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

by Dennis Showalter

  Had anyone at any of the responsible headquarters known it, Sontag’s and Staabs’s three brigades initially encountered only what remained of the Russian 2nd Division. These were the same units that had been so roughly handled the previous day. A Russian staff officer later reported them as “exhausted, with only a few rounds left, three days without bread or sugar.” They broke as soon as the Germans attacked. One brigade streamed back to Neidenburg, where it was reformed around noon by the army staff. The other held its position a bit longer, until the division commander ordered a retreat, which turned into a rout. The brigade fled even further to the rear than its sister unit. It could only be rallied at Frankenau.13

  The scattering of the 2nd Division temporarily exposed both the flank of XV Corps and the rear of 2nd Army. But the woods were too thick for German cavalry patrols or German air reconnaissance to discover and report the opportunity. Scholtz, moreover, had other worries. At 4:30 a.m. Russian artillery had begun shelling Mühlen—a systematic, heavy barrage, in sharp contrast to the more or less ineffective bombardments of the last two days. Scholtz also received a radio intercept ordering XV Corps to attack around Mühlen. The thick woods in front of the German position in that sector offered the opportunity to deploy a strong force with little danger of observation, and Scholtz had a healthy respect for the Russians’ ability to utilize terrain. No matter what success his active divisions gained on the right, Scholtz by midmorning was far more concerned with his left flank, held by second-line troops and supported by a division whose commander had demonstrated a Françoislike capacity to turn a blind eye to orders he considered inappropriate.14 On a smaller and more immediate scale than army headquarters, he feared being caught in a revolving door, with Russians smashing into his rear while he tried to find theirs.

  Scholtz’s problems were compounded when Hindenburg and Ludendorff established a forward command post just south of the Gross-Damerau Lake. Just before the staff left Löbau a report arrived that Usdau had fallen to I Corps. This seemed to fulfill everyone’s highest hopes. Even Ludendorff said that on learning this news he considered the battle won. Once in the field, however, it soon became apparent that a mistake had been made—Hindenburg was able to see through a stereo-telescope that German artillery was still firing on Usdau. When Hindenburg and Ludendorff learned that XX Corps’s attack south had also halted they were even less pleased, though the overall situation still did not seem to require direct interference with Scholtz’s orders.

  This opinion changed around 11:00 a.m., when confirmed reports of Usdau’s capture arrived simultaneously with news of the Russian advance on Muühlen. It seemed clear that François no longer needed support from XX Corps. It seemed equally clear—at least on a map—that the Russian attack on Mühlen offered a chance to envelop the attackers with a short right hook. This was the kind of opportunity that had made reputations in 1866 and 1870. At 11:30 a.m. Scholtz was directed to switch the axis of advance of his active divisions almost 180 degrees from due south to north and east, in order to roll up the flank of the Russians engaged at Mühlen.15

  The corps staff was still assimilating the new orders when around noon it received an excited telephone call. A lieutenant commanding a telephone platoon in the Mühlen sector declared that the German line had broken and Russians were pouring into the gap. Scholtz promptly directed Staabs’s 75th Brigade to turn in its tracks and march towards Mühlen “as rapidly as possible” to restore the front. This left only the 41st Division to continue the enveloping maneuver ordered by Hindenburg and Ludendorff. At 12:15 p.m. Sontag was ordered by telephone to advance at once on the village of Waplitz. About the same time Colonel Grünert arrived at his headquarters, sent by Hindenburg to make sure the division moved in the new direction.

  Sontag was less than happy with the situation. Patrols from his divisional cavalry regiment reported Russians everywhere in his sector, with Waplitz held in particular strength. He was not reassured by Grüunert’s dismissal of this enemy as mere “fragments” of previously defeated forces. The 41st Division turned itself around by 1:30 p.m., but its advance was delayed by a combination of heat, sandy roads, few wells, and delayed rations. Instead of driving his tired men forward Sontag decided around 5:00 p.m. to dig in along a line from the south end of Lake Mühlen to the village of Januschkow. A corps order to take Waplitz before halting arrived at 6:00 p.m. but was rejected as impossible to execute in the few hours of daylight remaining.

