Chapter 7![[image]](http://imgdetail.ebookreading.net/202009/02/9781101198988/9781101198988__the-complete-idiots__9781101198988__Images__idiot_ww1_90_1.jpg)
The Sun Sets in the East
In This Chapter
- Misguided confidence in Russia’s military might
- The Russian army
- Eastern Front strategies
- First blood at Stallupönen
- A draw at Gumbinnen
- The first battles between Austria-Hungary and Russia
Historians think of World War I as a conflict fought on many fronts, but two fronts were the most important: the Western Front, mainly in France and Belgium, and the Eastern Front, mainly in East Prussia and “Russian Poland,” the westernmost part of the Russian Empire that was enclosed to the north by East Prussia, to the west by German Poland (Poznania) and Silesia, and to the south by Austrian Poland (Galicia). In writing about World War I, Winston Churchill took a somewhat different view from his fellow historians, suggesting that the Western Front and the Eastern Front were virtually two different wars. If, he observed, “for a space we obliterate from our minds the fighting in France and Flanders, the struggle upon the Eastern Front (emerges as) incomparably the greatest war in history.”
We can look at the Eastern Front not only as a war in itself, a titanic and staggeringly costly struggle, but also as a war in which, as Churchill concluded, “nothing was gained by any.” This chapter covers the opening of the war on the Eastern Front.
The Myth of the Russian Steamroller
The influential nineteenth-century military theorist Karl von Clausewitz developed the strategic doctrine of what he called “total war”—that is, war in which combat is not waged between armies alone, but also by armies upon the civilian population, with the object of breaking the enemy economically as well as psychologically and culturally. Such a war, the philosopher Karl Marx observed, would sweep the world like “fresh air let into a tomb.” Marx believed that essentially healthy societies would survive and perhaps even thrive in total war, whereas those that were decayed from within would crumble into dust.
From the Front During the course of the war, 12 million men would wear the uniform. More than half this number, 6.7 million men, would be killed or wounded before the revolutionary Communist government made a separate peace with Germany at the start of 1918.
This is precisely what World War I did to Russia. The corrupt, oppressive, and politically bankrupt Romanov dynasty disintegrated under the pressure of total war, and the Communist Revolution swept in to fill the void.
If few of the politicians and military leaders believed that war would be the long nightmare of unprecedented destructiveness that it proved to be, probably none saw its potential for fomenting revolution. Instead, Russian officials and their Western allies saw Russia in war as nothing less than monolithic and single-minded, a great “steamroller” that could mobilize millions of troops to sweep over any adversary in Europe by sheer numbers.
When Numbers Lie
And those numbers were impressive. Before the war, the Russian army numbered 1.4 million men. Immediate mobilization added another 3.1 million to this figure.
But the vast numbers of Russian army resources were deceptive. After the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War, Russia instituted a system of mandatory military service in which all able-bodied men were assigned to army units and were to be given annual training. Although the assignments were made, training was rarely conducted. Thus, the reserve units, which constituted the bulk of the millions of men recorded on the rolls of the Russian army, consisted mainly of untrained civilians in uniform. At that, most of these men were peasants, woefully uneducated and many of them wholly illiterate and virtually untrainable.
The officers who commanded the regular army as well as the reserves were almost universally incompetent, especially at the senior levels, where advanced age compounded incompetence. Reflecting the strict class divisions within the nation itself, officers remained aloof from the men they commanded, turning over most of the work of leadership to the noncommissioned ranks. If the officers were notorious for being remote from their troops, the noncoms were infamous for treating the common soldier with great brutality and sadistic cruelty.
The weapons of the Russian army were generally comparable to those of the Western forces, although the standard infantry rifle, the Mosin-Nagant Model 1891, was somewhat obsolescent and plagued by a difficult safety catch, yet so tough and generally reliable that it would serve not only in World War I, but in World War II as well. The real problem was less in the quality of the equipment than in the quantity. In the first mobilization of 1914, at least one-third of the soldiers committed to battle lacked rifles and were told to pick up weapons from fallen comrades. It is recorded that, at least on one occasion, Russian troops were sent on a suicidal charge against German machine-gun emplacements wielding nothing deadlier than axe handles.
