At 6:30 a.m. the reservists were on the road once more, most of them with at least a cup or two of hot coffee in their stomachs. In the meantime Below’s orders had been changed. Instead of attacking, I Reserve Corps was now merely to “observe” the Russians until it could be reinforced.36 Unlike Mackensen, however, I Reserve Corps had sent its cavalry forward. Patrols found no sign of any Russians ten kilometers in any direction from Goldap. On the basis of that information, Below concluded that his immediate front was clear. He could best contribute to the day’s fighting by turning northeast and joining Mackensen’s battle, already clearly audible. At 7:30 a.m. he issued the appropriate orders.
Modifying, even ignoring, commands irrelevant to circumstances was accepted practice in the Imperial army. Below may have had visions of the Pour le Mérite before his eyes as he altered his line of march. But he had overlooked another accepted element of German military wisdom. This one was negative: never trust the reconnaissance reports of reserve cavalrymen. Below’s troopers may have seen no Russians around Goldap, but when Below informed Prittwitz of his on-the-spot initiative, he was informed that air reconnaissance reported two Russian corps on the move north from Goldap—Russians the cavalry had somehow missed.
Nor were the cavalry the only unobservant ones. The 1st Reserve Division on Below’s right, strung out in a single line of march along eleven kilometers, had just halted for lunch when it was attacked in flank by the 30th Russian Division of Alieuv’s IV Corps. Shimmering heat and dust clouds so obscured the uniforms that at first the Germans feared a repetition of the previous night’s misunderstanding on a larger scale. Finally an infantry colonel rounded up a few of the division’s cavalry and ordered them to ride towards the advancing columns until they were either cheered or shot at. The colonel might well have been pardoned for thinking that this was one way to get some use out of the “frog-stickers” who had so obviously failed to do their jobs earlier. Within minutes the whole division was engaged. Within a few minutes more the German reservists experienced the Russians’ use of terrain and their professional coordination of infantry and artillery. Whole skirmish lines seemed to disappear in the broken ground in front of the division, probing with a surgeon’s skill for exposed flanks and weak spots in the firing lines. Batteries that pushed forward to support the hard-pressed infantry were overpowered and silenced by Russian shrapnel, increasingly supplemented by heavy howitzers from IV Corps reserve. Not until the arrival of the 36th Reserve Division were the Germans able to mount a successful series of counterattacks.
German tactical doctrine stressed maintaining or recovering the initiative, and reserve officers were more likely than their active counterparts to operate by the book. Battalion and company commanders drove their men forward, often without orders, pushing from one farm or set of outbuildings to another with more enthusiasm than coordination. More than doctrine inspired this aggressive behavior. A German reserve division had only half the number of guns of its active counterpart—thirty-six instead of seventy-two, all of them flat-trajectory pieces. To make up for their lack of firepower, the German gunners had blasted away most of their ready ammunition. They had also changed position under fire so often that they had lost touch with their supply wagons. By midafternoon the German infantry was fighting on its own in many parts of the field, and their eagerness to close with their enemy was being enhanced by two related discoveries. Since the Russian infantrymen tended to shoot too high, the closer one advanced to their positions the safer one was likely to be. And the efficient Russian artillery was unwilling to inflict losses on its own men by shelling too close to their reported positions.
By nightfall I Reserve Corps was master of its field. Below’s men had held the Russians in place, keeping them from turning north against Mackensen. But the corps’s divisions had advanced in such different directions that they were virtually out of touch with each other. The loss of contact boded more ill for the next day than Below wished to concede.37
II
The German 8 th Army fought three separate battles on August 20. Each of its corps found all the fighting it wanted against an enemy in no way as obliging as those found at maneuvers or in war games. The result had been incomplete victories on the flanks, defeat in the center. What was to be made of the total? European military mythology stressed the role of the supreme commander—the guiding genius who surveys the maps and demonstrates to his less-gifted subordinates the order underlying apparent chaos. Reality, even during the Wars of German Unification, had been significantly different. A quarter-century later, in Manchuria, neither Japanese nor Russian generalissimos had shown any particular skill in directing, as opposed to reacting to, the movements of their subordinates.
