The First World War

by John Keegan

  It was, nevertheless, to Ludendorff that Hindenburg looked for an initiative when the two arrived at Eighth Army on 23 August. Its headquarters had moved from Marienburg, ancient commandery of the Teutonic Knights, to Rastenburg, future location of Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, the day before. On 24 August, the two generals went forward to confer with Scholtz, commanding XX Corps opposite Samsonov’s Second Army, which was advancing to contact after its long flank march but was not yet engaged. Scholtz was nervous, expecting an offensive against him in strength but doubting his troops’ ability to withstand it. He wanted to withdraw. Ludendorff was adamant that he must hold his ground. Assistance would reach him, but not if he retreated away from it. He must stand and fight.

  The help on its way had been started forward not by Hindenburg or Ludendorff, but by the superseded Prittwitz who, after recovering from the shock of Gumbinnen, had grasped that François, despite losing 8,000 casualties, had halted Rennenkampf and so freed forces to be used elsewhere. Old war games, some played by Schlieffen himself, had taught Prittwitz’s generation of officers that the correct strategy for defending the East Prussian frontier was to defeat one Russian army one side of the lakes, then use the north-south railway lines to send forces behind them to the other side and repeat the process. With remarkable moral courage and wise advice from his Chief of Staff, Max Hoffmann, he decided that Rennenkampf could be counted as beaten, or at least checked, and, before Hindenburg’s arrival, had already initiated the movement of I and XVII Corps to meet Samsonov on the southern front. Ludendorff did not, therefore, have to devise a plan—though he had already come to the same conclusions as Prittwitz—but merely to endorse one already in execution.

  On the Russian side, Rennenkampf correctly sensed that the German forces in front of him were thinning out but inferred that François and Mackensen were withdrawing to the Königsberg fortress on the Baltic coast. That they had departed in haste, loading their troops into rail waggons and leaving only a screen of cavalry and local Landwehr to hold François’s former positions, he did not guess. He believed he was faced with the burden of a deliberate siege of Königsberg, requiring much infantry and a reinforcement of heavy artillery, all taking time to assemble. As to urgent action, he and Zhilinsky, at North-West Front headquarters, had formed the conclusion that the task lay with Samsonov, now breasting up to contact with the Germans south of the lakes, who must be cut off by him from escape across the lower Vistula. To ensure the necessary encircling movement, he was ordered to swing his left wing even further away from Rennenkampf, who was meanwhile probing forward slowly with cavalry and transmitting orders for the planned siege of Königsberg by radio.19

  Russian radio insecurity has become part of the legend of the Tannenberg campaign, as the sequence of battles came to be named. In its most sensational form, the story has the radio sections of Rennenkampf’s and Samsonov’s headquarters signalling detailed reports of the two armies’ movements and intentions to each other en clair, to be intercepted and acted upon with deadly effect by their German opposite numbers. The reality is less simple and more mundane. There was a good deal of Russian signalling en clair, but it was a fault of which the Germans were guilty also. The reason, on the Russian side, was not Oblomovian laziness but difficulty in distribution of code books, on the German side lack of time. German operators were pressed and often transmitted uncoded messages on the calculation that they would be missed by listeners, just as they knew their own listeners missed so many Russian messages. “Neither instruments nor operators could be spared to scan empty air,” and there was also a shortage of interpreters.20 The East Prussian ether, in late August 1914, therefore crackled with messages of which neither enemy could make use.

  On the morning of 25 August, however, Hindenburg had a stroke of luck. Just before his departure from Eighth Army headquarters, he was passed the transcript of a complete Russian First Army order for an advance to the siege of Königsberg which revealed that it would halt some distance from the city on 26 August, well short of any position from which it could come to Second Army’s assistance in the battle he planned to unleash.21 Furnished with this assurance, he met von François, whose corps was just beginning to arrive on Samsonov’s flank, in confident mood. Distance was working for him, the distance separating Samsonov and Rennenkampf’s armies, and so now too was time, the self-imposed delay in Rennenkampf’s advance which, had it been pressed, would have put the First Army well behind the lakeland zone in positions from which it could have marched south to Samsonov’s assistance.

