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

by Dennis Showalter

  Max Hoffmann later declared categorically that German troops would have broken through I Corps’s thin cordon, but there was no ammunition, no food, no water, no orders. The Russians were impeded by their own transport as abandoned wagons, mired guns, and dead horses piled up on the paths and trails. To leave the shelter of the forest was to run a withering gauntlet of fire. Nor was it always easy to surrender. German detachments seeking to disarm prospective prisoners found themselves taken under fire by Russians more belligerent or less aware of their situation. In at least one case they responded by mowing down the Russians to their front with machine guns, white flags or not, until all shooting in the sector stopped.

  By the afternoon of August 30, XV Corps dissolved on the road between Ruttkowen and Saddek. Most of its men sat down and waited for the Germans to come and get them. The unfortunate General Martos spent the morning dodging German patrols until he finally took the risk of trying to reach the Russian frontier by car. His driver was promptly shot by a picket of the 43rd Infantry. Martos suffered the supreme indignity of a general: being captured apart from his troops.60 Taken to Osterode, he was quartered for the night in the same hotel that sheltered the 8th Army staff. Ludendorff, like Eisenhower in Tunisia thirty years later, had no interest in offering the traditional courtesies to a defeated enemy. Hindenburg took pains personally to greet his adversary, praising the bravery of his corps and expressing regret at meeting under such circumstances. As Hindenburg took his hand, Martos burst into tears.61

  But were the captured guns, the thousands of prisoners, merely Bellona’s jest? Shortly after noon on August 30 an aircraft from Osterode brought François a message that reinforcements were on the way.62 None had appeared by nightfall. Once again the 8th Army suffered from the yawning gap between intelligence information and the practical capacity to respond to that information. Von Staabs for one protested vigorously that the men of his 37th Division were simply too tired to move. By this time Scholtz and his division commanders had acquired a certain reputation as what British Field-Marshal Montgomery would in a later war call “belly-achers,” but this was no time to weed out senior command assignments. Grudgingly, army headquarters agreed to Staabs’s suggestion that the march be delayed until the next day.

  Staabs was at least honest in his reservations. Other commanders simply fudged. Goltz reached the area west of Michalken before stopping. Unger’s men bivouacked in Frankenau. The 41st Division halted northeast of that town. The 3rd Reserve Division received its marching orders so late that Morgen postponed its advance entirely until the next day.63 Nevertheless at 7:30 p.m. on August 30 army command notified François that he would be in tactical command of an attack to be made the next morning against the Russians around Neidenburg. He was authorized to issue any orders he thought necessary, though army headquarters wanted the Goltz Division and the 3rd Reserve Division held as far north of Neidenburg as possible just in case Rennenkampf complicated the situation by a surprise appearance.64

  Nor were the encircled Russians completely helpless. During the afternoon four battalions of Conta’s 1st Brigade, supported by a battalion of the 52nd Field Artillery, had pushed northward into the forest from Muschaken. The operation seemed a walkover. Whole Russian companies led by their officers came in under white flags—so many that the Germans disarmed them and sent them to the rear without escort. Cheering and laughing, the column reached a comfortable-looking meadow just outside the village of Malagofen around 5:00 p.m. The Germans halted, stacked arms, and doffed their equipment. Cooking fires were started, quartermasters were preparing to issue rations, when a burst of Russian rifle fire ended the idyllic maneuver picture.

  Frightened horses dragged guns and wagons in every direction. Riflemen and machine gunners blazed away at random. Officers who had no idea what was happening gave orders anyway. A few company commanders rallied enough men to form a skirmish line and led it into the woods. The brigade commander, Brigadier-General von Trotha, joined the charge with the color party of the I/41st Infantry. The flag was an obvious target and Trotha went down fatally wounded before taking twenty steps. Two battalion commanders were killed trying to rally their men. A battery was temporarily abandoned in the confusion. Colonel Schönfeld of the 41st Infantry finally had his headquarters bugler blow “Rally” again and again. Squad by squad, the Germans straggled into Malagofen and began to sort themselves out. Firing continued until nightfall, with Germans shooting each other more often than Russians. The Russian detachment that had started it all was long since gone, its men never to know what they had done to their conquerors.65

