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Second Army’s situation created an opportunity for a new German team: Paul von Hindenburg as commanding general, and Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff.

Samsonov’s axis of advance with Second Army-mostly determined by poor roads-extended so widely that its subordinate corps found maintaining lateral contact increasingly difficult.

Rennenkampf’s First Army advanced slowly and lost touch with the Germans it was ostensibly pursuing. The oft-mentioned, but essentially imaginary, hostility between their commanders, Paul von Rennenkampf and Alexander Samsonov, contributed far less to the resulting entropy than did inadequate communications, poor intelligence and worse staff work. The headquarters of Northwestern Front left the army commanders to their own devices. The Russians, however, failed to press their advantage or coordinate their movements. Mounted with overwhelmingly superior forces, the operation seemed on its way to success when the German theater commander panicked and proposed abandoning East Prussia entirely. Russia responded to this opening with a two-pronged drive into that exposed province-one army advancing west across the Niemen River, the other northwest from Russian Poland. Germany’s war plan, accepting a two-front conflict against France and Russia, initially allowed only token forces to defend East Prussia. The opening clash between the German and Russian empires in World War I ended in one of history’s most misleading outcomes. What We Learned From Tannenberg, 1914 Close