  Then François, whose stubborn aggressiveness could take a wilfully unco-operative form, interrupted the smooth unrolling of a plan that should have brought his I corps, XVII and XX successively into action against Samsonov’s flanks. Claiming that he was awaiting the arrival of his artillery by train, he was slow off the mark to attack on 25 August, and slow again the next day. Ludendorff arrived to energise the offensive, with characteristic effect, but François’s hesitation had meanwhile had a desirable if unintended result. Unopposed in force to his front, Samsonov had thrust his centre forward, towards the Vistula against which he hoped to pin the Germans, thus exposing lengthening flanks both to François, now to his south, and to Mackensen and Scholtz, who were marching XVII and XX Corps down from the north. On 27 August François rediscovered his bite and pushed his men on. Samsonov, disregarding the danger to his rear, pressed on also. On 28 August his leading troops savaged a miscellaneous collection of German troops they found in their path and broke through almost to open country, with the Vistula beyond. Ludendorff, seized by a fit of the nerves his stolid appearance belied, ordered François to detach a division to the broken units’ assistance. François, creatively unco-operative on this occasion, did not obey but drove every battalion he had eastward at best speed. With the weight of Samsonov’s army moving westward by different routes, there was little to oppose them. On the morning of 29 August, his leading infantry reached Willenberg, just inside East Prussia from Russian territory, and met German troops coming the other way. They belonged to Mackensen’s XVII Corps, veterans of the fighting south of the Masurian Lakes, who had been attacking southward since the previous day. Contact between the claws of the two pincers—the units were the 151st Ermland Infantry of I Corps and the 5th Blücher Hussars of XVII—announced that Samsonov was surrounded.22

  “Cauldron” battles were to be a repeated feature of the fighting in the Second World War, particularly in the east, where in 1941 the German army time and again surrounded Russians by the hundreds of thousands. Victories of encirclement were almost never to be achieved in the First. That was one reason which made Tannenberg—as Hindenburg decided to call the battle, in vindication of the defeat in 1410 of the Teutonic Knights by the Slavs at a place on the 1914 battlefield—so singular. The Germans counted 92,000 Russian prisoners, besides 50,000 enemy killed and wounded. The casualty list, already greatly exceeded in the west, was unremarkable by the standards of campaigns yet to come. The total of prisoners taken would rarely be exceeded in any comparable episode of the war or indeed approached. Tannenberg, as a result, became for the Germans their outstanding victory of the conflict. Not only had it saved the Prussian heartland from occupation by an enemy the German propagandists increasingly chose to depict as “barbarian”—quite unfairly, for the Russian commanders, numbers of whom were Baltic Germans with family connections in East Prussia, had maintained high standards of behaviour among their soldiers—but it had also averted the danger of a deeper advance into industrial Silesia and towards Berlin.23 Tannenberg was a deliverance, and celebrated as such. After the war the colours of the regiments that fought there were displayed in a monumental Tannenberg memorial, modelled on Stonehenge, in which the body of Hindenburg was interred after his death as President. In 1945, when the Russians reappeared in East Prussia in irresistible force, it was disinterred and the monument dynamited. The Tannenberg regiments’ colours now hang in the Hamburg officer cadet school while Hindenburg’s body has
been given a final resting place at Schloss Hohenzollern, the seat of the imperial dynasty.24

  Tannenberg had a military importance different from its symbolic significance, and far greater. It reversed the timetable of Germany’s war plan. Before the triumph, victory was expected in the west, while the front in the east was to be held as best it might be. After Tannenberg, disaster in the east no longer threatened, while victory in the west continued to elude week after week. Tannenberg temporarily devastated the Russians. Poor Samsonov, overcome by the catastrophe, barely escaped with his life from the battle of encirclement. He did not keep it long. Riding with his officers, he repeatedly expressed despair: “The Emperor trusted me. How can I face him again?”25 Finding a means to be alone for a few moments, he shot himself. His body was later recovered, and buried on the family estate. It was a kinder ending than that met by so many of his soldiers, who died anonymously in the undergrowth of the Prussian forests, untended in their last hours, undiscovered in death. Their bones lie there to this day and the news of their passing was communicated to their families only by the expiry of hope. Tannenberg was the beginning of the long agony of the Tsar’s armies which would culminate in their collapse in 1917.

