What Was the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914?
On the morning of 30 August 1914, General Alexander Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army, walked out of his headquarters tent at Willenberg (now Wielbark) and shot himself in the head with a service revolver. By the end of the day the army he had commanded — six infantry and two cavalry corps, about 120,000 men — had been surrounded, broken, and forced to surrender in the largest single Russian defeat of the First World War. Of the Second Army’s combat effectives, about 30,000 were killed or wounded and about 90,000 were taken prisoner. The commander of the German Eighth Army, Colonel-General Paul von Hindenburg, and his chief of staff, Major-General Erich Ludendorff, became overnight the most famous names in Germany (see Lieven, Russia and the First World War, 1983, and Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, 1975).
The two armies
The campaign was a Russian strategic initiative: the Russian Northwest Front, commanded by General Yakov Zhilinsky, was charged with invading East Prussia with two armies, the First (General Paul von Rennenkampf) advancing from the east and the Second (Samsonov) from the south. The two armies were to converge on the German Eighth Army, which under its commander General Maximilian von Prittwitz had been weakened by transfers to the Western Front. The plan was ambitious: with 27 infantry divisions the two Russian armies outnumbered the German Eighth’s 15 by almost two to one.
The plan foundered on the gap between the two Russian armies. The First and the Second were separated by the Masurian Lakes, a wooded country that took days to march through, and the two army commanders, both veterans of the 1904-1905 war, loathed each other. When the Second Army crossed the southern East Prussian frontier on 23 August 1914, it had no idea where the First was (Stone, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, 1975).
The course of the battle
The battle opened on 26 August with the German counter-attack on Samsonov’s right flank. The Russians had taken Gumbinnen two days earlier, and the German Eighth Army had begun its own attack on Rennenkampf at Stallupönen. The German forces, by 27 August, had been pulled back to face Samsonov, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff had taken over from Prittwitz.
The Germans attacked the Samsonov’s left wing on 27 August. The Russian 23rd and 15th Corps held, but the next day Samsonov ordered them to abandon their positions to shorten his line. The German counter-attack fell on the new position; the 13th and 1st Russian Corps, in the centre, were pushed aside; the 23rd and 15th were rolled up. By the morning of 29 August, Samsonov’s line of communications was cut. The Russian general, isolated in his tent with no intelligence of the situation of the bulk of his army, was already in despair. By 30 August the army was surrounded, the men were being captured in their thousands, and the commander was dead (Stone, 1975).
The impact on the Eastern Front
The battle fixed the German position in East Prussia for the rest of the war, and it fixed the Russian position in the East. The Russian First Army, isolated by the destruction of the Second, withdrew to the Russian frontier in early September; the German Eighth Army was too small to follow up; the front stabilised on a line that ran through eastern Poland and the Baltic. The German decision to move the Eighth Army to the centre in October 1914 produced the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes and a Russian tactical success at the Łódź operation in November, but the strategic consequences of Tannenberg lasted: the German Eighth Army remained in East Prussia for the rest of the war, and the Russian Empire never again tried to take it (Lieven, 1983).
The legend of Tannenberg
The battle became the foundation of the German Tannenberg myth. The wood of Tannenberg in 1410 had been the site of the Polish-Lithuanian defeat of the Teutonic Knights; in 1914 the same name was used for a German victory that was read as a recovery of the medieval humiliation. The Tannenberg Memorial, a colossal concrete monument unveiled in 1927, became the symbolic tomb of the unknown soldier of the German Eighth Army (it was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt in 1994 as the German-Russian Memorial Tannenberg).
In Russia the defeat was read as proof that the imperial system could not wage modern war. The Battle of Tannenberg was studied in detail in the Soviet General Staff Academy, and it was a key case in the deep operations doctrine of the 1930s. The German victory at the same-named battle in 1944 (Army Group Centre’s destruction of the Soviet Third Belorussian Front’s salient) is sometimes called the Second Battle of Tannenberg, but the two events are not historically connected (Showalter, The Wars of German Unification, 2004).