Ludendorff successfully lobbies Hindenburg to have the Kaiser name the battle for the town of Tannenberg, some thirty miles away, where Teutonic knights were defeated by a Polish-Russian force in 1410. The battle plan has actually been devised by Max Hoffmann, too, but Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg accept the victor’s laurels anyway, even though they have spent most of the battle panicking over false reports of Rennenkampf moving to rescue Samsonov. Ironically, the encirclement has been made possible by the irascible General Hermann von François, who disobeys orders and delays his attack until expected artillery support has arrived, allowing him to flank Russia’s 2nd Army in the rear.
The Germans are quick to shift their forces to the east again and push Rennenkampf back it is the last time that Russian soldiers will touch German soil until 1945. Shell-shocked and unable to report his failure to the Tsar, on the fourth day Samsonov begs his officers for a moment alone and walks off into the forest to commit suicide. Out of Samsonov’s command of more than two hundred thousand men, only about ten thousand escape the encirclement after two more desperate days of fighting the rest desert, are killed, or captured. When German reservists seem to give way before his attack today, Samsonov pushes his reserves forward without securing his flanks, and after tomorrow he finds himself surrounded. Called away from his successes in Belgium, General Erich von Ludendorff has used the German railroads to move his outsized army from its defensive positions in the east, leaving only his cavalry to keep Rennenkampf distracted while he achieves superior numbers against Samsonov in the south. Not understanding that his rival is not moving to support his attack as planned, and oblivious to the fact that his enemy is operating inside of his decision cycle, General Samsonov marches into a disaster. Only the foundation is still visible today as a World Heritage Site The German radio station at Kamina was so new that few images of any kind survive.
In a very real way, the Second World War will be bloodier, and move faster, simply because radios become ubiquitous among tactical units but this is not that war. But underlining how little tactical use can yet be made of radio technology, no army in this war will field a man-packable radio kit, with important consequences for communications in the trenches. On the Western front, French intelligence will spend the war breaking German encryption and analyzing their communications. That campaign ends today when the allies find the station destroyed by the capitulating Germans. To underline the strategic significance of radio even 100 years ago today, consider that Britain’s first shots of the new war have not taken place in Europe, but in Africa, where the Kaiser’s empire had just finished building the transmitter that links Berlin to her ships in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Radios will not have great tactical significance in this war, but they already have great strategic value - especially to the Russians, who lack telegraphy and telephony lines in much of Poland. But did he understand at the end that his radio communications were also responsible? General Samsonov’s personal rivalry with General Rennenkampf contributed to the disaster. To make matters worse, the Russian army has sent them into war without any intelligence officers able to read captured German documents - or the available radio encryption technology that would make it possible for them to talk to their national command without being overheard. Unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of men being led into battle, these two generals have a personal rivalry going back nine years that inhibits their ability to coordinate maneuvers. The Russian plan is to envelop the defending German army from two sides and destroy it. The speed of the Russian offensive has caught the Kaiser’s generals off guard, for they did not know that the Tsar kept sixty percent of his peacetime strength in Russian Poland. In 1914, they are the land feature that divides the two Russian armies attacking Germany: 1st Army, commanded by General Rennenkampf, that has been resting and rearming for the last five days instead of exploiting their victory at Gumbinnen, and 2nd Army, commanded by Alexander Samsonov, moving up from Russian Poland in the south. Carved out of what is now northern Poland by primordial glaciers, the Masurian Lakes are a 20,000-square mile wetland that splits the possible approaches to Eastern Prussia from the east and south.
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