The Russian army was also under-supplied with field artillery and woefully lacking in heavy artillery. While the Russians did deploy the sturdy Maxim machine gun, they did so in insufficient numbers and lacked proper doctrine for its use. Another problem was a chronic shortage of rifle and machine gun ammunition. In 1914, throughout the entire Russian Empire, there were only three factories capable of manufacturing small arms ammunition. Additional sources were not developed until late 1916.
Voices of Battle “Russian resources are so great that in the long run, Germany will be exhausted without our helping Russia.”
—Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, to Raymond Poincaré, president of France, 1914
Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War
As unreliable as the Russian army was in 1914, it had actually improved since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which exposed so many of the force’s weaknesses. Most important among the changes ushered in by that war was the introduction of a new generation of officers. To be sure, they were outnumbered and outranked by the incompetent and senescent lot that preceded them, but they did introduce certain reforms.
The Czar’s Problems
Unfortunately, the military reforms advocated by the new officer corps were tied to politically progressive views just this side of revolutionary. Effective military reform, they argued, could not be achieved without extensive political restructuring. This meant that the czar would have to yield some degree of his absolute authority to an increasingly representative form of government. The young officers argued that the entire Russian aristocracy was mired in a medieval epoch incompatible with a modern, technically advanced military force.
—Russian foreign minister Sazonov, quoted in Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, 1962
The czar, Nicholas II, was by no means an evil man, but neither was he an imaginative or even very bright man. With his broad goatee beard and magnificent moustache, he looked the part of a Romanov aristocrat, but he lacked the iron will, resolve, and vigor of a leader. He was overwhelmed by the revolutionary movements simmering and boiling over throughout his nation, and he allowed himself to be persuaded by the old-line autocrats surrounding him that change must not be actively engaged, but rather, should be entirely avoided. This meant ignoring it wherever possible and stamping it out where it couldn’t be ignored.
In 1909, Nicholas II, urged by his courtiers, authorized a wholesale purge of the reformed army, in which “unreliable”—that is, politically liberal—officers were removed. At the top, the quite able minister of war, A.A. Rediger, was replaced by the doddering, incompetent, and highly pliable Vladimir Sukhomlinov.
Manpower Russia had. However, equipment was in chronic short supply. And effective political and military leadership was almost totally absent.
Strategy for the Eastern Front
The contested region, what would be called the Eastern Front, was Russian Poland. On the one hand, it posed a threat of invasion to East Prussia. On the other hand, it was highly vulnerable to invasion by Germany from the northwest and by Austria-Hungary from the southwest.
What the Germans Counted On
The Germans, historically never shy about their appetite for new territory, certainly saw the desirability of acquiring real estate in Russian Poland, especially as a permanent buffer between them and Russia. But the Schlieffen Plan called for crushing France before embarking on an offensive war against Russia. The Germans needed time to achieve their goals in the West before tackling the Eastern Front in earnest.
They counted on their estimation that it would take an inordinate amount of time for the dispersed and poorly led Russian army to mobilize. Not only was this built-in delay a function of an antiquated and inefficient command structure, but it also was the product of a poorly developed infrastructure. Communication was inadequate, and, most important, rail transportation was poor—especially in Russian Poland. (Indeed, as German planners saw it, the lack of adequate rail transport would not only slow the Russian mobilization, but it also would impede a German invasion of Russia. Thus, it was a double reason to avoid moving prematurely on this front.) The German strategy for the Eastern Front, then, was to fight a defensive war, using its reserve divisions, to stave off invasion until France was neutralized and troops could be released from the Western Front to the Eastern Front for an offensive thrust into Russian territory.
What Austria-Hungary Feared
Russian Poland extended far to the west, between East Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia. Its western tip was a mere 200 miles from Berlin. Nevertheless, Austria-Hungary was even more vulnerable to attack from the east and therefore looked upon the Eastern Front very differently from its German ally. Much more of the Austro-Hungarian frontier with Russia was farther east than Germany’s. The eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were populated by Slav minorities, who felt a much greater affinity for the Russians than for the Austrians. A Russian offensive would be enthusiastically received by these minorities, and the integrity of an already tremulous empire could easily be shattered.
Austrian military and political leaders wanted immediate action to check any Russian offensive. They persuaded Helmuth von Moltke to agree to an Austro-Hungarian advance northeastward into Russian Poland. Moltke allowed himself to be convinced that this would help keep Russia occupied while Germany concentrated on France.