  Sontag was not one of the Imperial army’s obvious success stories. He was a mobilization appointment, coming to the 41st Division from command of the 10th Infantry Brigade in III Corps. He does not appear to have been the kind of forceful personality who made an immediate impression on his new subordinates. He finished the war in an undistinguished administrative post, as governor of Kalisch. At the same time nothing in his prewar record suggests that he received his job in the absence of anyone better qualified. Sontag was simply a good, ordinary general, the kind of solid professional every army taking the field after a long peace must accept on trust and hope. It was one thing to send a division forward against a visible enemy with colors flying and drums beating. It was quite another to advance into tangled forests one’s own scouts insisted were teeming with Russians. And those Russians had a peacetime image that did not encourage expecting whole divisions of them to dissolve after a few days’ fighting, no matter how confident the army’s liaison officer might be on that subject.16

  Sontag’s lack of aggressiveness was far less important to XX Corps headquarters than the continuing threat from the north. As the afternoon wore on it became apparent that the initial report of a Russian breakthrough at Mühlen had been greatly exaggerated. Some men of the 69th Garrison Brigade, ersatz reservists with no peacetime training, broke under the Russian artillery, but their company officers brought them back to their positions. Brigadier-General Unger inspected his lines at the gallop and was able to report not only that his infantry were holding their ground, but that his Ersatz and Landsturm batteries were actually silencing some of the Russian guns to their front. The only major assault, made about 4:00 p.m., was rapidly checked, with over a thousand men of XV Corps surrendering rather than risk a run back to their own lines through the German fire.17

  This local triumph was, however, almost lost in the growing number of reports that strong Russian forces were advancing far beyond XX Corps’s left flank. They belonged to XIII Corps, whose commander had spent most of August 26th on the horns of a dilemma. He had been ordered to advance on Allenstein, yet he could also hear the noise of battle to the south where XV Corps was engaged with Scholtz. Like every European general properly schooled in the campaigns of the elder Moltke, Kluyev proposed to march to the sound of the guns. Unlike some of his German opposite numbers, he did his superior the courtesy of notifying him. But almost simultaneously he received direct orders to continue advancing on Allenstein.

  Major-General Kluyev was in a quandary. His new orders mentioned that VI Corps was also to advance to Allenstein and cooperate with XIII and XV Corps against the German left flank. But efforts to establish direct communications with Samsonov had been frustrated by line-cutting German civilians and incompetent Russian repair gangs. Radio communications with Blagoveschensky were initially and inadvertently jammed by the powerful Russian transmitter across the border at Novogeorgievsk. When contact was finally made VI Corps’s reply could not be deciphered, as XIII Corps’s signallers had no code key. Kluyev’s final decision to keep moving towards Allenstein reflected in part a reluctance to risk leaving VI Corps—which presumably was marching there too—in the lurch. His men, moreover, were hungry. Even their emergency rations had been eaten. Presumably Allenstein’s granaries and bakeries could feed XIII Corps at least one solid meal. Presumably, too, Samsonov knew what he was doing when he issued the order.

  Kluyev almost changed his mind on the morning of August 27 when he received a telegram from XV Corps asking for support. But when this was followed by another
wire specifying that only a brigade be sent, Kluyev decided that given his lack of specific information, he was still best advised to start his corps on the road to Allenstein.18 By late afternoon the undefended town was in Russian hands. Their first demand was for bread—120,000 kilograms of it, to be delivered within ten hours. This meant 60,000 standard loaves, and with only six bakeries available, Mayor Zülch was correspondingly worried about exactly what would happen when the deadline was not met.19

  The occupation provided a different challenge to First Lieutenant Walther von Stephani of the 8th Army Staff. He had been ordered to make arrangements for the arrival and unloading in Allenstein of the Landwehr from Schleswig-Holstein, and for transferring army headquarters to the town of Osterode. Promptly on the morning of August 27, Stephani drove to Osterode to commandeer a locomotive. The station was overflowing with refugees; no train was immediately available even for a carmine-striped demigod from the general staff. Stephani spent the interval convincing the proprietor of the town’s principal hotel to abandon his own plans for flight in favor of grilling a steak for a hungry lieutenant and making rooms available for the rest of the army staff, scheduled to arrive in Osterode that evening.

