Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 251 - The Battle of Tannenberg Part 2: A Wild T Rex Appears

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

The story of the battle of tannenberg continues part 2/3 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 curtis 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 hello and welcome back to the lines of by donkeys podcast i'm joe and with me still trapped in the tannenberg content minds is Nate. How are you doing, Nate? I'm okay. Some interesting lore in my actual day-to-day life. I live in a house that's very old. Well, relatively speaking, it's 130-odd years old. And the landlady wanted to get a new mortgage. And now she's no longer trying to get a new mortgage because rates have gone up. But in the process of trying to get a new mortgage, she had a surveyor come through and check it out, who determined that when someone remodeled this place, and I think it was probably the landlady's previous builder, because she had this guy who worked for her who was an idiot who fucked everything up,

they decided to extend the ground floor for what they call the front room in a British house by about two feet by cutting away part of the old, the actual like original construction wall and basically adding a false wall, like a hollow wall between it and the other room. They cut away a load bearing wall. They cut away a load bearing wall and they didn't reinforce it. And so they were like, we have to come and do some work on this. And then she also scheduled the surveyor to come back just to make sure the work was done correctly when the builder was starting the project, the new guy who's actually good at his job.

And yesterday they were like, ah, this is way worse than we thought it was going to be. We're going to need you guys to be out for like another week. So we've been out of the house since Monday. We will be out of the house until Wednesday night. So basically, yeah, like nine days, 10 days. I can't fucking think. And fine, we got a hotel, but the landlady was like, it's fine. You get a hotel. I'll pay for it. Great. So we did that. The problem is we got a good price on a hotel for a three-night stay in London. London's a very expensive city. I can attest to that. Yeah. I just had to pay hotel

fees there. We have to extend our reservation, which is no longer at the discounted price. So I am 100% sure she's not going to end up paying this bill because it's a lot of money. And so it's just like, fuck. I mean, it's a nice hotel. It's nice to be in a hotel room that's warm because our house isn't ever. It wasn't that bad. It wasn't cold. It gets very

cold at night, especially upstairs. I will say my apartment is probably colder, but that's only because I'm a cheap fuck and I rarely turn on the gas. Even though gas here is obscenely cheap. We have the gas going with the boiler going, keep the house at a constant temperature. But the problem is the system is so inefficient, it just doesn't work very well. And yeah, one of those situations where you're just like, and yeah one of those situations where you're just like ah I greatly appreciate the fact that you know we're you pay a lot to live in a city like this but these are all houses that used to cost basically very very little and now cost a lot because the British property market is so insane

and so it's just like they have the maintenance of like flop houses but they cost like the equivalent of a million dollars if you wanted to buy that is that is one thing i can say here is like i'm not going to say i live in a nice apartment but i will say like it is in fact an apartment uh and say what you will about uh like soviet reconstruction or soviet construction but it keeps the heat in very well because it's all concrete so i don't have to worry about that. However, in the summer, it is a motherfucker because it is hot as fuck. Yeah, I can only imagine.

You know, the caucus is getting warm and so on and so forth. I will say, like, I'm also, like, this is my second winter in the caucuses, and I always assumed that it was going to be just absolutely brutal. Michigan winters, significantly worse. So I was actually quite shocked by that. Like, we don't even have snow. I mean, some parts of the country will have snow, but Yerevan doesn't.

It snowed twice, I think, and it stuck for one whole day. Like, a Midwestern winter is so much worse than an Armenian winter, which is kind of wild to think about. That is funny. I mean, yeah, it's the same thing. People talk about it, people who come from the UK visit the US and they freak out about the weather. And it's just like, right, but England just has mild weather. So of course, I don't think our weather in America is that much more extreme than what they experience in a lot of Central Europe, for example.

Maybe a little colder, maybe a little hotter at times but like definitely more humid in america but like people come to new york and they're like god i can't believe it's so fucking cold how's anyone survived it's like because this is actually kind of normal for the northern hemisphere england is just an island surrounded by water with the jet stream bringing warm water and warm air so you know the entire country basically shuts down if it ever gets below freezing here. Whereas in New York, you'll have weeks at a time when it doesn't get above freezing. That's normal. Below 15 Fahrenheit, below 10 Fahrenheit, that fucking sucks. That's kind of out of the ordinary. But mid to high 20s is your high for nonstop for a couple of weeks in January, February,

that's normal in New York. And in Indiana, fuck dude, I remember walking to class my freshman year at IU where the low was negative 15 Fahrenheit and the high was negative five, which I can't do the calculation into Celsius in my head for that, but it's extremely cold. I think it might be in like the negative 20 to negative 25 range in Celsius. It's bad. It sucks really bad. That fucking sucks. Yeah. The coldest I ever saw in my life was Anchorage, Alaska in January one time. It was negative 37 Fahrenheit. So that's about the same in Celsius. It's basically about negative 38 Celsius.

Yeah, I believe it. I think the coldest I've ever been was in northeastern Afghanistan during the winter. But that was like, I mean, their winters suck. Michigan winter is still colder, has more ice, has more snow. But you also have like, I'm going to go into this building with insulation and heat in the Midwest. In Afghanistan, you're living in a tent. So everything is just miserable all the time. That was definitely the coldest I've ever been.

But I think the coldest temperature that I've ever experienced is almost certainly the year. You might remember this. It's almost certainly the year, you might remember this, the year where almost the entire Midwest lost power because the Niagara Falls transfer station for electricity exploded. Maybe. I don't know. Because I moved to Indiana in 1996. So if it was before then, I wouldn't have experienced it. But the coldest winter I can remember in Indiana was we had a blizzard right before school was supposed to come back. So we wound up having an extra week of winter break just because we had a snowstorm and then a freezing rainstorm and then another snowstorm on top of it. And it was just like... So you just had this perfect cake of snow, ice, and snow that lasted for fucking months, man. It was probably March before it really broke up. And yeah, it was one of those times where it's like, oh, sweet, we don't go to school. like you couldn't really do anything so it kind of sucked actually you just knew that like you

were gonna have uh time extended onto the school year to make up for it yeah yeah and that's why i always hated fucking snow days because like hey there's really nothing to do uh because it's so brutal outside you really can't do anything for very long and then come like june or whatever i have to stay at school for an extra two or three days or however many snow days we had uh it's fucking miserable speaking of miserable nate i was gonna say great segue joe great segue uh we're still talking about the battle of tannenberg we're on part two of three and when we left you last time last time on the battle of tannenberg i'm gonna have to have tom edit in like the dragon ball z fucking sound uh last time on dragon ball z when we left you last time the russian imperial army had invaded eastern prussia after the outbreak of the great war the under

strength and badly commanded german defenders found themselves flailing and on the verge of mutiny against their commander, 8th Army General Pritzwitz, who eventually found himself fired and replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, along with Erich Ludendorff, who joined the staff as his second, the 8th Army Chief of Staff. I didn't really talk about it during the

script, but it's also quite funny that Pritzwitz didn't actually find out he was fired until Paul von Hindenburg showed up. Nobody told him. So he just shows up at his headquarters like, alright, fuck nuts, out. Yeah, pretty much. What probably happened is the message got passed but

nobody was talking to him anymore. Yeah. It just does make it funnier. And then like almost immediately after he dies of a heart attack. Well, I mean, he was really old, wasn't he? He was just fully teetering make it funnier and then like almost immediately after he dies of a heart attack oh well i mean he was really old wasn't he like he was just fully like teetering on the brink of yeah he's old and very like he's incredibly overweight and unhealthy uh and he didn't i mean he lived his life in the prussian and then german imperial military he was not a healthy man uh i think he died

once again midwest representation exactly exactly you basically live in what's effectively Germany the Midwest in terms of the makeup of the white people who live there and then you live really unhealthily and you die you just live like someone who's from Milwaukee for 80 years and then die and if you make it to Sturgis you probably wore one of the fucking pointy helmets

at one point in your life which we talked about last time and i completely forgot the fucking german name oh the helmet it's okay ah pickle halber yeah yeah exactly very dumb butt plug topped helmet that everybody hated exactly um now before we move on we should probably talk about the two main men of the upcoming battle because we're going to be talking about Lundorf and Hindenburg quite a lot, unfortunately. Now, Erich Lundorf was, even for the Imperial German military and previous to that, the Prussian military, a fucking asshole. Everybody knew him as one. He had no friends and everybody seemed to hate him. According to most people who knew him he didn't like anybody to include his own family uh which means he might just be the german version of my

dad um that that's the one i get one per episode that everything written about him was like he was a fucking dick nobody likes him uh and on top of that he wasn't even considered that good of a military commander until World War I. He rose to the attention of von Molk to the younger because he thought of him for this job after his action at the Belgian fortress of Liege during the opening stages of the war. It's a battle that we probably will cover at some point. But this fortress, because the Belgians at the time really loved them some fortresses have been holding back German attackers for a few days and they've been inflicting pretty bad casualties on them mostly due to inept German command

on the ground make a long story short they seemed shy about bringing their artillery forward and just shelling the piss out of the fortresses and they really seem to just be sending in their men unsupported because remember most gun crews at this stage are unfamiliar with the concept of indirect fire.

So direct fire artillery only. And so Ludendorff ignored orders, got in his car, drove to the front line and took command of the battle personally and turned the tide of the battle. Now, most of the way he turned the tide was like, move the fucking cannons up. And then they just eliminated the fortress. There is also a very famous story

of him literally knocking on the door of a fortress and telling them to surrender, and they did. Not all of them did, of course. Some of the Belgians did fight pretty much to the end until their fortress was reduced down to rubble and dead Belgians. But, and you know know it did tell a lot of people during the world like oh maybe fortresses are not a good idea uh famously a piece of

information the french would then ignore i was gonna say exactly i was gonna say yeah you know i i i feel as though there was all this fortress construction uh that they would later put to such great use in the beginning of uh world war ii but um i do really want to do a episode or a series in the fall of france because it seems like nobody really talks about it everybody likes to assume that like germans drove around the magno line the french immediately surrendered rather than like the french military just getting fucking mangled trying to defend themselves uh it really does seem to be a part of World War II that people just gloss over. Something that I find very, very interesting is that obviously part of the sort of French fascist legend and the kind of cult of personality surrounding Maréchal Patin is that basically the sort of quasi-socialist French government, the democratic government of france in the 1930s just was too obsessed with gender and smoking cigarettes like they were basically like the yeah they were basically like oh

yeah and it's just it's genuinely that shit um but it's also very funny because like a lot of those people went you know to their to their dying day uh believe this shit and But it's also very funny because a lot of those people went to their dying day, believed this shit. And there's one guy I would love for us to talk about, Louis Ferdinand Salin, who wrote a great novel about World War I and was like Mr. Anti-Semitism and ended the war hiding in a chateau

with part of the Vichy government in Strasbourg basically holed up in a castle. It's a very, very strange story and I realize that's a digression but I'm just saying that like all of these kinds of things about yeah fortresses the Maginot line and like the weird kind of

kind of cult of historical understanding that comes about all these things it's very very funny and I do think that like you'll find some similar ones from World War I oh absolutely yeah big big big big fortresses, kind of on the way out by, you know, 1914. Definitely on the way out by 1940.

And it's another character we're eventually going to have to talk about whenever we like breach Verdun is like Joseph Joffre and Philippe Petain because it's like, man, you would have died a fucking hero if you stroked out about 10 years before you died. Yep.

Yep, exactly. But they made him monsieur le president anti-wokism yeah that shit happened oh yeah it's true fascism is cool i don't think he talked like that he probably had this very highfalutin style speaking i'm sure there's recordings i'm assuming that he microphones i'm assuming he spoke exactly like that while holding three cigarettes and balancing on a unicycle. Exactly. He's like,

All simultaneously buried nut deep into his mistress. I don't know. You don't speak French, but that's exactly what I was talking about. Well, I don't know. You don't speak French, but that's exactly what I was talking about. What I said was a long time ago, it was fine for me to have mistresses, but the wokest say I'm not allowed to. It's a bad idea. Spiritually, I speak French because of my grandfather. It's extremely funny. Okay. When it came to Ludendundorf taking over as chief of staff,

he was pretty much picked specifically for that prickishness that everybody knew him for. Uh, because Pritzwitz was such a weak leader in every way. People simply ignored him and pushed him around and they figured, look, we don't really like Lundorf that much, but nobody's going to push him around. He simply won't let it happen. He's too much of a dick. So they figured he... And not to mention, he had a pretty good reputation that... And we'll talk about this a little bit later on. The German Imperial military, despite everybody thinking that it's this effectively army of automaton-brained Prussians, did have a culture of taking the initiative if something wasn't working. And he had a really good reputation effectively army of automaton brain impressions did have a culture of like

taking the initiative if something wasn't working. And he had a really good reputation of doing that, like at leash. So they're like, well, if everything falls apart, Lundorf will just handle things. Yeah.

And then we come to Paul Von Hindenburg, a guy picked, and this is true by default, which is also the way I was promoted. So I guess I'm on his side here. Now, one of the reasons why he was picked is that he lived in Hanover, which was apparently a really easy train ride to get to East Prussia. That was it. He can get here fast. And that was one of the main reasons that he could jump on a train

and be here in a couple days. The other reason was he was old as shit. He was born in 1847. He had fought in the wars of German unification starting at the ripe age of 11 as a cadet,

which meant that he had one hell of a seniority over virtually anyone else up for the role. He had also previously committed Von Francois, the guy who repeatedly acted without orders. And the general staff figured

he would be able to control Von Francois. Now, they would be wrong about that because that man cannot be controlled, but it was a good idea. Now, there is something of a pervasive rumor that by the start of World War I, where Hindenburg came out of retirement because he had been retired for quite some time, and he just demanded an active frontline command, that he was starting to go senile. This is a belief that kind of survives to the modern day, because when he was president of the Weimar Republic, he was senile.

He was senile and a fascist, which is not a good combination. Now, other people assume that he wasn't senile during World War I. He was simply stupid. I'm not sure which one to believe. They called him, quote, simple-minded. So, dumb or

declining with age. And this is obviously pushed by, there's a pro-Ludendorff faction in the legacy of the Battle of Tannenberg that obviously Ludendorff himself spreads a lot of these rumors because the two had gone to fucking hate one another until they both died.

However, there might be some truth to it more than just Ludendorff saying that Hindenburg was slipping with age. There was the fact he had been shot in the fucking head during the Austro-Prussian War. And that'll slow you down a bit mentally. Just a little.

I mean, I genuinely am not as quick on my sort of verbal responses to things since I got in a bike wreck in 2019 and got a really bad concussion. And that was just me hitting the ground on the back of my head wearing a helmet. There was no bullet involved. So I can only imagine, And that was just me hitting the ground on the back of my head wearing a helmet. There was no bullet involved. Yeah.

So, like, I can only imagine. Like, if I had gotten drive-by in London off my bike and gotten shot, you know, then that would have been really bad. I probably wouldn't be able to podcast anymore. I certainly wouldn't be able to command an army. Yeah, a whole fucking army. I've had quite a few pretty serious concussions in my life. And I think I've mostly recovered from them. But I also have not caught a M&A ball in the fucking gray matter.

Because this wasn't like a glance off of his skull by any stretch of the imagination. He was full on. I mean, I think it wasn't a M&A ball at the time, but whatever. He got shot in the head. And the Kaiser hated both of them, but hated he got shot in the head um and the kaiser hated both of them but hated hindenburg more now this is mostly because hindenburg also hated the fucking kaiser despite the fact he was a monarchist he just hated wilhelm as a person not the office because the kaiser was an overbearing idiot when it came to military affairs which is true he absolutely was kaiser

wilhelm saw himself as the actual commander-in-chief of the German Imperial Army, despite having no military education, training, any experience of his own. He could never serve in the military because he had a deformed hand. So basically, not too far removed

from being German Napoleon III or Prussian Napoleon III. Yeah, that's pretty accurate actually. Yeah. And this is not not hindenburg's feelings towards the kaiser were not uncommon within the german uh military officer corps almost all of them hated their monarch because he thought that he was the german napoleon and micromanaged military commanders when to be fair he was one of those things being a micromagic dickhead. And this is also quite ironic when you realize that the German empire would effectively be a military dictatorship under Hindenburg by the end of the war. And the Kaiser would be completely

sidelined because he was a fucking idiot. He wasn't good at the non-military stuff either, but for a long time, he had people to pick up after him. But after the war started, there's really nothing you can do. Not that Americans know anything about being ruled by senile people. No, not at all. Or fucking idiots.

