The German officer who was given the order ignored it, and moved his troops to the east so that the center of Samsonov’s forces would not be able to escape across the border. The German Army was told to head north in case von Rennenkampf actually did move to assist the Second Army. The intercepted message told the Germans the route that Samsonov planned to take as he pursued the German Army to Tannenberg, where he believed the Germans had withdrawn.īut the Germans had no intention of being reckless.
Von Rennenkampf’s first intercepted message told the Germans the distance that separated the First and Second Armies, and the fact that the First Army was not heading toward the Second Army. Samsonov didn’t know, but the Germans, who were intercepting the messages between the Russian commanders, did. Nor did Samsonov know that the Germans were transporting troops and supplies to the battle area in daunting numbers. Samsonov didn’t realize that the First Army advance had come to a halt and was not, as he assumed, conforming to plan. The Germans were led by the veteran Field Marshal Paul von Hindenberg and rising star Erich Ludendorf, who had been placed in command by Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke.īack to those communication problems. The men, who had once come to blows, were so hostile to one another that, even though they were fighting on the same size, ostensibly with the same end in mind, Samsonov did not bother to synchronize the movements of his Second Army to match those of the First Army. Not all of the communication flaws were attributable to technology, however. But the two commanders were having problems sending and receiving messages to one another. General Alexander SamsonovĪlexander Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army, and Paul von Rennenkampf, First Army commander, had orders to invade East Prussia.
But the Battle of Tannenberg was a warning that Russia’s military, like Russia’s monarchy, was on its knees and ripe for the death blow. Russia was able to mobilize over five million troops, not to mention 360 aircraft, along the Eastern Front’s almost 1,000 miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
Would the history of the twentieth century have taken a different turn if the World War I Battle of Tannenberg had ended in a Russian victory rather than defeat? When the war began, the expectation was that Russia, with the world’s largest standing army, would be a major force for the Allied Powers.
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