What the Russians Hoped For
The Austrians were quite right to assume that Russia was most interested in operating in regions populated by Slavs. In fact, a war in the name of Slavic unity was seen by many czarists as just the remedy required to cure Russia of its revolutionary discontent. On the eve of the war, within the court at St. Petersburg, there was a pride and optimism about Russia’s military prowess. Of course, the feeling was unrealistic and not shared by most military men, but it was compelling nonetheless. However, it did not extend to war with Germany, for very little would be gained by such a conflict. Indeed, the Russians almost willingly played into the Schlieffen Plan. Their wish was to concentrate all immediately available forces against Austria-Hungary and to leave the German Front alone until mobilization was complete.
What the French Demanded
The trouble was, of course, that the nations of Europe had relinquished much of their free will and national sovereignty by entering into a host of entangling alliances. Germany would have preferred that Austria-Hungary help defend its border with Polish Russia, but it had to allow Austria-Hungary to protect its own frontier area. Russia would have preferred to focus an offensive against Austria-Hungary, but its ally France insisted on action against Germany to relieve some of the pressure on the Western Front.
France persuaded the pliable Czar Nicholas II to authorize an offensive involving two great Russian armies against the Germans in East Prussia, while another four armies were deployed against the Austro-Hungarians in Galicia.
A Divided Army
What the French were asking Russia to do was well beyond its capability. With all its faults, the Russian army was a formidable force on account of sheer manpower alone. But its inherent slowness called for a highly cautious strategy, directed against one objective at a time. What France was asking for required a highly mobile, agile, thoroughly organized, and extraordinarily efficient force. These qualities Russia could not offer.
Against East Prussia
In prewar planning conferences, France had insisted that Russia be able to move with 900,000 men by the 14th day after the mobilization order—called, in military jargon, M+14. Stavka, the Russian General Staff, replied that such an offensive could not be mounted until M+20. After much discussion, the Russians agreed that M+15 was reasonable.
In fact, the Russian Northwest Army Group, under General Yakov G. Jilinsky, began its westward march on August 13, 1914—even earlier than the M+15 promised. Unfortunately, the march was premature. Although infantry and cavalry units were at least approaching full strength at this time, the all-important supporting units—supply and communication—had not even been assembled yet. The army was on the move without adequate supplies or communications.
Words of War The Stavka was the Russian supreme military headquarters during czarist days, including the period of World War I.
On August 17, the First Russian Army, under General Pavel V. Rennenkampf, crossed into East Prussia. The Second Army, under Alexander V. Samsonov, was supposed to keep pace with Rennenkampf’s command so that the two armies could converge in an attack on the German Eighth Army, a force that it outnumbered almost three to one.
On paper, the plan looked good. In the field, however, the inadequately supplied, poorly trained, and ineptly led armies faltered over difficult terrain.
Opposing the Russian invasion was the overwhelmingly outnumbered German Eighth Army, under General Max von Prittwitz. Prittwitz was headquartered in the fortress of Königsberg on the Baltic coast, and his army was widely dispersed from the Baltic some 90 miles south to Frankenau. His difficult mission was to trade space for time, delaying the Russian advance into East Prussia, and exact a cost in casualties from the Russians until the Western Front was sufficiently stabilized to allow troops to be transferred east for a definitive offensive against the Russian invaders.
Prittwitz was not a great general, and Moltke was uneasy at his appointment to lead the Eighth Army, especially in so difficult a mission. The Germans rightly believed that they were better trained and better equipped than the Russians, but they had also heard horrifying tales of Russian brutality and ferocity. Intentionally confronting a superior force was difficult enough. The rumors of “Russian barbarism” and “Cossack cruelty” made the task seem terrifying.
Encounter at Stallupönen
The first combat came at Stallupönen, about a hundred miles east of Eighth Army headquarters and near the East Prussian frontier with Russian Poland. There one of Prittwitz’s most aggressive corps commanders, the energetic and dashing Hermann von François, disobeyed standing orders to avoid decisive engagement by launching an offensive against Rennenkampf’s center.
François tore into Rennenkampf, inflicting 3,000 casualties and pushing the Russians back across the frontier into Russian Poland. His action, however, had been risky. If the Russians had been better led, they could well have encircled François’s corps and annihilated it. The cautious Prittwitz was appalled and immediately sent his chief of staff to François with orders that he break off the engagement immediately. It was too late, however, because the engagement had already been fought and won.