To a significant degree this was recognized as an inevitable result of the extended fronts created by the size of modern armies and the empty battlefields created by the destructiveness of modern weapons. Controlling a battle in the Napoleonic sense of the concept had become impossible. In 1909 the British military writer Ernest Swinton published a short story set in a higher headquarters during “the next great war.” While staff officers strain their nerves, while telephones ring and messengers rush to and fro, the commanding general spends the day fishing. He wanders into headquarters at twilight, carrying a two-pound trout. Then, with clear eyes and unimpaired vitality, he studies the map and issues orders for the next day.38
The story’s moral was the necessity for senior officers to avoid becoming overinvolved in details which they had no power to influence. Prittwitz began his first battle as though he accepted the principle. He established his headquarters in the town of Nordenburg. It was thirty miles behind the fighting lines. It was also a regional communications center with excellent telephone and telegraph connections. In theory this location enabled Prittwitz to keep in touch with his entire front, rather than the section under his immediate eye. The 8th Army’s commander, however, lacked the self-confidence to pursue ad hoc field sports. Instead he spent the morning waiting for phone calls and telegrams.
Around 10 a.m. Prittwitz made an appearance to tell some of his staff officers that things were going very well, and to receive congratulations from the more optimistic and the more sycophantic of them. But the atmosphere of victory created by the early successes of François and Mackensen evaporated rapidly during the afternoon. On the left, I Corps was not advancing. In the center, it seemed increasingly doubtful if XVII Corps would be able to hold its ground, much less continue its attack. On the right, I Reserve Corps seemed to be facing superior forces. Air reconnaissance also reported masses of Russian cavalry to the north of the main armies.
None of this was news to inspire optimism. Then at 2:00 p.m. more intelligence information arrived from an unexpected quarter. The long-range radio station in the fortress of Posen reported intercepting a Russian dispatch giving the strength of their 2nd Army as five corps and a cavalry division. Since Prittwitz had left only a reinforced corps to screen his southern flank, it was scarcely a panic reaction when thirty minutes later he telephoned the headquarters of that corps to ask what was happening in its sector. He received a cheerful reply from Chief of Staff Colonel Emil Hell. Since daylight, Hell reported, the corps aircraft had been patrolling south and east, bringing back reports that the Russians were indeed advancing in force. At least six divisions had almost reached the frontier. When Prittwitz warned that he could spare no reinforcements, Hell confidently answered that XX Corps needed none, and could hold its positions until victory was won around Gumbinnen.39
The army commander remained unconvinced. At 5:00 p.m., just about the time XVII Corps’s tactical retreat was becoming an operational rout, Prittwitz telephoned François. He declared that in view of the news from the south and the failure of XVII Corps to advance, he would “probably” have to retreat across the Vistula. In reply he received another burst of effervescent good spirits. The Russians in I Corps’s sector were defeated, François declared. He could easily roll them up from the north a
nd ease the pressure on Mackensen. His corps had inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy. It had taken thousands of prisoners. Success depended only on one more attack. Prittwitz answered that he wanted to “think through the situation.” Then he hung up.40
The difference between thinking and fretting can be a fine one. The XX Corps was likely to be fighting for its life within thirty-six hours. Gumbinnen was apparently neither a clear-cut defeat nor a textbook victory. What to do? Prittwitz had as yet issued no orders when at 7:00 p.m. he received another technological jolt. Brigadier-General von Unger commanded the grandiloquently titled “Field Reserve of the Fortress of Graudenz,” a collection of reservists and depot battalions removed from its comfortable garrison to cover as best it might the right flank of XX Corps. Unger also commanded the services of the Graudenz air detachment. Around 2:30 p.m. one of its four planes had made a routine flight south across the border. Its crew discovered a strong column of infantry, cavalry, and artillery advancing towards the Russian town of Mlawa—miles to the west of even Unger’s position. Clouds of dust further south on the Warsaw road indicated that this was only a vanguard. The plane took two and a half hours to return to its improvised base. It required two more hours for the report to reach Prittwitz.41
