THE TWO TANNENBERG BATTLES

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32554, 13 March 1971, Page 10

THE TWO TANNENBERG BATTLES

Tannenberg. By Geoffrey Evans. Hamish Hamilton. 182 pp.

There can be few places in the world able to claim that they have been the site of two major battles. There can be scarcely a handful able to call those two battles crucial moments in history. This proud and melancholy claim can, however, be made without exaggeration by Tannenberg, a small and otherwise insignificant village in what, at various times, has been Poland, Prussia and Germany, and is now Poland once more. On July 15, 1410, it was the scene of a bloody struggle between the Teutonic Knights and the combined armies of Poland and Lithuania, which resulted in a crushing defeat for the Teuton invaders. In the last week of August, 1914, it was the Slav people who met defeat at the hands of the Germans, as the invading armies of Imperial Russia were outmanoeuvred and over-run by the German defenders of East Prussia. Each victory was more or less unexpected, and each put paid to what could have been momentous plans for invasion, and so, as much as any single battle can, altered the course of history. Invaders find it comforting and, diplomatically, rewarding if they can grace their activities with the title of “crusade.” The invasion of Poland and Lithuania which the Teutonic Order of Knights undertook in the summer of 1410 was presented as such to the Catholic world of Western Europe, and to the Pope, under whose nominal orders the invasion was being undertaken. At one time, such a claim would have had a certain validity. When, in 1230, the Order had first turned its attention to the Baltic region, after forty years of campaigning in Hungary and the Middle East against the infidel, it had campaigned, under the aegis of the Poles, who were already Christian, against the heathen Prussians. These having been crushed and forcibly converted and Germanised, the Order moved on to attack heathen Lithuania, gradually establishing control of the Baltic coast from Danzig to Riga, in what is now Soviet Estonia.

By 1410, having completed this task, they were ready to bring the advantages of Catholic Christianity and German culture to the Baltic hinterland. By now, however, the “crusade” had lost its ostensible “raison-d’etre;” the Lithuanians had embraced Christianity when their Grand Duke, Jagiello, had done so, in 1386, on marrying the heiress to the Polish throne. Such a setback was, however, minor to the Teutonic Knights. Ignoring the conver-

sion of the Lithuanians (and the fact that the Poles had long been Christian) they invaded the united kingdom, still claiming to be crusaders. Confident of success, since they had never been beaten in the Baltic, save by the Russians under Alexander Nevsky, in 1242, they were utterly routed. The causes of this disaster, in which the Order lost 18,000 killed and 14,000 as prisoners, as well as almost its entire leadership, were various. Bad generalship on the part of the Order’s Grand Master, Von Jungingen, played a part as did chance. Yet probably the greatest factor of all was the fierce patriotism of the Poles and Lithuanians. They were fighting for their country under a King they loved and, militarily inferior though they were, they triumphed Tannenberg, 1914, was again, a triumph for patriotism, but this time patriotism well-led and well-supplied with arms and equipment. The Russians were not only the invaders, moving against well-prepared defences, but were also ill-equipped and ill-led. There can be no comparison between Generals Samsonoff and Rennenkampf, who com-

manded the Russian Second and First Armies respectively, and their opponents Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The latter were fine professional soldiers, and Ludendorff brilliant. Samsonoff and Rennenkampf brought nothing to command save personal courage and obstinacy. Their failings as leaders, compounded by incredible organisational weaknesses and a distressing mediocrity among their staff officers, led to a debacle in which the Russian Second Army was surrounded and cut to pieces when it could, in a co-ordinated attack with the First Army, have pushed the Germans back by sheer numbers alone. The result was a loss of 70,000 killed or wounded, and approximately 60,000 prisoners. From such a loss, not even Russia, with her huge reserves of manpower, could soon recover. The defeat of 1410 always rankled with the Germans. So much so that Ludendorff chose Tannenberg, which figured only to a small degree in the five days battle of 1914, as its name. German honour had been avenged. To commemorate this fact the new Nazi regime built a huge monument there, in the form of a Teutonic castle, in it placing the ashes of Hindenburg in 1934. The Poles already had a monument to the first Tannenberg, built in Cracow in 1910. One of the first acts of the Germans, on entering that city in 1939, was to erase the granite reminder of their shame. Now that they have finally driven the Germans from East Prussia (and who but the dispossessed Junkers themselves can see any likelihood of a reversal of the situation?), perhaps the Poles will build a monument at Tannenberg itself?

The first battle of Tannenberg is almost unknown to English-speaking peoples. The second was a complex and often confused struggle which makes its description difficult. Acquainting us with the importance of the first battle, and then describing both it and the second in a clear and lucid manner, Sir Geoffrey Evans .himself a retired LieutenantGeneral, has performed a major service. Simply but effectively written, supplied with an excellent set of maps—those dealing with the various phases of the second Tannenberg are especially valuable—and interesting illustrations, it performs its purpose admirably. On the subject of the illustrations, perhaps one point should be made: the photograph captioned “German soldiers surrendering” in fact shows Russians laying down their arms. Second, Tannenberg was not a battle when German prisoners were often taken, and certainly not one in which they surrendered en masse.