Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Read online

  TANNENBERG

  Also by Dennis E. Showalter:

  German Military History Since 1648: A Critical Bibliography

  Little Man What Now? Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic

  Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany

  Voices from the Third Reich: An Oral History, with Johannes Steinhoff and Peter Pechel

  The Wars of Frederick the Great

  CORNERSTONES OF MILITARY HISTORY

  Brassey’s Cornerstones of Military History series presents new editions of classic works of military history. Recognized as the seminal studies in their particular fields, these are the texts that have served as foundations for subsequent scholarship.

  TANNENBERG

  CLASH OF EMPIRES, 1914

  Dennis E. Showalter

  Copyright © 2004 by Potomac Books, Inc.

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First published in hardcover by Archon Books, The Shoe String Press, Inc., North Haven, Connecticut, in 1991. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Showalter, Dennis E.

  Tannenberg : clash of empires, 1914/Dennis E. Showalter.—Brassey’s

  paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-57488-781-5 (pbk : alk. paper)

  1. Tannenberg, Battle of, Stnebark, Poland, 1914. I. Title.

  D552.T3S55 2004

  940.4’22—dc22

  2004000782

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books, Inc.

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Order of Battle

  PART I THE FASHION TO MAKE WAR

  1 The Circus Rider of Europe

  2 The Center Fails to Hold

  3 War Finds a Way

  PART II NOW THRIVE THE ARMOURERS

  4 The Virgin Soldiers

  5 Taking the Measure of Danger

  6 First Contact: Gumbinnen

  PART III THE BLOOD-SWOLLEN GOD

  7 The Province of Uncertainty

  8 The Province of Chance

  9 The Province of Victory

  PART IV THE BITTER FRUITS OF VICTORY

  10 Opportunities and Illusions

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliographical Essay

  Index

  Index to Military Formations

  About the Author

  Maps

  Europe, Summer 1914 39

  The Northern Sector 141

  Gumbinnen, 3:00–4:00 PM 175

  The Southern Sector 215

  Concentration of the 8th and 2nd Armies 251

  August 28, Evening 289

  Preface

  More than any modern conflict, the study of the First World War’s origins remains connected with wider issues of politics and historiography. Even before the armies marched, the respective combatants were compiling document collections establishing their innocence in the run-up to war and the initiation of hostilities. These “color books,” named for their respective covers, were intended as much for domestic as international consumption, aimed at solidifying a public opinion widely and legitimately considered less enthusiastic for war than the massive street demonstrations of late July suggested.

  The pattern of justification did not end with a series of peace treaties ascribing responsibility for the war to the former Central Powers—Germany in particular. The newly established Weimar Republic lacked the self-confidence to shoulder the moral as well as the financial responsibility for a conflict that had devastated Europe and shaken the world. Instead the government fought back with the best weapon remaining at its command: Germany’s academic community. Strongly nationalist and patriotic in orientation, matchless researchers and unrivalled polemicists—controversy has long been an art form among German intellectuals—the pundits and professors rallied behind a cause lost by the soldiers. Given previously unheard-of access to government documents, frequently supported by government money, a generation of revisionists challenged and denied Germany’s sole responsibility for what they recognized as a catastrophe, but attributed to causes more complex than the behavior of a single country and its government.

  Politicians elsewhere in Europe quickly recognized the risks of allowing Germany to take control of the discourse on the war’s outbreak. Beginning in the 1920s, France, Britain, and the Austrian Republic published elaborate document collections of their own. In a reverse process, the Soviet Union sought to confirm its revolutionary legitimacy by issuing material focusing on Tsarist Russia’s complicity in the war’s outbreak. This material was supplemented by increasing availability of other primary sources, especially memoirs and the documents supporting them. What emerged from the first postwar wave of research and analysis was a kind of pecking order among the major participants, with responsibility adjudicated according to an author’s perception of the evidence. Thus in the United States, Harry Elmer Barnes inverted conventional wisdom by blaming France and Russia. Harvard’s Sidney Bradshaw Fay asserted that Austria-Hungary was more responsible than any other power for the war’s direct outbreak. Halfway across the continent at the University of Chicago, Bernadotte Schmitt continued to assert Germany’s primary responsibility, while conceding it was not exclusive.

