Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 252 - The Battle of Tannenberg Part 3: The Not So Battle of Tannenberg

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

The conclusion to the Battle of Tannenberg series 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 Kurdish 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. Welcome back to Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me still trapped in the Tannenberg content cave is Nate. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing all right. So I've talked about this on Hell of a Way, which is a podcast you should listen to. But my wife and I had to leave our house for basically almost 10 days

because our landlady was doing construction work and they determined that there was like, at some point, some builders had taken out part of a load-bearing wall for aesthetic reasons and hadn't reinforced it successfully so uh it was causing a wall to settle it would eventually collapse so while they were ripping shit out of the walls and stuff they're like yeah it's you literally can't use anything in the house so uh we moved out for a while and we're in a hotel and today we checked out of the hotel we

are going home tonight so i'm in a a much better mood than last time we recorded. Like it will come through in the recording. I am 100% sure of it. I'm feeling much better because I get to sleep in my bed tonight and not in a fucking hotel. And like the hotel was fine, but I just, I like being in my own space. That's just how I am. Once you get to a certain point, it's like I've slept on floors. I've slept in train stations. I've done all that shit. shit i just want to be home i want to have my things that i

bought because i have a house that i live in yeah absolutely like like staying in a hotel on a vacation is is fine but you know it's there's it's always so much different and like you never feel comfortable everything the bed is always kind of not great. The sheets aren't great. The blankets aren't great. It's not yours. Honestly, I always sleep terribly in hotels. It's not my space.

I don't feel like I can work in them. I don't know how people do that. Working in them is almost impossible. Yeah, my impression is basically it's fine if you're on vacation. And if we had known, we probably would have just traveled somewhere. But when you're staying in a hotel in the city you live in, and so you can't do all the normal life things you do because you're not at home, it's annoying. And also, I just discovered this about myself.

I really like being able to cook. I like being able to listen to music on my own thing. And I like being able to play music. And those are all things I can't do when I'm in a hotel. And those are things I do that like make me just put me in a better mood. So I was recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, which anyone who's listened to my shows probably is not surprised by. And apparently, yeah, playing fucking music,

cooking, doing all the chopping, repetitive motion shit. Apparently that being is like a thing that makes you like, puts you in a better mental state. It's a pretty typical behavior. So I'm at age almost 39. I'm learning all this shit about myself that I've been doing since I was a kid. I had no idea, which is kind of embarrassing. Kind of embarrassing to be like, wow, 39 years I've been annoying as fuck.

But, you know. There's a 0% chance there's not people who are like in their 40s and 50s and you know people you know call them eccentric or something and really it's like no you probably just have an undiagnosed medical issue that could be fixed possibly with medication or therapy

you know the process to getting medication takes a while here so we'll see what happens once I get on the good shit but yeah that's for all I've seen people who like the process to getting medication takes a while here so we'll see what happens once i once i get on the good shit but yeah that's uh for all i've seen people who like like my presence on this show and i appreciate your positive feedback but people are like oh those great nate tangents wow insane tangents like yes my brain doesn't fucking function normally like it just it just doesn't like i get one little idea and it goes on a fucking complete out of nowhere place and it's

just like sigh yep i mean it's just like, sigh. Yep. I mean, it's good. Good for being a podcaster. Good for being an entertainer. Bad for being a person living in society. So we'll see what happens.

Maybe those tangents will end. That, uh, that couldn't possibly be me, me and my, in my day to day life. Uh, yeah,

it couldn't possibly have been me in school. Just like fucking around. Yeah. I think, uh, someone asked for a mate tangent supercut uh but uh feel free to do that but i would be really really embarrassed like i just i i i know it's it's entertaining but like you could understand what it's like hey hey we find it really really funny when you just cannot stay on topic and go all over the fucking place and talk like a million miles an hour it's like oh god damn it i i mean people you are what i would be if i was not reading from a script a trillion percent yes yeah i mean people have heard me on episodes like you know when we did the whole rome cast or doing sharps now i don't

have a script for that and you see what comes out of me like i mean fuck during our last episode of tannenberg at one point uh we were reading t-rex erotica like this is not we were talking about taken by the t-rex and other stuff yeah uh someone in our discord before we get started here on tannenberg part three asked if there was a patreon goal where uh you and i do a dramatic reading of that book which i agreed to uh at 4 500 patrons only because that book is shorter than most of my scripts um so which book is this i'm sorry oh oh oh fucking so we need to read taken by the t-rex but in a like German accent? In a dramatic reading, yeah.

Oh, dramatic. I thought you said Germanic, and I'm like, well, I don't know what the fuck that entails, but okay. Ja, hallo. Ich war bei den T-Rex genommen. The T-Rex hat mich gespritzt. See, this is why Germany is our number one listening country where English is not the majority language. It's because we've brought you aboard. Yeah, and could I please say to all our German listeners, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I want to be normal. What I just said was to all of our German listeners, I'm sorry. I would really like to be normal. What I just said was to all of our German listeners, I'm sorry. I would really like to be normal. So that could be the internal podcast within a podcast is you're actually just trashing the podcast in German and I would have no fucking idea. Yeah.

I mean, I did find it very funny when I went on the French tangent and was talking about mistresses and you made the mistress joke and we didn't connect that we were talking about the exact same topic, but that's just the beauty of podcasting and so before we get into this the wrap-up on this uh early world war one slaughterhouse you know it's nice to have a little bit of light commentary a little bit of fun some some some jests and japes you know but uh i know the subject matter we're here for is is uh not fun even if it does involve uh for example a german to tab a bicycle detachment whipping ass or a german platoon basically crushing russians while just singing the entire time yeah uh i was actually wondering what song they were singing i that that stuck in my brain for a while when we

did the last recording it was some prussian national song and i did not write it down uh but i wasn't it wasn't it wasn't edica was it no because that's the whatever yeah i don't even know if that dates it was it was not written yet i believe that song was not written until the 20s gotcha yeah that would be fucking hilarious yeah yeah such a weird fucking the the rhythm of that song is so strange. Once again, the Germanic brain pan. Now, when we left you last time, Russian General Samsonov facing an ever-extending German line on his left, his army scattered and lost,

many without any kind of communications between them, attempted to turn and face the German center, and thus sealed the fate of the Russian Second Army, but he didn't know that quite yet. That's still yet to come. Somehow, during everything that happened in our last episode, Samsonov had not been in communication with either his superior commander, Zelensky, nor the commander of the Russian First

Army, Renenkov. I mean, a good excuse for that could be they fucking hate one another, but communication is also very very bad for example samsonov didn't even know that entire core of his the sixth had been completely collapsed and ran for their lives in fact everyone still thought they were out there fighting somewhere but they weren't sure where and you know my dude what, 50,000 men he just lost track of? So things are not going great for General Samsonov. I don't know what exactly, what kind of communication and command breakdown there has to be to lose track of 50,000 men. But it's bad. It's real bad.

Yeah, I feel like in that era, though though it's just sort of like it's it's everything is just like okay we sent a telegraph order i hope someone got it maybe they confirmed it or not and it's like when you're talking about the things at the sort of general staff level there are so many echelons above it that like you know you could genuinely be like oh we got a telegram we've got an entire i don't know core of you know fucking a group of armies whatever just like oh yeah they popped up again and it's just i don't know it's like in a way all command and control in that era was basically like playing battleship so you just got what you got i guess yeah and like they didn't have really didn't have radios all the time

because remember these are hardwire radios uh they didn't have tele radios all the time. Because remember, these are hardwire radios. They didn't have telegraph lines all the time. They didn't have field telephones all the time. So a lot of this just comes down to a literal game of telephone. And messengers get lost. They get shot. They take a chance to fuck off and run. There's a lot of reasons why there's a communication breakdown.

