The outcome reflected less fundamental Russian incompetence than a specific decision to wage a campaign of maneuver their field armies could not execute. But its operational consequences were marginal and its strategic consequences nonexistent. After five days of close-quarters fighting, nearly 80,000 Russians lay dead or wounded 90,000 more were prisoners of war. As the Germans closed in from three sides, Russia’s Second Army stumbled into the developing encirclement, obliging its enemy by advancing in the center while disregarding the looming threats to its flanks. Both repaid their commanders’ confidence. It was a gamble dependent for success on the marching ability of the troops and the carrying capacity of East Prussia’s railway network.

They implemented plans, already drafted by staff officers on the ground, to concentrate their entire strength against the southern sector. Hindenburg had a reputation for unshakeable imperturbability, Ludendorff for erratic brilliance. Second Army’s situation created an opportunity for a new German team: Paul von Hindenburg as commanding general, and Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff. Samsonov’s axis of advance with Second Army-mostly determined by poor roads-extended so widely that its subordinate corps found maintaining lateral contact increasingly difficult. Rennenkampf’s First Army advanced slowly and lost touch with the Germans it was ostensibly pursuing. The oft-mentioned, but essentially imaginary, hostility between their commanders, Paul von Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov, contributed far less to the resulting entropy than did inadequate communications, poor intelligence and worse staff work. The headquarters of Northwestern Front left the army commanders to their own devices. The Russians, however, failed to press their advantage or coordinate their movements. Mounted with overwhelmingly superior forces, the operation seemed on its way to success when the German theater commander panicked and proposed abandoning East Prussia entirely.

Russia responded to this opening with a two-pronged drive into that exposed province-one army advancing west across the Niemen River, the other northwest from Russian Poland. Germany’s war plan, accepting a two-front conflict against France and Russia, initially allowed only token forces to defend East Prussia. The opening clash between the German and Russian empires in World War I ended in one of history’s most misleading outcomes. What We Learned From Tannenberg, 1914 Close

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