  A younger generation of scholars in turn reacted to their dissertation advisors by arguing that it was not the policies of any particular government, or any particular statesman, but systemic factors like imperialism, arms races, alliance systems, that underlay the war’s outbreak. General-audience historians as well saw this as a fresh approach, rein-vigorating old readers and attracting new ones. During the 1930s a new paradigm of the war’s origins emerged: the assertion of a collective responsibility that was usually so attenuated that the Great War came to be processed as a war no one wanted, a failure of systems rather than a product of decisions. This approach fit well with a wider cultural and political effort in liberal Europe to heal the wounds of 1914–1918 in the face of the contemporary threats of totalitarianism and depression. Its intellectual and political appeals were strong enough to sustain it for at least a decade after 1945, with Nazi Germany in turn processed as an aberration in German and Western European history—an aberration illustrated as much by its starting World War II as by its genocidal war against the Jews. Probably the most familiar example of this interpretation is Barbara Tuchman’s general-audience classic, The Guns of August (1962), which ranks as one of the few works of history that had a direct effect on current events; U.S. President John Kennedy cited it as offering him a lesson in how not to handle the Cuban missile crisis of the same year. And ironically, just as the “unwanted war” paradigm had its most significant impact, it was being challenged by a fundamental reexamination of a question long thought settled.

  West Germany’s historians on the whole initially had no trouble accepting the terms of the “unwanted war” consensus, with its emphasis on comparing mistakes and decisions
. Then in 1959 Fritz Fischer of Hamburg University published an article, followed in 1961 by a monograph, stating that Germany’s leaders had deliberately pursued an aggressive foreign policy in 1914, knowing it was likely to led to general war. The Second Reich, moreover, waged that war from the beginning in pursuit of a comprehensive set of annexationist aims designed to give Germany continental hegemony and world power.

  The particular and general challenges posed by Fischer’s scholarship generated a fundamental reconsideration of virtually every aspect of modern German history. Yet the “Fischer Thesis” had a surprisingly limited impact on the subject it ostensibly addressed directly: the origins of the Great War. In West Germany Fischerite purists continued to insist Germany went to war in 1914 from hegemonial ambitions. A “domestic crisis” school whose influential protagonists included Hans Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Volker Berghahn emphasized internal stresses and contradictions as preparing Germany’s path to war. Smaller in numbers, less familiar outside the German historical community, a neoconservative school including Gregor Schoellgen, Egmont Zechlin, and Andreas Hillgruber saw German policy in 1914 as essentially defensive, based on a series of calculated risks to preserve freedom of action in tightening military/diplomatic parameters shaped in turn by Germany’s position at the geographic center of Europe. Even these scholars, however, were usually willing to concede a far larger share of German responsibility for the war than their intellectual predecessors.

  Outside of Germany as well, a significant number of works continue to place Germany at the head of their lists when assessing responsibility for the war’s outbreak. Luigi Albertini’s three-volume The Origins of the War of 1914, published in Italian during World War II, translated into English during the 1950s, and still the classic diplomatic history, described Germany as making most of the key decisions. British historian A. J. P. Taylor, in a series of works with general as well as academic influence, presented Germany as the crucial disturber of modern European order. John Keegan sees the First World War (in his book by that title) as a “European tragedy,” but puts Germany at its focal point. The major recent development in analyzing the Great War’s origins, however, is the growing understanding that the rest of Europe did more than react to German initiatives. In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson goes so far as to argue that British policy before 1914 accepted the virtual certainty of a war with Germany that the subsequent course of history has shown as neither inevitable nor necessary. While the thesis has generated more criticism than acceptance, it highlights the fact that few signs of a “will to peace” were to be found anywhere as Europe approached 1914—a point clearly demonstrated in Hew Strachan’s magisterial The First World War: To Arms.

  Not merely the great powers, but such middle-sized states as Belgium and Serbia, Greece and Rumania, possessed a level of agency in 1914 far greater than that they could exercise at the twentieth century’s end. They used that freedom to overhaul their military systems and increase their military capacity. Edward Hermann and David Stevenson have demonstrated that the near-exponential expansion of armed forces after 1905 was accompanied by an obsessive symmetry in their structuring. Not only did each government anxiously watch all the others for signs of some innovation worth copying. Each high command was all too conscious of its own perceived shortcomings. With no state believing itself able to withstand a first strike, conciliation was at a corresponding discount not only in Berlin, but in Vienna, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Belgrade—even Brussels, as a rearming Belgium prepared to defend its neutrality by force against all comers.

  Yet for all the sound and fury, Europe continued to dodge the bullet. Crises came and went; crisis management techniques repeatedly proved their equal. Armies drilled and paraded; war plans remained in General Staff pigeonholes. The summer of 1914 was one of the calmest periods in a decade. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Dual Monarchy’s throne, was assassinated in an obscure provincial city on June 28, initial reactions in foreign offices, war ministries, and newsrooms alike reflected nothing so much as a sense of déjà vu. It was just one more damn fool thing happening in the Balkans: the stuff of speeches and headlines for a week or two, music-hall jokes for a little longer. When on the morning of August 30, the red notices that even illiterates knew meant mobilization began going up on official bulletin boards throughout Russia, no one, even the immediate participants, was quite sure what had happened. At 5 P.M. on July 31, Germany responded. War’s iron dice rolled across Europe as the lamps went out one by one. This is the story of the twilight.