  Yet, for all the incompetence of their commanders and inadequacy of their means to fight, the Russians retained resilience, as they were to show time and again in the campaigns of 1915 and 1916. They were to show it immediately in 1914. Despite Samsonov’s collapse, Rennenkampf refused in the aftermath of Tannenberg to accept defeat. When Hindenburg turned against him the whole weight of Eighth Army, now reinforced by the IX and Guard Reserve Corps from the west, he handled his troops with dexterity. It was they who were now outnumbered, despite the arrival of Tenth Army from the rear. First Army, Hindenburg’s target, still only counted nine divisions, against the Germans’ eighteen, but in what came to be called the battle of the Masurian Lakes, launched on 7 September, the same day as the opening of the battle of the Marne, it evaded all Hindenburg’s efforts to organise an encirclement. François, directing the first stage, succeeded in cutting off some units at Lötzen in the heart of the lakeland. Thereafter Rennenkampf conducted a fighting retreat, in and above the lakes, switching units from one flank to another as need arose. On 13 September he crossed back into Russian territory, having extricated his whole army, drawing the Germans behind him. By 25 September delaying actions had allowed him the time and room to organise his own and Tenth Army for a counter-attack and on that day he unleashed it, driving the Germans from their positions, recapturing much of the ground lost and in places returning to the lines reached on the Angerapp during the August invasion.

  GALICIA AND SERBIA

  The high point of the Masurian Lakes counter-offensive, however, was a tactical rather than a strategic success, for it engaged only a fraction of Russia’s forces. The majority were deployed across the southern face of the Polish salient, facing the Austrians, whose main line of resistance ran along the crests of the Carpathians, through which the strategic passes led down to the Hungarian plain, to the Danube and towards the Austrian heartland. This was an enormous front, 300 miles in length from the junction of the Austrian and Russian borders with neutral Romania to Cracow in Austrian Poland, and defended by large fortifications, of which those at Lemberg (Lvov) and Przemysl had recently been modernised. The Russian war plan required the concentration on this sector of four armies, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Eighth, forming the South-Western Front under General Nikolai Ivanov, on mobilisation. They were to attack as soon as deployed. The Austrians, too, intended to attack as soon as mobilisation was completed. Because of confusion over choice of priorities between the fronts in Galicia and Serbia, however, the Austrians were slower to concentrate their force against Russia than they should have been, while the Russians, defying the German and Austrian staff appreciations, were quicker; their enemies had not made allowance for the fact that two-fifths of Russia’s peacetime strength was stationed in the Polish salient, or for the eventuality that the Stavka would start the troops in Poland forward before general mobilisation had been completed. It was a crucial difference in attitude. The Teutonic general staffs, which had last gone to war over forty years earlier, could not conceive of large-scale operations beginning before everything their war plans stipulated was in place. The less programmatic Russians, with the Japanese War only recently over and the experience before that of decades of frontier fighting in Central Asia, were much readier to improvise. The result was that, by the end of August, the Russians had fifty-three infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions in place on the Austrian front, while the Austrians had only thirty-seven infantry and ten cavalry divisions to oppose them. The Russian formations, moreover, were larger than the Austrian; and while Russia was under pressure from France to mount operations that would divert German forces from the Western Front to the east, Austria was under even heavier pressure to act in relief of the outnumbered German Eighth Army in East Prussia.

  Austria’s principal emotional, if not rational, war aim, however, remained the punishment of Serbia, which had precipitated the July crisis by its involvement in the Sarajevo assassinations. Sense would have argued that Austria deploy its whole strength forward of the Carpathians to engage the Russians, the Serbs’ protectors and great Slav brothers. Outrage, and decades of provocation, demanded the defeat of the Belgrade government and the upstart Karageorgevic dynasty. Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian Chief of Staff, had long had prepared a plan to deal with Serbia alone, a situation known as “War Case B.” During 1912–13, however, increasing consideration was given to the likelihood that a crisis with Serbia would precipitate a Russian war, “War Case R,” demanding that the Balkan army be reduced to strengthen that in Galicia.26 The General Staff tinkered with the deployment of three groups: the “A-Staffel” that would go to Galicia in the event of a Russian war, the “Balkan Group” that would attack Serbia, and the “B-Staffel” that would participate in either campaign, depending on the promptness of Russian mobilisation. The railway planning section prepared timetables accordingly.