  The incident at Malagofen suggested the encircled Russians could still fight. François slept with his pistol by his side. Morgen, who normally prided himself on his calm, was awakened during the night by loud shouts that the Russians were attacking. Discovering that a zealous orderly had taken away his clothes, the division commander ran outdoors in his nightshirt, strapping on his Luger as he went.66

  Mackensen’s corps also spent an anxious day wondering what had become of the Russians they had faced and beaten on August 26. Here chronology must be modified in the interests of clarity. Most of the Russian VI Corps reached the Ortelsburg area by the morning of August 29. Regimental commanders urged the necessity for a day’s rest. Communications with army headquarters were episodic, and Blagoveschensky was not anxious to report his disaster in detail. He was saved, at least for the moment, by Samsonov’s last order to VI Corps, issued on the 28th while the army commander was riding to meet Martos. It was to hold the Ortelsburg area “at all costs.” Blagoveschensky seized the chance to remain passive, even when German vanguards occupied Ortelsburg itself.67

  His army corps faced no more than companies and shadows. The German detachment from the 35th Division that had arrived in Ortelsburg during the night of August 28/29 left the town on the morning of the 29th and took the road to Willenburg. This was a calculated risk on the part of its commander, Brigadier-General von Hahn. The nearest German troops, a half-dozen companies of the 176th Infantry, were still far back on the road. Hahn’s superior, Major-General Hennig, was correspondingly and uncomfortably surprised when he and his staff drove into Ortelsburg at 1:00 p.m. on the 29th to find only a cavalry detachment trying to keep control of a town still full of Russian stragglers. Within minutes of Hennig’s arrival Russian patrols, elements of the 4th Cavalry Division, gingerly entered Ortelsburg’s outskirts. Were they an isolated force or the vanguard of a counterattack? It was no time for heroics. Hennig and his staff officers abandoned Ortelsburg at top speed under Russian fire and drove north looking for reinforcements.

  By the time they encountered the vanguards of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, the 176th Infantry had reached the scene. The regiment was a drill sergeant’s nightmare. Packs long since abandoned, cartridge belts slung around their necks, the men marched along in a column of flocks, gnawing on chunks of bread obtained from village bakeries and houses by an enterprising reserve lieutenant. But they retained enough energy to clear the Russians out of Ortelsburg by 9:00 p.m.

  His cavalry’s brief success inspired even the supine Blagoveschensky. During the night of August 29/30 elements of VI Corps, about a division supported by some heavy artillery, began advancing towards Ortelsburg from the east and north. It was this force that was spotted by Air Detachment 16. The Russians were indecisive and hesitant, unwilling to press home an attack. Nevertheless the position of the Germans occupying the town was serious. The cavalry had withdrawn the previous evening rather than risk being surprised in bivouac. Hennig had his headquarters staff and six understrength infantry companies—not a single artillery piece or machine gun. One house after another burst into flames as Russian guns found the range, but Hennig refused to abandon Ortelsburg a second time. Instead he sent messengers in every direction requesting support.68

  Army headquarters meanwhile had forwarded the air report of Russian troops near Ortelsburg to Mackensen. The commander of XVII Corps received the information at 11
:20 a.m. on August 30, and found himself once again at square one. His 35th Division was supposed to be making contact with François’s I Corps and rounding up stragglers in the forest around Neidenburg. Instead its commander, at least, was miles north of his assigned sector, playing the hero in a surrounded outpost. The 36th Division was supposed to be acting as a backstop against Russians coming from the north or west. Now Mackensen felt constrained to order that formation to turn eastward, meet the threat from Ortelsburg, and put Hennig back at the head of his own troops where he belonged.69

  Good intentions at higher levels were no substitute for firepower on the line. Hennig’s handful of men were counting their cartridges and eyeing their bayonets when, in a scene more” appropriate to a Hollywood battle than an East Prussian one, two squadrons of the 10th Jäger zu Pferde rode through heavy Russian fire into Ortelsburg. They had left Willenburg; earlier that morning, sent north by Schmettau to find and engage the enemy. The lieutenant-colonel in command heard the guns and marched to their sound as a Prussian officer was supposed to do. His hundred or so carbines were welcome enough on the skirmish line. Even better were the shrapnel rounds of the field battery he brought with him.