The Battle of Stallupönen had little effect in immediate and direct military terms; however, it stunned Rennenkampf, who had not expected anything so ferocious from the Germans in the east. Rennenkampf resolved to proceed with greater caution, and he greatly slowed the pace of the advance of his First Army. This would have dire consequences for the soldiers of the Second Army in the coming Battle of Tannenberg (see Chapter 8, “A Suicide”).
Triumph and Failure at Gumbinnen
François’ victory had another effect. It bolstered Prittwitz’s uncertain resolve, and the intense François, whose distant ancestors had been Huguenots—bold rebels and agile survivors—persuaded his commanding officer to launch another offensive.
Eighth Army headquarters had made a key discovery about Russian communications. The Russian soldiers, including junior and middle-level officers, were so poorly trained and the level of literacy so low that the army had given up the practice of transmitting wireless (radio) messages in code. The process of encryption and decryption was just too complex for most of the Russian troops to handle. Instead, the army broadcast orders and instructions “in the clear” for everyone—including the Germans—to hear. Prittwitz and his officers received Russian orders simultaneously with the Russian officers.
Prittwitz decided to attack with three corps at the village of Gumbinnen on August 20. The corps led by the redoubtable François smashed into Rennenkampf’s First Army on its right flank. Relentlessly, François pushed over five miles, driving the flank back.
The other two German corps were not successful, however, and the main part of Rennenkampf’s force, the center, held fast. The Battle of Gumbinnen was a draw, perhaps even marginally a Russian victory.
When Prittwitz learned that two of the three corps engaged had been repulsed at Gumbinnen and that 13 divisions of Samsonov’s Second Russian Army had now crossed the southern frontier of East Prussia—thereby posing a threat to the German Eighth Army rear—he blanched and instantly reverted to his customary faintheartedness.
He proposed a general retreat, to which his staff loudly objected. One of his staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, made a counterproposal of an attack on Samsonov’s left flank in the vicinity of Tannenberg, near East Prussia’s southern frontier with Galicia. Pressed by the others, Prittwitz tentatively approved. The mission that had been assigned him, in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan, had been one of delay and gradual retreat—which was fine with Prittwitz. Instead, however, he now found himself nervously preparing for another offensive.
Against Austria
Austria-Hungary had conducted the very first operations of World War I with the July 29 bombardment of Belgrade, capital of Serbia. This attack was not followed up on until August 12–21, when Austro-Hungarian forces numbering 200,000, under the command of General Oskar Potiorek, invaded Serbia across the Save and Drina rivers, from the west and the northwest.
The Austrians were in for a shock. They were met by an almost equal number of Serbs, inadequately equipped, but fierce and determined after becoming honed and hardened by the just-concluded Balkan Wars. Under Marshal Radomir Putnik, the Serbs counterattacked vigorously on August 16, delivering a series of punishing blows that sent the Austro-Hungarian army reeling back across the River Drina. It would be early September before the Austrians renewed the invasion.
In the meantime, in Galicia (Austrian Poland), General Count Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, prepared on August 23 to lead the First, Fourth, and Third Austrian armies (positioned from west to east) northward to invade the so-called Polish Salient. This thick tongue of Russian Poland projected westward below East Prussia and above Galicia, thus driving a broad wedge between Germany and Austria-Hungary. It presented a threat to both of these allies, but conversely, it was also vulnerable to a pincers attack from both. With the Germans busy fighting the Russians above the Polish Salient—and too committed on the Western Front to send more troops east—it would be, for now, up to the Austro-Hungarians to invade this region on their own.
The three Austro-Hungarian armies deployed along a 200-mile front north and east from Lvov (then called Lemberg), Poland, and met headlong the Southwestern Russian Army Group (consisting of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth armies) southwest of the Pripet Marshes, some 400 miles to the northeast of the Ukraine and deep inside Russian Poland. Here the Battle of Krasnik was fought during August 23–24. As a result, the northern flank of the Army Group—the Russian Fourth Army—was driven back by the Austrian First Army.
The battle ended without full resolution, however, and, in fact, the conflict spread throughout the colliding forces. From August 26 through September 1, the Battle of Zamosc-Komarów erupted and raged. In bitter fighting, the Austrian Fourth Army hammered at the Russian Fifth, driving it well back.