For the Russians, it really does seem like it's a complete lack of preparation especially for a country that had been hypothetically planning this war for about five years like not knowing like your your uh your telephone line repairman not knowing how to fix the telephone line or not having enough telephone line to fix said telephone line if they knew how to do it. Not looking good. So Samsonov soldiers that had taken the town of Allenstein had no idea that the Germans were on their way to retake it because, again, nobody could tell them. When a Russian scout plane was shot down to the south, nobody was worried about it, figuring that figuring that ah these new planes crash all the time uh there's no enemy south of us it wasn't shot down which to be fair these planes were just

invented like you know 24 hours ago they do crash all the time but you know in short the russian second army was completely blind pretty, and about to be surrounded. Not a great place to be. No, not really. No, sounds like shit. And even worse, the blind men were about to go on the attack. Samsonov left to take control of the attack towards the German Army Center, personally, on the 28th of August. However, this is an especially dumb thing to do. Nobody within the Second Army had really shown themselves to be a great commander, Samsonov included.

Despite his countless flaws so far that we've outlined in this series, he had done his best to kind of keep them kind of sort of functioning as a disjointed whole and that was obviously now coming apart at the seams but he had kept his army together ish so far and now he was removing himself without removing himself from overall command by taking personal command of the center attack because you can't do both you can't command personally and also have overall command of an entire army you know your your picture becomes very very small and even if he wanted to do both at the same time he had no communication networks um there's a lot there's a few reasons why people think that he did this uh because as we will find out soon samson off is not around to tell us his side of the story.

Pretty much everybody believes that this is the last gasp of a man who finally understood that he had lost control of a chaotic situation and maybe believed some good old fashioned personal courage can inspire them and around him to fight at a greater level than they had been fighting so far. That's one way of thinking of it. There's also another way of thinking of it, which is Zelensky had all of the dispatches that had been sent out by Zelensky at this point had been fucking savage towards Samsonov, insulting him, making fun of his lack of ability of command, saying he's a disappointment, all this shit. And he was starting to think that I have to save face here by doing some personal hero stuff,

right? Nobody's entirely sure which. Nobody believes that Samsonov truly thought that this was the right tactical decision to make. But I don't think that there actually was a right decision to make at this point, other than just surrender immediately and maybe save your men's lives. But we don't know. Now, it was only 930 a.m., an hour after he had left to take command of the Russian center. And that is when Samsonov kind of sort of learned how truly boned that he was. The Russians had a British military attache with them, because remember, they're allies. And there's a guy named Major General Knox. And he's one of the main sources that we

have for what exactly was happening with Samsonov during this time. According to Knox, Samsonov learned that rather than coming to help him, the 2nd sixth corps that he thought were still out there, remember, had melted, made combat ineffective in one way or another, broken and ran, taken too many casualties. So that is two corps that he thought that were coming to save him, gone. He just learned this. Samsonov, when confronted by this situation, we'll call it, he described it as serious. A small problem, but serious. An understatement of the war, if there ever was one.

I was going to say, there does seem to be this tendency amongst Russians, that sort of general cultural milieu of just being like, nothing is good and nothing is bad. Understatement of the good thing, understatement of the good thing understatement of the bad thing and it's just like well all right i guess it's uh displeasing concerning uh less less than less than optimal as you're just like getting just converging artillery barrages just like basically functioning like like a precision bulldozer from the sky just ripping up your transatlantic lines. You're just like, suboptimal.

The German artillery is slowly churning your men into slightly room-temperature borscht. And like, hmm, serious. And remember, during our last episode, he believed that men who were falling out could not be Russian but had to be Jewish. So he doesn't exactly have a great grasp on his own army, right?

He's not a serious mental power here. Yeah, I was going to say, one imagines from the history of the Pale of Settlement that if it was one thing that Russian Jews were sort of genetically predisposed towards, it was legging it the fuck out because like, let's be honest, it just happened a lot.

Yeah. If, if only, uh, you know, the czar wasn't such a bloodthirsty psychopath, uh, or czars for that matter.

Um, now according to Knox, Samsonov didn't seem that stressed out, uh, chalking up all of these German victories so far as to being just luck. Though, that's probably not what was actually happening inside Samsonov's head. Because after that, he told Knox, like, it's time for you to leave my command. Like, you should leave. Knox, it's time for you to leave my command.

You should leave. Because it's bad PR if your military attache gets annihilated alongside you. He, without saying as much, told Knox, get the fuck out of here and save your life. Yeah. I presume Knox must leave because he survived. Yeah, he gets the hell out of there pretty quick. So this wasn't a case of the British attaché being like, hmm, staying alive wouldn't be sporting now, would it? No, I do think that the stiff upper lip

of the British officer class was broken by the fact that he looked at us like, wow, we are fucked. I'm getting out of here. It's a bit of a pickle,'t it i suppose i might i might retire to the rear retire to the rear i've got lots of experience with that uh that sounds really bad i wasn't even meaning it to sound like that i was just concentrating on doing the one the one british the one english accent i can even passively do, which is based on this terrible British TV comedian

that I dislike, but for some reason I can do his voice. So that's Knox's voice from now on. He's just going to speak like this and say, oh, I suppose the woke left on the German lines don't want me here. They have no understanding of joy and laughter. However, they do seem to have quite accurate artillery fire. The Russians would have

won if it wasn't for all of these genders cut that part out so we've been beset by gender i don't even know how to understand it now uh while the russians were preparing for an attack the germans continued to move through the night and uh and at this point a huge dense blanket of fog working their way through the russians towards a town of woplets where others dug in expecting a coming attack the next morning though marching through the fog was a bit of a motherfucker it was incredibly thick like people really couldn't see their hand in front of their face everyone got lost commanders became so paranoid about like this obscurity around them that they ordered their soldiers to unload their rifles for fear that someone would panic and start shooting the first thing they saw

which is a level of of like not having faith in your soldiers that i am unfamiliar with like i don't even trust these motherfuckers have a loaded gun anymore um yeah it seems concerning you know what I mean we're sort of like I'm at the point where I just I don't I don't trust these guys to not just go insane just dump dump the 1914 equivalent of dumping an entire magazine

into the dark kind of thing takes a little bit longer um I imagine like it would be it's very sad but also funny to envision people dumping the same amount of rounds as like a lost platoon in vietnam which is very methodically reloading the fucking carbines over and over again while just firing into the dark their forearms are like the size of their legs from working the bolt so much christ eventually the force under the command of a guy named general son tag got to the outskirts of Waplitz and all hell broke loose.

Because this is exactly what we were just talking about. Remember, they were supposed to be attacking the town. But previously, he was so panicked about his soldiers having loaded weapons in the same fog that he had them unload them. But now he had no choice. And the fog was so thick that nobody could see what was happening. But the Russians that were defending the town could see them slightly more. So they started getting shot at. And the German tendency, especially this early in the war, and this is mostly Prussian by invention,

which obviously becomes the dominant military ideology of the German Empire, is that officers lead from the front, um, which meant that within seconds, uh, these various loss units being carried forward towards the sound of gunfire by their officers,

all of their officers get wiped out, uh, which is something personally I call an improvement, but from a tactical standpoint, it's not good um and you know this ends up uh you know smaller unit leaders like they have some one of the more professionalized nco cores at the time and their nco start taking charge but they're they're they immediately find themselves like wow we have no more lieutenants left what the fuck happened uh and other parts had their own issues which is you know this fog is incredibly thick nobody can

quite pinpoint where the town is specifically they can see like muzzle flashes and stuff from russian guns so some of the other officers n, whatever, take their units and charge off toward the town and just vanish. They're killed. Nobody can see them or they just get lost. They just run off into the distance and disappear. And all of those other problems that we have are kind of compounding here. There's no communication. And obviously, I keep talking about the fog.

