Perhaps the most spectacular and complete German victory of the First World War, the battle all but ended Russia’s invasion of East Prussia before it had even really started. Alexander Samsonov, lost in the surrounding forests with his aides, shot himself, unable to face reporting the scale of the disaster to the Tsar, Nicholas II. But it was too late, as his forces scattered directly into the encircling German forces.Ībout 95,000 Russians troops were captured an estimated 30,000 were killed or wounded, and of his original 150,000 total, only around 10,000 of Samsonov’s men escaped. On this Day, in 1914: Russian forces began laying siege to the fortress-city of PrzemyślĬritically short of supplies and with his communications system in tatters, Samsonov finally became aware of the peril he faced and ordered a general withdrawal. Upon his arrival in East Prussia, Hindenburg immediately reversed Prittwitz’s decision to withdraw, choosing instead to authorise a plan of attack and to move troops to the far south to meet Samsonov’s Second Army, effectively surrounding the Russian contingent. Meanwhile, Samsonov bedevilled by supply and communication problems, was entirely unaware that Rennenkampf had chosen to pause and lick his wounds, instead assuming that his forces were continuing their movement south-west. The German Chief of Staff recalled Prittwitz to Berlin and installed as his replacement the markedly more aggressive veteran Paul von Hindenburg, who was brought out of retirement at the age of 66. Pledged to their French allies to assume the offensive against Germany at the earliest possible date, Russia’s First Army led by General Paul von Rennenkampf assembled on the eastern frontier of East Prussia, while the Second Army under General Alexander Samsonov gathered at Warsaw.Ĭommanded by General Yakov Zhilinsky from Warsaw, the two armies initially planned to combine in assaulting Prittwitz’s Eighth Army stationed in East Prussia – Rennenkampf in a frontal attack with Samsonov engulfing Prittwitz from the rear.īut after a scrappy victory against the Germans at the Battle of Gumbinnen, Rennenkampf paused to reconsolidate his forces, while Prittwitz, shaken and fearful of encirclement, ordered a retreat to the river Vistula. The troops in East Prussia, organized into four corps, formed the Eighth Army, commanded by General Max von Prittwitz. Some second-line troops were tasked with the defense of the Eastern Front fortresses such as Posen (Poznań), Thorn (Toruń), Danzig (Gdańsk), and Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) and to watch the Polish frontier. The choice of France for the initial offensive was actuated chiefly by the relative slowness of Russian mobilization and by the impossibility of gaining a rapid victory against Russia owing to the great distances. As pointed out by Christopher Clark, the actual Tannenberg is some thirty kilometres to the west, and there was no intrinsic reason - other than the historical battle and its emotive resonance in the narrative of German Nationalism - to name for it the 1914 battle.On August 30, 1914, in the early days of World War I, the German forces led by Paul von Hindenburg almost completely annihilated the Russian Second Army at the Battle of Tannenberg, in modern-day Poland, all but ending Russia’s invasion of East Prussia before it had even really started.įollowing the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, the German General Staff drew up a plan which provided for quick, all-out ground offensive against France, designed to obtain a rapid and decisive victory, while taking up defensive positions in the east against Russia, until the victory had been obtained in the west. The battle is notable particularly for a number of rapid movements of complete German corps by train, allowing a single German Army to present a single front to both Russian Armies.Īlthough the battle took place near Allenstein, Ludendorff's aide Max Hoffmann suggested to name it after Tannenberg in an attempt to erase the defeat in the medieval Battle of Grunwald (Tannenberg) of 1410 in which the Teutonic forces were defeated by the Poles and Lithuanians. A series of follow-up battles destroyed the majority of the First Army as well, and kept the Russians off-balance until the spring of 1915. The battle resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian Second Army. The Battle of Tannenberg was in August 1914 a decisive engagement between the Russian Empire and the German Empire in the first days of World War I, fought by the Russian First and Second Armies and the German Eighth Army between 23 August and 30 August 1914.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |