Tannenberg 1914
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Tannenberg 1914
09 / 2019 – Jacek Bartosiak
The summer of 1914 changed the European world forever. In particular in Central and Eastern Europe. August 1914 marked the beginning of the end of the European continental empires and in the near future gave the nations of the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge a chance for independence.
German I World War cemetery in the forest near Zerbuń (photo: author's own collection)
By the way, giving such a chance to other nations in this part of Europe, which for the previous several centuries were successively crushed by empires external to the region - the German, the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian - in a constant centripetal motion, destroying dreams of their own subjectivity. The last in the crush zone to undergo this process was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, once a great land empire stretched across the Baltic-
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Black Sea Bridge. And this entity also emerged again from the tumulus of 1914-1921 as the strongest of the new states, with aspirations to rebuild the former land empire, or at least a large part of it.
Spending my holidays in August this year in Warmia near Biskupiec, I made a list of the surrounding cemeteries of soldiers of the Great War. There are many of them, often hidden deep in the forests, between the picturesque hills and numerous lakes so characteristic of the region.
German war cemeteries and burial sites in the forests near Zerbuń (photo: author's own collection)
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German war cemeteries and burial sites in the forests near Zerbuń (photo: author's own collection)
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Tsarist army soldiers' quarters at the German war cemetery, around Zerbuń (photo: author's own collection)
The northernmost part of the battle opening hostilities on the Eastern Front, later dubbed the ‘Battle of Tannenberg’, took place at the end of August 1914 between Biskupiec, Czerwonka, Biesów and Zerbuń north, west and east of the large Dadaj lake, currently popular among Warsaw tourists. The goal of the Russian offensive was to push the Germans back behind the strategic line of the Vistula river. This maneuver corresponds to the regularity of the Polish theatre of war and was repeated in subsequent wars waged in Poland. The Vistula with Nogat and the city of Malbork form a strategic line cutting off or, respectively, communicating fighting units depending on who controls the river’s crossings.
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Commemorative plaques in honour of the achievements of German soldiers in August 1914, around Zerbuń (photo: author's own collection)
However, the Germans managed to defeat the Russian army in the summer of 1914 despite the involvement of huge forces on the Western Front in France. The Battle of Tannenberg had other serious consequences. The Russian offensive in East Prussia resulted in the early withdrawal from the Western Front of two German corps, who managed to reach the battlefield with the Russians in August and were missing at the time of the German surge in the West - the offensive on Paris (which perhaps saved France in 1914).
In September, they were already taking part in the next great battle of the campaign - the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, which was to seal the defeat of the Russian army in East Prussia. And indeed, by September 15, German corps had claimed the Niemen (Nemunas) river line, pushing the Russians behind this operational barrier that separates the former Polish Crown from Lithuania proper.
Germans, taking decisive action, operated in full concentration of forces, bringing them together, especially while artillery was the most powerful instrument of war.
The Russians who were active dispersed and were never able to use their numerical superiority, not being able to apply the iron war principle of the economy of force, mainly due to the backwardness of rear services and logistics, which in the era of modern material war has grown to enormous proportions. The stretching of forces and the inability to concentrate them when needed was one of the causes of Russian disasters in East Prussia during the entire campaign of 1914.
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It is hard not to have respect for the organisation and efficiency of the then Kaiser-led German army. This is also evidenced by the way they buried not just their own soldiers, but also their opponent in the forests and fields of Warmia and Mazury, and put up commemorative plaques after the Great War. They have been preserved to this day, as can be seen in the pictures.
The names of the fallen German army rank and file very often sound Polish, and in Warmia a large part of the recruits were Poles. Besides, Poles serving in the German army in the Great War came from Wielkopolska, Silesia and Pomerania, not only from Warmia and Mazury.
In 1914 and the following years, up to 900,000 Poles were dressed in feldgrau German uniforms, of which probably over 100,000 were killed. The Pole - Stanisław Kaczyński - was one of the heroes of the arguably most famous German book about the Great War, "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque, which describes the fate of the soldiers of the Kaiser’s army on the Western Front.
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Commemorative plaques in Ramsów on the Dadaj Lake (photo: author's own collection)
20 years later, during the next World War, the Germans, however, had already succumbed to the Soviet army coming from the east and entering German East Prussia, terribly avenging itself for the atrocities of the total war that the Germans had perpetrated in the east of the continent in 1941-1945, and which did not resemble at all war campaigns in the west of the continent. The operation started in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa devastating primarily all of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, the western part of Russia and Poland, materially devastating the lands and nations living between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, in a place which communicates the European Rimland with the Eurasian Heartland. This area always becomes a crush zone when the war of domination between the great powers is to begin.
Author Jacek Bartosiak CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Date 09 / 2019 Loose thoughts, Poland&Europe Find out more at: strategyandfuture.org
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