But the fog has also made their backup communication impossible that backup communication being like messengers and runners because the runners are running off into the fog and getting lost uh so and you know they also have hand and arm signals and like you know uh so they can kind of sign to one another what they're supposed to do especially because combat is loud you can't always orders, but they can't do that either because they can't see anybody. So eventually individual German units would just set up their own missions. Effectively, uh,

squads, platoons, companies just run forward and begin trying to figure out how to attack the town on their own. And there's no overall command from anybody at this point everything is complete chaos sounds bad I mean like for not wanting to just jump in with like a hey

kind of joke about it I don't know it just sounds extremely unpleasant in the sense that like every single unit is you know comprised of platoons companies etc and like this is such a massive confrontation in terms of the size of the two the forces arrayed against one another and it's just like without any

overall sort of coherence to it it's just sort of you know all right your turn to get completely slaughtered all right now it's your turn and it's just like sucks once again it's like i definitely was not born in the wrong century it would just fucking suck to have been a soldier in world war one ever in any place unless your job was like i don't know running the r&r station in malta or something like that no yeah like uh what was a fourier or the guy who puts uh horses on shoes or whatever they're called yeah i mean that was you get kicked in the face by a horse though i I'm sure that happened on like a regular basis. I would rather get kicked in the face by a horse and run against like a max.

Well, all right. If I was alive in world war one, it would be much different where my family is from. But like, if I was, yes, yes,

it would, it would have been, but if I was like, you know, American or French or whatever, I would much rather get kicked in the face by a horse than have to be like, how am I going to survive running across no man's land?

Yeah, I might get my shit rocked and have a concussion from getting kicked by a horse. But I like my chances with a TBI than having a German machine gun punch a speed hole through my chest. As a tangent that I will open and immediately close, I knew a guy when I was in the army whose dad was drafted and went to Vietnam,

but not long after being in Vietnam, he wound up getting reassigned, and I'm not joking, to run the R&R station at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. King shit. Exactly. I'm so happy for him. His time in service was fucking

just being at bondi beach yet which i was there in november it rules i i can only imagine that's like the sickest place the u.s army can send you this wasn't necessarily an r&r thing but uh like my my stepdad fought in the vietnam war and like his brother was in the navy um because like obviously if you enlist and not get drafted, you can like pick what branch you're in and then, you know, serve out, you know, still a shitty duty, uh, like in doing whatever, but not in Vietnam, which is what you want to do. Right. Uh, but you know, years and years later when, you know, the, we had the, like the POW MIA movement and suddenly being a veteran was like something to be championed he would tell people like yeah i was in the military during vietnam and my step they'd be like you're on a fucking submarine the gulf of mexico like yeah you're wearing that hat this is vietnam era veterans there's a very very important distinction here yes uh thank you for your service sir i'm jealous of you uh they're Global war on terror,

Federer. You're an avionics mechanic on an aircraft carrier, my man. I think before we go back to the script, I would just say, I think the sickest one you can have where it technically counts as a combat deployment is if you were some kind of sustainer at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, because for the Air Force, that does count as a combat deployment and you get all of the tax exemptions and all the stuff for hostile fire pay, imminent danger pay, but you're in Kyrgyzstan.

So you could also like go horseback riding in the Tian Shan Mountains. You can do like cultural tours of Bishkek. You could like go to Russian class for free. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I went through there and you can drink beer there. It's awesome.

Well, the Air Force could, we couldn't, but yeah, Roger, same. I went through there as well in 2009 and 2010. Ah, Nate, that's why you get you a commander that authorizes you to drink like I had. Look, dude, I was in an airborne unit. That would never, ever happen. Just not fucking happening. Airborne units are always commanded by people who think that your job is to live in pain. That's just the way that it works. That's true uh i was really happy that my commander went to the same university as i did but was like a drunken frat boy so like yeah it was pretty fun um i mean as much fun as you can have at minas air base in kentucky yeah i mean i i was like i was fascinated but that's just me i'm a huge nerd i was, wait, we have a base in the former Soviet Union.

And I was like, whoa, is that a Hrushevka? Like, I was genuinely that much of a geek about it. And the base is right across the street from a Russian air base. Well, it was the Manassas close down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think they, didn't they like jack the rent up like 500 times of what it was originally going to be? Yeah, well, basically because- I don't blame them. I don't blame them. But also it's funny. the rent up like 500 times of what it was originally going to be. Yeah.

Well, basically because- I don't blame them. I don't blame them. But also it's funny. As I understand it, the Russians put the screws to the Kyrgyz government after there was unrest in the country because of high fuel prices. And so the Kyrgyz government wound up asking for a lot more money and the US closed it down.

At that point, I think they were kind of ramping down in Afghanistan anyway. A funny side note on this is there actually used to be a base in Uzbekistan at a place called Karshi Hanabad. That was the chemical dump, right? Yeah, it was the decon site for the Soviet military and then for the Uzbek military. And that's where they put the tent city at. And basically everyone who was stationed there has cancer now.

So yeah, another one of our reasons to not join the military is that we're like, hey, we have this plan that says this is where you get cancer at. We'll definitely build a tent city there. Not PTSD, not a TBI, but a secret third thing. Exactly. And a fourth thing maybe too. You never know. Before we move on, I do have to say there's something darkly hilarious, not about the

cancer thing. That's awful. But about the United States military getting like landlorded out of their like military base. about the United States military getting like landlorded out of their like military base well the reason they closed down K2 is because apparently even even during the first Bush administration some of the shit that Uzbekistan

was doing was too much and so the US in some official capacity spoke out against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan in the way the US government does which is like oh this is bad we're not really expecting you to do anything about it and the government of Uzbekistan was like well then fuck you you can't you can't house your troops in the way the US government does, which is be like, oh, this is bad. We're not really expecting you to do anything about it. And the government of Uzbekistan was like, well, then fuck you. You can't house your troops in the cancer site.

And so that's why they moved to Kyrgyzstan instead. But yes, that is very true. We had bases in Kyrgyzstan, in Uzbekistan, and we may have had some elsewhere. I'm not sure. That would have been like secret squirrel things. Things that don't technically exist

that we never would have been privy to but you could definitely find them on the Strava heat map because Jews are fucking tracking their runs going around like some secret base in Turkmenistan or some shit I don't I don't know if that's true that happens that happened to a few US military bases but specifically there's like an Israeli I think it's like an Israeli

nuclear site that a nuclear site sorry people always get mad at me how I say that word that There was like an Israeli, I think it was like an Israeli nuclear site, that nuclear site. Sorry, people always get mad at me how I say that word. That they use the Strava app to like, huh, there's this weird circle that three people are running literally in the middle of nowhere. I wonder what could, like, you click on their profile and they're like the Syriac Moktal Berets and shit. Yeah, it's the same thing that happened with the strava heat map with um with uh bases in nige i believe in mauritania in syria um and guys were wearing them both to like go for runs around the perimeter of their little compounds as well as wearing them like on patrols to get like their steps in and so like their patrol routes in fucking syria and iraq were like

popping up on this map it's genuinely unreal that is fucking incredible like and what's what's even funnier is like the units that are doing that in syria are like green berets ranger like they're they're the guys that everyone assumes knows better but in reality they're just dumb joes still no no i was gonna say like if you've ever worked with those units you'd understand why this would happen but what's very funny to me is as a strava user is that you'd get your steps regardless even if you weren't tracking the as a workout but dudes were like no this has to count for my fucking activity minutes for this week i've got a goal to hit so that's the only reason it was happening there's some like sergeant whatever it's like nah man I got a patrol I have an idea and it's like look I drew a penis on the Strava app

yeah 100% I can imagine it would happen I mean in the same way I mean yeah you know what I just all of that is very very funny and I'm glad I'm not in the military anymore and I'm not in a chain of command that we get in trouble for that because now I can just laugh at it instead of it being a problem

I have to pretend that it's anything besides funny when you know it's compromising opsec and everyone's getting mad at me and my soldiers but now that i know like that is actually very funny like more people should do that yes uh more people should go on dick-shaped patrols not in the air force shape patrols to to dox the fact that the u.s has troops in places it says it doesn't have troops. I hope like all those stupid maps that people keep posting on Twitter of NATO bases that don't exist. Like, look at all these NATO bases. Of course, Russia had to invade Ukraine.