I can't say many nice things about the current government of Armenia, but I will say it's not that old. Yeah, it is very, very strange in America how we've gotten to this point where basically it's like the qualifications for office is, are you 70 and do you use adult diapers?

But I mean, that's just the nature of things. The big stretch of, I would say the baby boomers, but a lot of them are like too old to be baby boomers. They're fucking silent generation. It's incredible. Our prime minister doesn't use adult diapers because of age. He simply looks like he uses an adult diaper

and it's full at all times. Roger, yeah, well. That's just the nature of things being ruled by idiots. We're ruled by a guy who he simply looks like he uses an adult diaper and it's full at all times. Roger. Yeah. Well, you know, that's just the nature of things being ruled by idiots. We're, we're, we're ruled by a guy who asked a homeless person if they wanted to, uh,

to study business. Oh my God. I remember that. Oh, it's fucking incredible. Yes. It's like, I just want to get through the day.

Like, but have you thought about investing in business? Yes. No, man, I'm homeless. He genuinely, it's strange that we rishi sunak's parents paid so much for him to go to winchester and he now talks like fucking um what's his name the the character from bojack horseman once again my memory is failing me uh vincent adult man it's just the fucking three kids in a trench coat sitting on each other's shoulders

oh man now uh hindenburg was so old uh that when he showed up to the eastern prussian eighth army command he was still wearing his old prussian blue army uniform because he had not been issued a new german field gray now to be honest with you if i got drafted back the Army, I'd show up in my ACU and be like, what up? Guess what? You guys want to bring me back? You're going to deal with my old guy shit. I'm going to be talking about Blue Force Tracker all day, even though I'm sure you have something newer and worse. I was in long enough to

be able to wear multicam, but the multicam that they're wearing now is different. Mine would still be old. Yeah. I would have gotten multicam if I'd deployed before I got out. The deployment if I deployed before I got out. The deployment that I did, I got back in 2010, and they were just starting to bring them out for units going to deployment. But for garrison uniforms, I just missed it. And it's like, whatever.

Who cares? My second deployment to Afghanistan when we all got multicam, they didn't know we were going to get it. So they had us all go through RFI to get ACU. And they're like, oh, just kidding. We're going to get multicam they didn't know we were gonna get it so they had us all go through rfi to get acu and they're like oh just kidding we're gonna get uh uh multicam stuff no don't turn in the acu stuff also go to rfi and pull even more gear and multicam so i had like six fucking sets of rfi gear that had to turn in when i got out i was like wow thank you fort hood you fucking idiots um i love rfying stuff right it. It's rapid fielding initiative for those of you... For those without brain damage? Yeah.

For those of you who don't suffer from TBI and the consequences thereof, when you would deploy because they would want to give you newer kit to take with you to a deployment and they wouldn't want to wait to field it to the entire army, they would basically just be like, okay, every company got its fucking date

to go through this big hangar where they just cycle through a bunch of stations, and they give you the new body armor, the new equipment carrier, any stuff specifically for downrange, like the improved first aid kit, a tourniquet, a seatbelt cutter, a good multi-tool, stuff like that.

In our case, like new helmets, new helmet pads. A carcated pocket pussy. When they determined that the fucking United Prison Industries had made a bad lot of fucking helmets, they had to give us new ones. Because yes, prisoners make our ballistic armor. Yeah, like it's funny. I do remember that. Our ballistic armor. Yeah, like it's bloody.

Now, by the time they both arrived, that being Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Eastern Front was rapidly falling to pieces. The Eighth Army was still in chaos. And across the border, the Austro-Hungarians had launched an offensive in Iglesia, something the Germans warned them not to do because they'd be completely unable to support them. And surprise, surprise, because it's the Austro-Hungarian military, the entire operation was falling apart and failing. Konrad von Hötzendorf begged the Germans to launch an attack to pull his ass out of the fire, something he would do countless times throughout World War I. Now, the Germans couldn't do this due to the advance of the Russian Second and First Armies because they only had one army against the two. There's no way they can conduct offensive operations into Russia. Now, the Germans didn't know this, but the Russian First and Second Armies were already pretty much coming apart at the seams. The Second Army was advancing on a 60-kilometer front, but was so badly organized that it was

strung along and scattered. Now, this is mostly due to inexperience rather than any kind of active incompetence. Their officer corps just didn't know how to keep an army together because they've never had to do it before. They didn't have training. Not only was the Second Army made up of units from three different military districts, meaning they didn't know each other or had never worked together before, but a full 60% of the entire army, officers included, had been in uniform for no more than five weeks,

having just been called up and the officers having no actual officer training. Whoops. Great. That sounds excellent. All I can say, that sounds like a recipe for success. I think good things are going to happen. I expect the rest of this episode will just be positive things.

That is the thing that our show is known for, is talking about positive things that don't go wrong. Exactly. Now, anybody who's ever been to Europe, any part of Europe during, say, August, knows that the temperatures get quite hot. And at this point, it's about 90 degrees or a little bit higher. August knows that the temperatures get quite hot. And at this point, it's about 90 degrees or a little bit higher.

And a bad supply system in the Russian military meant that by the time their invasion of Prussia started, they were already out of water. And remember, also their uniforms are all wool. So it's not comfortable. There's legendary amounts of swamp ass happening, and people are already starting to be heat casualties. We've already talked about Swamposh last episode, and all I can say is that August in Europe, it's...

It doesn't typically get as hot as most of America does, but if you live in, say, for example, the upper peninsula of Michigan, it's not too dissimilar. In some places, it'll absolutely get into, let's say, the mid-90s. It's just not quite as humid, but it sucks. And if you're wearing wool and you're trooping around carrying shit on your back, God knows if you're doing infantry combat, you will get insanely hot.

It's very, very, very warm. This past year was kind of an anomaly, but back in those days, it was common for it to get into the mid-80s to the low to mid-90s in August in Europe. That's still pretty common. So although Western Europe is in general milder, then certainly it's milder than what you'd expect at that latitude say in north america because like london is further north than vancouver canada um like it's it's milder uh it still gets hotter than dog shit in the summertime here in the south caucuses in the summer it can break easily break 90 by august i think we broke 100 uh this last summer but only for only for like a day or two it got we had 104 in London last year.

It really sucked. It pretty much just laid on my floor and tried not to die. It got so hot, it just made more sense to close all the windows and blinds because it's like if you let air in from the outside, it just gets balls hot inside too. It was actually genuinely unreal. It's like trying to cool yourself off

with a hairdryer. The Br brits they don't complain about the weather at all famously they don't do that so yeah there was also the fun fact that hundreds of thousands of men were marching through a dry countryside in the middle of august so i mean if you've ever seen a large body of men and you know if you're listening and you've never had to see this i don't oh i've seen a large body of men i've seen the largest bodies of men uh And if you're listening and you've never had to see this, I don't... Oh, I've seen a large body of men. I've seen the largest bodies of men. But soldiers marching through places is a lot like a herd of livestock, right? They destroy everything. And they were churning the countryside into dust. And so within a few days of campaigning, the Russian military had been struggling through

what was effectively a man-made dust bowl. Well, the dust bowl is also man-made. This is an army-made dust bowl. Fair enough. Different kind of dust bowl, creating the big dust bowl, but still a dust bowl nonetheless. Soon, hungry and thirsty soldiers began straggling behind, deserting, or simply getting lost in blinding dust storms. General Samsonov, commander of the Second Army,

pointed out that everybody who was falling behind must have been the Jews because good Russians wouldn't do such a thing. It's still the Russian Empire, folks. There's got to be the anti-Semitism in there somewhere. My co-host and friend Alice Caldwell Kelly once described the Russian Civil War as a conflict between generals on the Bolshevik side who would say things like chess, comma, is the tennis of the mind or something to that effect. And that the white generals were basically like effectively Prussians who kept a ham under their coat to ward off the Jew.

