From the first day of hostilities, the French bombarded the Russians with appeals to move against the Germans. The German assault on Belgium turned out to be conducted on a broader front and with larger forces than they had anticipated. France now found herself in great jeopardy, the more so because the assault on the German center, the key to Plan XVII, made little headway.
Russian mobilization, as planned, was completed by early November.43 Nicholas wanted to lead the army into battle personally, but allowed himself to be dissuaded (for the time being) by the Council of Ministers on the grounds that reverses at the front would damage his prestige.44 Since it was custom for the army’s supreme command to be entrusted to a member of the Imperial family, given the nearly autocratic powers accorded the Commander in Chief in the zone of combat, the post went to the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. This appointment was received with some surprise, because even though the Grand Duke had graduated from the General Staff Academy and was popular with the military, he had not been involved in the preparation of strategic plans. Nevertheless, it was indubitably the best choice under the circumstances.45 Nikolai was one of the few members of the ruling dynasty to be favorably viewed by public opinion, which credited him with persuading the Tsar to sign the October Manifesto. His very popularity, however, made him enemies at the Court: the Empress, in particular, suspected him of designs on the throne.
As agreed with France, Russia deployed two armies in the northwest. The First Army, commanded by General Paul-Georg Karlovich von Rennenkampf, a Baltic German, was stationed in the Vilno Military District. The Second, under General Alexander Samsonov, was deployed near Warsaw. Rennenkampf had participated in the Japanese war as division commander but had never led larger units. Samsonov had no combat experience.
The sources differ on Russian strategic intentions in July 1914, but the conduct of the operations suggests that they had initially planned to attack the Germans and the Austrians simultaneously in drives on Berlin and Vienna. According to one historian with access to the archives, the Russians changed their plans at the last minute under French pressure in favor of immediate operations against German forces in East Prussia. The hastily mounted East Prussian campaign was meant to eliminate the threat of a flanking movement against Russian armies advancing westwards in Poland and Galicia.46 The strategic plan now put into effect called for the First Army to invade East Prussia from the east to pin down the bulk of the German forces deployed there, while the Second Army struck north, in the direction of Allenstein, to cut them off from Germany proper. Having accomplished these missions, Rennenkampf and Samsonov were to join forces and advance on Berlin. The two Russian armies enjoyed considerable preponderance in numbers (one and a half to one), an advantage somewhat offset by the fact that the terrain in which they were to operate, a region of lakes and forests, favored the defense. They attacked on the fourteenth day of mobilization, one day earlier than they had promised the French. It was a bravado performance, in the best Suvorovian tradition, which Samsonov’s chief of staff privately described as an “adventure.”47
The Russians at first made good progress. Indeed, they advanced so rapidly that the forward units outran their logistic support. For lack of time to string telephone wires, they sent reports and received their orders by wireless, usually in the clear. The Germans intercepted these messages, obtaining from them a picture of Russian dispositions and movements which they were to use to deadly effect. The two Russian armies acted independently, without coordination, each eager for the laurels of victory.
The invasion confounded the Germans. Their commander in East Prussia, General Friedrich von Prittwitz, panicked and urged a withdrawal to the western banks of the Vistula, which would have meant abandoning East Prussia. Berlin, fearing the effect such a surrender would have on German morale and already troubled by the spectacle of refugees streaming from the east, ignored von Prittwitz’s advice. It relieved him in favor of the sixty-seven-year-old Paul von Hindenburg, whom it recalled from retirement. Hindenburg arrived at the Eastern Front on August 23 in the company of his chief of staff, Erich von Ludendorff. The two breathed new life into the shaken Eighth Army and drew up plans to trap Samsonov’s forces. The latter were heedlessly pushing toward Allenstein, dispersing in the maze of Masurian lakes and losing contact with Rennenkampfs units operating near Königsberg. Counting on Russian carelessness, Ludendorff decided on a gamble. He secretly withdrew most of the forces facing Rennenkampf, leaving the approaches to Königsberg virtually undefended, and sent them into the breach which had formed between the two Russian armies. This had the effect of isolating Samsonov. Had Rennenkampf realized what was happening and attacked, he would have stood a good chance of rolling up the German left and inflicting a disastrous defeat on the enemy. But Ludendorff gambled that he would not and he was proven right. On August 28, the Germans counterattacked against Samsonov’s army, trapping it in an area of marshes and lakes. The operation, in some respects the most decisive of World War I, was completed in four days: on August 31 the Russian Second Army, or what was left of it, surrendered. The Germans had killed or put out of commission 70,000 Russians and captured nearly 100,000 prisoners, at a loss to themselves of 15,000 casualties. Unable to bear the humiliation, Samsonov shot himself. Next came Rennenkampfs turn. On September 9, reinforced with freshly arrived units from the Western Front, Hindenburg took on the First Russian Army, forcing it to abandon East Prussia. In this operation, the Russians lost a further 60,000 men.*
One of the striking features of the East Prussian debacle was the casual reaction of the Russian elite—a nonchalance that passed for bon ton in the highest strata of the aristocracy. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich was unperturbed by the loss in two weeks of one army and almost a quarter of a million men. When the French military representative at headquarters expressed sympathy over the Russian losses, he replied, “We are happy to make such sacrifices for our allies.” But Knox, who recounts this incident, thought the Russians had acted less out of concern for the Allies than plain irresponsibility: they were “just great big-hearted children who had thought out nothing and had stumbled half-asleep into a wasp’s nest.”48
Many Russian participants and historians have claimed that their country’s disastrous invasion of East Prussia was a supreme self-sacrifice which, by compelling the Germans to withdraw troops from the Western Front at a critical juncture, aborted the Schlieffen Plan and made it possible for Marshal Joffre to launch the counteroffensive of the Marne that saved France. This claim does receive some support in both German and French sources. Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff, believed that the withdrawal of troops from the Western Front had an “evil influence … [that] can scarcely be exaggerated.”* Moltke, Falkenhayn’s predecessor as chief of staff, and Joffre, who headed the French General Staff, also attached importance to the Russian August offensive as contributing to the failure of the Schlieffen Plan.49 But it has also been argued, possibly with better justification, that the failure of the plan was due less to the transfer of divisions to the east than to such factors as the exhaustion of the German troops advancing across Belgium, the overburdening of transport facilities, and the unexpected appearance of the British Expeditionary Force. The Schlieffen Plan has been denounced as unrealistic because it had ignored such possibilities. General Alexander von Kluck, the commander of the German First Army on the extreme right flank of the Belgian campaign, whose mission it was to envelop Paris, had no alternative but to swing his forces on a shorter axis that took them north instead of south of the French capital. This maneuver, which had nothing to do with the battles that were being waged at the time in East Prussia, saved Paris and made possible the Marne counteroffensive.†