  By noon slightly more substantial help arrived in the form of Ortelsburg’s original conquerors. Von Hahn’s detachment had made such slow progress south that one of Hennig’s messengers was able to reach it and turn it around. By this time it was a real flying column—a machinegun company, a squadron of cavalry, and a battalion of field howitzers. The few infantrymen who remained with it were riding captured Cossack horses. At the trot and the gallop, Hahn brought his men the thirteen kilometers to Ortelsburg and took the Russians under fire from positions south of the town. A lieutenant of the 176th led twenty-five men, the remnants of his platoon, in a counterattack just as the shells of eighteen German howitzers began bursting on the Russian positions. And in what seemed like a miracle to the Germans on the spot, the Russians began to retreat east and southeast.70

  This maneuver was less a response to German boldness than a reaction to the Northwest Front’s only direct effort to influence the developing disaster. At 11:00 a.m. Zhilinski’s chief of staff had telegraphed an order to VI Corps. Blagoveschensky was ordered to cooperate with Samsonov by concentrating his corps at Willenberg! He immediately broke off the fighting at Ortelsburg and started his men south, only to be checked during the night of the 30th/31st by another front order—this one to withdraw across the Russian frontier. Once again Blagoveschensy obeyed with alacrity. The surviving Germans were too few to do more than catch their breaths and give thanks to providence.

  François, like Mackensen, respected Russian powers of recovery. His orders for August 31, issued at 5:30 a.m. on that day, were for Goltz and Unger’s troops, the 3rd Reserve Division, the 41st Division, and the 5th Landwehr Brigade to advance against the Russians around Neidenburg. If all went well, he reasoned, this mass of troops should close in on the town from three sides and end the last Russian threat in the south once and for all. But by the time his orders reached their destinations, elements of the 41st Division had reached Neidenburg and found it empty. The Russians occupying the town had retreated during the night.

  Sirelius had learned from survivors of the disaster to the Russian center and calculated the approximate strength of the German forces moving against him. His decision, generally condemned, cost him his command. Had Sirelius moved faster on the 29th, had he risked his superior numbers in overrunning Schlimm’s battalions when the Russians in the pocket still retained their organization, he might have opened a corridor for some of the trapped men. His critics, however, discounted the lessons taught since the opening of the campaign. Prewar Russian doctrine might stress attacking off the line of march. Wartime Russian experience, however brief, suggested improvisation was a recipe for disaster against the Germans. At least Sirelius was able to draw consequences and pull his division out of the German noose. With the Russians in his sector again in flight to the south, François ordered his own corps to continue mopping up while notifying 8th Army that its reserves were free for service as required.71

  The roundup of the 2nd Army’s broken center continued throughout August 31. Skirmish lines and small columns of XVII Corps pushed their way through the forest from the north, collecting stragglers as they went. An Orthodox chaplain negotiated the surrender of several thousand exhausted soldiers to Schmettau just outside Willenberg. At 11:00 a.m. Kluyev himself handed over another thousand men to a detachment of I Corps. Hour by hour the numbers grew. Hundreds, then thousands of men sat glumly under the guard of a few German riflemen. Riderless or unharnessed horses wandered about. The detritus of a broken army, ambulances, supply wagons, telephone carts, piled up on the Neidenburg-Willenberg road. Farm houses filled with captured officers. A village school saw teachers and pupils give way to a half-dozen Russian generals and their staffs. The plunder of a campaign found its way into German knapsacks or pockets. Every Russian officer appeared to carry his own personal hair-clippers somewhere in his baggage. Linen, lingerie, and silverware, looted from houses on the Russian line of march, called forth ironic admiration for the taste of Muscovites who seldom fell prey to kitsch. Even Martos’s car, carefully searched, turned up a large and expensive silver bowl belonging to the local Landrat. Martos denied any knowledge of the object. His chauffeur was not available for interrogation.72