I know she's not wrong. I'm probably misquoting, but it's very, very, very funny and true. It's mostly accurate, yeah. I will say too, there's always a part of me that i think about deserting back in those days where it's like you know you had to carry your like id card in your breast pocket because like there was no formal like you know personnel registry system you just everywhere you went you had to show your id card you basically got arrested for suspicion of desertion and it's like there's also part but then there's also part of me that's like you could just fuck off out of a column be like i'm done yeah i'm gonna be a hermit i'm living in the woods

i'm gonna shit i'm someone else this is absolutely the era of time where you could just disappear as a person like i'm private vasili whatever and i'm like man i don't have boots i haven't had a drink of water in two days i'm somewhere in germany fuck this i'm walking away exactly i'm getting on a boat and i'm going to america and then 50 years from now i'm doing an animated story of my family history except it's mice and it's going to be called an american tale fuck all of you i'm done and if you like were worried about your officers catching you if you look to the left the officer would probably be deserting with you so it really doesn't matter private i have heard there are no cats in america

can you tell me if this is true or not? You're not Jewish, are you? I'm very concerned about this surname, Mauskiewicz. It sounds quite Jewish, actually. Sir, is that a necklace of ham that you're wearing? You know, honestly, the problem is that my Russian accent

now starts shifting towards sounding Israeli, so I should probably just not do it. That's kind of the same accent! It's basically the same. It's basically the same. The army could also hardly communicate as the Russians ran out of telegraph wire or simply forgot to bring it. Now, this became a bit of a problem

when enemy scouts and also just angry German civilians began cutting the telegraph wire. You know, partisans, whatever. Cavalry did this a lot where they would go behind enemy lines uh the telegraph wire you know partisans whatever uh cavalry did this a lot where they would go behind enemy lines and cut telegraph wire um and when the russians sent in the repairmen who the guys tabbed to be in charge of fixing telegraph wire like sir we don't know how to fix telegraph wire i've never done this before well so what the fuck is a telegraph? I realize that there's a long stretch of time.

It was well known at this point. But because it's so close to the 19th century, there's a part of me that wants to imagine they send out a telegraph signalman and he's like, wait, you can talk over a wire? What the fuck is this shit? I'm a horse doctor. I was going to say, I can imagine Kaiser Wilhelm

is more like, wait, you can talk through a wire? What? You mean I don't have to carve my letters into a peasant's back? So you mean all of these pigeons are for nothing? And I mean, not to mention, when the Russian Empire starts drafting people, they draft people from the middle of fucking nowhere first. And it's always been that way. The Soviet Union was the exact same way. So it's always the minorities that get scooped up first who, by design, have the worst amount of infrastructure going out to the republics and oblasts and whatever. Back then, they were called something else.

So you have guys who absolutely have never seen a telegraph before being told the word lay down telegraph wire after being drafted three weeks ago so it's like but it's cool like once you have them you can like if you if your signal wire gets cut you can just use these guys as like tuvin throat singing wind talkers they can just communicate in a different way you know what it's it's it's redundancy on your now the length of their of the russian advancement dispatch riders took too long and nobody in the russian military at the at the time had access to cars or motorcycles. I mean, this is very early in World War I. There was not a lot of cars floating around at all. This is the future urbanist.

The German general staff had some shitty old cars. Because remember, even having a car back then kind of sucked. There were no roads. You'd be driving over horse tracks like oh car snapped in half yeah it's just it's a combination of like no road has ever been paved because why would it be and what the fuck is a car like it's not really a good moment in time to be you know whipping ass around the airplane flies overhead only like 10 years for after it's invented exactly once again what the fuck is an airplane humans can do that someone from like being drafted to like the ottoman army or whatever they like scraped and from the highlands like what the fuck is in the sky oh god that horse is metal someone sent me back home to my village and also this is the era when like absinthe would make you trip so like

everyone is going to be doubting their senses so general samsonoff commander of the second army used the easiest thing he had for communication which was radios now i know that sounds normal especially for this show uh but these are radios from 1914 but were much much more likely manufactured years before then. They were hit and miss at best. And when they worked, they were completely unencrypted because nobody encrypted anything yet. They were broadcast in the open in plain Russian. And that meant any German listening nearby could simply tap in and be like, oh, yeah, I can hear the Russian radio communications.

I presume, though, the tapping in is going to be done by, say, signalmen from the German side. Yeah, I mean, you could... Because I was like... Once again, I know radios are primitive, but I imagine in this part of the world, it's so early on in that technology that they're not going to be a common thing that people have.

No, no. It's the German military specifically. And it is literally as easy as turning a dial around and like listening in because they all use the same exact kinds of radios generally and because i guess in my mind i thought 1914 radios would be like 1940 computers and so their radio is like the fucking big wheel from fritz lang's metropolis which is like fucking turn it back like a guy all day having to fucking just turn it to different positions to make it work the size of a fucking company barracks it's i mean they're they're not great and the germans

radios were better but i'm not gonna say that the german radio operation was better though fewer russians spoke german than germans spoke russian so the germans had a much easier time listening in and you know over time code, primitive codes were developed. I mean, because codes had already existed in written dispatches and stuff like that, but hadn't quite made the jump to radios. Because again, this is weeks after World War I has started. There's a lot of innovation that's going to happen

in the next couple of years. It has not happened yet. Now, the dumbest part is, and we can say this about most things about the Russian military, is the Russians can you know say this about most thing about the the russian military is the russians fucking knew this they had just experienced this in their war against japan um the japanese had a lot of russian speakers in the military because they knew how to like tap into radio communications and the russians were again broadcasting their orders

orders of battle movements etc etc in plain r Russian over an unencrypted radio network. And the Japanese were just like, oh, this is what they're going to do. It's like, definitely do not conduct forward operations today. Everybody has swamp ass to impossible degree. It would be terrible if a Japanese person heard me say this. And what's even dumber is that the Russians could pick up German radio communications as well. So they knew everything they said over the radio was being listened to. Wow, it sure would be terrible if other people could do this. Anyway,

I'm not going to think about it. Yeah. No need to look too far into this one. Meanwhile, the first army, the Russian first army, had still yet to move after fighting off the German attack previously. They still had no supplies, and the men were beginning to desert, because that is literally always happening in the Russian military. People are always deserting. I mean, this is kind of a common problem across most armies during World War I. It was desertion, malingering, stuff like that. But that would happen for armies like armies like germany and france in a

couple years uh the russia simply started off with their military already falling apart for instance several of general rennenkampf's subordinates suggest that they should probably retreat out of eastern prussia because if the germans attacked again the men would simply shatter now remember the war had only been going on for a few weeks, and the First Army had fought two small battles in the grand scheme of things, and was already completely in shambles. The army was in such bad shape that Renenkov was under the idea that he had lost the last battle, which remember, he had won. The Germans had retreated. However, Renenkov believed that they had simply pulled back because

they couldn't take advantage of the situation they had created. He had no idea that he had caused them to retreat and had won a battle. However, Hindenburg wasn't aware of the realities of either army. Instead, he figured he would have to shift south to deal with the second army as it was still moving, as the first army had kind of paused. The reason why he thought that he needed to immediately confront the second army is because it was moving. It was supposed to be the movement force of the incoming pincer attack that was hypothetically going to destroy the German 8th Army. Whereas Hindenburg later wrote, quote, we had not merely to win a victory over Samsonov, we have to annihilate him. Only thus could we be free to deal with the second enemy,

Renenkamp, who was plundering and burning through Eastern Prussia, which is true. The German First Army was effectively a plague of locusts across anybody they came across. They were eating anything that was vaguely edible. They killed a lot of civilians. The things that you would kind of expect from an invasion force in 1914, or 1939 for that matter. Slowly, the majority of the 8th Army was peeled away from facing Renenkov and south. The only single cavalry division was left in place, armed with lances and handguns, to harass the entire Russian First Army. The idea was to ride around and cause havoc

and get them to believe a much bigger force was opposing them. How do you think this worked? I have an impression that it didn't go very well and that basically at the first juncture they realized this is probably just going to get everyone killed. Now did they stop? That's a 50-50 decision.

It's interesting because while it worked, and by worked I meant the cavalry was able to act like to ride as mounted cavalry, it did kind of keep the Russian First Army on its toes. However, the Eighth Army had been marching constantly, and especially because they're changing orders at the last second. These men and horses have marched dozens of kilometers in only a couple of days.

I think 50 or more. So they had rode their horses into the ground. At this point, the vast majority of the German cavalry divisions were just infantry. They had no horses to speak of. It was just some assholes with lances and handguns on foot.

In the south, the Russian Second Army continued to march, but could not find anybody to fight. The Russians only had a few reconnaissance planes and couldn't find anybody with them. They launched entire attacks on what they thought was a German position, only to find empty

woods or swamps. When the northwest front commander, Zelensky, demanded that Samsonov keep searching for Germans, Samsonov had to explain that his army was too tired, despite still not having to fight a single battle. I mean, we love a shamming king, but at the same time, this sounds like just an organization in free fall. Yeah. And what's interesting is, again, this is August 1914, the month the war started, right?