  In the event, the Austrians muddled. Conrad, whose hatred of the Serbs was almost pathological, claimed as mobilisation began that Russia’s military intentions were not clear and that it was safe to send B-Staffel to join the Balkan group, which he did. When it became clear that Russia intended to attack in Galicia, which was not only Austria’s strategy also but a solemn duty owed to the Germans, he decided, as he had to, that B-Staffel must go north; but as it was on its way south, and re-timetabling would present difficulties, he allowed it on 1 August to proceed after all and to take part in the attack on Serbia before re-entraining to the Galician front. It was given the mission of making a “demonstration,” to draw Serbian forces away from the main axis of the Austrian invasion.

  The idea of a demonstration revealed how little the Austrians understood the Serbs’ military qualities. In Vienna they were thought of as backward semi-barbarians. The Serbian officer corps’ participation in the murder and mutilation of the Obrenovic King and Queen in 1903, and the widely reported practice of mutilation of corpses during the Balkan Wars, had led the Austrian army to imagine that a campaign in the Balkans would present little more difficulty than the British or French commonly encountered in their colonial campaigns in Africa or Asia. True, the Serbs had participated in the successful defeat of the Turks in 1912 but the Turks, too, were thought to be backward barbarians. The Austrians, despite the known impassability of Serbia’s terrain, high, forested mountains cut by deep river valleys, with few roads and almost no railways, expected a walkover.

  In fact the Serbs, if barbarian in the cruelty with which they waged war, were not militarily backward at all. Their system of conscription mobilised, even if by informal means, a higher proportion of the male population than in any other European country and their soldiers, from boys to old men, were naturally warlike as well as fiercely patriotic. They were also frugal and hardy. Their arms were varied; but every man had a wea
pon and the first-line units retained most of the modern weapons acquired during the Balkan Wars, including a hundred batteries of artillery and four machine guns per infantry regiment. With a third-line reserve of men aged forty to forty-five and “capable soldiers of sixty and seventy, affectionately known as ‘uncles’ ” joining the first and second lines (poziv), Serbia could put 400,000 men into the field, almost as many as those in the Sixth, Fifth and Second Armies of Austria’s B-Staffel.27

  The Austrians nevertheless began with an advantage, for the Serbian commander, the voivode (war leader) Radomir Putnik, expected an attack from the north out of Hungary across the Danube towards Belgrade. Instead, Conrad’s plan was for an attack from the west, out of Bosnia, into the salient of Serbian territory enclosed by the Drina and Sava rivers. There was sense in it, for the salient is one of the few areas of level terrain in the whole of the country, and at first the advance, begun on 12 August, went well, benefiting from the Austrians’ ability to attack concentrically, south across the Sava, east across the Drina. Had Putnik hurried his troops forward, they might have been encircled and trapped. The canny veteran—voivode is an honorific given only to generals who have won a victory, as Putnik had spectacularly done against the Turks—declined the risk. Instead he organised his main line of resistance behind the plain, along the River Vardar and the high ground beyond. The defenders did not arrive until the night of 14 August, having force-marched sixty miles in forty-eight hours, but, once in place, brought devastating fire to bear on the attackers at close range. Potiorek, the Austrian commander, signalled Conrad to request the intervention of Second Army, the “swing” formation of the R and B Plans, in order to take pressure off. Conrad refused, despite Potiorek’s report of a “frightful heat” in the fighting.28 He appealed again on 16 August, as the fighting intensified, and a third time on 17 August, when the request was granted, on condition that the “swing” formation’s departure for Galicia was not delayed. The battle on the Drina and Sava now involved the Austrian Fifth and Sixth Armies, part of the Second and the whole of the Serbian, which, driven back and forward by the weight of Austrian artillery fire, always returned to the attack and gradually overbore the Austrians by its persistence. On 19 August the commander of the Austrian Fifth Army had withdrawn it across the Sava. The Second Army made a final, ineffective intervention on 20 August, before departing to join the A-Staffel in Galicia, as it should have done at the start. The Sixth Army had never been properly engaged and joined the general withdrawal. By 24 August the Serbs had expelled the enemy from the whole of their territory.