As winter set in and fronts stabilized, evaluations began. Tannenberg was the first battle between two great empires in what was expected to be an off-the-shelf, come-as-you-are war. Such a conflict is a corresponding test of professionalism. How well did the adversaries prepare for the contingencies they expected? More importantly, how successful were they in maintaining the initiative? This question is particularly important in a war’s first stages. As the Army of Northern Virginia demonstrated after Gettysburg and the Wehrmacht after Kursk, an experienced, worked-in army can damage even a significantly superior adversary to the point of exhaustion by ripostes. An army first taking the field after a long period of peace can put no such trust in either its fighting power or its powers of improvisation. It is impossible to determine precisely which officers and units will perform up to their responsibilities, which will prove hopeless, and which will develop with seasoning—if seasoning is an affordable luxury. This fact enhances the importance of taking a first battle to the enemy, not necessarily by incessant offensive action, but by constraining him to fight your way.11
In this context the discrepancies between the German and the Russian armies in East Prussia were by no means as great as myth and history suggest. Both fought about as they expected to fight, and faced no major surprises. Tactically the adversaries were reasonably well matched. The fighting was on terms even enough that the Russians’ consistent hopes of turning around the campaign by winning the next day’s action were by no means ill-founded, especially since the Germans’ flexibility at platoon and company levels was accompanied by a corresponding instability. The Germans’ proneness to panic when surprised, or to break unpredictably and all at once after a day’s hard fighting, offered significant opportunities for an enemy able to take advantage of them. The repeated successes of German officers in rallying their men and bringing them back into the firing line owed much to their being left undisturbed in their work.
In contrast to the German situation, the Russian soldiers were appreciably better than their officers. In attack they overran positions by weight of numbers; in defense they were likely to die before they ran. But they tended, for good and ill, to stay where they were placed. The men of both Samsonov’s and Rennenkampf’s armies were easier to outmaneuver than to outfight. And that fact in turn reflected the Russians’ essential command failure: commitment to a strategy of maneuver, a strategy that paid more attention to lines on a map than to the enemy’s presence in the field.
In making this commitment, the Russian command at all levels was guilty of misunderstanding the essential nature of its tool. The Russian army was a broadsword. It could not be used like a rapier. It could not fight like even a blurred carbon copy of the German. And as a result of the friction generated by false expectations, it sacrificed too many of its concrete advantages. Rennenkampf’s often-cited diliatoriness was less significant in this respect than the misplaced focus on operational flexibility of Samsonov and his corps commanders, who consistently gave their German opposite numbers the thing they most needed: time to recover from shocks and surprises.
German performances in the Tannenberg campaign are best described as professional. The 8th Army operated within expected frameworks, and sustained a command structure that in turn made sustainable demands on subordinates’ capabilities. At corps and army levels the Germans’ reaction time was consistently within the Russians’ loop of initiative. The German conduct of operations also showed the importance of will power at a period when the availability of information far outweighed the capacity to act on that information. The real importance of the often-cited radio interceptions was as a security blanket, helping army and corps staffs to execute decisions already made. For the Germans as much as for the Russians, attempts to change plans too often resulted in dangerous levels of confusion. And when a German corps commander was left altogether on his own, like François at Stallupönen or Mackensen at Gumbinnen, the results were not much more impressive than those achieved by their Russian counterparts.
Administratively the Germans were far more successful than the Russians in keeping their troops supplied. Logistics are particularly important to citizen armies in their first weeks of war—and only partly because the men in the ranks have not yet learned to look after themselves. War brings with it a basic uncertainty, an ongoing fear that can be at least be reduced by everyday proof that the system works well enough to deliver the rations.
Tannenberg’s significance, however, transcended the operational level. Above all the victory lent domestic credence to Germany’s definition of her war as fundamentally defensive. Prewar advocates of militia systems or citizen armies justified them largely on the grounds that citizen soldiers could not be mobilized for participation in aggressive wars as readily as professionals or mercenaries.12 Their position was partly validated by the deliberate, not to say desperate, efforts of the continental combatants to present the war of 1914 as a defensive measure. The sense of protecting home and hearth was an important element of morale in all of the conscript armies. Its waning or overshadowing prefigured collapse, whether in 1916 Russia, 1917 France, or 1918 Germany.
This was a sense particularly difficult to sustain in a Germany whose main armies stood deep in enemy territory from the war’s first days. The letters and diaries of the reservists, draftees, and war volunteers who made up the vast bulk of the fighting forces indicate a significant dichotomy between an intellectual conviction of Germany’s righteous cause and the pragmatic reality that it was French and Belgian towns that were being destroyed, French and Belgian civilians coping with the burdens of military occupation.13 Tannenberg, however, was fought on German soil. The destruction accompanying the Russian invasion, mild enough by the standards of 1632, 1812, or 1945, served as an early warning of what the Fatherland might expect if its defenders faltered.
By September 1, Germany’s media began to react. Tannenberg made headlines in every corner of the Reich. It inspired speeches, parades, and votes of thanks. Such a mystique developed about no other battles of World War I. One of the most enduring legends pictured an old general who spent the years of his retirement devising a gigantic trap for a Russian invasion, exploring paths and sounding the bottoms of marshes in which the enemy was to be engulfed and then fulfilling his dream in 1914.14 Another, this one slightly more plausible, developed as the shadow of Ludendorff grew behind Hindenburg. It described a masterly plan for a second Cannae, improvised and dictated by Ludendorff as the train bore him eastward.15 Ludendorff, never a man to be modest about his own achievements, himself denied this by recounting in his memoirs a conversation which he had in October 1914 with the Spanish military attaché. That officer asked if Tannenberg had been fought according to a set plan, and was extremely surprised when Ludendorff told him it had not.16 But the myth defied suppression.