Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 250 - The Battle of Tannenberg Part 1: Deadly German Swamp Ass

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Joe and Nate begin the story of one of the most legendary battles from the beginning of WWI. It is much dumber than you think. Part 1/3 support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old crow

today and now back to the show hey everybody and welcome to the lines up by donkeys podcast i'm joe and i have nate here in the content minds with me and uh live live in studio in the other side of the world what's up not a whole lot how's it going man uh you know just another lovely day uh weirdly this morning when i went onto my balcony despite the fact i live on the sixth floor and I have no balconies remotely near me due to how Soviet apartments were built. But I could smell an old man's cologne somehow wafting six floors up. And I am baffled at the science that made that possible. And it's stuck with me for hours now. Yeah. I mean, it's in the same vein that when you're in... I remember being at Fort Richardson, Alaska in, you know, January, February when it was insanely cold. And like when it gets that cold, the sound of the cannon fire at morning Reveille is just completely different.

Like it just, it doesn't sound like a boom. It sounds like a like a whip crack moving across the sky because it's so cold so maybe you're having that like there's like some climactic condition that makes like caucasian man's perfume fucking waft up on some kind of like niche atmospheric condition i recall the same thing in afghanistan the uh that cologne smell the musk cologne smell is just so incredibly strong and like you once you once you recognize it once you've identified what it is you never stop smelling it when it's around and there were times a mixture a mixture of dracar noir and cigarettes right like incredibly strong musk perfume and then also uh sweat and cigarettes and it's just like you just you know that smell and every now and again i would encounter that smell on the new york city subway and i'd be like oh boy i i guess i guess the caveman ancestors genes of like smell being this

really profound sort of uh association is uh that's not a lie that's not that's not woo shit that's not healing crystal shit it's actually true that just makes me want to drop like daredevil on the eastern block and just have his senses get completely fucked yeah exactly daredevil has to try she for the first time he's just like you're gonna pronounce this let alone eat it so nate i have some bad news for you um you've been on the show frequently as of late but i have yet to lock you in for a series and this is going to be your first one um and i have decided no in case anybody is sitting at home and for some reason did not read the title of this episode,

it's not a genocide, calm down. We're saving that one for later. We've got to ease them in a bit. I appreciate it. I appreciate you not jumping me in all at once. Surprise, this is an eight-part series on the Bosnian genocide, but we're going to be talking about World War I,

but more specifically, probably not a very well-known battle. This isn't Verdun. This isn't Vimy Ridge. This isn't Passion Delta or the Somme or anything like that. We're talking about the Battle of Tannenberg. Are you familiar at all with the Battle of Tannenberg? I'm not. I think if I knew what era of the war it was, I might be able to guess,

but off the top of my head, I don't know. It's literally a month after it starts. The Maneuver War is still happening in the West. It has not stagnated yet. What's funny, man, is that I actually know a decent amount about that. I know nothing about Tannenberg, but between reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August when I was in the army and

reading a French novel called The Officer's Ward, which is about a ward in a hospital of officers who've been facially disfigured in the war and the main character, everyone is always surprised when he says that he got shot in the face on the battle for the Meuse River in like August 1914. Because everyone's like, wait, fuck, I would have assumed Ypres or the Somme.

No, no, no. Meuse, 1914. That first initial war of maneuver is when they just burn down Belgiumgium and so on and so forth it's like it's fascinating and it it feels like the like you know south sea islands new guinea campaign of world war one in the sense that like people who were involved communities countries who were involved they absolutely hold on to that memory but as far as like the grand war narrative goes people don't talk about it in the way that Australians talk about New Guinea, but Americans don't.

Because America has all these other things they can point to and be like, what a great success, whereas New Guinea for Americans was like 95% casualty rates. So it's like this as a corner of the war is fascinating. So I'm actually genuinely excited, even if it's going to be a series where everything gets worse. I think, before we get into it, I do think that we both grew up and were excited even if it's going to be a series where everything gets worse uh that i i think you know before we get into it i do think that you know we both grew up and were educated in the west even though i guess i i don't live there anymore and you kind of don't but um in a different way so you have yeah you you know our knowledge of what we were taught about World War I is very much Western front focused, where in Germany, this battle is quite famous.

It definitely helps create the mythos of two massive dickheads that would lead directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler. And somewhat ironically, it leads into the stalemate in the West because of the massive shift in manpower and material that Germany had to do. Actually, they didn't even really have to, but they did anyway. But we'll get there. That's in part three. So likewise, when you picture World War I, you probably picture the same thing I do. static lines of the Western Front, trenches stretching for miles and human wave attacks running across no man's land only to end up being churned into chunky sauce and McNuggets

by machine gun fire and artillery. Now, there's a reason why we picture World War I like that. I mean, it sticks out as this inhumane level of cruelty and most importantly, the senselessness of it all. The haunting pictures that survive,

that show us the horrors of trench warfare. You could go to parts of Europe today that are still completely mangled by World War I. Yeah, I mean, like Otto Dix's paintings are hallucinatory and yet in many ways closer to the experience than any kind of like artistic representation in film and furthermore like you said areas of belgium uh are still like they are still and will be for decades removing uxo and shrapnel and you know just like scrap and detritus of war because you know farmers continue to find this stuff because it was

yeah a meat grinder and that i think is the the cultural memory of it um you know for the anglo world or at least at least the european anglo world in north america north america the canadians have um what is it vimy ridge i think the america we have passion dale passion yeah the james of passion dale we have um bellow wood um obviously the australians have gallipoli which is different because it's one of those forgotten campaigns but australia new zealand has that but like for us especially for americans because we didn't enter the war until 1917. But for us and for the British, like the eternal British emblem here in the UK of military service in general and veteran stuff, but specifically World War I, is the poppy in Flanders Fields, the poppies grow, and a silhouette of a Tommy wearing the helmet that they wore

at the time with a rifle and a bayonet. So once again, the trench, the Western Front, that is crucially... That is the centerpiece of how the war is remembered in Britain, in America, in Western Europe in general. But like you said, perhaps not in Germany. And I'm not as familiar with the German recollection of it. Now, what's interesting here is, like we've already talked about a little bit, World War I was not always a static nightmare of trenches. That was, of course, a feature, and it was certainly a feature of the Western Front. Even then, the Western Front was only stalemated, like turned into a stalemated hellscape once the war kind of ground down

the initial phase when the schlieffen plan failed closer to 1915 the first year or the first few months of the war rather was full of large mobile offenses which were still a horrifying meat grinder but at least it wasn't a trench but on the eastern front however mobility warfare was commonplace all the way until the end. A trench-based stalemate didn't really develop, and things tended to be a lot more fluid. There's a lot of reasons for this, mostly because the front was just so large. The eastern front was roughly marked by the Baltic Sea in the west and Minsk in the east, and St. Petersburg in the north and the Black Sea in the south.

the east and St. Petersburg in the north and the Black Sea in the south. This is a distance of over a thousand miles while the western front was less than half of that. So this idea of like these massive immovable fronts was not going to be possible even with the massive amounts of manpower Russia happened to be throwing around. This made things much harder to bog down, making huge changes in the battle lines much, much easier. This is because the greater length of the front ensured that the density of soldiers in the line was lower and the line would be easier to break. And once broken, the sparse communication networks and communication technology being quite limited at the time and the distance between the units made it difficult for the defenders to rush reinforcements into the hole and mount a counter offensive which like in the west you had an entire system of trenches like oh this is the counter-attack trench like so like that just didn't exist in the east and uh you know we're of course we're talking about movement in the eastern front because we're talking about the

eastern front in general at the battle of tannenberg um now the battle of tannenberg is could also be known as the reason why paul von hindenburg and Erich Lundorf became legends and national heroes, a power that they would use to murder the living shit of the Weimar Republic and hand Germany directly to Adolf Hitler. So real winners here. And this has really nothing to do with anything. But I do have to point out because people might get mad at me if I don't point out what these two guys end up doing. Most people know the role that Hindenburg played in the rise of Hitler, so I won't go into that too much, but Ludendorff was literally involved in the Beer Hall push. Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but it's quite funny. By the time Hitler rose to power in Germany,