  Acknowledgments

  A book eight years in the making accumulates a corresponding structure of personal and intellectual debts. Clara Anne, Clara Kathleen, and John bore with good grace the regular disappearances of their husband and father into the arcanae of an era long past. Colleagues and students at Colorado College accepted the highs and lows accompanying the project with no more than an occasional, “Aren’t you finished yet?” College President Gresham Riley, Deans Glenn Brooks and David Finley, and successive research committees were more than generous with financial support and released time. History department chairs Robert Mcjimsey and Susan Ashley earned my repeated gratitude for their empathy in discussing course schedules and administrative demands.

  The reference staff of Colorado College’s Tutt Library, in particular interlibrary loan librarians Susan Connolly, Kim Miklofsky, and Diane Burgner, once again did wonders in unearthing obscure works from unlikely locations. Sheila Fuller’s typing of the final manuscript relieved much of the last-stage anxieties accompanying authorship. At the publishing level, Jim Thorpe demonstrated once again why he is among the Atlantic world’s best editors of military history. His questions, comments, advice, and encouragement have been crucial from start to finish of this project. I owe special thanks as well to someone I have never met: Pamela Chergotis, the copy editor who saved me from serious professional embarrassment by catching numerous lapses in argument and consistency.

  I owe particular debts to three people. Louis Geiger, my first department chairman, showed me that scholarship is a necessary element in the liberal arts college. Denys Volan of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, exemplified learning brought alive in the classroom. History department secretary Judy McClow typed early drafts, provided valuable stylistic suggestions, and helped bring perspective to a complex enterprise. Tannenberg is dedicated to them, with affection and admiration.

  Finally, I wish to thank Paul Merzlak of Brassey’s for suggesting and sponsoring this paperback reprint and Diantha Thorpe for making the rights available.

  Introduction

  Why a book about Tannenberg? Can anything useful possibly be said about a battle which began a war but did not end it, a battle whose very place names are lost to geography and history alike? Tannenberg in fact offers material for analysis on three levels. It is a significant case study of the problems facing armies in the initial stages of a major war. First battles tend to be neglected, except as examples of how not to proceed.1 Students of men in war, like John Keegan and Richard Holmes, tend to focus on armies that have a spectrum of experiences behind them. Agincourt, Waterloo, the Somme—none were fought by greenhorns on either side. Even the British New Armies had well over a year’s experience in uniform. But all wars have a beginning, and performance in a first battle can often mean that there will be no second chance. France in 1940 is only the most obvious example of that particular truism.2

  The opening rounds of a come-as-you-are war highlight the relative success—or failure—of armies in preparing for their primary task. The opening days and weeks of war test a nation’s military system and its military institutions in ways far greater than in later stages, when experience begins taking over and soldiers at all levels learn when and how to break the rules. Europe’s greatest military powers in the twentieth century have been Germany and Russia. Both had forty years to prepare for the first round in East Prussia. The details of their successes and failures
remain correspondingly relevant to students of war and society.

  Readers will note that the operational chapters of this work are presented from a German perspective. The Russian army of World War I is the subject of an increasing number of major monographs. Bruce Menning discusses its doctrinal antecedents, David Jones its operational performance, Allan Wildman its collapse. William Fuller is completing a major work, based on previously unavailable archival sources, on the history of Russian strategic planning. The army of the Second Reich, however, is more often studied in its political or social contexts than as a military instrument. One of the major reasons for undertaking this study was a desire to evaluate the kaiser’s fighting men as they made the transition from peace to war. The scale of the Tannenberg campaign offers opportunities to integrate case studies at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels into a framework small enough to be more readily comprehensible by non-specialists than the amorphous fighting on the western front.

  Tannenberg had mythic properties as well. The victory in East Prussia stood comparison with Verdun as the most familiar battle of World War I in German public opinion. The legends and hopes clustering around it helped shape attitudes until the very end of World War II. Even today a remnant of the tale lives on. Poland, a country which did not exist when Tannenberg was fought, remembers well that the battle borrowed its name from a centuries-earlier encounter of Germans and Slavs—one with a far different ending.3

  Tannenberg was, finally, a clash of empires. Recent discussions of the origins of World War I have taken two forms. One emphasizes the war’s accidental nature. It postulates, with an obvious eye on the present, the existence of mutually antagonistic alliance systems whose rivalries are largely generated by internal stresses of the states involved. Essentially artificial, the hostilities are all the more inflexible because of that fact. Eventually a small event on the periphery sets in motion a chain reaction, drawing the great powers and their clients alike into a war no one wants or expects.4