But there's like one in Beijing, one in Mongolia and shit like that. Like if those bases are real, start drawing penises in your Strava app. They'll show them. Yeah. Please, please, please demonstrate. This is the case. Now, uh,

the Germans, uh, charged across this town bridge, right? Uh, they, uh, they had like small groups of them had actually managed to find their way to the town independently.

And there is one bridge that goes into this town. You, you would know this as being a, a bad place to attack, right? Uh, but they ran across the town's bridge and found themselves knee deep in You would know this as being a bad place to attack, right? But they ran across the town's bridge and found themselves knee-deep in swamp as Russian artillery began to get sighted in on them. But enough men made it across that they were able to start clearing the town.

And because the Russians were defending the town, they had to go house to house. However, the fog is still there. The Stephen King's the mist situation um however you can't see still so you know close quarters combat everybody kind of sort of looks the same wearing you know with fog everywhere everybody's using the same generally shaped rifles stuff like that so on more than one occasion nobody could tell who controlled what house while clearing the town so there is several incidents of russians or germans kicking in the door of a house controlled by their own men and gunning them down uh you know fun stuff friendly fire uh you know the the fog also made it impossible for the Germans to resupply their forward units after they had fought their way into the town.

Because remember, one bridge. Try to get a wagon across that bridge. See what happens. So that meant the soldiers within the town were down to their bayonet. However, the Russians did not have this problem because they're defending. They have supplies in the town for themselves. And whenever the Germans attempted to get freshmen or ammo into the town, that obvious thing I just talked about happened where they just get machine gunned or hit with artillery. Eventually, the Germans that did make it into the town, which is only about 300 men, simply surrendered and the rest the germans withdrew from the area general sontag was so embarrassed by this he didn't even bother to report his defeat to hindenburg there's

a lot of like general officers who seem like they're like ashamed children when like they get caught by their parents doing something wrong and just don't make eye contact or don't talk to them. Like, if I don't tell my chief of staff or my army commander about this, surely that will make me look better. I will get away with this. But Sontag doesn't tell him. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just one of these things is just kind of a difference in approach

because there's an extent to which in, for example, U.S. military culture where, like, if you fuck something up, like, your only rec your only recourse of making it not be a thing that ends your life basically is immediately being like, hey, we fucked this up. Like, look how much of a show I'm making about the fact that we acknowledge we fucked this up. Unless it's like, you know, something that can notionally be hidden. Yeah. Like, if it's a war crime, if it's a fucking environmental disaster, the first response is to say nothing. Uh,

but if it's a thing where like the command where you can exonerate yourself by saying you fuck something up, like by going to leadership and immediately be like, we have not, we have identified this problem. Like five, I'm five finger pointing in the studio. And like,

that's the way that it goes. And certainly in training, like the way that you sort of play act is actually taking it seriously is like doing after action reviews and be like here's the things we all fucked up and so that's just like so baked into american military culture i'm not saying there's a culture of transparency because there's not and like you can find 30 examples by like in like a five minute fucking wikipedia search of where they obviously i'm like fucking podcast where where where where where stuff was hidden but like that notion of just not saying it, of saying nothing at all and just hoping it goes away, when it comes to this sort of a thing, actual engagements

with the enemy, it's just a completely different culture, a completely different thought process. And there are militaries even to this day that are still like this. Oh, absolutely. You might have worked with some. I definitely found that to be the case. I may or may not be living in a country whose military does this yeah yeah certainly working with the south korean army for example this was a hundred percent a thing of like let's just pretend we didn't see the thing we obviously saw when all of our forces fucking shot at each other when we had two support by fire's position two support by

fire positions opposite one another just shooting at each other the whole time i really hope this is training and not live fire no it was training believe me god i but they 100 would have done a live fire that way but i mean that's a story for a different day but you know that's my interjection here it's just like that to me is such a challenging thing to conceive of and i think some of it a lot like um you know it it's the the the era that you know glory and and personal honor is still very much a huge thing um when it comes to like shame etc etc so like there's a very good possibility that he's like this is too shameful for me to admit uh like it hurts my personal prussian honor or whatever all that dumb shit i think that also is part of it, which most people,

I will say most modern militaries have managed to get rid of, but it was very much a thing in every single side in World War I. However, since he didn't tell anybody what was going on, his support force, which was supposed to set

out once he had secured the town, began to get impatient. Eventually, at around 7am, the force under the command of Von Morgan simply attacked the Russian right flank of Waplitz, which is inside the Jabunkin Woods. A word that I

really hope I said correctly, because it's funny. Fair enough. I don't know why I just kept thinking of the word jabroni when i was writing this uh or or jablumpkin is that a thing i don't i don't know probably probably yeah now uh they attacked on their own without orders so like part of this isn't always isn't all uh the the other commander's fault because they should have waited until they had confirmation, but also they assumed that maybe they just

didn't send it and they attacked on their own. Both commanders are fucking stupid in this situation, but Morgan knew he was ignoring orders, so he didn't report his movement to his superior commander until he was engaged in combat, fully knowing

at that point it was too late for his boss to order him to call it off without there being unwarranted casualties of a withdrawal. And because Morgan ran in unsupported, he immediately ran into trouble and called for help, but managed to continue to advance through the woods anyway. As the fight in the woods hit the heat of the day, again, remember, this is August. It is not cool. It is very, very hot and humid. More reservists piled into the battle.

And as fast as they began to drop like flies from gunshots from the defending Russians, they were dropping like flies from heat stroke. Somehow, this extra wave of already pre-dying men was enough to finally drive the Russians out of their positions for the day. The Russian military is just as bad off. They're actually worse because remember from day one, they had no water. They're hurting real, real bad, but it's always very interesting to see two armies which are falling over themselves, dying just to get to the point of contact and see who comes out on top. Ludendorff began to worry about the development of the battle near where Sontag was supposed to be and was supposed to be attacking through and ordered von Francois to take his men and go and support them.

Francois thought this was dumb as hell. to support them. Francois thought this was dumb as hell. And instead, he thought he should be attacking Neidenberg, which if secured, would cut off the Russian route of retreat and pin them in place. And if nobody's picked up on this, Francois hates Ludendorff and Ludendorff hates him, but more like Francois hates everybody that's in charge of him. He disregards them entirely and has this entire series. And in this situation, Francois just thought that Ludendorff had no idea what he was doing, so he just ignored him. He took his corps and began marching towards the town of Nidenberg on his own. army commander, sighed and agreed that Francois was right because Russian forces had begun retreating towards the Southeast, putting him right in the correct position to cut them off.

Meanwhile, other elements of Francois were to take the town of Nidenberg while his bicycle detachment were to pedal forth behind enemy lines and take Villenberg. Now, when this order got passed to Francois, he deemed it acceptable and actually followed it i fucking love this guy i mean fuck it whatever i'm also you can see my eyes light up when you

mentioned the bicycle detachment yet again oh it's so great uh like the bianchi boys are just out here fucking destroying things yeah like uh x games east pr edition, lighten it up. It's a shame that the twilight of the bicycle brigade was World War II, but also kind of the Indochina War. But specifically World War II because the fall of Singapore was on the back of Japanese bike-borne troops. It just whips so hard. I mean, it sucks about the Japanese occupying Singapore. That's bad. Yeah, that part is very bad. But the bicycles, the bicycles did nothing wrong.