Ludendorff had so thoroughly lost his mind in a mess of different crazy conspiracy theories. Again, crazy conspiracy theories for Nazis that Hitler was embarrassed to even be seen around him. So, yeah, just a little addendum to these two assholes we're going to be talking about a lot. But we should acknowledge our sources for the series. Tannenberg, Clash of Empires by Dennis Showalter,

probably one of my favorite historical authors and historians, recently away i think two years ago three years ago though i will say his books are not easy to read they're quite dense so tread at your own peril uh there's also tannenberg 1914 by john sweetman and the eastern front 1914 to 1920 by michael nyberg um so those will all be cited in the show notes if anybody wants to look those up and buy them. They're good books. Very dry and dense, but you will go away knowing a unit by unit breakdown of what exactly every single person did at the Battle of Tannenberg, which I did not put in the script because

that is boring as shit and I don't feel like going through it. because that is boring as shit and I don't feel like going through it. Now, Nate, I warned you before we got started that somehow while researching this script and this series, I ended up talking about how World War I started. I didn't mean to do that. I really tried not to do that, but the relationship between germany and russia is very important to this uh so i ended up going back to the 1800s uh can i can i try a speed run

and you tell me if i get it wrong on what cause world war fire go away so in the aftermath of the franco-prussian war and the reconfiguring of europe the uh emergence of a sort of settlement of peace in western europe between prussia and france basically uh all the the competing powers of france and central europe started forming alliances with one another forming treaties with one another uh vying over influence uh for places like the balkans russia uh turkey their ottoman empire the hat the the the Habsburg Empire in Austria-Hungary. All these places basically got signed up to alliances with one another, sort of protection alliances and treaties.

And the degree to which they basically... The war started because Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. However, there was already tension between different powers about what the sort of fake bullshit excuse was going to be, pretty much identical to the way that the Franco-Prussian war was started on complete bullshit pretext. The notion of like a intentionally mistranslated press release about an ambassador being disrespected or something along those lines. And so it was already a foregone conclusion that something was going to light the match, that it wasn't just

Franz Ferdinand being executed or being assassinated, but ultimately it came down to a lot of kind of court politics amongst European powers aligning against each other, etc.

And then everyone being like oh fuck i guess we're actually on the hook to go to war that's pretty much correct but i bet you i got something wrong because i'm recalling what i know from reading shit as an adult and then also a lot of high school history class so like i might just be regurgitating shit that's like received wisdom that's not true i mean you're mostly correct um now let's say the relationship between the german and russian empires is complicated even before the rise of nazis germans and russians fucking hated one another even if their monarchs were related by blood uh bakunin once wrote quote nothing unites the slavs like the hatred of germans and vice versa um i would say a similar

thing is true if nothing unites scandinavians like a hatred of Russians. So, once again. I mean, that pretty much is every region. Like, you know, nothing unites the Caucasus like a hatred for Russia. Or, like, at least the South Caucasus. Now, like, kind of what we talked about way back during our French invasion of Russia series

by Napoleon, Germans were knitted into the elite Russian, the elite of Russian society to much of the same reasons and much of the same extent that the French had been previously. The czar wanted to try to modernize, pick the country he liked and then imported people to do it. Rich Russians were then sent to Germany, especially like the aristocracy for what was considered a better education.

And this has been going on for quite some time. However, by the late 1800s and the rise of Otto von Bismarck, things began to change quite drastically because Bismarck is Bismarck. His concept of balanced tension pretty much required Europe to be on the verge of war at any given time so that he could control the outcome so it could benefit Germany, once Germany was unified, of course, starting with Prussia. This is how he effectively unified Germany via trolling the idiot French emperor into starting the Franco-Prussian War. Correct. Because the French emperor, Napoleon III, was convinced that he could convince southern German Catholics to rebel against the prussians or fight against the

prussians if the prussians started a war but they wound up not for a variety of reasons as you can basically guess and he also insisted on leading the battles himself from the front um he wound up getting captured at the battle of sedan and france was then militarily occupied by the prussians they extracted a huge amount of concessions. The Germans or the Prussians took possession of Alsace-Lorraine. And this led to a very, very, very strange period in French domestic politics, but also a sustained period of peace, more or less peace in Western Europe, during which time they then focused all their energies on colonizing Africa until 1914. So 1871 to 1914, what you'd call the bellapak uh in french which means like the beautiful era but basically it's this period of whenever you see like matisse paintings

you know like artwork like uh whenever you see um toulouse-latrecque advertisements things along those lines like the you know the musee d'orsay that kind of stuff it conjures up this image of like continental europe at peace in this period. And then this thing happens in August 1914 that kind of puts the kibosh on it. It's easy to have peace when you export the war somewhere else in America. Now, a lot of this balanced tension on the part of Germany when it comes to Germany-Russia was mostly about provoking and embarrassing Russia, such as simple things like not inviting the czar to various meetings where he invited all of Europe's other monarchs. He also got German

newspapers to start publishing anti-Russian articles to help fan the flames amongst the German population. But Germans didn't really need that much help hating Russians. For instance, the German left wing hated Russia because it was an absolute monarchy, while the German liberals and conservatives saw Russia as something of a reactionary backwater, while still others outright called for the colonization of Russia so they could be ruled by their betters. However, that didn't stop German firms and companies and stuff like that from becoming the backbone of the mid-1880s Russian modernization program, which largely didn't go great. backbone of the mid-1880s Russian modernization program, which largely didn't go great. They gave them loans that were so bad that there was something of an imperial version of a payday loan. And Russia's economy was already complete trash at this point. So this just continuously imploded them, which of course benefited Germany twice. So bear in mind, there's a significant population of ethnic Germans, German speakers in russia at the time primarily a community of people who were invited to settle there to basically modernize russian

farming they invited there by catherine the great uh those people let's just say things didn't go well for them in world war ii and with stalin uh but no it did not those people were a significant subset of you know like in russia they mattered significantly in the Russian economy at the time. Yeah, there's like there's a huge population of Baltic Germans. And we've talked about one very famous one during a series. Yeah. And a lot of them ended up being something of ardent supporters for the white movement and stuff like that. Yeah.

Significantly, also of a lot of these people wound up being expelled and up until like the 80s there was still an appeal in west german politics that like to kind of appeal to the expelli uh you know german votes like putting out maps and be like you know like for all germans and stuff in the political map or whatever and it's like or the german flag over a map that extends well into the Baltics. Like there was absolutely this belief of like, they're like the greater Prussia, et cetera. I was pretty poison.