Right. Exactly. Yeah. If you told me this is 1916 or 1917, this was leading up to Russia exiting the war after the Bolshevik Revolution. Okay, great, got it. But no, this is literally the first few weeks of the war. Yeah, they stepped over the Russian border and immediately started falling apart. And crucially, this will never happen again in Russian history.

No, I can't think of another example. Anyway, let's look out my window. Not once. Finally, the Russians raided the town of niedenberg thinking the germans were there there actually wasn't then word got back to the commander this is a powerful german name all right the local german army bicycle detachment commander lieutenant burscher von saher zum wiesenstein uh he heard uh through a runner that hey there's russians in neidenberg neidenberg whichever so his boys all hopped on their fucking huffies pedaled over to the town and chased off an entire cossack squadron that's

really amazing i mean i bicycle infantry is a thing that hasn't really survived like there's a part of me deep down it's like that'd be sick but then i'm like the army makes everything suck so no it wouldn't be sick because you would just be like rocking on a bicycle and also back in those days i imagine bike wheels were even if they had rubber tires were still like it was harder than shit um and you know like the various mechanisms that make life easier on a bike now probably didn't exist but this is kind of funny that like bicycle infantry won a battle against cossacks who you know have something of an unwarranted legacy of being these fearsome cavalry um got chased off by a whole bunch of you know fancy boy uh germans on on pedal bikes and then they again peddled into town and ambushed a

different group of cossacks who had just got done pillaging nearby houses and were cooking their lunch in the middle of the town square. Then, after they chased off the Cossacks, they found a full copy of the Second Army's orders in plain Russian without any kind of coding whatsoever, which the Cossacks left behind after they ran. Once again, this will never happen again in Russian history. Bicycle kings. after they ran. Once again, this will never happen again in Russian history. Bicycle kings. I mean, I just find it very funny that it's just like in the middle of a complete just

mishmash conflagration like a bunch of guys on bicycles are able to exploit the situation and do really well. And it's just imagine being the Cossacks like literally all of your military prestige comes like we are just unstoppable fucking doing pogroms left and right. Just like fully, fully just making life hell for every jewish person in the pale of settlement and then also like

a bunch of germans on bikes whip our ass yeah i mean the cossacks can be fearsome warriors assuming they're storming the towns of unarmed jewish folks yeah the second you get confronted by some uh some kraut boys on a bicycle like run away we can't possibly defeat this force and again it's a detachment it's like less than a hundred guys and they chased off a fucking squadron embarrassing the kashik the cossacks should still be ashamed of this on top of literally everything else they've ever done while under arms for the russians i'm just just imagining a german like early machine gunner slash fucking just some kind of repeating rifle just doing a sick fucking spin on a mongoose and just completely no-scoping a bunch of Cossacks. be able to do sick jumps in order to call it like a faint operation in order to attract enemy fire

so they could then fucking pin it down, suppress them, etc. Someone's got to be on there. And there's got to be at least one guy as an ammo bearer or assistant gunner riding on his pegs. That's just how it works. This is actually how Dave Mears' great grandfather got his start. Hitting a wheelie

and just fucking blowing the back walls out of a Cossack with a Mauser. Normally, that Turner phrase is used to mean fucking them. So, I mean, in a way, either works. Hypothetically fucked with a Mauser bullet. Yeah. Exactly. But also maybe fucked for real because we don't want to assume anything about their precludes. There could be star-crossed lovers across the front line.

We don't know that. A lot of shit happened during the Christmas truce. Someone got their cheeks clapped. I mean, if you wrote a historical erotic fiction work about like a gay romance where someone found like a German bicycle infantry twink fighting against the Imperial Russian Army,

you could probably, I mean, if people made a lot of money on a book called Taken by the T-Rex, which is about fucking a dinosaur, you could make money off this. Hold up. I'm just saying. Hold up. Is this book real? Yes.

All right. There was the thing in, like, the early 2010s where, like, people were basically selling erotic fiction on Amazon. And, like, the more ridiculous it could be, the more sort of, like, meme-worthy joke content it could be, like, the better it was doing. the more meme-worthy joke content it could be, the better it was doing. In the same way as... I don't know if you're familiar with the author Quan Mills, but he does stories like this. I haven't read enough of his stuff to know if it's fully meant to be erotic or just kind of a joke. But Quan Mills does what you might call... And I'm not trying to take the piss here. He writes what you might call hood erotica. For example, a book called This hoe got roaches in

her crib and stuff like that um incredible it's it's yeah so the amazon self-published erotic fiction market is a real thing and yes there was a book called taken by the book is only 5 000 words long that's not even a short story and they make thousands of dollars because it's a joke like i said it's meme worthy like my friend and i I used to joke about doing a sci-fi erotica series called Fuckscape Horizons. And if we had ever gotten our stuff together, we probably could have made money off this. And I'm just saying,

World War I bicycle infantry twink, star-cloth cross-lover romance, Imperial Russian Army conscript who wants to desert. There's got to be a guy whipping ass on a mongoose, even if it's a historical anachronism. We'll make it work. Someone make that fan art.

Okay. I'm reading. I found this book on Amazon. It's called Taken by the T-Rex, parentheses, Dinosaur Erotica by Christy Sims and Alara Branwen. This required two people to make. It has two and a half stars. Drin is her tribe's chief huntress.

She lives for the thrill of the hunt. Men and sex hold no allure for her, as Drin has never found a partner who could satisfy her. When a T-Rex ascends upon her village, destroying it, Durin demands that the tribe's hunters go in search for the beast and slaughter it. Opting for safety instead of revenge, the tribe moves to a new location, hoping that the big beast won't follow them. It does.

Durin taunts the beast, giving its tribe mates time to flee. As she runs, leading it through a gauntlet of traps, the thrill of the hunt soars through her blood. Like I said. Leaving her wet with desire. Yes, exactly. When the angry T-Rex corners the

huntress in a box canyon, it seems more interested in her wet womanhood than her flesh. Words, 5,800. This is, like I said, there's maybe five people on this planet who ever jacked off to Clan of the Cave Bear, but someone decided to make a version of it that also involves dinosaurs,

and it actually made money. Tom, leave all of that in. I don't care if this is Canenberg Part 2. made money. Tom, leave all of that in. I don't care if this is Canterbury part two. This is why I could never be a voice actor because I couldn't hold it together for fucking 30 seconds. Oh, I know. I remember when we did the

radio play about the Kandahar giant. We're all terrible at this job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, in response to the Cossacks being chased off by some dudes on their mongooses, the Russians leveled the town with an artillery barrage because they couldn't handle the fact they'd been fucking routed by some dudes on bikes. However, this made Samsonov believe the Germans had actually retreated rather than pulling back this one detachment.

Because Samsonov didn't think this is a bicycle detachment. He thought this is like a major like maneuver piece of the 8th Army. The Germans have a bicycle group of armies for some reason. That's just what they're doing. I do not understand why they're all on bicycles.

It is because they are Jews. Are there 300,000 bicycles in all of Europe? Why do Russians, why do Germans have these? I don't understand. They believe that they pulled back much further than the Masurian Lakes, which isn't really that important right now. But the Masurian Lakes, which I'm sure I'm pronouncing incorrectly, was supposed to be the pinch point for the pincer movement of the Russian First and Second Armies. the pinch point for the pincer movement of the Russian First and Second Armies. So if they believed it to be true that the Germans had retreated back further than the Messirian lakes, then in their mind, there was no point in trying to pin them against the lakes as they'd already

retreated beyond them. So Samsov scrapped his plans without consulting with Zelensky, which is the overall front commander, and shifted his army's march to the west, pulling him much, much further away from Rennikoff's first army. So now, despite the fact that these two armies are separate, there's no hope of them ever being able to support one another now. Furthermore, because, you know, splitting your forces, always a great idea. Exactly. You have the lines led by Donkey seal approval on splitting your forces always a great idea um exactly you have the lions led by donkey seal approval on splitting your forces and at this point despite the fact we have a lot of stuff more to go through i can say with full confidence this is where samsonov killed his entire command uh he just had no idea yet he has a couple more days to live and i mean

that samsonov personally as well he's not going to survive this either uh furthermore the russians had just picked up on german troop movements away from the first army moving towards the second but rather than thinking they're moving to confront the second army the russians believe they must be retreating back uh back across the vistola river and abandoning eastern prussia zhelinsky the overall commander thought their plan should be to drive forward because they could not allow them to dig in behind the Vistula because the Vistula is a very easy place to defend. So Zielinski now believed that this offensive was now chasing down routing Germans, not fighting against an army that's still very much still functioning, and going on the counter-offensive. They have no idea about any of this, because their recon element does not exist.