Look, the only thing that can stop a bad man with a bicycle is a good man with a bicycle. This message brought to you by the National Bicycle Owner Rights Association of America. The only thing that can stop a bad man with a bicycle is a good man with a bicycle and or a car door. And I'm speaking from personal experience as a person who's been doored before.

No fun. A pockmarked sidewalk. At least slow them down. In a moment of hilarity, that almost ended with the death of Francois' entire staff because his scout pilots told him, hey, by the way, the Russians had evacuated Nidenberg. You can just walk right in. So Francois and his staff got in their cars, drove over there to check it out and found out that, in fact, the town was very much not evacuated.

and found out that, in fact, the town was very much not evacuated. Oh, I can think of some fucking primitive 50 Cal, precursor to the 50 Cal. This has happened three times now somehow during the series, and we're like, hey, town's empty, and then someone walks up and gets shot at. Now, you would think this is where the staff officers get in their car and run away. You'd be wrong, because Francois fucking rules.

The Russians began shooting at them, and this was quickly followed by a Cossack cavalry charge. Soon, all of these staff officers were ordered by Francois to run back to the cars and get rifles and form a skirmish line. All right. Okay. Something that I'm willing to bet most of them had forgotten how to do. And they probably all would have been wiped out anyway, but right as the Cossacks

were bearing down on them, a German cavalry unit came out of the woods and saved their ass. But even then, Francois told the cavalry, hey, keep riding towards Villenberg, where the Russian supply depot was. my and my staff will hold this position until the infantry arrive and then they assaulted the town together i mean what

can you say but badass i'm sorry you know it's nice that this is the good von francois because there's that there's two kind of important von francois in german history maybe there's more than two but in this era there's two one is this guy and the other guy was the military commander of the german genocide in namibia of from my understanding they are actually not related um but i'm just i'm just imagining like guy whose job is 1914 edition of PowerPoint having to fucking hold down a skirmish line. Just just unloading. Okay, I stand corrected. Herman von Francois, this van von Francois talking about is Kurt von Francois, the the Namibian genocide guy's younger brother. There it is.

Yeah. There it is. If it makes anybody feel better, Herman von Francois never served in Africa, but he did grow up there because their family had moved there for a little bit. But yeah,

from what I can tell, Herman never fought in any colonial war, though his other brother, Hugo, did die there. And his older brother, Kurt, was an absolute fucking psychopath. But Herman von Francois, seemingly normal guy. And, yeah, at least we have that going for us the only worrying part is he died in 1933 and i was unable to find anything that he did um during a very key part of german history there i'm going to hope for the best i'm gonna be honest with you uh i'm gonna be i'm to hope for the best. I'm going to be honest with you. I'm going to hope for the best. Roger is the first.

Now, the Russians inside this town were barely able to put up a fight as infantry marched towards the town to support von Francois. Now, these infantry marched 25 kilometers straight in order to support him. They secured the town and then kept marching towards Villenberg. The soldiers who remained in Nidenberg discovered a basement full of beer and promptly had a kegger, which is something we can all support.

Meanwhile, Schultz continued his mission to punch gaps in between Russian units and found that the units were so far apart, disorganized and scattered that he and Martos' men could simply walk between the units, just advance forward with very little fighting. The Russian units were so far apart, they were not tied into one another. They would circle around and then surround small pockets of

Russians one by one. Thousands of Russians surrendered once they realized what was happening. The Germans finding that most of them had no food, no ammo. Some of them didn't even have shirts on their backs. Most of them weren't wearing boots. A lot of them didn't even have rifles anymore. Morgan saw this and got emboldened. Ordered his cavalry to charge towards the retreating Russians. However, it's getting dark.

The horsemen got lost and then they fell into ambushes. When the sun came back up, it became obvious that the German leadership were brutalizing their men by ordering them to constantly advance. Maybe just a little too much, even for German standards. Trying to catch the Russians, they had run themselves out of water because they had outrun their own supply lines. Soon, men were dropping to their knees and drinking the nasty pond water scum that accumulated on the ditches on the side of the road. Obviously, this led to a rash of disease

sweeping through the ranks. When one officer rode by his men, he tried to give them a cheer of motivation. I think it was like, to Allen Stein or something like that, which is a key town that they were going to take soon and he was he was answered by

a cheer of we're starving he chose to ignore that somehow I'm not surprised I feel like I feel like once again it's just sort of like that I didn't hear that all right the men are very motivated did you hear them cheer yep exactly their voices sounded strong and not parched at all.

Look, they're so happy. They're doing keg stands at the pond scum. Fuck. Now, when they did find groups of Russians, they were sent charging into the forest after them. These are forests so thick, it was hard to keep contact with one another. Kind of like the last episode, everybody was singing.

Now, this actually happened again without any kind of like the last episode, everybody was singing. Now, this actually happened again. Without any kind of communication systems, one German reserve unit decided to find an interesting way to stay in at least verbal contact with one another. They sang the regimental song. And if you could hear the song, you were close enough. And that's how they stayed online with one another, is just constantly chanting the regimental song, which had to be one of the weirdest ways to die if you're a Russian soldier. Like, you're in woods that are so intensely thick and deep, and then you just hear Germans chanting some shitty regimental song,

because every regimental song is lame as hell. While you're getting domed with a Mauser. Auf der Heide, Blütein, feines Blumenlein. Und das heißt, so farsch. Now, small problem though. Reservist units in the German military at the time did not have machine gun units in their machine guns in their units. Those were kept to the active military as the reforms of having machine gun support units in every unit had not made it to the reserves. So these guys went running through the woods without any machine guns.

So they eventually had to fall back. But when the Russians countercharged out of the woods, the German artillery, stationed right nearby and trained on the opening of the forest, blasted them to pieces. Now, these gunners were brand new, and like most of the others we had talked about, were unfamiliar with the concept of indirect fire yet so they had to you know use their artillery like it was straight out of the 1800s and direct fire mode direct fire it yeah um now this came to be a problem because you know you're firing these directly in front of your own face uh and soon the gunners couldn't actually see because they were like powder blind uh there was there was uh so much flash and powder in the air they were temporary blinded and they had to stop shooting this is unpleasant yeah uh you know occupational hazard of being a an artillery gunner in 1914 is like whoops blighted myself ah shit well i'll just drink this mercury and i'll feel great drink this mercury get some blood out

the leeches it'll be fine um this is also on the 28th of august and while this is going on elsewhere the german attack on allenstein was finally forming which according to a scouting mission was only lightly defended by russians this led lundorf and hindenburg to think the main body of russian troops had traveled south and they wanted to circle around, cut them off, and attack them from the rear. This required passing orders much more rapidly than they normally did. Because remember, everything in the German military is in a strict timetable, not just the German military, but we're talking about the German military right now. So how exactly do you pass orders so rapidly when you normally, everything is meticulously planned down to the second? And I promise you, it's so dumb, you know, everything is meticulously planned down to the second.

And I promise you, it's so dumb you wouldn't think of it. They're simply going to load up into planes and throw leaflets down onto their own men with their new orders. Now, this is where normally I'd be like, and then everybody got lost and confused and nobody was sure what happened. But like this kind of worked somehow this didn't end in like a german army falling apart onto itself unsure of what to do um and it ended up being the right call as when the germans marched into allenstein the uh the russians had already evacuated it directly towards the rest of the force that was circling around them some pockets were left behind on accident, like orders weren't passed. There's also a possibility that some of these are rear guard units.

However, they walked right in without really any resistance, and these Russian pockets rather fought on, having really no idea why they were fighting. They assumed that Allenstein was still theirs, when in reality he had fallen and they were surrounded. A totally unimportant side note here, but the capture of Allenstein was something of a rallying cry for Germans. Like it was when they were marching towards it,

people were like, oh, we're going to take the town. Like, don't miss this. This is like the key moment of the battle. So one guy, Captain Lilly, a battalion commander, didn't want to miss out on this glory, right? So he jumped on his horse and ordered his battalion towards Allenstein yelling, forward, follow me. Small problem.