Like was a, you know, that, that still mattered. And like, but most of all those people are now dead. So yeah, it's kind of a race,

a race from people in Germany. Definitely remember this, but like it's no longer talked about with any seriousness, but it was as late as just before you and I were born. Yeah. And all of this weaponized racism towards Russians is obviously gross, but it was a calculated campaign by Bismarck as another one of his many campaigns to foster German unification. Remember, the German empire was new. The concept of being German was a vague thing like people would would

identify themselves as prussian bavarian whatever they and there was no unifying national identity that's something that he was trying to create and everybody knows the best way to whip up some nationalism it's fucking racism um and of course it helped that russia had been in decline for years arguably you could say terminal decline at this point, ever since the Japanese kicked their asses across Asia and the Russian Navy lost a goddamn warship to an alligator. They're an easy target. So, like, let's pick on these guys. Comically backwards country at the time with a security apparatus that, let's be real, the NKVD would have seemed like a soft to gentle touch compared to. The degree to which if you know about any Russian political figure,

any Russian author, any significant person in Russian cultural life, you will hear a story about them in some way or another being harassed, chased, bothered by a group called the Ofrana. That is basically the Russian secret police under the Tsar. And yeah, it's unreal. Joe said previously Russia was an absolute monarchy, and that was a thing that caused the German left to look down on it, also the liberals to look down on it.

It was an absolute monarchy. It was like Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for reading books the Tsar didn't like. And they commuted his sentence literally as he was lined up to get shot by a firing squad. Well, that is his correct punishment for reading Harry Potter. Wait, what? well that is his correct punishment for reading harry potter wait what and like the okrana also uh created the protocols of the elders of zion

yeah you didn't know that no i mean i knew it was it was created in czarist russia but i didn't realize that it was it may have been the organization that predated the okrana but same vibe like it doesn't it's like saying the kgb is different from the mkvd it's the same thing uh but yeah like they their footprints are still felt to this day uh they they literally

uh like created 4chan effectively via posting with fake jewish conspiracies um so thanks thanks guys czarist russia y'all y'all made my ancestors lives really great i appreciate you yeah as i've said before all of russian history could be described as and then things got worse um but and to be clear here this german imperial project in russia was called austin perium uh which sounds like something from Warhammer 40K. And it's shockingly similar to

General Plan Ost, which was the Nazi plan to genocide virtually all of Russia and take it over. They did not want to take over a population. They simply wanted space for Germans. Showalter writes, quote, other writers dwelt on more loving on the prospect of Russian troops fleeing before German bayonets a village is raised and peasants deported to make room for the younger fitter race so yeah just just because they're not Nazis doesn't mean they aren't kind of Nazis uh and and to be fair Germany had practice uh doing this in uh in German southwest Africa I was gonna say exactly that I was gonna say in Namibia you know the Germans And to be fair, Germany had practice doing this in German Southwest Africa. I was going to say exactly that.

I was going to say in Namibia, you know, the Germans, what the Germans did there. Like Germany sometimes gets overlooked by white people, by people in the West, by people in the English speaking world for what it did in Africa. Because also everyone remembers what Germany did in World War I, World War II, etc. Like they've got a lot of blame to fucking contend with. But let's just say people who are the descendants of the people who suffered under German colonial occupation have not forgotten how fucking insane the Germans were in Southwest Africa. And just for some more connecting tissue there, the German military mission to the Ottomanoman empire was largely made up of

veterans of namibia and you can guess what they helped the ottomans do ah roger yeah there's actually an entire book called german responsibility in the armenian uh genocide which i highly recommend anybody if they can get their hands i believe it's out of print but yeah it it's uh it's grim and a lot of those same guys are founding members of the Nazi party. So yeah, Germany, it's a problem. There is no connection here. We have not been able to identify any connections between these people. It is very cool that you have read this book, Joe.

Kind of like what you said, Germany believed that there is no real reason for war. However, if the Tsar was dumb enough to try something, they would take advantage of the situation in order to check the expansion of Russian influence and expand their own. This is literally a foundational concept when the German Empire was created. Yeah, because this is literally the

Franco-Prussian War. This is 100% how it happened. And Bismarck saw an advantage there to bring, because you know, Protestant North, Catholic South, bring them into the fold. This is 100% like, yeah, let them fuck up and give us a pretext to dominate them militarily and achieve what we want much like your friend who only has one dance move auto von bismarck only ever does one thing uh now how there was a worst case scenario uh in the german mind that could unfold of course being a two-front war against

France and Russia. However, they knew there was no way they were going to march to Moscow or anything. That was never their plan, unlike the Nazis. They also saw somewhat correctly, the French were one of, if not the most powerful military in the world. And they knew in the event of a war, they'd have to throw all their attention against the French if they hoped to win. They believe Russia would just fall apart after being smacked around in a couple battles or two and then force the government to negotiate at which point they could leave uh they they assume that this short campaign against russia would take a few weeks at most uh though as a side note here because i have a lot of side notes in the series because

i cannot control myself people often say military leaders had no idea what their new modern weapons could do when World War I actually kicked off. That is not true. There was plenty of evidence, especially the Russo-Japanese War, that showed everybody what artillery and machine guns would do to human beings. And that's especially not true for the Germans. Schlieffen and the others had a pretty good idea of what the new artillery and machine guns and rapid firing rifles are doing a war. They just didn't think it was going to be that important. Like Showalter puts it, quote, what they were expecting was not a gentleman's war, but an Armageddon in quick time. They just didn't think it was going to last that long.

And now, somewhat ironically, there was a guy who pointed out that all these guys are very, very wrong. It's going to be young Gottlieb block, uh, who had written about the concept of industrial war at the time, penning a book called legal future, where he points out that like industrial, can I,

can I say it please? No, no, it's a legate. Tom cut his mic. Now, he points out that industrial war would make this indecisive mass war through attrition not only more common, but inevitable. And therefore, should be avoided.

German war planners disregarded his assessment for being pessimistic. Whoops. Eric Shinseki of his day. Now, just because this guy has the biggest I told you so in history at this point, his book goes on to say, new weapons made a war of maneuver impossible and any great power war would have devolved

into mass slaughter using vast networks of trenches. He wrote this in 1898 and died before World War I started. Yeah, I mean, look, there was a war of maneuver. It just eventually devolved into trenches and mass slaughter. Funny how that happens. Yeah, way to go, Jan. Now, by the 1900s, Germany began to make concrete plans for just this kind of future war. Famously, this is the Schlieffen Plan and was developed at the idea of conquering the low countries while deploying a huge amount of men to Austria in order to protect it from the Russians.

Leaving Eastern Prussia, where the stage of the series, pretty much undefended. stage of this series, pretty much undefended. Instead of forming a line to protect Germany's large eastern border, they decided the best thing they could do to protect it was to go on the offensive against Russia because they knew that they couldn't depend on the Austrians to do fucking anything. This is helped by the fact that eastern Prussia is something of an environmental nightmare for war making. It has lakes, swamps, heavy woods so thick that people can hardly see each other in them. it's just a hard fucking place to attack as the russians will soon find out previous to this plan the germans figured they would just have to abandon it all the way back to the vista la river uh because that gives

them a solid line to defend it on uh but they this is also the era of the really dumb dreadnought arms race that just implodes everybody's military budget. People aren't making great choices at this period of time. But as the German war plans evolved, so the concept of German war making, specifically the idea of strict non-negotiable timetables that all military efforts would have to work by. As Sweeney says, quote, a military myth requiring everything to go impossibly right to have the chance of succeeding like this is one of those things that like i think barbara tuckman writes about it where uh even down to like company level formations we have very specific times they're supposed to like wake up eat and then march 20 fucking kilometers and if anything delays any single one of those movements, nothing will work.

