Both repaid their commanders’ confidence. It was a gamble dependent for success on the marching ability of the troops and the carrying capacity of East Prussia’s railway network. They implemented plans, already drafted by staff officers on the ground, to concentrate their entire strength against the southern sector. Hindenburg had a reputation for unshakeable imperturbability, Ludendorff for erratic brilliance. Second Army’s situation created an opportunity for a new German team: Paul von Hindenburg as commanding general, and Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff. Samsonov’s axis of advance with Second Army-mostly determined by poor roads-extended so widely that its subordinate corps found maintaining lateral contact increasingly difficult. Rennenkampf’s First Army advanced slowly and lost touch with the Germans it was ostensibly pursuing. The oft-mentioned, but essentially imaginary, hostility between their commanders, Paul von Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov, contributed far less to the resulting entropy than did inadequate communications, poor intelligence and worse staff work. The headquarters of Northwestern Front left the army commanders to their own devices. The Russians, however, failed to press their advantage or coordinate their movements. Mounted with overwhelmingly superior forces, the operation seemed on its way to success when the German theater commander panicked and proposed abandoning East Prussia entirely. Russia responded to this opening with a two-pronged drive into that exposed province-one army advancing west across the Niemen River, the other northwest from Russian Poland. Germany’s war plan, accepting a two-front conflict against France and Russia, initially allowed only token forces to defend East Prussia. The opening clash between the German and Russian empires in World War I ended in one of history’s most misleading outcomes. To find out more about the magazine and how to subscribe, click here.What We Learned From Tannenberg, 1914 Close This is an article from the October 2014 issue of Military History Matters. But it was not decisive in any wider sense: Rennenkampf’s First Army fell back in good order after the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, while Germany’s Austro-Hungarian allies crashed to disastrous defeat in Galicia. Tannenberg was a decisive defensive battle in that it saved East Prussia from invasion. Both sides were aware that much en clair messaging was relatively safe. In any case, the air was alive with radio communications, and it required large numbers of trained enemy operators, fully equipped for interception work, to take full advantage. The Russian problem was lack of codebooks and trained personnel. The Germans also sent many uncoded messages during the campaign. The use of uncoded radio signals was not due to incompetence. In this respect, it represented a mix of 18th- and 20th-century technology. Beyond railhead, it moved at the speed of marching men and horse-drawn transport. The German Army, though more advanced than the Russian, was itself a hybrid. The technical arms were especially good: the Russian artillery was numerous and well-served, and there were no less than 244 military aircraft available at the outbreak of war. Part of the way through its modernisation programme, the Russian Army was a mix of tradition and modernity. The Russian ‘steamroller’ was not a uniformly primitive military machine. In consequence, the decisive battle of the war of movement in East Prussia was fought two weeks before that in the West (the Battle of the Marne). In fact, the Russians mobilised rapidly and launched an immediate offensive to relieve the pressure on their French allies in the West. German plans assumed slow Russian mobilisation. Russian prisoners being held at Tilsit station in August 1914.
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