Battle of Tannenberg

Prittwitz, shaken by the action at Gumbinnen and fearful of encirclement, ordered a retreat to the River Vistula. Then Prittwitz was dismissed. General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff were sent forward to meet Samsonov's advancing troops. They made contact on 22nd August, 1914, and for six days the Russians, with their superior numbers, had a few successes. Samsonov meanwhile, bedevilled by supply and communication problems, was entirely unaware that Rennenkampf had chosen to pause and lick his wounds at Gumbinnen, instead assuming that his forces were continuing their movement south-west. Samsonov’s army was trapped in an encirclement plan of German army, while pursuing and destroying the supposedly retreating Eighth Army. German army succeeed to catch two Russian messages, revealing the plans of Samsonov’s army. The battle was successful for German army. So, by 29th August, Samsanov's Second Army surrounded.



General Alexander Samsonov attempted to retreat but now in a German cordon, most of his troops were slaughtered or captured. Only 10,000 of the 150,000 Russian soldiers managed to escape. 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. The Germans, who lost 20,000 men in the battle, were able to take over 92,000 Russian prisoners. In Britain, all news of the Russian defeat at Tannenberg was kept from the public.



The Battle of Tannenberg was a great propaganda victory, the scale of the Russian defeat shocked Russia's allies, who wondered whether it signalled the defeat of the Russian army. Such was not the case, as was demonstrated by the lesser scale of German victories at the Masurian Lakes.