If victory has many fathers, defeat too is rarely an orphan. Its roots are sought so assiduously that when the critics are finished, every aspect of the vanquished military system and the socio-political order supporting it have been presented in such a negative context that future generations wonder how such a ramshackle society and such a patchwork army ever dared try conclusions in battle. While the most familiar examples remain France in 1870 and 1940, the France of Zola’s La Débacle and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, Tsarist Russia takes a strong second place in the literature, and Tannenberg plays a key role in that literature.
Though most of the senior Russian officers involved were re-employed, a number of divisional and regimental commanders had their careers broken early. This gave them ample time to tell their stories with memories sharpened, if not always rendered more accurate, by idleness. The success of the Russian Revolution offered still another reason for concentrating on Tannenberg. A generation of officers forced into exile and poverty found accounts of this great German victory from the other side of the hill were reasonably marketable in central Europe—not exactly best-sellers, but worth a few hundred marks in royalties and publishers’ advances. Postwar Russian writers, the most recent and familiar being Alexander Solzhenitsyn, continue to find Tannenberg a convenient metaphor for the collapse of a doomed system.
In such a context the initial German response to their victory seems significantly mundane. The first reports of Tannenberg were almost lost in the excitement of the developing western front. To the men in the headquarters and on the fighting lines in Lorraine or Picardy, tales of a whole army destroyed and tens of thousands of prisoners taken seemed exercises in fantasy—not least because such triumphs had eluded them. At OHL the picture was clearer. As early as August 28, Tappen noted in his diary that “victory in the east appears to be an accomplished fact.” By the 31st Wenninger, whose attention had been distracted for several days by an inspection tour of the Bavarian army, was able to write that the results of the victory were growing by the hour, with 60,000 prisoners already counted.4
For the 8th Army’s staff any desire to relax, whether among the rank and file or on the part of their commanders, was a threat to be fought with every possible moral weapon. The Russian 1st Army was still virtually intact and little more than a day’s forced march from the German rear. Max Hoffmann apologized to his wife for being too busy to write, excusing himself by describing a work schedule that kept him from sleeping more than two hours a night.5 He and Ludendorff were at their professional best during the first days of September in redeploying their weary men to the north against Rennenkampf. Reinforced by the two corps from the western theater, the Germans began their attack on September 7. In many ways it was a reprise of the earlier fighting. Mackensen’s corps once again suffered ruinous casualties in frontal attacks against prepared Russian positions around Lötzen. François repeated his flank maneuver at Gumbinnen from the other direction, the south. This time, as I Corps drove deep into the Russian rear, Mackensen’s divisions finally broke through their front. With five thousand prisoners and sixty guns in German hands, with two veteran corps poised to roll up the Russian flank, another Tannenberg seemed in the making.
Its failure to materialize indicated once again that great victories depend on the quality of one’s enemies. Rennenkampf’s right and center corps not only held their positions but mounted a series of local counterattacks fierce anough to alarm XI Corps on the German left wing. This formation had not been heavily engaged in the west. Its regiments were still recovering physically from the march into France and the enervating train ride across Germany. Its commanders had not yet taken the measure of their adversaries. But neither Ludendorff nor Hindenburg were any more willing to take risks than they had been at Tannenberg. On September 11, army headquarters ordered Mackensen and François to close towards the north and provide direct support for XI Corps instead of attempting to envelop the Russian left.
The decision reflected a general belief at 8th Army headquarters that the Russians were preparing to fight it out as Samsonov had done two weeks earlier. Zhilinski, at least, had intended Rennenkampf to stand his ground and deter German pursuit of the 2nd Army’s remnants. Rennenkampf for his part was worried about both his flanks. The prospects of a sortie from Königsberg, perhaps reinforced from the sea, initially concerned him almost as much as any threat from 8th Army. Once François’s move against the Russian left became clear Rennenkampf acted decisively if unheroically. He ordered a general retreat. In the context of Samsonov’s disaster, discretion seemed by far the better part of valor. His corps and division commanders, eager to avoid the German buzz saw, forced the pace. Withdrawing as far as twenty-five miles a day, the Russians literally ran faster than the Germans could chase them. Eighth Army’s men, footsore and exhausted, lagged behind on the sandy roads. Periodic efforts to send the army’s two cavalry divisions forward in independent pursuit proved vain because of the troopers’ inability to get forward along roads blocked for miles by abandoned carts and wagons. No one in the Russian supply services wanted to be the last man on German soil. Instead teamsters cut traces and rode to safety on their draft horses. Others simply took to the forests. Pushing through the mess they left behind was well-nigh impossible even for fresh troops.6
By mid-September, only rear guards and stragglers remained of the great Russian invasion. If Rennenkampf’s army had managed to escape with its structure intact, it had lost 150 guns and all its transport. Its units would need a good deal of work before they would again amount to much as combat troops. But an indication that this double victory was to be something other than an immediately recognized world-historical event came on September 14, when 8th Army’s signal troops opened lines of communication from the new headquarters in Insterburg to OHL and to the Austrian high command. Since arriving in the east, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been too preoccupied with their own problems to pay systematic attention to developments on other fronts. Now they learned the details of the Schlieffen Plan’s failure, of the French counterattacks and the German withdrawal that constituted the Battle of the Marne.7
More seriously and more immediately, the German commanders also discovered that the Austrian advance into the Polish salient had been a high road to disaster. Conrad had sent four armies marching into Galicia. Successful small-scale battles along the frontier obscured the fact that the Austrian lines of advance were extrinsic, with their armies actually marching away from each other. On August 23 the Russians counterattacked at Lemberg. Within a week the Austrians were in a retreat that by mid-September turned to a rout bringing the Russians almost to the frontier of Hungary. In the process the Austrian army lost a third of its fighting strength—a quarter-million dead and wounded, over 100,000 prisoners. Included in the casualties were a disproportionate number of career officers and NCOs, the cadres on which a polyglot army depended heavily for its cohesion.8 While Austria-Hungary was far from the military cipher of legend in the war’s later years, Winston Churchill’s judgment that Conrad broke his army’s heart and used it up in less than a month nevertheless stands as an epitaph for the Habsburg Empire’s status as a great power.9
The Austrian collapse ended any hope of exploiting the German victories in East Prussia. Instead Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the bulk of 8th Army—now renumbered the 9th—were transferred south, into Silesia, to support their ally directly and secure their own frontier from invasion. In an operation facilitated by clumsy Russian efforts at redeployment, the Germans drove to the Vistula River by October 6, threatening Warsaw itself. But the Russians were too strong, the Germans too weak, the Austrians too crippled, to sustain the offensive’s momentum. By the end of October the Germans had retreated almost to their original start lines. And within days the Russian army in turn mounted its best-coordinated offensive of the war to date, rolling through Poland almost to the Silesian border. Once again Ludendorff used the railroads to shift his Tannenberg veterans, this time northward into Posen on the right flank of the Russian advance. But the German counterthrust into the Russian rear, towards the city of Łodz, provided an object lesson in the risks of consistently underestimating an adversary. This time the Russians held, rallied, and counterattacked, isolating an entire corps. With memories of Tannenberg and fears of a Tannenberg in reverse throbbing at all levels of command, the Germans fought their way out of the encirclement.10