Their planes do not catch any of this, and they're not sending any scouts forward, really. The 2nd Army began their advance towards what they believed this fleeing group of Germans was so fast, they left their flanks completely open, and missed Hindenburg's buildup on the Russian left flank. There was German forces building up there and the Russians literally just walked right by them. Once again, the lines that I don't see

of approval for leaving your flanks undefended. It works every time. Not only undefended, but not even considered. The Russians driving forward without any scouting ran into a German reserve corps, the 20 Corps, dug in around the town of Orlau. Instead of waiting within their positions for the Russians to come to them, the German forces launched themselves out of their trenches, waving flags, bands were playing,

and soldiers were singing. This terrified the Russians who turned around and ran because they had no idea there was even Germans there in the first place, and they suddenly appeared singing at them. They ran back to their own positions, and the Germans gave chase. Sword fights erupted, soldiers began bayoneting one another, and more than one person was literally bitten to death via another person's teeth. another person's teeth. The Russians tripped over their feet into a different battle at the town of Lana and began running into Germans. They did not know were dug in there all over the place again, because they decided not

to scout ahead. And despite being a massively outnumbered, again, this is a single German reserve corps full like backup guys just blunted an entire army at advance. After two days of fighting, Hindenburg and Lundorf met with the 20th Corps commander, Frederick Schultz, who told them how badly fucked his unit was if the Russians actually got their shit together and deployed their entire army at once. Because Samsonov really had no span of command. He couldn't organize this into an actual full advance. He was sending like an action movie. He was sending one unit

at a time to assault these places because that's the only amount of troops he could effectively command at once. However, this was the whole plan for the 20th Corps to hold in place and not to break. Schultz just didn't know it yet because Hindenburg-Lundorf didn't tell him. Fewer people

know about the plan that you're coming up with, the less ways it can leak out. XX Corps was to hold in place while Meckensen and von Francois moved into the positions they would need in order to attack the flank of the entire second Russian army. If they allowed Schultz to retreat like he

wanted, and admittedly did make sense if you're Schultz in this position, the entire plan would go to hell and the Russians would be able to march by unopposed. Schultz is ordered to hold his position to the last man. And again, he had no idea, but he was probably fighting the most important part of the upcoming battle of Tannenberg because without him holding, it wouldn't be able to unfold the way it did. Schultz is worried that a full frontal assault on his position by the entirety of Russian forces in his sector must be coming. And if that happened, his corps would be destroyed. And to his credit, he was 100% right. He stood no chance if the full weight of the Russian Second Army fell

on him. But weirdly, it didn't. And it seems the best way we can think of this is that the Russians simply couldn't bring their entire army on target at once. And they simply stopped attacking his positions after they were forced back the first time. They simply changed the route of their bring their entire army on target at once. And they simply stopped attacking his positions after they were forced back the first time. They simply changed the route of their advance, leaving their left flank even more open and more spread out, giving more space to the Germans. While Scholz was holding, Francois and Meckensen's men were rapidly being moved into position on the left flank. They're actually already supposed to be in place on account of the strict German army timetables that we talked about during our last episode. However, timetables don't account for things that are not men walking. There'd been a flash storm that had flooded

several rail lines, which had slowed down their deployment, not only their deployment, but all of the material they would need for a counter-assault. Now, the troops slowly were moved into place on the count of the rail lines not working, and this date was moved back from August 25th to August 26th, which meant that Schultz would have to hold in position longer and longer. Hindenburg was beginning to panic that the 1st Army would turn and head south in order to support Samsonov, as they had finally begun to move. However, as if on cue, the Russian Northwest Front commander sent the First Army orders via radio in plain Russian that told him to halt hundreds of miles

away no sooner than August 26th, meaning there was absolutely no chance that Samsonov would get help once the Germans launched their plan. There was no way Redenkopf's men could cover that distance on foot in such a short amount of time. If that wasn't bad enough, the Russians then radioed the positions, the exact positions of the second army the next day. Normally, you might be able to believe this is like a ruse of some kind, like this is disinformation. But remember, they had captured those plans from the Cossacks in Nidenberg. So they could literally check the work. And so Hindenburg could check the written orders that the Cossacks dropped and compare them to the radio orders and be like, oh no, these are still the same. Because despite knowing possibly that his orders had fallen into enemy hands, Samsonov had

not changed his plans whatsoever. Francois was still not entirely in place on the 25th, and as only about half of his men and guns had arrived, even his ammunition supply hadn't arrived yet because of the late trains. Still, Hindenburg ordered him to go on the attack on the town of Usadu. Francois shrugged, knowing he kind of didn't have the ability to go on the attack, and said, quote, naturally the attack will be made. Of course, the men must fight with bayonets, because he had not received ammunition yet. With intercepted radio transmission in hand, Hindenburg told his staff on the night of the 25th, quote, gentlemen, our preparations are so well in hand that we can sleep soundly tonight. Well, that's always a good sign.

I'm sure that's not going to portend anything. Well, it portends a whole lot of surrendering Russians very, very, very soon. I mean, well, the German army doesn't exactly work flawlessly either, but Samsonov had finally noticed a large buildup of Germans on his left flank by this point. He thought about stopping his advance to face them, which would have been the correct idea, by this point. He thought about stopping his advance to face them, which would have been the correct idea, but there is no real way in order for him to do so. All of his corps were widely spaced

apart, and even the units within those corps had largely lost contact with one another. His army had devolved to mostly just a collection of dudes going on a shitty walk through Prussia. The amount of men making that walk is dropping drastically, as the hard-marching and empty stomachs with no water, on top of being fresh conscripts with no history of campaigning, people are dropping like flies.

He knew he couldn't really concentrate his forces, so he didn't. He kept his main body advancing, sending reinforcements to the left as he went. However, even this did not work. One unit he sent was so far away that they had no chance to reach the left flank on time. The two cavalry divisions he ordered to respond couldn't even be located. One division that might make it there was full of fresh conscripts led by, and this is in Samsonov's opinion, the worst commander in his army, a guy named Lieutenant General Artunimov. Francois, meanwhile, had gotten

new orders. At 4 a.m., he was to attack the Sieben Heights, which would require him to advance over open ground, cross a small river, and attack uphill. And his train still had not yet arrived with cannon ammunition. In case he thought about refusing orders yet again, which he had done previously, again, Hindenburg warned him that his unit would attack with or without him in command of it. However, Francois found a way around this. He continued to be a little shit and reported his bosses that the attack was in progress at 530, when in reality he hadn't even ordered his unit to march yet. He then called multiple times after he had told them the attack had begun, asking him to

delay the attack, and by noon, he actually had still not ordered his forces to attack, despite the fact they would be fighting for over five hours at that point. He got an angry phone call demanding to know why the position hadn't been taken, and he lied, saying his soldiers had been fighting for hours, but he still didn't have his ammunition trained for his artillery so it was impossible for infantry to take such an object unsupported which to be fair he was probably right francois in my opinion is not in the wrong here he seems to be one of the few commanders in world war one is like that's just gonna get my soldiers killed i'm not gonna do it yeah so crit like that's why i said the last episode that i fucking love this guy. Um, cause they, the rare,

the rare sort of sensible approach here. Yeah. And the only reason that he was kind of, uh, invulnerable of being fired is that Ludendorff knew he was a talented commander and he also didn't know who could replace him. So he simply didn't fire him for insubordination. Finally, Francois gave orders to attack at 1 PM,

despite the fact already telling his commander that it started at 5.30 a.m. And he also then told the commander, told Ludendorff, I'm giving my men an hour before we attack because he wanted them to eat lunch first. I mean, look, fuck it. You know what? Yeah, this guy rocks. He's legitimately the best person in the series. Do a little MRE heater action, you know, make series do a little mre heater action you know make your make a little sloppy joe thing you know even heat up break up the cheez-its and heat them