And obviously, anybody who's ever been in the military knows, very detailed, very micromanaging timetables. war to something of a military dogma that everything would revolve around, despite the fact that the German army's own assessment of any future war that might use it could be so destructive and uncontrollable that it'd be completely unwinnable for Germany. Turns out they should have listened to themselves. I was going to say something also about the Germans in the future, German future military operations, and I was just going to say it in German. What happened to the Germans? Did they learn anything from this? No. which is to say and did the germans learn anything from this no they did not now it was now 1905 russia had just gotten their teeth kicked in against the japanese the help of virtually every european power and including the us who all wanted to check russian expansion to the pacific

however germany who also helped the, was shocked to find that Russia was rapidly becoming friends with England, who had also helped the Japanese, because Europe is dumb. France, who also helped the Japanese, was also keen to piss off the Germans, and acted as a go for the two powers. The German imperial court, who had been tearing

apart their own minds at the concept of unavoidable, unwinnable war against its neighbors for years, saw this as something of a prophecy fulfillment. Then, of course, the Balkans exploded. Without going into much detail, what it boiled down to is good old-fashioned nationalism combined with the weakness of dying empires around it. Various nationalist movements were springing up in the Balkans owing to the fact that many of these groups of people were being oppressed by the Russians or the Austro-Hungarians and

before that the Ottomans. Bold Place has been a scene of numerous riots and revolts and wars and also it's the fucking Balkans. Then in 1908 Russia supports the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina which the empire had de facto been ruling for a few decades

but they've made it official which really pissed off some people, specifically Germany. And then eventually Russia, the situation's stupid. Now they did this in exchange for free passage of Russian warships through the Dardanelles. This pissed off everyone else,

but specifically Serbia, who began to threaten war. There's no chance that Russia could fight a war at the moment because of the Russo-Japanese War, so they took a step back and asked for mediation from Europe, and in came Germany. You can see where Russia had fucked up here because now they look weak. Russia was powerless to help Austria other than already supporting the annexation, so Germany swept in and also supported them as a fuck you to Russia for getting close to England, while Russia continued to claim to be the protectors of all the Slavic people

and then switch sides to support Serbia on the matter. This is based on the concept known as pan-Slavism, where Russia had this idea that all the Slavic people should be under the protection of the Russian crown. This is sometimes also tied into pan-orthodoxism. of the Russian crown. This is sometimes also tied into like pan-orthodoxism. And even before that, the Tsar believed that he was the protector of all Christendom in the East. Very stupid.

I would say, and also this notion has never gone away, has it? This notion of pan-Slavism never got away. Not influential today, is it? It comes and goes, yeah. Periodically. Yeah. I can't think of anything that's happening right now that could be they have something to do with it actually now that i think about it yeah uh however this

idea of panslavism was popular in the imperial court but wasn't really popular in russia uh so like the czar kind of knew that man the russian people be really mad at me if i start a war over this shit about like about serbia nobody in r Russia is going to give a fuck about Serbia. Russia eventually backed down after the Germans gave them an ultimatum that boiled down to shut the fuck up or we're going to fight. So Russia took a step back. Now, this is a win for Germany for a lot of ways. Like I pointed out, it showed Austria who was the real leader in any future alliance and who could force Russia to back down in regional turf wars. It had the added benefit of making Austria dependent on Germany in the case of any confrontation with Russia,

because Austria-Hungary was like the new sick man of Europe, kind of. And they were held together with duct tape and Habsburg jaws at this point. They knew that during the case of any war, they would not be able to win on their own. This further separated Europe into camps as Russia was embarrassed at this entire thing and ran to the arms of England and France who agreed that the bad man Germany

had been disrespectful towards them. After this, virtually every side of the coming conflict began training, arming, and preparing for what was coming next as everybody's convoluted foreign policies rapidly fell apart under the weight of constant pressure. For example, Russia began having war exercises, openly talking about how they were planning on fighting the Germans. The Germans

instituted the Army Bill of 1913 to expand their military, but service within the officer corps was considered something of a pain in the ass. They had the regular officer corps and the reserves, and everybody wanted to be in the reserves. It allowed the social credit of being an officer while literally doing nothing, while active service in the military sucked ass, as we can both attest to. Half of eligible candidates who became officers performed no actual military service at all, to include training. So the expansion of the military by three corps in size, which is what they wanted, only further diluted the pool of people who actually wanted to work in the military other than wear fancy uniforms at dinner parties. People often champion

Prussian and therefore German militarism during this period of time, but it really just boiled down to people wanting to look good in a uniform and not actually go to work. Yeah. I mean, let's just talk about for a quick second for people who may not be familiar with the nomenclature here, that typically speaking, a corps is a group of divisions. And typically speaking, in the modern US Army, a division is about 10,000 soldiers. So a corps in the US Army is going to be about four divisions, but these groupings can vary across time. But in the regimental system, what Joe has just said is the expansion of the army by three corps. That is at a minimum, based on the notion of this, around 120,000 soldiers, but could be as many as 250,000. So it's a huge expansion of the military. And I'd also say too,

this is very funny, that there's a certain point at which you hit shamming critical mass, where it's no longer cool to sham because like your country is completely like your entire military system collapses. Up until that moment, though, shamming is fucking cool. Like getting over. Military is based upon getting out of work. You're going to have a problem when you actually have to go work. Yeah, exactly. It's like it's like shamming is cool and everyone respects it and everyone understands the way that it works.

And at the same time, shamming can hit critical mass and then you got a problem. Much like I wrote about in Hooligans of Kandahar, they built a school in Afghanistan and they mixed not enough concrete in with sand. So when it rained, it melted. The whole school melted. in with sand. So when it rained, it melted. The whole school melted. So consider you can't have foundational sand when you're building a school, much like shaming cannot be the foundation of your military. It will melt. Now, another party of the German military pointed out, hey, why don't we invest more in equipment rather than men with technological advances, such as this idea of

like where to put machine guns and where to put artillery in the structure of the military was kind of revolutionary at the time uh also like cars are a thing now why don't we buy trucks i mean trucks during world war one were kind of fucking terrible but you know internal combustion engines are expensive uh but the problem is, they didn't want to raise taxes. So they raised Germany's active army to 800,000 with a compromise that each regiment would get machine guns, because this is how much they could do without having to raise taxes on the wealthy. Meanwhile, Russia was kind of doing the same thing with extensive French support. The rapid expansion they had made since killing a ton of their own army against the Japanese meant they were dragging in barely qualified people in order to lead. in 1913 only drove Germany harder to keep dumping more men and more money into their army.

It's kind of like the golden purse tactic that Britain was using during the Napoleonic Wars. We're just going to drive them to bankrupt themselves. Another driver in this entire situation was the European collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First Balkan War, after which the victorious Balkan League collapsed in the war amongst themselves. It's the Balkans. Then virtually every Balkan state turned against Russia as they hadn't done anything to actually help them during this whole thing because they were more focused on taking the Bosphorus Straits from the Ottoman Empire. However, Germany, as we've already kind of talked about, had thrown a ton of military advisors and soldiers into the Ottoman Empire in order to counter Russia. So once again, Russia looked like shit and was embarrassed by Germany. For the Germans, Austria had also failed in the Balkans to contain the shit show that they said

they would. The Balkans is supposed to be Austria's thing and they completely shit the bucket there. The Austrians really couldn't do anything because the rampant internal and external weakness had you know of their famously unwieldy dual monarchy system of government brought with it people often joked saying austria was a new sick man of europe while the german chancellor remarked that their alliance with austria was like having a corpse chained to their leg. That sounds pretty fucking metal but also very inconvenient. Yeah, yeah. It's everybody's

new accessory. It's the dead Austrian tied to my leg. I fucking love it. I hate this dead Austrian, man. Shit. Fuck, this guy is heavy. The problem with having to make a joke about the dead Austrian is everyone's going to think you're talking about Hitler. We're like, no, no, it actually goes further back than that.