He did not consult a map before he did this and ran in the complete opposite direction. Ah, whoops. The forces circling around the town ran into the Russian baggage train, which had turned into such a chaotic massacre at this point that the road was clogged with dead horses and broken down wagons within the hour. As the Germans picked through the abandoned wagons, they found that the Russians had for some reason stolen huge amounts of

women's underwear from the prussian countryside okay yeah yeah that was kind of by like just i guess you just gotta loop what is it nailed down when everybody else picks over the good stuff and the prussians were just like we are not so different after all the germans continued their march on the r Russian rear only to find that all hell had broken loose as flanks, lines, things of that nature, all kind of order had fallen apart. The German army was now so tired and so spread apart from constant force marching and fighting. And as we've pointed out, the Russians were the same, if not worse. Nobody really knew where the fighting was taking place. Pockets of one side would simply run into pockets from the other side and start killing one another.

There was no order or overall planning to any of this. This kind of went on for a couple hours until midnight, until everyone got too tired. They run out of ammo and they broke contact and went back home and went to sleep. In other places, German commanders took their own initiative, something that was expected of them, to try to push forward. However, they did that by murdering their own men and horses in the middle of the night via pushing them too hard. Men, not being able to see, got lost and accidentally shot one another. Horses, exhausted and hardly fed due to outrunning their own supply lines, dropped dead.

Other horses fell asleep and trampled infantry. By around 4 a.m., none of the cavalry had any horses left in this particular sector, and everything had kind of stopped. But as dumb as this all was and sounded and it was, it worked. And we have a saying here on the show, if it's dumb and it works, it's not that dumb. This frantic run around the Russian line had pinned in the entire Russian Second Army Center in the middle of the woods outside of Allenstein before they could successfully evacuate. They were trapped with no way out.

And it was around this time that the German staff, mainly Lundorf, came up with a name for this battle, Tannenberg. Now, you probably think, like, you know, who comes up with a name for a battle? Like, they're just named after where they're fought, right? Like, the Battle of Verdun, got that name for a reason. The Somme, got that name for a reason. All of these, like, Gallipoli, got that name for a reason. psalm got that name for a reason all these like gallipoli got that

name for a reason that's where these battles take place but this battle did not take place in tannenberg it was near tannenberg but it should have been called the battle of allenstein if we're going to go off of how battles are normally named right um now the name tannenberg was suggested to him by a man named hoffman naming it for a nearby village that had been a site for a battle four centuries ago when the Polish Lithuanian army had destroyed the German Teutonic Knights, thus ending the Germanic eastward expansion. So the whole thing got its name based on revenge from a battle that took place in 1410. The main battle would... It's literally so stupid. They thought that this German victory in, quote unquote, in Tannenberg,

but actually in Allenstein, would overshadow the German defeat at Tannenberg in 1410. That's literally it. It's literally a name for propaganda, 1410. That's literally it. It's literally a name for propaganda, which is uniquely stupid, but not a one-off in history for sure. Now we're going to jump to the fateful day of August 29th, the day that the Russian Second Army would die. For the men of the Russian center, they had no idea they were trapped and Samsonov had no clue where his soldiers were. He was telling Martos to wait for reinforcement from Kluyev, who was his soldiers were. He was telling Martos to wait for reinforcement

from Kluyev, who was trapped somewhere else. He was telling other officers that resupply would be coming soon, which was impossible at this point. Their wagons had all been destroyed and the rail lines had all been cut. So Samsonov ordered Kluyev to move east and to get out of the trap via a night march towards the town of kirken and as he did the entire first german reserve corps chased him and several other russian units they ran into along the way were destroyed and prisoners were taken though this uh particular reserve uh reserve unit did not take prisoners uh they just shot the russians which happened not that much this early on in the war, unless you're Belgium. And, you know, Germany did that whole rape of Belgium.

Whole thing. Yep. Samsonov hinged this entire defensive plan on the idea that as long as he held the town of Nidenberg, the center would hold, and he'd be able to break the German counterattack on his defenses. Small problem, though. This key town, Nidenberg,

had been left completely undefended. Now, nobody's entirely sure why this is the case. And for reasons that we will soon know, Samsonov never explained why. There's a pretty good chance that he actually didn't know that he had left it undefended. There's another good chance that he had put soldiers there and a different subordinate commanders had moved them, or he simply forgot. We legitimately have no idea. So soon the roads leading to Nidenberg and Villenberg were cut, finishing the complete encirclement of the Second Army Center. The Russian soldiers meant to be holding their last few lines of retreat surrendered, virtually without a fight. In one case, 800 men dropped the rifles when the Germans

promised to give them water. This happened all over the collapsing edge of the encirclement. So many Russians were surrendering that the Germans were not sure what to do with them all. In one case in Villenberg, 2,000 Russians surrendered to 20 Germans. Jesus. Yeah, it's like some Gulf War shit. Yeah, it's like some Gulf War shit. Yeah, it's crazy. In another case, so many Russians were surrendering that they were surrendering without even seeing Germans.

Like a battalion or whatever would be like, look guys, we're done. Let's just put our hands up and walk towards the German lines and surrender. There's no Germans even anywhere near them. They just tie a white cloth to a stick and start walking towards German lines.

But the Germans have no idea about this. In one case, there's a company of Germans and then suddenly a thousand Russians appear on the horizon. They're like, holy shit, it's a counterattack. And then they realize like, oh no, they're walking very slowly and nobody has guns. And then there was another case where a Russian supply wagon, like a whole convoy of them that had been lost for hours,

simply came across like a German checkpoint, like, oh, fuck it, we surrender. Like, you can have it. Now, in order to do this again, the Germans ground their men to a nub. One unit was forced to march 65 kilometers in a single day in the middle of the August heat and humidity. You can imagine there's not much left of that unit at the end of that march. In order to escape, the trap center turned and ran south and had been marching the men for 40 hours straight. The men had tossed everything away, rifles included, out of exhaustion. Nobody had water. The horses were dropping dead.

It's just horrible in the Russian center at this point. Now, there was no order or command. Nobody was even sure where they were marching other than just to go south away from the Germans. But remember, they're surrounded. They have no idea. It was only then when Samsonov jumped on a horse and ran to the town of Yanov, where the rear of his headquarters element was supposed to be, that he realized he was truly fucked. His headquarters was gone.

The Germans had completely attacked the town, wiped out his rear headquarters element. And then that is where he finally discovered the Germans had taken the town of Villenberg and Nidenberg. This is where he gave his last known order as commander of the Russian second army. He turned towards his bodyguards, a group of Cossacks and said, quote, go save yourselves and then walked off. Then his entire staff element, that being the commanders of the entire army, attempted to escape the encirclement on foot.

This turned to a very, very stupid idea, as Samsonov was not exactly an infantryman shape. He was very overweight. He had asthma, and asthma in 1914 is fucking fatal a lot of the time. And he's not exactly a guy that should be humping it through the woods. And, you know, he's not exactly a guy that should be humping it through the woods. Oh, and he forgot a map.

So he had no idea where he was going. Everybody got lost. The staff group wandered through the woods for all of the next day, while tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, all without any kind of overarching command, fought, died, and surrendered, while subordinate commanders tried desperately

to figure out just what the fuck was going on. At this point, effectively, the Russian Second Army was dead on the 29th. The other members of the staff hardly talked to one another at this point, just defeated and depressed. The one of them that survived said that Samsonov only said one thing and he said it repeatedly quote the emperor trusted me then on the night of the 30th he snuck away in the middle of the night and shot himself so yeah sorry yeah uh again like that's another thing is he couldn't face the shame of defeat he would have like If he would have been captured by the Germans, he would have been treated fine.