up too you know take your time there's a reason why his soldiers loved him and all of his superior commanders fucking hated him it's extremely fun i mean genuinely uh the sieben heights fell quite rapidly but it took another two hours to reform his uh core together and try to move on osaru the town that he was also supposed to attack. But by now, his men were out of water and heat exhaustion was taking over as it was the middle of the day and he called the attack off

and did so without clearance once again. But this time, Ludendorff was like, okay, fine, I get it. At the German center, Rekhan pointed out that there's a large gap between the Russian center and the Russian right flank, which is where Francois was attacking. Schultz's men were ordered to move forward and test to see what would happen. The entire Russian left, held by the 2nd Division, was enveloped and pushed south towards a lake, pretty much without resisting. They're like,

oh look Germans, let's run that way. Now, this was hardly easy for the German soldiers, however. The unit had never seen combat before and was filled with what was known as, Showalter puts it as, quote, the enthusiasm of the inexperienced, having no idea how bad combat was going to be. They rushed forward without taking cover, and they ran so fast into fire, they crossed the sights of their own artillery. But they couldn't make contact with their artillery because they didn't have any radios of any kind. So they just had to

run faster to try to outrun their artillery and close in on the Russians, which seems like an all-around bad idea, but it worked. This was made worse by the terrain. It was hilly and broken, so German gun commanders weren't entirely sure how to support their troops with artillery. So they just pushed their artillery forward, bringing it online with their infantry and dragging it along with their advance. This is fucking stupid, but it did help them to stop blowing up their own men.

The Russians attempted a counterattack, but ran into a German machine gun company, which is made up of only six Maxim machine guns. This ended in the deaths of hundreds of Russians. The Russian commander of this unit was desperately trying to take the machine guns, attempting to apparently use the kill bot tactic from Futurama and just kept feeding Russian infantry

into these six machine guns, figuring they'd have to reload eventually. But yeah, maybe the barrel will get hot at some point. Yeah, and the Germans defeated this by at some point. Yeah, and the Germans defeated this by simply having two guns not fire while the other ones fire and then cover them

when they're reloading and vice versa. So, yeah. The Russian commander screamed threats that he would murder anybody who didn't obey him being fed directly

into the buzzsaw. And by the time Schultz's attack finally stopped, the Russian 2nd Division was rendered completely combat ineffective and destroyed within a few hours of fighting. Their division suffered 3,000 casualties, the vast majority of them from artillery and machine gun fire. So, well done.

Now, at this point, the entire Russian right flank was teetering on the brink of collapse. flank was teetering on the brink of collapse. On Schultz's left, this was supposed to be to the left of General Kurt von Morgan, commander of the 3rd Reserve Division. But Morgan just didn't march when he was ordered to, and then didn't inform the 8th Army Command that he was not marching. So all the way until 6pm that night, everyone thought the Russian right flank was being taken by Von Morgan. Nobody's entirely sure why Morgan did this, though Morgan insists that because, like we talked about in the last episode, this part of Prussia has some pretty thick forests. And Morgan would have had to march through a forest. And he insisted he could be walking directly into a trap. Though there was no intelligence to give this idea.

He simply cooked it up in his own mind. Nobody's sure why he thought that. Elsewhere, the German forces continued their steady gains, even if now they're pushing their men to the point that they are dropping from ragged feet in heat stroke. In one case, 50% of a German division dropped out from a 50 kilometer forced march without a break or water supply so yeah

just eating their own men alive that's like 30 miles in august that sucks yeah it's just there's no way to describe that as anything but without break without water nothing yeah yeah the ost group which is the name given to two corps that were made into one group under the command of meckinson struck out at Bischofsburg, a linchpin of the Russian flank, which would be needed to be secured for the greater plan to be used. Samsonov finally, maybe, realized he had seriously fucked up by leaving his left so wide open and ordered an entire corps to protect the town. And again, for reasons nobody is entirely sure of, the order simply never got to the unit. So nothing happened. Though Meckensen's men were half dead at this point,

they'd been marching nonstop for hours and just simply couldn't go on anymore when the order was given at 8 a.m. on the 27th. They had no idea that their Ost group had just stopped directly in front of two Russian divisions who had dug in around Bishofsburg and another town, Ortelsburg. So after Russian snipers began picking people off, the dead, tired soldiers were forced to dig themselves in while getting shot at. Meanwhile, Meckensen called for reinforcements, and the 35th Division was ordered on a force march to go help them out. However, the 35th was not long for this world. They'd been disintegrating for hours under the stress of constant force marching. They'd been disintegrating for hours under the stress of constant force marching.

They'd been throwing away their backpacks and rifles because they were so exhausted. And that's despite the fact that not carrying a rifle in the German army at the time was punishable by lashing. They would rather be like, fuck it, lash me. I'm not carrying this anymore. Some companies had thrown away so much gear that 100 men only had 60 rifles between them. So after a few hours of walking, they were called off as reinforcements when their commander was like, I can't fucking control these guys. They're done. They will not fight. You can't send them into battle. So they didn't. Somehow during all of this, the Russians

were still convinced that the Germans were retreating towards the Vistula, and they were not. In fact, caught in the middle of a large counteroffensive, and had really no way out. So despite the Russians having Meckensen pinned in, they began to pull soldiers away and send them west, hoping to chase down these mythical fleeing German forces. This led to the two armies accidentally smacking right into one another. accidentally smacking right into one another. A German brigade made up of older men, so old in fact they had not been trained on the concept of indirect fire from artillery or the operation of machine guns,

and a Russian division. The battle played out so strangely it could be from some kind of surrealist war film. While getting hammered with machine guns and artillery, the older German reservists, who had probably done training back with the Prussian military, stuck to their training, which at the time was keeping to a light pace while marching towards the enemy so as not to tire themselves out and stick together.

So they effectively calmly walked up to the Russian machine gun and artillery positions and destroyed them. Just a stroll through a graveyard effectively. Then German officers drew their swords, sounded a full charge using bugles, and then charged on horseback. Again, this is World War I. At this point, the Russian 16th Division commander, General Blagiovsky,

Blagiovsky, fuck, I don't know, I give up, realized that, wow, I'm probably not fighting or treating our enemy anymore. He immediately ordered his forces to turn around, march straight down the one road they had been walking down, and move towards Bischofsburg.

However, he made the move so fast, the division got bunched up into something like a human traffic jam. They forgot to secure their rear guard and flanks, and then German artillerymen on nearby hilltops sighted in their guns on the road. Within a few hours of shelling, the entire division was destroyed. Other Russian commanders, who also thought they were fighting a retreating enemy, just kept sending men towards Bischofsburg without any kind of scouting or communications with one another. Down this one road. It was effectively a firing squad

of German artillery directly down on a Congo line of very confused Russian conscripts. After each one of these advances was smashed by the Germans, the Russian 6th Corps, the entire Corps that all of these units are a part of, collapsed and retreated alone without orders while the Germans weren't even chasing them. They retreated so quickly that Samsonov had no idea that they had broken. Hundreds, if not thousands, of these fleeing Russian soldiers ran directly into the swamps of Missouri, getting trapped in the muck, and some of them drowned in the middle of the night with no one coming to save them. The general in charge of this was so embarrassed, he did not report to General Samsonoff until the next day. So again, a 24-hour period where the army commander has no

idea one of his entire corps has been wiped out. Back with Francois, the attack on Osadu would begin with the artillery barrage at 4am. Yeah, they finally got their ammo, it only took a whole other day. For the men of the attack, this is the first time they had a full night's sleep and a hot meal in about a week, which obviously makes running into the meat grinder of World War I much easier. Though, intel did not get any better for the Germans. At 5 a.m., Francois got a report

that his men had captured the town, which was weird because according to his timetable, they weren't even supposed to be there yet. So he sent some men from his army command to go check out the report to see if it was true, only for them to get shot at when their car got near the town. It turned out some very young, excited officer captured a farmhouse and reported that he had captured the entire town on his own. Great job.

The one thing that helped the Germans in this situation was the terrible Russian commander, Artomov, who wasn't commanding at all. He left everything to his junior commanders, meaning nobody was coordinating the overall defense, while he simply walked around and made small talk with regular soldiers. Then, finally discovering he was about to be attacked, decided the best defense was a great offense and ordered his brigade to assault a nearby German unit, the only one where he knew their actual location. However, this just opened a larger gap between the Russian 1st Corps and Samsonov's entire formation center, which is where Schultz is able to assault and send

a Russian division running. The brigade he ordered into combat ran right into the attacking Germans, who not only had the Russians to contend with, but their own artillery once again, because the Germans kept shelling themselves throughout this entire battle. Finally, a lone bugler climbed a nearby hill and played a tune to tell the artillery to stop fucking blowing them up. And then Cossacks appeared and chased off the rest of the German brigade. But by 11am, USADA was in German hands and another German brigade. But by 11 a.m., Usada was in German hands and another German brigade was attacking towards a nearby town called Großtauersee.

