy of common sense. Only in October would the chief of staff order the expulsion of all men of working age from occupied German territory, with women, children, and old men remaining as hostages against partisan activity. Centuries of experience had shown Europe’s armies the necessity of living at least in part from the countryside. Even in an age of railroads, horse-drawn wagons could not move an army’s complete requirements of food and forage from railheads to nose bags and haversacks. This meant not plunder but systematic requisitioning with payments made, in hard cash whenever possible, to willing providers. In the first days of the invasion, Rennenkampf issued a series of orders and proclamations promising ample compensation for services rendered. Russian officers regarded themselves as men of honor, not common thieves. They paid for food and forage out of their own pockets when regimental funds were unavailable. German civilians for their part were often so relieved at not being shot, raped, or dispossessed out of hand that they did their utmost to please. Lieutenant Bennigsen described one hostess who was not only willing to sell her uninvited guests everything they needed, but who made coffee and cooked eggs for the young officers before they rode on.

  This state of affairs rapidly deteriorated. Small-scale plundering of abandoned property was difficult to control in an army whose NCOs were often reluctant to enforce regulations to the letter, and whose company officers seldom commanded the respect given to their German counterparts. Was it really worth testing already shaky authority for the sake of some straw, a chicken or two, or a few trinkets taken from an empty house—particularly when those swine from the rear echelon were sure to help themselves in any case. And if a carelessly lit cigarette or an overturned lamp meant fires that spread quickly in the August heat, who could spare time and energy to extinguish them? There was still a war to fight. So trophies were thrust into knapsacks or stowed in baggage wagons, as clouds of smoke on the East Prussian horizon suggested that the war was beginning to turn serious.

  The Russian army too had its rumors. On August 11, Bennigsen uneasily noted that men of another regiment had responded to a sniping incident by driving the inhabitants of the guilty village into their houses and burning them alive “in a most terrible and merciless manner.” Five days later he described villages blazing in the distance—all set on fire by regiments other than his own. By August 17 he wrote of the necessity for carrying a pistol in hand while riding through the streets of a town rendered dangerous by snipers. It is no coincidence that this town was the first place where Bennigsen and his comrades took what they wanted without paying for it. By August 23, Benningsen’s squadron was camping in the open to restrict looting. “We are expected,” the lieutenant wrote with an old soldier’s insouciance, “to behave like gentlemen and pay for everything. It is doubtful if we do.”40

  As the armies groped towards each other, patrol actions became sharper. The wild firing of the first encounters gave way to cooler heads and better aim. Here and there uneasy young men in spiked helmets clustered around the corpse of a Russian trooper before carrying his carbine, saber, or saddle back to their companies as trophies. The occasional Russian airplane was greeted with volleys of rifle fire, even if the airplane turned out to be a soaring bird. Russian artillery observers gave the men of one German company a laugh when they mistook a field kitchen for a machine-gun wagon, took it under fire, and sent it on a wild ride to the rear, the cook and his mate desperately lashing their horses as shrapnel burst around them. Number 1 Company of the 1st Grenadiers was green enough to appreciate the joke even when its noon meal was delayed until late into the night.

  More seriously, Russian gunners were showing an uncanny ability to range even the best-concealed German position and bring it under accurate fire in two or three salvos—a fruit of the Manchurian campaign the Germans had not expected. German artillerymen who pushed their guns forward in an effort to compete found themselves under fire from sharpshooters who seemed able to disappear into the ground at will. One venturesome battery of the 52nd Field Artillery came near to being overrun by an assault from trenches no one saw until the Russians were almost on their gun positions. Point-blank rapid fire, with fuses set at zero, saved the day, but the lesson remained vivid: tactically, the Russians were an opponent not to be taken lightly.41

  Prittwitz was of the same opinion. When he finally learned on August 15 that part of I Corps was east of Gumbinnen, he faced a decision. Rather than ordering François to retreat to the Angerapp, he instructed him instead to concentrate at Gumbinnen, leaving only detachments at Goldap, Stallupönen, and Tollmingkehmen. This was more than simple reluctance to overrule the man on the spot. Air reconnaissance reports and information obtained from prisoners and deserters had created the impression at army headquarters that the main thrust of the Russian advance was coming south of François’s presumed position, directly against the line of the Masurian Lakes. Were this true, I Corps might well be able to roll up the enemy right flank in a day or two.

  On August 16, another set of fragmentary intelligence reports led Prittwitz and Waldersee to the tentative conclusion that the Russian 1st Army was in fact extended farther north than the lakes—perhaps even far enough to envelop I Corps’s left flank. Prittwitz, however, was reluctant to act on the conclusion. Ordering François to change position against a threat that was still vague meant the risk of overcontrolling. The I Corps, the army commander reasoned, should be secure enough around Gumbinnen until the situation became clearer.42

  Even before Prittwitz’s order, François had begun withdrawing his forward elements under Russian pressure. This was more than an operational decision to men like Lance-Corporal Schwadtlo of the 16th Field Artillery. His gun crew helped to destroy his home town of Eydtkuhnen, occupied by the Russian advance guard. Anti-Semites in the same regiment may have found something to think about when Corporal Cohn and his gun team covered the retreat of the 3rd Battery by successfully duelling a Russian machine gun at four hundred meters—a task akin to shooting mice with a rifle, one for which the 77-millimeter field gun had never been designed. In the rifle companies, war diarists marvelled over the ostensible coolness of soldiers who fell asleep in the midst of the heaviest shelling—a stress response still unfamiliar to this inexperienced army. NCOs were learning that a rough tongue and a heavy boot were worth any amount of patriotic exhortation in keeping men in position under fire.43

  But François had no intention of falling back as far as Gumbinnen. By August 16, instead of the detachments authorized by Prittwitz, I Corps had a brigade of the 2nd Division at Goldap and another at Tollmingkehmen, with the entire 1st Division around Stallupönen. The Germans were extended like beads on a string. A rapid, coordinated Russian advance might well break through
François’s cordon and strike for the Angerapp, then the Vistula, without opposition. The stakes were higher than François expected when on August 17 he finally found the large-scale trouble he had been seeking.

  III

  The corps commander was inspecting advanced positions of the 1st Division when he learned that the Russians were on the move. He went immediately to division headquarters in Stallupönen, and learned from Major General Richard von Conta that the 1st Division was being attacked along its entire front. François, concerned with covering as broad a sector as possible, had kept none of his infantry in corps reserve. All that he had available was his battalion of sixteen heavy howitzers, still in Gumbinnen. He ordered them forward to support Conta’s division. At the same time he sent a dispatch to the brigade at Tollmingkehmen, ordering it to advance north and attack the Russian left flank. Able to do nothing else at the moment, François and his personal staff went up to the tower of the church at Stallupönen to follow the course of the battle, only to have eardrums and composures temporarily shaken when some overzealous civilians decided to ring the alarm.44

  The bell tower was far from the noisiest place in the area. German regimental histories are fond of describing the heroic enthusiasm accompanying the baptism of fire—a tendency best described by Mark Twain as “half lie and half forget.” Yet even with due allowance for retrospective pieties, morale in Conta’s front line was initially high. To the euphoria that can accompany individual recognition of the fact that one is actually surviving under fire was joined the observation that peacetime battle drills seemed to be working in roughly the way that the officers had said they would. Companies taking the trouble to entrench found Russian shrapnel fire more an exhilarating nuisance than a paralyzing danger. One reservist described cheering with his men like children on a playground as the short rounds and duds missed their marks.