He was a general. They have the officer and a gentleman type thing back then. But he, kind of like the other guy who was too shamed to pass the orders of his own defeat, he couldn't even face it. He couldn't face the Tsar after losing this many. And to be fair, he may have been shot for this, but maybe not.

The Russian Empire is quite forgiving for their generals hemorrhaging entire armies because they did it so often. Yeah, fair enough. If the Russian Empire killed all of their generals that lost an army in battle, they would have no more generals. But at this point,

the Second Army doesn't really exist anymore. There's small pockets of resistance, each on its own, trying to find a way out of the tightening German kill zone. Many of these have just turned to masses of surrendering men trying desperately not to get killed as artillery barrages smashed into them with such ferocity that the impact zone were compared to boiling cauldrons. Though there was so much destruction of Russian material, like wagons, trucks, things of that nature, that a lot of these units accidentally blockaded roads with their own destruction, so they couldn't get out. They were boxed in by their own dead logistics system. This went on through the woods until the 31st.

Though I should point out that the hardest fighting Russian units were obviously and famously their artillery, which is something of a tradition for them. If you go back and listen to our series on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, you know, a hundred years before this, same kind of thing. The Russian artillery was the shining example of their military. Artillery crews fired at the Germans until they ran out of ammo or the barrels of their cannons burnt out.

I don't even know how many hundreds of rounds of ammo that takes. And then they fought with small arms over their guns until they ran out of ammo, at which point they fought with fucking swords and knives. All for a battle that had been lost for days at this point. Though eventually, on the 31st, Hindenburg formally reported to the Kaiser that three Russian army that had been lost for days at this point. Though eventually, on the 31st, Hindenburg formally reported to the Kaiser that three Russian army corps had been destroyed, and the second army was defeated. Samsonov's second army was annihilated, for lack of a better term. 92,000 men had been captured, 78,000 killed or wounded, and only about 10,000, though sometimes the number is a little less,

managed to get out of this encirclement. Virtually all of them were from units on the flank positions because they had an easier way out. Now, this ends the Battle of Tannenberg. However, you can't really tell the full story of the Battle of Tannenberg without talking about what happened to the Russian First Army under Rennenkamp, in case you forgot about them, they were still out there. The Germans turned their attention to Rennenkamp. This began what became known as the First Battle of the Mazarin Lakes. Now, this wasn't really... Without the Battle of Tannenberg, the First Battle of the Mazarin Lakes isn't much of a big deal, quite honestly.

But as a cohesive picture, it's the complete destruction of the Russian invasion of Prussia. The Russian First Army, after pretty much marching around in circles and getting lost, was now on its way to Konigsberg, still thinking that the Russian Second Army was on their way to help, having no idea they'd been completely annihilated. However, as August turned to September, Ranenkov slowly learned the full details of what happened to Samsonov, so he correctly realized, I got to get the fuck out of here. He has to establish defensive lines, so he pulled back to a line extending from the Baltic Southeast to Ungerberg, Poland. still had the same problems that Samsonov had in regards to communication. Namely, he had none other than open radio communication signals and bad planes. This meant a combination of intercepted radio communications and aerial scouting, which the Germans were getting much better at, told the Germans that the Russian southern flank was not only made up of pretty bad

barely trained troops, which they could tell because their march was very stretched out. There was no order in the ranks, nothing like that. because their march was very stretched out. There was no order in the ranks, nothing like that. So that would become the German target, to attack the southern flank, collapse it, and then repeat what they had just done to Samsonov, encircle them and destroy them. Renenkamp, however, seems to be much better at his job than Samsonov was, which I understand is a pretty low bar. He also had the gift of knowing what had just happened to Samsonov. So rather than letting this encirclement happen, he launched a counterattack to hold up the Germans around the town of Goldop, which the Germans had to build a series of pontoon bridges to try to get their forces across, which slowed them down.

So that's why he targeted it. This actually worked at first. The Russians stormed the town, chased off the bridge builders, then the Germans just annihilated them with artillery. But they did slow down the German advance, which was their point.

There was going to be this counterattack to hit and slow down the Germans, and he was going to slowly withdraw his army with that time that they bought. But then Francois and his forces appeared on the Russian southern flank. Renenkov panicked. He knew exactly what this meant

because it had happened to Samsonov. He decided, fuck this, it's time to go. He ordered a full general retreat with added orders to abandon absolutely anything that might slow them down right uh like dump everything get the fuck out run and uh that's exactly what they did they dropped everything wagons fucking sick horses wounded and their rifles anything the first army retreated like usain goddamn Bolt against the Prussian countryside with no unit wanting to be the last one left to face to come in German forces.

The army marched as much as 25 miles per day without break and retreated so fast that the Germans simply could not keep up with them because the German 8th Army had been dragged all across Eastern Prussia fighting Russians for two weeks. So they just couldn't be pushed really any harder. When the Germans ordered the cavalry to try to catch up with the Russians, they found that the Russians had ditched so many wagons on the road that it created a blockade for their horses, and their horses were too sick and tired to run across the flat countryside. By mid-September, nothing was left for the Russian invasion of eastern Prussia. Renenkamp was able to save his army mostly. He lost around 100,000 men in his retreat, but half of those were prisoners, and half of the other were heat casualties who were captured, minor wounded and sick, things of that nature. But they also lost most of their artillery and all of their transport and their mad dash back across the border.

This is a huge victory. But remember, it's 1914 in World War One. In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing. Huge amounts of material the Germans had sent east for the Eighth Army, however, had come from the Western Front. for the 8th Army, however, had come from the Western Front. Right around the same time the Germans had lost the Battle of the Marne, and the Schlieffen Plan became a complete and total failure, and the Western Front devolved to the human meat grinder we all know it for. So, whoops. Also, later on that month, the Russians would counterattack again, retaking much of the territory they had lost during their initial retreat. So, in short, just more World War I, I guess.

Now, the postscript to this battle is mostly Lundorf and Hindenburg both trying to claim total responsibility for the victory, slowly devolving into insane proto-Nazis who hated one another. And I guess a funny side note, the German monument to the Battle of Tannenberg was blown up by the Nazis because the Soviets were advancing and they didn't want them to capture it, which is delightfully petty and stupid. Oh, and Rennenkamp was arrested

by Soviet revolutionaries in 1918, forced to dig his own grave, and then stabbed to death. The end. The end. Out of curiosity, I looked up the battle Out of curiosity, I looked up the Battle of Tannenberg on Wikipedia, and I found what needs to be the episode art for this, because maybe you saw this in your own research but there's a

commemorative coin made by the Germans to honor the victory at Tannenberg and the art on the coin is Paul von Hindenburg completely naked swinging a Zweihander sword and killing the Russian bear. I'm dead serious. They made him a lot more jacked than I think he was in real life, but it's a hundred percent the same Hindenburg you're thinking of. Hindenburg even back then was a large boy. He was not exactly a jacked Prussian warrior anymore. He looks,

he has the body of like Achilles, but his beard and his like kind of craggly face completely naked, including dick and balls. And he is, he is swinging this big ass sword on the russian bear so yes i will say that's a flex like if i was a conquering king or emperor or general in this case why not mint a coin with my dick on it i mean i don't know if you've heard the story about this with the the battle of sedan in the frank or prussian war but they just stamped a bunch of coins sedan like yes they were in circulation in france but

just had sedan stamped on them yes i did hear about that yeah petty shit involving coins is always very funny but um yeah this is this is i think the thing for me is that listening to this i am always taken aback by the absolute misery of the sort of war of movement phase of world war one like which is not to discount or rank it against the misery of the trench of war of movement phase of World War I, like, which is not to discount or rank it against the misery of the trench warfare part, which obviously included, you know, over-the-top kind of shit, people going to fight, you know,

like actual engagements, not just artillery engagements. But I think, like, the description that you've put together here, the kind of picture you've painted of just completely, like, some ball sweat sweat broken down people and animals moving further and further and further fighting in these massive encounters

with no food or water it sounds horrible it sounds fucking miserable like genuinely i was like damn i guess otto dicks was really on some shit for real about all those paintings he made of just sort of like the psychic horror of World War I. This sounds awful. Yeah, and remember, this is before things get truly awful, like truly terrible. When there's true deprivation in any of these countries, Germany at this point is not winning the war. I mean, after the Schlieffen plan fails, they never come close again. But there's food on the table.