Now, do not attach Hitler's corpse to your leg. That is the podcast stance. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, because no matter how cool you are, Hitler is attached to your leg, dead or alive. Yeah. Now, much like the Ottoman Empire, virtually every great power began to draw up plans for what they would take when the Austro-Hungarian throne finally died. All of this was happening against the backdrop of constant seething nationalism within the empire because everyone, even their own reluctant

subjects, saw the writing on the wall. And just so we're clear here in case we haven't been obvious, every single power we're talking about here is at fault this is a situation of their own creation that each could have backed down from at some point but nobody wanted to they were caught up in momentum of their own bullshit and then just decide this entirely controllable completely avoidable situation was just inevitable and nothing could be done i don't want to make it sound like i'm blaming germany for everything i. That is incredibly unfair and untrue. Literally everybody is at fault. Now, specifically the tipping point was the

perceived power dynamic change between Russia and Germany. I say perceived because it was not real. At this point, Germany is paranoid as shit. Obviously we have hindsight here over 100 years later, and we know that the collapse of the Tsarist army and the Tsarist government was coming.

I mean, they already had an attempted revolution before World War I. The Russian empire was not long for this world with or without World War I, in my opinion. But World War I certainly helped things along. But Germany was convinced that unless a war started, and started soon specifically, they would never be able to counter Russia in the future. For example, the head of the German general staff told Konrad Van Houtzendorf, his Austrian counterpart and noted psychopath, we did an episode about a while ago, that Russia would be ready to launch war by 1917. And by then, the two of them,

Austria and Germany, would have no hope of countering them. So they needed a war and they needed it soon. And this wasn't just German paranoia. It was the goal of the French and English to make this happen in order to counter the Germans and the Austrians and speed along the Austrian collapse. The English specifically said their goal was to outspend the Germans and cause them to back down lest they risk financial collapse in order to keep up with what they were doing. This was in May of 1914, a month before Gavrilo Princeps would connect the Archduke to God's Wi-Fi and everybody went to war. Things were getting so dumb, even Woodrow Wilson, the American president at the time and famous

racist, got nervous and sent an envoy to Germany. The envoy pointed out that the Germans had lost their goddamn minds over Russia and said, quote, the atmosphere is surcharged with war and warlike preparation. Militarism runs stark mad. This attitude was not lost on the Russians, who were pretty paranoid themselves that Germany was going to snap at them at any minute. This idea was fostered by both the English and the French because, again, they wanted this, and they really wanted Germany to get stomped into the dirt and allow them to do whatever the hell they wanted with the ashes.

Though most of the main geopolitical problems, other than normal political bullshit, were directly tied to Austro-Hungary, as Russia and the dual monarchy were both beefing over the same turf in the Balkans. Russia went so far as to tell Germany via public letter to abandon Austro-Hungary rather than risk a war with Russia, France, and England, a war they helpfully point out that Germany could never win. Now, we already talked about how incredibly paranoid this attitude within Germany was.

So you can imagine how this letter went over in a place that's already like melting down from the situation that they've created. Now, then we got the thing that truly put the nail in the coffin in Europe going forward, in my opinion. Sensing tension between the two countries, Serbia leveraged the situation into getting Russia to agree to protect them in the event of any Austro-Hungarian attack. I should point out here that Konrad von Hötzendorf had been pushing quite publicly for a war against Serbia literally for years at this point, pretty much since Serbia was independent. And to be fair, I think Conrad would have fought a war against anybody. He just really wanted to invade Serbia. So there's no secret to anybody here what the Austro-Hungarian plans would be if Hötzendorf is given the plans that he wants, is given the freedom to do what he wants.

And then a few weeks later is when Archduke Ferdinand got clapped on June 28th, 1914. So that gave everybody the excuse they were looking for. Nobody gave a fuck about him. It had absolutely nothing to do with him being the Archduke. Nothing. Didn't matter that he was the heir to the Habsburg throne. This is just that thing that Germany had been talking about for years at this point. Escalation, nobody was backing down, ultimatum, let's take advantage of it. This is just the tipping point. Honestly, it was going to happen either way, in my opinion.

Now, one day we'll go into the assassination itself, but something that everybody's hopefully familiar with rather than a decades-long buildup of antagonism between Europe's great powers led by people who are playing and itching for what they saw as unavoidable war had much more to do with starting World War I than the assassination. if this happened without all of this the war doesn't start in my opinion like if it was just you know a young bosnian nationalist assassinates the archduke uh the the yeah heir of the i believe or the leader of the uh the austro-hungarian empire doesn't matter yeah i honestly don't think it would have gone anything because without those tensions serbia wouldn't have and without Conrad von Hotzendorf constantly talking about how he wants to invade Serbia, Serbia would have no reason to get a mutual defense back with Russia. It's all a feedback loop.

And like I pointed out before, it's summer. While in Russia, as shocking as it is, they actually had the best system for mobilization of any of the powers when the war started, at least partial mobilization. Germany was caught flat-footed, at least in the east, where the war was about to blow up in their faces and where we're going to focus on the most. The summer was traditionally when conscript dates ran out and the ones that were staying went home on leave. The ones that didn't go on leave were helping the local communities around their barracks harvest crops, as most of the army in the east is stationed out in rural frontier area. This was a solid arrangement for the farmers, as they didn't have to pay them anything other than a few pieces of food and a ton of beer. But outside of free beer, being stationed out in the middle of nowhere

was not what anybody wanted to do. Officers fucking hated it. It was boring and bad for their careers. So generally, anybody who could got out of serving there. This is a little off topic, but it's really funny to see how much people actually hated being stationed there. I'm sure we can find some kind of American experience version of this. Officers were so bored that drunken duels were commonplace and commonly led to deaths and manglings. Everyone was fucking one another's wives, daughters, and occasionally sons.

everyone was fucking one another's wives daughters and occasionally sons my absolute favorite story comes from a guy who came home early for work only fine only to find another officer fucking his daughter on the couch walking in the house just in time to hear her daughter call the guy fucking him fucking her daddy and then he like had to like chase him out of the house with a sword. Yeah. So this is basically Korea or Panama, I would say. In the US Army experience, there might be some others in other branches of service. But I would say this is pre-Yangju Highway incident Korea and or Panama pre-closure of bases. The reason why it's not Honduras is because families weren't in Honduras. But yes, 100%.

It goes on. STDs in the local sex worker population were so commonplace as considered a standard risk of being posted there. One guy got so sick of the situation, he published an entire book about how everybody was so bored they devolved into little more than wild animals, which ended with him being arrested for libel, which was a criminal offense at the time. animals, which ended with him being arrested for libel, which was a criminal offense at the time. The army knew that this was happening, but refused to combat it, because if they publicly combated it, it would require them

to acknowledge it, and it would ruin the army's reputation as being these stalwart Prussian professionals that they liked to show them that they were. But more than that, remember, the German Empire is still new. The army was effectively the main tool the empire used to legitimize the german unification and the crown like to underline the deeply divided society that

the german monarchy wanted to create with the officers being damned near the top of german social class just below the aristocracy and sometimes they were the same under them were the conscripts who generally only did one year on active service before being transferred into the reserves. The drastic change of German unification had upended a lot of what can be considered cultural norms in regards to male rights of passage. So the government was happy to shoehorn in military service to be the main replacement. is to be the main replacement. So nobody really wanted to be like, yeah, sorry, that organization full of your sons is just a drunken sex maniac party.