It was suddenly clear to a shocked army staff that the Russian 2nd Army was not only advancing in force, but that it was extended much further west than Prittwitz had expected or feared. Any lingering doubts about the accuracy of the dispatch were dismissed when one of XX Corps’s planes reported seeing a large dust cloud about five kilometers northeast of Mlawa around 4:55 p.m.—just about the right distance for the column seen by the other air crew to have advanced in three hours on a hot day.42
Max Hoffmann subsequently declared that he reacted to the arrival of one of these messages by suggesting to Grünert that the contents be withheld until 8th Army ended its battle in the north.43 His words have the ring of retrospective bravado. Enough information had reached army headquarters about Russian movements in the south to make anyone question previous judgments—even Hoffmann, and certainly Prittwitz. Suddenly the 8th Army seemed in mortal danger. In view of the apparent wide sweep of the Russian advance, the Germans were at significant risk of being cut off from their Vistula bases and driven into Königsberg, or against the Baltic coast. The specter of a new Sedan suddenly seemed all too real. But it would be a Sedan in reverse.
Much was subsequently said and written about Prittwitz’s behavior on the night of August 20. Most of it was critical; all of it enjoyed the benefit of hindsight; all of it tended to simplify the issue. A detailed examination of events on the night of August 20 suggests more than mere failure of nerve was involved. The process of confusion began when Prittwitz, presumably after some consultation with Waldersee, called Hoffmann and Grünert into his office. The 8th Army, he declared, would break off the action at Gumbinnen and retreat immediately to the Vistula River. Both junior officers challenged the decision. Grünert in particular urged continuing the attack against Rennenkampf, arguing that it would take at the most two or three days to defeat him and turn on the other Russian army. Until then, he said, XX Corps and its attached units should certainly be able to hold on in the south. Prittwitz cut him off, saying angrily that the army was to retreat at once. He and his chief of staff were responsible for the decision—not the quartermaster or the G.S.O.I.44
It was easy to marshal powerful arguments in favor of continuing the attack against Rennenkampf. Schlieffen had consistently emphasized that the only way to defend East Prussia was to take advantage of the division of the enemy’s forces caused by the Masurian Lakes, to strike and destroy whichever enemy first came within reach. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy with the Russians’ immense superiority in cavalry was perceived as an extreme risk by generals as yet unconvinced of the defensive power of modern weapons. And while the Russian 2nd Army might advance toward the Vistula while the battle against Rennenkampf was in progress, it would increasingly expose its right flank and lines of communication to a German attack from the north.
Victories of this scope are easiest won in retrospect. Whether a German attack on the 21st, made without the advantage of surprise, could have broken through the Russian positions under the tactical conditions of 1914 is at least questionable. At the same time, howevers, Waldersee was apparently unconvinced that retreating to the Vistula was the best response to the 8th Army’s operational dilemma. Certainly the chief of staff was unwilling to prepare orders mentioning the river as a possible destination.45 Prittwitz was an elderly man at the end of a long and trying day. This was neither the first, the second, nor the hundredth time that a commander had made a snap judgment, then lost his temper when challenged. Given an hour or two to calm down, given a word or two of concrete advice, and the chief would be fine. The telephone and the telegraph, after all, made it unnecessary to issue next day’s orders immediately.
Fulfilling the cynic’s definition of autobiography as the life of a hero by one who knows, Max Hoffmann presents himself as convincing Waldersee that since the Russians at Mlawa were closer to the Vistula than was the main body of the 8th Army, a general retreat would be impossible. Even if it degenerated into an every-man-for-himself flight for the river, there was every chance the Russians would get there first. If fighting it out at Gumbinnen was no longer a feasible alternative, the only remaining solution was a concentration to the south, against the Russian 2nd Army.