In the meantime, at the southern flank of the engaged forces, the Austrian Third Army (together with some elements of the Second, which arrived from the Serbian front) suffered a setback at the Battle of Gnila Lipa (August 26–30). The combined Russian Third and Eighth armies drove this outnumbered force back to Lvov. Here, the Austrians organized a hasty defense but were penetrated by the Russian Fifth Army as a result of the Battle of Rava Ruska during September 3–11. Despite their initial successes, the Austrians were now forced to fall back a full hundred miles to the Carpathian Mountains, leaving behind only a garrison at the fortress of Przemysl.
Combatants Paul Ludwig Hans von Hindenburg (1847–1934) was the son of a Prussian military officer and was raised in an atmosphere steeped in his nation’s military traditions. He fought in the Austro-Prussian (Seven Weeks’) War of 1866 and the Franco-German War of 1870–1871 and secured a post on the staffs of German field marshals Helmuth von Moltke (uncle of the Moltke of World War I) and Alfred von Schlieffen (author of the Schlieffen Plan) in 1878.
Hindenburg retired from the army in 1911 but was called out of retirement to assume command on the Eastern Front in 1914. In collaboration with Erich Ludendorff, he formulated the plan that decisively defeated the advancing Russian armies at the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914 and then at Masurian Lakes the following month. Victory in Poland at the Battle of Lodz led to Hindenburg’s appointment as chief of the General Staff in 1916, replacing Moltke.
Hindenburg attempted to formulate a strategy to defeat France and England before the neutral United States joined the conflict. He advocated a campaign of submarine warfare against Great Britain, intended to blockade and starve that nation into surrender. The effect, however, was to propel the United States into the war.
The German people never blamed Hindenburg for defeat in World War I, and in 1925 they elected this popular hero to two terms as president of the second Weimar Republic. The aging Hindenburg could not reconcile the factions of a country plagued by punitive peace terms, torn by political unrest, and worn down by the economic effects of a worldwide depression. In desperation, he looked to the charismatic Adolf Hitler for support, appointing him chancellor of his second cabinet in 1933. With Hindenburg by this time senescent, Hitler became de facto leader of Germany and, after Hindenburg’s death the following year, absolute dictator.
Austria-Hungary had incited war to punish Serbia and thereby secure its own faltering grasp on the disparate peoples of its creaky empire. Now, however, Galicia—Austrian Poland—had fallen into Russian hands, and the Austro-Hungarian army had lost a quarter-million men killed and wounded, with perhaps another 100,000 taken prisoner by the Russians. With characteristic inefficiency, Russian officials did not bother to count their own casualties, but, doubtless, they were comparable. Heartened nevertheless, the Russians were poised for an advance into the Carpathians.
The New Commander
Back at the German Eighth Army, Colonel von Hoffmann had given Prittwitz a plan for an effective recovery from the disappointment at Gumbinnen. At general headquarters, however, Helmuth von Moltke sensed Prittwitz’s undercurrent of panic. After all, at the very first setback he had announced his intention to withdraw all the way to the Vistula River. To his credit, although Moltke was embroiled in the fast-moving action of the Western Front, he saw opportunity in the east. It was time to stop entrusting this front to a marginally competent commander and turn it over to someone of proven ability. Moltke called out of retirement Paul von Hindenburg to assume command of the Eighth Army, and he assigned the brilliant Erich Ludendorff, the hero of Liège (see Chapter 5, “Battle of the Frontiers”) as his chief of staff. This command team would prove to be the most effective in the entire war.
On August 22, Ludendorff formulated a plan that, quite coincidentally, duplicated what Hoffmann had proposed to Prittwitz. Elements of the Eighth Army would attack Samsonov’s Russian Second Army while other elements remained farther east to delay Rennenkampf’s First Army. If these two forces could be kept from joining, they could be defeated in detail. It was a tactic as old as Caesar—and probably much older: divide and conquer. That both Rennenkampf and Samsonov were proving themselves Russian officers of the old school—that is, fumbling and incompetent—would greatly aid Ludendorff’s strategy in the coming titanic Battle of Tannenberg.
The Least You Need to Know
- The Allies placed inordinate and unthinking confidence in the “Russian steamroller,” counting on the sheer numbers of the Russian army to defeat any enemy.
- Despite reforms after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Russian army was rife with corruption and incompetence—its men were poorly trained and inadequately equipped.
- Russia’s early encounters with the Germans boded ill for Russia’s military fortunes, although some important gains were made against Austria-Hungary and its forces.