You get boots. You get a uniform on your back, you like the turnip winter hasn't occurred yet. Like famines haven't swept through Russia caused by civil war and mismanagement. Like, and this is still already happening. Something that you might find interesting too, for listeners of the show who aren't familiar with this is the city that the, the, the Germans or rather the Russians were retreating towards in their advance into Prussia, Königsbau, that you mentioned, that city is now called Kaliningrad because it is the sort of

exclave of Russia in the Baltics that is part of Russia now, but was taken back by the Russians in World War II. And we talked about this before about East Prussia and sort of like the notion of kind of like the territorial integrity of East Prussia being a political thing in German politics, in West German politics into like the 80s, the idea that they were arguing that someday we will take back all of East Prussia, which is now the German city of Danzig is now, I don't know how to say it in Polish, but it's spelled Gdansk. Yeah, yeah, in Polish. all these these cities on the baltic sea all the way up through the baltic countries like um lithuania latvia estonia and what's now that that russia kaliningrad oblast that whole area um was at one point east prussia and um or like always poison um and so, yeah, it's nuts.

Like this is, there are still things to this day that are, you know, kind of like ripples of this war. And I think also it's interesting to just consider that like, we always think of the Western front. We always think of the, you know, the trenches in Belgium, the trenches in France, that kind of stuff. But it's like the idea that it's a, this is something that's happening

way, way out elsewhere. And this much human misery catastrophe is taking place just in the first month of the war. Yeah. And this doesn't even cross into the big three or whatever it is you want to call them of World War I. This isn't the Somme.

This isn't Verdun. This isn't Gallipoli, Passchendaele. But I also think the Eastern Front of World War I is a complete blind spot for most people who probably aren't Russian. Which, I mean, you could say that fair enough for the Eastern Front of World War II for people who were not Soviet.

Not Russian, but Soviet. Yeah, not Soviet or not German, because ultimately those are the only people who fought. I mean, obviously there were some units from Eastern European countries that fought as well, but by and large, the historical memory of World War II in Europe, in the sort of English speaking world is North Africa, Italy, and then France and Germany. It doesn't include anything, you know, when like the most action in the war, the biggest battle in human history was the defense of Moscow, the siege of Moscow, like in 1941. And then that, Kursk, Stalingrad, Leningrad. Stalingrad. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, it gets erased. And primarily because like,

you know, English speaking people were not involved in those conflicts, like, you conflicts, by and large. There weren't any units. There might have been a few like your observer Knox, but other than that, not that many. It's just, to me, this is one of those things that I might have heard of in passing, but never really scrutinized. It's just a reminder of... This country, Britain, where I live, used to have a culture of sort of remembering World War I

by sort of remembering it as this incredible folly, this incredible waste. That's kind of gone. Now that all the World War I veterans are dead, it's now just sort of like our brave troops and it's kind of morphing into

American, you know, respect the troops shit. That doesn't really address the fact that the war was a disaster. Yeah, I think it's because like the soldiers and veterans themselves can no longer be like what the fuck are you talking about you know yeah it was shit it sucked it was awful that reminds me and i don't like to talk about the internet much on this show because i don't consider it real life but like there was some guy who said like don't let the woke left lie to you that World War I was that bad. I was like, what?

What? Yeah. Oh, God. But, you know, Nate, we do a thing on this show, and we've been going a little over, so as we tend to do every episode, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion,

donate a single dollar to the show or more, whatever you want to do, and ask us on our Discord, via Patreon. Give it to a Russian Imperial soldier as a message. Load it onto a horse and send them off into a blanket of fog, and we will answer

it on the show. And recently, Nate, we answered a question about fighting animals. What was the biggest animal we felt comfortable fighting? And defeating, I should say. We had to beat them. I guess technically you could fight any animal if you just lose.

What historical figure could you defeat in a fight? I'm going to say historical as in dead, just so we can't possibly catch any libel or threats, because there's a lot of alive people we'd both like to punch in the fucking jaw. But what historical figure could you beat in a fight? I could absolutely whip the shit

out of Charles II of Spain. El Hechizado. I have a feeling I would win that fight very quickly what oh my god I would hope so honestly like I'm not exactly I'm just trying to make it obvious here like you know I'm picking a battle I know I can win

I will smack the shit out of Charles II that little Habsburg freak and I think it'll be easy I have a strong feel like I'm not in fighting shape, right? Uh, I'm,

I'm a little bit older, but I would whip Pol Pot's ass. Well, you know, at the end of the day, uh, I, I aimed low,

but, uh, yeah, I'm not really in fighting shape either. And I'm older than you. Nobody said it had to be a fair fight. Like you could hide like just around the corner from, I don't mean charles the second wasn't the most mobile guy on earth but like and just like nancy carrigan his ass uh like there's no there's no rule saying

that we're putting gloves on and going nine rounds here you know like i said wouldn't take that long his head was full of water i think i'll be okay uh that's a good that's a good plug for our bonus episode of charles the second um you should listen to it it's very funny i almost felt bad for making it until i realized that he was a king and i could say what the fuck i wanted exactly he was a piece of shit you know this is divine reddit kings whatever you know your your your family tree is a polygon uh i believe that was the episode that the that the hapsburg twitter guy actually responded and said that i was lying about his family uh not as funny as the albanian prince who called me a charlatan um well i mean we're all charlatans in our own right but uh i can't

imagine i mean like i don't i don't see see any you know royal palace of albania they don't even have monarchy people voted against it and he's still claiming to be a prince sucks that's a whole that there's cope and then there's royal cope uh and nate thank you again for joining me here on your first series uh on the show i will ensure that you will fully earn your uh legionnaire chevrons by making the next series just the most depressing fucking thing on earth but thank you ken Ken, for joining us. This is your area where you can plug the shows if somebody listening doesn't already listen to them. I am the co-host of a show called What a Hell of a Way to Die,

which is a podcast where myself and Francis Horton talk about why you shouldn't join the military and also just talk about being dads and having gardens because we're old now. I am the producer of this show. I am the producer of this show. I am the producer of a show called Trash Future, which is a podcast about business success and capitalism and how to grow your brain with cryptocurrency. Actually, no, it's a show about how stupid the tech industry is. And I am the producer of a show called Kill James Bond, which is a movie podcast by three extremely funny trans people, Alice Caldwell Kelly,

Abigail Thorne, and Devin. They talk about the Bond series. They're now talking about the Man from U.N.C.L.E. series. They've talked about the Bourne series and lots of other movies. And it's just a great, great fun laugh time to listen to. I strongly recommend them. So please check out my shows

if you're interested in podcasts in this general vein. And follow me on Twitter at In These Deserts if you want to. I don't really tweet that much anymore, but I'll probably check periodically. So I'll see stuff you send to me, like those comments about my tangents, which warmed my heart and shattered my self-confidence. Thank you, everybody, for listening. If you like this show, consider throwing us a dollar or two on Patreon.

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Uh, but again, thank you for joining us for these last three weeks for this very uplifting story, but a horrible battle from world war one. Uh, and, uh,

until next time, when you go marching through the Prussian countryside, bring water, bring water.