However, the colonel who gave the orders gave them in the dumbest possible way. He simply ordered his men to, quote, advance towards the rising sun. However, it was foggy that morning and no one could pinpoint where exactly that was. So men just kind of meandered into the distance into a direction that had not been reconned in any way and ran directly into dug in Russians as they kept doing. The brigade fell apart in the

chaos as more and more men were thrown in to try to stabilize the situation. Artillery got stuck in the mud. Ammo wagons got lost. Officers couldn't find out where the hell their men had gone. And by the time it was all over, half of a German division was put out of commission. Despite this victory, the Germans retreated once again without orders from Samsonov or Samsonov knowing where the fuck they were. Not even the entire First Corps retreated together. It was piecemeal and whoever got the message kind of thing, by the time the sun went down, random bits and pieces of Russians were still in place, having never received any orders to retreat at all. And it stretched north to the town of Saldau. And there was no, all these little pockets of Russian defenders in this

area had no communications with another, no coronation of any kind. At this point, effectively no commander of their own defense of the area. The elements that did retreat didn't even retreat back towards the rest of the Second Army and simply just sprinted off into the distance on their own. when the Germans advanced later that night, they thought it was some kind of unnerving trap that they needed to be worried about, that there's some tens of thousands of enemy soldiers hiding, because why would they be retreating so fast other than to lure them in, when in reality, it was just a route. The next morning, when an attack was ordered once again, they ran to the tattered remnants of the Russian 2nd Division, who had barely escaped their lives the day before.

A Russian staff officer who immediately ordered his men to surrender said his soldiers hadn't eaten in three days and most people only had one or two bullets between them. They retreated as soon as they saw Germans. And this happened a lot. For some Russian units, the second they saw the German army, they threw down their weapons and surrendered without firing a shot. Then came the Russian attack towards Allenstein. General Kuliev had heard that several other Russian corps were marching towards the town of Allenstein to put pressure on the German left flank. However, while he had gotten orders to carry out the attack, he couldn't get in contact with any other units that were supposed to be heading that way. That's because in one case, the 6th Corps, which we already talked about, simply didn't exist anymore, and this is one of the units that he was told was supposed to support him.

And in others, there wasn't enough wire cable laid for the different command sites to talk to one another. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the Russians had wheeled a giant radio transmitter nearby, which was so powerful it jammed local communications. So, unable to get in contact with anyone, Klyuev just marched his men towards the sound of combat. Allenstein fell, but only because the Germans were not actually defending it. The Russian forces came to town, doing what they normally do, acting like a horde of locusts as they've been out of food and water for days. This all happened without the Germans' knowledge because a few hours later, a German train pulled into Allenstein Station, not on board with a single German lieutenant, part of the 8th Army General Staff,

who had been sent there to make arrangement and find housing for the German unit that was supposed to be arriving shortly. He pulled right up towards a group of Russian soldiers eating lunch by the train station and got in a kind of Mexican standoff stare-down situation before they realized, like, oh, oh, fuck, the Russians are here, and started shooting at each other as a train slowly pulled away. Elsewhere, the Russians had abandoned Bischofsburg with German scout planes reporting an entire corps of Russian soldiers were retreating south. The order was given to Meckensen to chase them down, leading with their cavalry and everybody

else catching up. Somewhat hilariously, kind of what we already talked about, the German cavalry broke down first because the horses were pretty much already dead on their feet. And soon infantry who had stolen bicycles from passing evacuating civilians were pedaling their way towards the Russian army. Because everybody knows at this point, the Russians kryptonite is Germans on bicycles. Fair enough. The Russians had been fleeing so quickly that the town of Passenheim was completely abandoned. But behind, they left their entire ammunition stockpile and a chest containing their pay chest for paying their soldiers.

So not only do you not get ammo now, you don't get your paycheck. Then word finally got back to the German command about the situation in Allenstein, so Meckensen was ordered to call off the chase, turn, and attack south towards the town in the hope that the Russians would be driven south directly into the positions held by the other German army units. However, Meckensen only found this out hours after the fact because he still didn't actually have a phone link with the 8th Army Command and his subordinate, Fritz von Bello, simply didn't tell him and pass the order now this one we actually have a reason for it because bellow uh or below uh later said like i only got a partial order that made no sense so i decided not to tell my boss until i got a full picture which does make sense eventually someone had to get in a car and drive over to his command center and tell him hey you're

supposed to be going on the offensive right now. While all of this was happening, Samsonov literally had no idea what was going on within his own ranks. Only hours after it happened, he was learning about the growing list of destroyed units or that thousands of his men were running in the wrong direction and tens of thousands of others had already surrendered. He gave out orders to some generals to try to stem the flow, plug the gaps in the line, but several of them simply refused to take part in this, saying that this plan is stupid, it's not going to work, his command influence is failing at this point. One man, Nikolai Martos, insisted that he had the Germans on the ropes. Martos still believed that the Germans were retreating. And moving his men from this

position was stupid. Therefore, if you want to move my men, you need to fire me and replace me if you want to move my forces. As Martos is one of several Russian generals who came at Samsonov that way. If you want to take control of my men away from me by giving me orders, which is your job, you have to fire me. So he simply couldn't control his own men. Instead of sending more forces towards Allenstein to defend it, Martos would launch his own offensive because sure, why not? This would include three corps of Russian soldiers and be an attempt to center the Russian main body against the Germans in the South on August 28th, 1914. This decision, made largely because Samsonov had lost control of his command, would set the stage for the total and complete disaster of the Russian imperial forces over the next two days. And that is where we'll pick up on part three,

the conclusion of the Battle of Tannenberg. Yeah, so far, this is just more of a surprise of just the degree to which all command is breaking down and the just incredible, terrible conditions that people are putting up with. So, yeah, in a way, I was just sort of listening in silence and I was like, wow, this sucks. Wow, that sucks. That really fucking sucks. It's just like, no, just disaster. Just like complete mishmash

and it's like, if you were historically going to be there, you would be one of the dudes whose job it was to get eaten up by a machine gun. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And like, again, from the second they crossed the border, these armies were falling apart. And from the description that I'm giving,

the German army was also falling apart under the stress of early combat with fresh soldiers. And we're kind of seeing like the small differences between the two of them that made it so one goes down in history as like, or these two generals, Lundorf and Hindenburg, go down as geniuses simply because their military did not fall apart as fast as the Russians did. As fast. In part three, we're going to see that the Germans are also completely disintegrating

under the stress of campaigning in the open in August of 1914. But we'll see more on that on part three. Nate, you can use this area to plug your shows for the few people who don't already know what they are. Yeah. So I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is a show I host with Francis Horton about why you shouldn't join the military and many other things. I'm also the producer of this show. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about business success and the horror of the tech industry being very, very stupid. And I produce Kill James Bond, a movie podcast by the three funniest trans people on the planet, Abigail Thorne, Alice Caldwell Kelly, and Devin. You should check out all those shows if you haven't already.

Check out all those shows. And if you like what we do here on Lines Loaded by Donkeys, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get episodes like this early. You get bonus episodes. donkeys consider supporting us on patreon you get episodes like this early you get bonus episodes you get discord access and a very cool community um you get all sorts of stuff depending on how much you want to support and if you don't want to support us it's fine it's your money do with it what you will leave us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts it helps us a lot and hopefully we continue making content worth your time and hopefully your money uh nate again thank you for joining me on this much longer than anticipated episode as we tend to do when we're together.

And I look forward into concluding this series in part three, where hundreds of thousands of people are about to die. Whoops. Yep. It wouldn't be a lines episode if that wasn't going to be on the horizon. But once again, Joe, very, very wonderful experience talking, listening, learning, and discovering that this is definitely one of those eras of life where you don't want to be in the YouTube comments being like, I was born in the wrong year because it fucking sucks. And it is now canon on this podcast, the Battle of Tannenberg includes T-Rex erotica. And we'll talk to everybody next week.

Later.