  The hotelier had never heard of either Hindenburg or Ludendorff, and had no very high opinion of generals who appeared incapable of protecting German territory against invaders. Appeals to his patriotism brought no more result than suggestions of the profit to be made by lodging and feeding all those high-ranking officers. Stephani finally closed the issue by insisting that no more civilian trains would be leaving Osterode in any direction until the fighting was over. With necessity become a virtue, Stephani was able to set out for Allenstein secure in the knowledge that his commanding general would have a reasonably comfortable bed for the night.

  Osterode did not possess elaborate switching facilities. The only engine available had just arrived from Allenstein and had to retrace its route in reverse. Stephani, more or less comfortably ensconced in the coal car, felt the effects of his full stomach and promptly fell asleep. As the locomotive neared the outskirts of Allenstein he was awakened by one of the train crew, who pointed out what looked to him like a column of troops on the road paralleling the tracks. Stephani, confident of his professional judgment, said that they were only refugees. Then he decided to use his field glasses. What had looked to the naked eye from a half-mile’s distance like farm wagons suddenly turned into field kitchens and machine-gun carts. The Russians seemed to be eating their noon meal, but there was no reasonable doubt that Allenstein was in enemy hands.

  What to do next? This was not the kind of emergency discussed in the war college. The only logical action was to reverse course, if possible before arousing suspicion. But a heavy engine could not simply be brought to a dead stop. While the engineer was applying the brakes, Stephani saw a half-company of Russians marching along the right-of-way. The Russians, naturally enough, scattered out of the locomotive’s way. Stephani, perched on top of the coal pile, drew his pistol with all the aplomb of a cat at a dog show. German officer and Russian soldiers stared at each other for split seconds. Then the spell was broken. Friendly hands dragged Stephani to the bottom of the tender as Russians unslung their rifles. Bullets began whistling around the engine, thudding into the coal and pinging off the boiler. The engineer replied with the official emergency signal: three short blasts on the whistle. Finally, after what seemed endless minutes, the brakes took hold. The train stopped, reversed, then began moving faster and faster in the opposite direction, through a small defile, out of sight, then out of range of the Russians.

  With Allenstein out of the question as a destination for the Landwehr, Stephani, once he recovered from his shock, arranged for the division to be diverted to the nearest station with a network of sidings. Within two hours, the first trains from Schleswig began disembarking their cargoes of leg-stiffened reservists at Biessellen.20

  The Russian occupation of Allenstein confirmed Scholtz’s belief that XX Corps faced a major Russian threat to its left flank. He decided to respond by pulling the entire 37th Division out of the line and sending it north, to deploy behind the left flank of the 3rd Reserve Division. This was a risk on two accounts. It would diminish by half the ability of XX Corps to attack eastward as Hindenburg and Ludendorff had ordered. Given the day’s heat, the dust, and the disorganization still plaguing Staabs’s formations, the 37th Division also might reach its new positions too exhausted or too demoralized to fight. Some of Staabs’s battalions had to countermarch to pick up knapsacks temporarily abandoned. Others barely settled into their bivouac areas when they were awakened for still another night march. Rumors of a new disaster, of a German retreat across the Vistula, began passing through the stumbling ranks despite all efforts of the officers. They were not the best omens for the new mission.21

  II

  Army headquarters had its own problems with erratic troop movements. Ostgruppe’s victory on the 26th had raised hopes at headquarters that XVII Corps and I Reserve Corps could march undisturbed against the Russian 2nd Army’s flank and rear. At 7:30 a.m. on August 27, Below and Mackensen were told to advance south with every available man as soon as the enemy at Bischofsburg was disposed of.22 These orders, transmitted by messenger rather than telephone for security reasons, reached Below’s headquarters at 12:30 p.m. Fifteen minutes later the army liaison officer with Below responded. Below’s cavalry patrols had found that the Russians had abandoned their positions south of Bischofsburg without a fight, and I Reserve Corps was moving south as ordered. But Below wanted to know how the fighting was going on Scholtz’s front. He also wanted to know the exact whereabouts of Rennenkampf’s army. An excited telephone call from Allenstein had said Russians were in the town. A staff officer sent to investigate confirmed the report by backing his car down the road into Allenstein until he saw Russian sentries. Before the surprised soldiers could react, he changed gears and vanished towards his own lines in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes.23

  But where had this new enemy come from? Were they Rennenkampf’s men or part of the 2nd Army? Hindenburg and Ludendorff as yet did not know themselves. They responded by ordering Below to send only a detachment south, to Passenheim. The bulk of his corps was now to face west, ready either to advance on Allenstein should the Russians be there in force or to turn southward as originally ordered.24

  No matter which Russian army was mounting it, the possibility of a concrete threat from the north led Hindenburg and Ludendorff to leave their command post during the afternoon of the 27th and drive to Scholtz’s headquarters at Frögenau. Their announced intention was to discuss plans for the next day’s operations. Almost certainly they also hoped to put some vigor into a headquarters apparently more concerned with holding positions than with driving forward. They were especially disturbed at the way the 41st Division’s attack had been allowed to fade away. Hindenburg and Ludendorff reasoned that both flanks of the 2nd Army, at Bischofsburg and Usdau, had been driven back. According to the best available reports on the main enemy forces, the Russian 2nd Division was broken and in retreat. The XV Corps was in position along the Drewenz. On the immediate Russian right, if Scholtz’s and Below’s intelligence was correct, XIII Corps had turned west to support XV Corps and was somewhere around Allenstein.

  In a war game, 8th Army might have been willing enough to let the two latter corps concentrate. The more deeply the Russians committed themselves against Scholtz the less chance they would have of retreating successfully—if all went well in the field. In fact, the situation as perceived at 8th army headquarters by late afternoon of the 27th bore an uncanny resemblance to that existing around noon on July 3, 1866. At Königgrätz the 1st Prussian Army held its ground all morning against superior Austrian numbers. Its left flank, however, was in serious jeopardy until relieved by the 2nd Army, which emerged from the north to crush the Austrian right at the same time the Elbe Army’s three divisions drove in the enemy’s left. Though no memoirs mention the similariti
es, perhaps they crossed a few minds as the army staff prepared orders for the 28th. In the German center, the Goltz Landwehr Division, which had been detraining during the day, the 3rd Reserve Division, and XX Corps would attack the Russian XIII and XV Corps, pinning them in position. On the left I Reserve Corps would move against the Russian flank and rear, while XVII Corps pushed south and cut their line of retreat. François’ corps would close the ring from the south.

  But Königgrätz had been near run. Had the 1st Army broken under the Austrian attacks, the 2nd Army might well have arrived only in time to cover a Prussian retreat. Should Scholtz be right about the extent of the Russian threat from the north, the 8th Army might find itself facing an analogous situation, with its fate depending heavily on the fighting power and the military know-how of the uniformed civilians under Goltz, Morgen, and Below.25

  Ludendorff was anything but complacent as the army staff drove back to Löbau in the late afternoon. When the officers reached the town they found the streets blocked by a disorderly stream of army wagons headed north. They were from the supply train of I Corps, and their senior officer knew no more than that he had been ordered to prepare for a general retreat. Wild rumors were circulating that I Corps had been routed and overrun, that its remnants had withdrawn to Montowo in the army’s rear. In light of the day’s events as reported the stories made no sense. Max Hoffmann promptly made a phone call to the railway station commandant at Montowo. That officer declared that earlier in the afternoon a badly disorganized battalion of the 2nd Division, the II/4th Grenadiers, had arrived in the town. The major in command said that the entire I Corps had been completely defeated; his battalion had only been saved by a rapid retreat. He then ordered the supply troops in Montowo to prepare to evacuate to the north. Some units had already started without orders, and their wagons were those blocking the road.