Our bad, we'll fix it. Even though literally every army from every era of time, from every country, is literally nothing but a group of drunken sex maniacs. It's basically this, yeah. Yeah, it still is. It's the same, like,

soldiers literally never fucking change. But much like problems in in modern armies which you can probably think of a few confronting the problem means acknowledging this existence which is bad for pr and you can't have that but i guess before moving on we need to talk about the russian army despite being heavily invested by the french and the english it was still in pretty rough shape. And that has to be expected because it's fucking huge. They had the largest army in the world at the time, with an active strength of 1.5 million men. Fully mobilized, it would have been about 5 million. So any reforms you do are going to take a really, really long time to take hold. The officer corps was, unlike the Germans,

not one based on social standing. This is because the people who had social standing, the aristocracy, wanted absolutely nothing to do with Russian military service. Officers were guys who had a little bit of money and not a lot of prospects for a future, and bought their way into the system and stuck around. Or as Showalter puts it, quote, the Russian army accepted and retained what they could get. Promotions for those officers going forward had nothing to do with being good at your job and everything to do with who you knew or who owed you a favor on your way up. Being a conscript for the Russian empire was as bad as you can imagine. I'll say it had gotten better, Nate.

I'm pretty sure you produced this series a while back during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. And the families would hold funerals for their sons after they got conscripted because conscription back then was a life sentence. You never went home. So it had gotten somewhat better.

They have gotten the reform that reduced your time in uniform to a short 25 years. And most people still died before they were released from service. From disease, murder, hazing, whatever.

After reforms again it was trimmed down to six years with nine more in the reserves uh and finally during these reforms you could take leave before then you literally could never leave your unit that's insane i mean like that's that's like eritrea is not that bad north korea is not that bad that's that's insane yeah uh now anybody who could read or write well enough to sign their name in the paybook because a lot of peasantry were just on uh we're just illiterate uh would get promoted uh and into like soft jobs in the logistics corps and like administration so your line soldiers are hardly literate, so you can imagine how that hurts the flow of information and just basic understanding of skills. Now, unlike Germany, there is absolutely no prize attached to serving. Anybody that could get out of it did, and the ones who didn't could expect a harsh existence with absolutely no upside other than maybe dying within the first couple weeks just to make it end

sooner while the germans had some of the best equipment of the war at least at the start of it not the best across the board but every soldier would get decent equipment um good rifle the standard horrible hobnail boots everybody wore and a decent uniform. Though I should point out that the famed and notorious helmet that they had that was the pickle howl was absolutely fucking hated by everybody who had to wear it. Now, it was not protective

at all at first. It was leather until they eventually made a metal version without the stupid spike on top because it was only originally supposed to protect from sword slashes from cavalry because it was designed in the 1800s. And the back

of the helmet was so long that when soldiers laid down prone on their stomach, it would push the helmet into their faces so they could not see. I gotta ask a question. In your professional opinion, Joe, what was the point of having the big spike on the pickle halber looks really

just to look cool I mean like the leather construction makes sense in a time when like getting charged by saber wielding cavalry was a realistic threat but if I was to stretch really hard I could

say the spike could possibly deflect a blow of a saber. But I'm going to say much more realistically, it served no actual purpose. Also, it's very funny seeing photos of gatherings of Prussian officers hanging out, like all wearing the pickle halberd, because it genuinely looks like they're all wearing butt plug costumes like it's extremely funny i'm gonna send you a picture and maybe you could make this the episode art joe but i found this on wikipedia just looking up the because i remember i was like oh yeah i remember hearing about this and i i don't know like any details about it i'm sending it to you right now but

like does this not just look like every man has lost a dare and has to wear the butt plug hat? Franz, isn't it funny? We have a butt plug on our heads. Ja, das ist eine... Wir sind in einer schlimmen Lage. Ich weiß nicht, was passiert. Every time I do a German voice, I over accentuate the accent. I speak German. It was the language I spoke more than English when I was a kid.

And yet I cannot do the German voice now in English without either just... It sounds like I'm trying to be like the world's campus German. And like when I speak normal German, which is a struggle for me now, I just sound like a normal person. But it's impossible for me to not sound like this when I speak German. My life is a fucking mess. It's funny because I think Germany is the number one non-English speaking country

that listens to the show. The introduction of you speaking German on every episode is just pandering to the audience. Ich was gonna say, Sie können froh sein, dass es gibt ein Deutscher hier auf dem Podcast. Aber ich spreche Deutsch wie ein kleines Kind. Yeah, man, it's

just the nature of working with me you have to deal with with all these fucking digressions you can deal with random ass languages you have to deal with me being like no we're gonna say this french word correct but uh yeah dude i i still can to this day i just it's very very funny that they they wore a hat i simply don't recognize friend i i don't recognize french or italian as actual, so you can do whatever you want. All right. Sounds good. Maybe. You say it wasn't long. Go ahead.

Now, for all of the flaws of the German military, the one thing they did have down pat was standardization. But again, at the beginning. Obviously, things would go real bad in a few years because everybody wanted to survive something called the turnip winter. So, yeah, things will suffer with time. Now, the Russian military reforms, in comparison, were hit and miss. They didn't even figure out how to get every soldier a rifle.

That rifle, a Mosin-Nagant, of course, the rifle that will not die and is still fighting wars to this day, which had been in service since 1891 in various forms. If you had a rifle, the condition of your rifle would depend on where you fell on the conscript ladder. Because despite reforms and some industrialization, Russia still couldn't produce enough of them to go around on their own. Hence, a chronic shortage that they never actually figured out.

So two kinds of Nagants were made. One was made by Russia, and it was like rolling the dice on if it worked or not. The others were produced by Remington and Westinghouse of the US. However, that wouldn't start until the next year of the war in 1915. So in the context of this story,

if you're a Russian soldier and you either don't have a rifle or you have one that sucks and if you have one of the ones that sucks the least, one of the older conscripts will take it from you. And you'll have to either not have a rifle or have a shittier one. A funny story about those American-built Nagants.

The Russian Empire obviously collapsed and never paid for those rifles. And of course, the Soviet Union was not going to pay for them either. Remington almost went fucking bankrupt and it ended in a military like uh bailout program where the u.s military bought hundreds of thousands of them just to keep rem just to keep remington afloat for war purposes uh but they had to find something

to do with them so they gave them to the national guard so there was a period of time where a lot of states in the u.s's national guard were armed with American-made Mosin-Nagants. That's so funny. It's very strange. But any new equipment in the Russian military, if you happen to be a place where it existed, would be stolen by older conscripts of an entrenched, unending system of institutional hazing and abuse, leaving everybody with little more than rags, both on their backs, but also their feet. Literally. It was not uncommon for many units of the Russian army to

not have boots. I've talked about this before. They didn't have socks either. They used foot wraps, which are rags that you tied around your feet. They literally had rags for shoes. Sigh. This sounds bad.

This sounds unpleasant. And Nate, I need to remind you, the war has not started yet. So it's only going to get better, right? It's only going to get better. Logistics are only going to improve. It's only going to become a tighter ship. Yeah.

However, even with the military that was duct taped together with French money and hazing, Russia had their own offensive plans. Virtually everyone involved in the Great War started off thinking that the only thing that mattered was constant never-ending offensives. So Russia

believed that in the event of a war with Germany, Germany would focus on France, leaving East Prussia wide open for them to attack and just pour in human material into Prussia. Not to mention Austria, because Austria would be left undefended.

And everybody knew that Austria could not defend itself. So when the war finally started in July of 1914, that's exactly what Russia did. German war plans had shifted at this point. Rather than immediately launching attack against Russia, which is what they originally planned on doing, they moved to a defensive posture in the east, but without retreating to the Vistula. That's now their emergency plan. They left most of eastern Prussia simply open and undefended, so they could focus on France and the low countries. Germany, seeing the east as secondary at best, left one army, the 8th Army, in charge of the defense of the entire region.

