In Russia’s humiliating loss to Japan in the early 1900s, Western military planners had been impressed with Japan’s unexpected strengths as well as Russia’s leadership problems. PLANNING FOR WAR, THE GERMANS did not see Russia as a serious threat. The win also might have strengthened the tsarist government enough that it could have controlled its internal turmoil through the war, with consequences for the world that are fascinating to imagine. A Russian victory would have made German gains in the west extremely difficult to sustain and would probably have shortened the war. If the Russians had won at Tannenberg, Germany would have been forced to devote much more of its resources to the east, for the farmlands of East Prussia are not that far from Berlin. That does not say it all, but it says a lot. To take just one small example, Russian soldiers who were there remembered their supplies coming up to the line in horse-drawn carts-and seeing German supplies arriving in long trains of motorized vehicles.
Tannenberg was a battle of logistics, reconnaissance, communications, and weaponry as much as it was a battle among men. Coming at the war’s very beginning, in late August to early September 1914, it completed the long transformation of warfare into its thoroughly modern form, and it exposed the fatal weaknesses of the Russian army-that it could generate manpower but did not have the infrastructure to support it. Yet few of those battles by themselves had the kind of influence on the postwar world that the Battle of Tannenberg did. MOST WESTERN HISTORIES OF WORLD WAR I place the focus of their narratives on the Western Front, which has become a touchstone of bad leadership and futile slaughter. Obligated by treaties to declare war in August 1914, Russia was unprepared to attack, and in East Prussia its vast army soon proved no match for German intelligence, reconnaissance, and railways. Blind Bear at Bay: The Russians at Tannenberg Close
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