  Detachments and individual Russians continued to straggle in and surrender or to lay down their arms after a brief exchange of honor-saving shots. Other parties, bolder or luckier, made their way across the border. But the only organized formation that broke through the German cordon was a cavalry brigade reduced to about two hundred riders—all that remained intact of Samsonov’s main body.73

  The Germans seemed almost as disorganized by victory as the Russians by defeat. The I and XVII Corps in particular had companies and battalions scattered everywhere from Neidenburg and Ortelsburg to the Russian frontier, securing booty and guarding prisoners. Cleaning up proved almost as much a challenge as winning the battle. The sandy roads of the region were blocked in every direction by destroyed or abandoned guns, caissons, carts, and wagons. Dead Russians were beginning to bloat in the August heat. Wounded Russians were being combed out of the woods by search parties. Tens of thousands of prisoners had to be evacuated to Germany on a railroad network straining to support a developing two-front war. They had to be fed without drawing on supplies destined for the 8th Army; no one took seriously the kaiser’s shocking suggestion that the captives simply be driven into a barren peninsula in the Baltic and left to starve.74

  On the evening of August 30 Ludendorff tempered his boasts to OHL with praise for the tenacity of the Russians and warnings that the battle in the south might not yet be over. But by the afternoon of the 31st he was reporting the “complete destruction” of the enemy. Sixty thousand prisoners, he declared, were in German hands, with more certain to come as stragglers were rounded up. Three Russian corps had been annihilated; the commanders of two of them, Martos of XV and Kluyev of XIII, were prisoners. The battle, Ludendorff declared, was over. Eighth Army was ready for new operations. As for Rennenkampf’s army, it appeared to be going nowhere.

  This did not stop Ludendorff from requesting reinforcements. However strongly he may have denied his need for XI Corps and the Guard Reserve Corps while the battle was going on, Ludendorff on the 31st declared that “in spite of the victory” their arrival would now be welcome. He also requested heavy artillery for use against the Russian fortresses in the interior. Next stop—St. Petersburg.75

  In response the 8th Army shook off its brief victory euphoria. Staff officers began studying maps and charts, their eye on the next moves. Stragglers rejoined their units, or were delivered by the military police. Replacements arrived from provincial depots themselves often disrupted by the invasion. Lightly wounded men showed off their bandages. Talk of Iron Crosses swept the ranks. The dead were buried in those neat little cemeteries that w
ere the German army’s pride: fifty here and a hundred there, neatly fenced and marked. Not yet for them the anonymity of Verdun or the Somme, where cynics and realists sang to the tune of Zapfenstreich, “Auf Wiedersehen ins Massengrab, wir sehen uns wieder ins Massengrab....” That time was coming.

  PART IV

  THE BITTER FRUITS OF VICTORY

  10

  Opportunities and llusions

  The details of the Russian disaster at Tannenberg remain varied. Eighth Army headquarters was too busy to tally jots and tittles. On the Russian side nobody was left to keep records. The German official history gives a total of 92,000 Russian prisoners, plus approximately 50,000 dead and wounded. These are the figures most frequently cited, and while the Germans could hardly be accused of understatement, their numbers are probably reasonably reliable. In operational terms, the Russian 2nd Army had been annihilated. Its center corps were destroyed. Only two thousand stragglers from XV Corps and the 2nd Division escaped the German noose. The XIII Corps had three thousand men left in its two divisions. The I and VI Corps could muster at most the equivalent of a division each, and both formations were badly demoralized. N. N. Golovine gives an elaborate breakdown of the prisoners taken by each German corps in an attempt to prove that the 2nd Army did not really surrender as a unit. But 90,000 prisoners constituted a self-evident fact.1

  I

  On closer examination, however, the data begins to blur. Two Russian corps had been destroyed, and two more badly mauled. But the Russian army of 1914 mobilized no fewer than thirty-seven active corps, to say nothing of independent brigades, reserve formations, and enough individual replacements to begin reconstituting 2nd Army’s decimated formations almost immediately. Losses of guns and equipment, while serious, were not out of proportion to the forces engaged.