This meant when the Russian forces marched into East Prussia, they vastly outnumbered the German defenders. This is the Northwest Front under the command of Yakov Shalinsky, a veteran of the Russian disaster against the Japanese. Though he's not that important in this story because he's such a bad commander, he has very little to do with what happened next. His subordinates, however, will become a center point to the story specifically one of them uh alexander samson samson off the chief of the second army and there's also pavel reinenkampf the chief of the first army the two army chiefs fucking hated one another and had a rivalry that

went back decades both had commanded units in manchuria and once had gotten into a no shit, knock down all out brawl at a rail station while working in Mukden. Now, depending on who you talk to, this incident is debatable. Rennenkamp was known as it was like a known guy in the Russian court. He was very high up, very well known in the aristocracy.

Well, Samsonov was a virtual nobody. He was the guy who joined the military because he had a couple extra bucks and had no prospects and made his way up to general. He was not anybody at court. He had no nobility in his blood to speak of. Nobody knew who he was. Reinenkamp's biographer makes an excuse as to why would such an enlightened noble such such as Reinenkampf, fight someone whose station in life was so far beneath him? Which, I don't know about you, Nate. That really sounds like something a guy who lost a fight in a train station might say. Yeah, I would say. Yeah, sounds pretty bad.

And not to mention, a lot of people have talked about this fight. People who have no reason to fucking lie about this said that they saw it, they heard about it, whatever. I believe it because it's funny. But that is my professional stance on history. If it's funny, it's true. Probably true. Yeah, fair enough. This kind of relationship was not uncommon for the Russian military, however.

The army was riddled with factions and cliques, and several French military advisors pointed out that they could not stamp it out, no matter how hard they tried. These cliques and factions would all be under the same command sometimes, working against one another politically, while at least trying to kind of sort of lead an army as a cohesive whole. And you can imagine how this did not work. No, it sounds terrible. Though, thankfully for the Russians at this point, the German army was sweeping through the West,

conducting the Schlieffen plan. They weren't doing much of anything in the East. This happened to be something of a blessing for the Russians because their forces were massive, but horribly organized and badly led. For instance, the Russians really liked cavalry more than just about anybody else and brought tens of thousands of them for their invasion. The problem was they had no peacetime cavalry to speak of, and these were all rushed conscripts. They were hardly trained and unskilled horsemen with no ability to actually conduct an organized attack.

So it really just boiled down to throwing horsemen at a problem in large numbers. Most of them were very, very old or very, very weak and couldn't ride for very long. Their horses were sick. And one of their commanders had a case of hemorrhoids so bad he couldn't actually even ride a horse. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Which is, I don't even know how you do that.

I mean, you know, sometimes it's just you eat too much fucking black bread and, you know, knock verse and your shits are really hard and it causes the veins in your asshole to really swell and get painful and then you can't ride a horse anymore like that is that's a very very 19th century problem taking place in the early 20th century fellas have you ever eaten so much black bread and sausage that your asshole exploded you couldn't ride a horse exactly exactly you know it's funny too because he's like uh his name was like something khan and he was uh he was a cossack but he like he went everywhere in a carriage because like if he rode a horse his asshole would bleed you know what's funny is that like i think uh i think the degree to which you would have Und mein Arschloch tut weh. Das ist sehr schlimm. Ich weiß nicht, was hat passiert. that problem to a cossack my asshole is hurts instead of having their assholes exploded by one thing or another you can just assume that every

german soldier will is like sweating because remember it's summer uh wearing a wool uniform is just walking with the worst fucking rotten crotch in the world because like there's no medicine for it eastern front swamp ass no one ever like they were never able to find a more intense example of this oh god yeah um so the the russian horsemen were so badly trained and their and their commander couldn't actually even ride with them and they couldn't travel with the infantry or the supply train because they couldn't hold themselves together so

tens of thousands of weak and dying and old horsemen are just doing this weird slinky motion across all of eastern Prussia leaving a trail of ass blood as they say mit mit der schlimmste i don't even know if the gender is right on swamp ass in german i don't i don't even know

if some files make sense in german it's just the word for swamp and ass but i'm just gonna go with it i'm more concerned that the term swamp ass is gendered in german well it's it's it's more like like i i can't remember what the gender for as there's three genders in german and i can't remember what the what the gender for ass is i think it's das but i really can't remember it might be there might be it might be masculine it might be gender neutral i think it ought to be gender neutral because it's like ever you know like why would an ass be inherently one or the other i mean as the as the german station in east prussia said an ass is an ass be inherently one or the other? I mean, as the, as the German station in East Prussia said, an ass is an ass.

Yeah, fair enough. Now, somewhat confusingly for everybody, this made them very hard to track kind of on accident. The Russians kind of defeated German intelligence gathering by being bad at marching. Now, especially the man in

charge of the defense of the east eighth army general maximilian von pritzvitz um pritzvitz sorry uh he's dead i don't care uh badly now he was badly outnumbered he thought it might made sense to retreat to the vistala river because it's easier to defend. But everyone disagreed with him. The standing orders from Berlin were like, you are not to retreat to the Vistula unless it is an absolute emergency. And then going against their own battle plan, however, the general staff of the German army ordered him to go on the offensive, which is he did not really have.

He didn't have the command ability to do that, as you'll find out. But also, this is kind of hard to do due to the fact that the Eighth Army kind of got the shit under the stick in regards to mobilization. Its ranks were either full of brand new soldiers or old reservists who had just been called up but had not been in uniform for like 10 years. But neither of them had fought in any wars. The new conscripts hadn't done any maneuvers, and the reservists hadn't done maneuvers long enough for it to not matter. But Pritvits also had no idea what the Russians were doing as the German intelligence network in the East collapsed completely after mobilization snatched up all of their most uh talented agents as well as the sources so they just slapped people in the spots they assumed that would work even if they had no idea what they were supposed to do

for example in konigsberg the intel chief that was selected for his job to replace the vacancy was picked simply because he was seen reading a r newspaper once. There you have it. Like, yeah. The guy in charge of intel for the Eighth Army entirely, a captain, wasn't even allowed around maps in their briefing rooms simply because nobody liked him. Like, sure. They did have some air recon

because planes are a thing now. They had some monoplanes, and they also had Zeppelins but like the concept of air recon is so new that von pritt pritt wits pritt wits had no idea how to use it he's also very old and not like he he dies like only a couple years after he's relieved from command he's incredibly old and unhealthy and he is not the guy to try to unravel like this new concept of flying machines i was gonna say like imagine imagine being a guy who cut their teeth in military service probably in the franco-prussian war or immediately after

which is in the 1870s the early 1870s and by the time like you're capping out your military career man has invented flight it's like you grew up in the era where like a telegraph seemed like the devil's work and now like humans are flying like that it's basically like that's at the point where it's like if you and i somehow got press gang into military service in our 60s and like they had invented wizards and they were able to like fully cast final fantasy spells on each other in combat like that's the level of fucking just unable to relate to reality this guy must have been on like we're gonna we're gonna be called up as like emergency reserves and then like joe you're a tank criminal here's a gundam figure exactly exactly like pilot pilot pilot the eva joe otherwise nate's gonna have

to do it again and he's even more broke dick than you are look i've said it once and i'll say it again i have no idea why the u.s military has not invented evangelions simply because they have a never-ending supply of depressed teenagers at their hands i was gonna say and also i think the reason is every time i've ever i mean paid attention to the stuff in evangelion i just noticed that like everything seems to have really really big proprietary connections on all the cables and it's like that's the u.s military in a nutshell like what in the fuck is a j8 cable why on earth am i using this shit that was invented in the 1960s still when like they have new connections to things so like in a way all i could think of was just like wow this this show really really loves wired