Other staff officers described the G.S.O.I. as bursting into fits of tears and rage, tearing off his decorations in despair, and sitting silently while Grünert and Waldersee did the actual work of changing Prittwitz’s mind. To the extent the latter accounts are correct, they suggest behavior motivated by frustration rather than panic. Writing to his wife on August 21, Hoffmann called the previous day the most difficult of his military life. Until noon he had firmly believed in a great victory. He considered retreat from Gumbinnen a major error. “I am,” he declared, “so boundlessly sorrowful that you cannot imagine.”46
Whatever Hoffmann did or did not do, no extraordinary persuasive gifts were required to move Prittwitz once he made himself available for consultation. A switch from one front to the other had been so often discussed, so often described as necessary in prewar plans, that thoughts of its implementation came naturally to tired men late in the evening. An even more mundane explanation involved saving face. Prittwitz had announced his intention to retreat from Gumbinnen too openly and too loudly to reverse himself completely without appearing a weakling or a fool. Concentrating to the south was in some ways an even riskier maneuver, yet it was the kind of compromise that enabled Prittwitz to retain at least part of his authority. With no more than token objections, he approved orders to I Corps and the 3rd Reserve Division to move southwest, eventually deploying on the right flank of XX Corps against the threat from Mlawa. The I Reserve Corps would remain facing Rennenkampf on the Angerapp. The XVII Corps would retreat westward and reorganize as a general reserve. Walter Elze accurately observes that these orders resembled only in a general way the actual concentrations for the battle of Tannenberg. Nevertheless they suggest that Prittwitz and his staff were beginning to cope with the new situation by 9:00 p.m., when the first of them was issued.47
Prittwitz, however, had not simply gone off to cool down in his own company. Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), the army supreme command in Koblenz, was concerned about the situation in East Prussia. It responded to Prittwitz’s initial report of François’s insubordination with repeated requests for information on 8th Army’s “intentions and measures.” Prittwitz obliged. At noon on the 20th, his headquarters informed OHL by phone that the army was engaged in a “promising” battle at Gumbinnen, and that spirits were “tremendous.”48 That evening Prittwitz picked up the phone once more. He began, according to Moltke, by describing 8th Army’s situation as desperate, with eight enemy cavalry divisions on its flanks and with XVII Corps “as good as finished.” “If still possible,” he proposed to
disengage and retreat. When Moltke advised him to pull himself together and rally southward on XX Corps, Prittwitz declared the maneuver impossible and asked for reinforcements. Moltke replied that at least the Vistula must be held at all costs. Prittwitz by this time resembled a bull harassed to its limits by banderilleros. He asked how he could defend a river line against superior forces with his “handful of men” when the river was so low it could be forded anywhere. Moltke answered that that was Prittwitz’s problem. He could hardly expect the chief of the general staff to plan his campaign in detail from Koblenz.49 It was hardly a reassuring exchange. Prittwitz may not have played the role of a storybook hero, but Moltke’s generalized carping was hardly calculated to restore anyone’s equilibrium.
Nor was Prittwitz finished for the day with modern communications. At 9:00 p.m., Mackensen telephoned to explain what had happened to his corps. Prittwitz interrupted him to say that the army was going to retreat across the Vistula.50 Shortly after 9:00 p.m. François received a phone call from army headquarters ordering the artillery and trains of the Königsberg division back to the fortress. About 11:30 p.m. he received a telegram declaring that the army was withdrawing in the face of the Russian advance from the south. François, as might be expected, was outraged. But nowhere in his memoirs did he say or imply that either the conversation or the telegram mentioned the Vistula as 8th Army’s destination, though he continued to insist that he had received verbal orders to retreat across the river.51
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 30