technology which so does the u.s army like it is a natural thing to build an evangelion they haven't done it yet do dudes will attach an entire robot to a series of cables before they go to therapy that's also something about even something i don't know evangelion that's something that's very funny about evangelion though it very much dates it is that like they've envisioned the future but they're like but they could not conceive of wi-fi this is very very funny when you think of it that way you're just like oh now the sort of epistemology of this universe makes sense i never even fucking thought of that um now eventually they did figure out how to use uh the the air recon and the pilot reported that the first and second russian armies had been

split which was part of the russian plan because they wanted to catch the eighth army in a pincer movement so it required them to split up a considerable amount of distance and work their way around the Eighth Army. Now, Pritzwitz panicked because he wasn't sure what to do, but he knew if he didn't act, he would be fucked. He'd be spit-roasted by two Russian armies. Furthermore, First Corps Commander Hermann von Francois, a subordinate of him, of course,

insisted that they should go on the attack and attack one of the two armies while they are separate like they split their forces like idiots we need to attack one um but prince vitz refused to give him orders to launch an attack uh he so francois simply did it on his own. Launched a core-wide offensive without any authorization whatsoever. And I have to point out here, I fucking love this guy, because this is not the first time he's going to do something like this. Somehow, he is not fired. Now, he wins. He fights and wins a small battle on August 17th.

After that, Pritzvitz was worried that Francois would launch another unauthorized and unsupported attack, because he did launch an unsupported attack. Nobody helped him other than his one corps. And he was going to launch another attack against Reinenkamp's First Army. So he agreed to launch a larger attack

against the First Army, saying, quote, First Corps has made a soup for us and now we will have to eat it up. I'm literally always saying this. I always try to stick to soup metaphors, personally, when it comes to hundreds of thousands of infants dying horribly.

Now, this attack was launched on the 20th, and things did not go great. Now, Francois may have won that one smaller battle on the 17th, but one thing that he did do was to, it was taught the Russians to make sure their artillery is closer to their front line because both

sides of the army here, of the armies here, really don't fully know how to do indirect fire yet. Their gun crews aren't super experienced or trained, so they're kind of forced to just fire their artillery, which is capable of indirect fire,

like a cannon from the 1800s. They have to direct fire them. So if they didn't have them close to the line, they would not be able to support the infantry. And for some reason in the Russian military, the artillery was kept at an army level rather than integrated at any point to a lower formation. So there was no kind of interoperability,

working together, nothing. But Francois' attack did teach them to move their artillery up. So that meant while Francois' attack on their, I believe it was their left flank, went beautifully, things did not go great for August von Meckensen, Francois' attack on their, I believe it was their left flank, went beautifully. Things did not go great for August von Meckensen, who launched his attack on a different location, directly into the Russian artillery, and they got shelled to pieces.

He retreated so quickly, his own staff office had to run to keep up with them, and they got shelled by their own artillery during the retreat. Now, this is a problem, of course, now francois is attacking unsupported again um and the only thing that saved the two core from the two different cores from being wiped out by you know a russian counter attack is shitty logistics the russian supply line had already failed to the point that soldiers were raiding local villages for basic supplies and line infantry had already fired off all their ammo. So they just kind of sat there as the Germans ran off. After this, Pritzvitz announced a total retreat to the Vista River, all without consulting general staff, nothing, because he was convinced the Russian second army was going to

swoop down and finish them off. Virtually everyone disagreed with him, including General Staff back in Berlin, who told him under no circumstances are you to retreat. The Eighth Army Chief of Staff, George von Waldersee, simply refused to pass the retreat order. Facing a straight-up

mutiny, he then changed his mind and ordered, despite the fact he just told all of his subordinates we're going to retreat, he then changed his mind, we're going to attack he has told all of us abornance, we're going to retreat. He then changed. We're going to attack South. Change my mind. We're attacking South now. All right.

All right. He did not. He did not tell army command back in Berlin that he had changed his mind and they believed that he was retreating. This meant the general staff virtually had no idea where an entire army was or in what they were doing in the field where they're locating during an invasion while they're in the only army defending eastern prussia so pritzvitz subordinates simply began operating without their commander who had since locked himself away in his quarters in a fit of panic attacks any orders he passed out to try to get the army under his command

were simply ignored. His subordinates just began commanding their units on their own with no chain of command or overall commander to tie them together. Orders from the general staff started getting ignored and different political groups in the various splintering command groups that formed from all the officers

meant that the entire situation had collapsed into an unusable pile of infighting in three days this only took three days looks like things are setting up for extreme success for the prussians uh i heard they were really good at being in the military so it's all good yeah now three days after the battle and after three days of complete and total chaos within the eighth army german general staff fired pritz Fitz and his Chief of Staff, Waldersee. In their place, the main characters of the German side of the Battle of Tannenberg finally step into the episode. Erich Ludendorff would become the Chief of Staff and Paul von Hindenburg would become Army Commander. And that is where we'll pick up next week.

There you have it. So, things are going great they're going excellent yeah wow this is uh yeah i mean it's always very funny because you know you have the sort of return with a v notion to the idea that like you know the the x historical cherry-picked example was you know so much better than the modern day and it's like no it's he you're you're everyone's acting on their own orders everyone's sui sponteing everything the commander's having a panic attack and has locked himself in his room like full hikikomori twitch streamer style

he's just like me for real basically uh yeah this is this sounds like a million pritwits are gonna show feet on stream exactly exactly like you know maximilian von pritwits has uh has has closed his twitch account and opened an only fans like it's just it's it sounds terrible it sounds like it's really falling the fuck apart already and uh yeah so i'm excited to see what kind of just blunder mass slaughter chaos happens next because i will admit to you i don't know anything about this without giving too much away i will say that this series is an impressive example of your military can be incredibly fucked up and dysfunctional as long as your enemy is more fucked up and dysfunctional. And this is a great example of that going forward, because obviously Ludendorff and Hindenburg become military legends for this and other victories as well.

And not to mention, they effectively become military dictators of Germany by the end of the war. But let's just say they were still getting their feet under them during Tannenberg. And luckily for them, they're going to be fighting mostly Alexander Samsonov, who is a fucking idiot. And that's all I'm willing to give away in part one. Sounds good, man. Sounds good. Now, Nate, thank you so much for joining me here on part one on your first series as one of the co-hosts here on the show.

And this is the place that you can plug the other shows that you do in case people are somehow unaware of them. So I am the co-host of what a hell of way to die a show with francis horton uh where we talk about why you shouldn't join the military but we've branched off a lot into just being sort of middle-aged dads um i also am the producer of this show co-producer with thomas o'mahony uh take that again co-producer of this show with thomas o'mahony uh and I also produce Kill James Bond, a movie podcast by three extremely funny trans people

who hate James Bond but have a great time with it. And I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about business success and making yourself smarter under capitalism and basically about the tech industry and why it's terrible. All great shows. Check them out. And

everybody, thank you so much for listening to the lines led by donkeys if you like what you do here consider throwing us a buck on patreon it makes everything that we do possible uh and uh you know you get bonus content like episodes like this early you get three bonus episodes a month discord access to a lovely weird little community that's been building over the last several years. You get stickers, books. I'm probably forgetting a few things. You get a lot. You get a lot. And if you don't want to give to the Patreon,

that's fine. It's your money. Do with it what you please. But leave us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts because that is free and takes like five seconds and helps us in ways I don't understand. But it does help us. So do that. And leave something in the review of of of weird german or something and i'll send it to nate all i can say until next time joe some farsh is a very

serious problem so you should do everything you can to avoid it that's right everybody remember dry your shroom fars