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Victory myths and the battle of Tannenberg
Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Winter 2001 by Dubeski, Norman
Journal of Political and Military Sociology 2001, Vol. 29 (Winter):282-292
The study of the difference between the alleged explanations for victory and the real causes can yield insight into the mindset of the combatants. The legend of the Battle of Tannenberg incorporated several falsehoods including an anecdote by Colonel Hoffmann. The need to mythologize the explanation for victory reflects the nature of the challenge to the preconceptions and cognitive assumptions of the participants during the course of the battle.
INTRODUCTION
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Sometimes there are mistakes in the explanations for military victories. Just as military leaders will not want to say that they do not know how to fight a battle, victors will not want to say that they do not know how they won, or to otherwise attribute the outcome to chance and other circumstances beyond their control. Also, sometimes the defeated also build myths about battles in order to give themselves some solace and to find meaning and unity in defeat.
Many military historians have discussed the causes for the outcomes of wars and battles, but few historians and sociologists have studied the popular explanations for military outcomes as a phenomena in themselves. Richard Hamilton (1996) expounded how the explanations for victory (victory myths) sometimes had little to do with the actual chain of events, but Hamilton limited himself to showing that the two phenomena were different, rather than seeking to find the causes behind the nature of military mythmaking.
Not all battles will be mythologized. Only battles that were thought to have been able to go either way and that shook up established preconceptions become mythologized and become the subject of plays, operas, ballads, movies, books, and historical monuments. The political and cultural influence of a battle like Tannenberg, Kosovo, or Pearl Harbor is felt generations later long after its military significance becomes no longer relevant. When the combatants' view of the world and themselves is challenged, the need to make a myth or legend arises and the function of the myth is to put an end to the uncertainty and sometimes, in fact, to deny that it ever occurred. If the beliefs of the combatants were neither changed nor challenged, then there would have been no reason to build monuments and to create explanations for the battle that included elements of fiction or wishful thinking.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BATTLE AND THE LEGEND
The Battle of Tannenberg was fought approximately over a five day period at the end of August 1914. The German 8th Army encircled and then destroyed the Russian 2nd Army. The nearby Russian Ist Army had tried only belatedly to come to the aid of the 2nd Army. The commander of the 2nd Army, General Alexander Samsonov, shot himself. The commander of the 1st Army, General Paul Rennenkampf, was accused of cowardice, sloth, and even treason (Evans 1970:171). The German generals who commanded the 8th Army went on to glory and gained an aura of prestige they never lost. German propagandists claimed that the German people were superior in terms of race and culture to the Asiatics and Slavs. The German generals propagated legends about their leadership and unity and about how the two Russian generals, Rennenkampf and Samsonov, had allowed their personal rivalry to sabotage their professionalism. As we can prove that this rivalry never existed, and because we also know that the German leadership had its own share of disunity and insubordination, we can see that the official explanations of the battle were more mythical and factual. We can see how this particular myth was created because we can now detail the ways in which the official explanations were mythical. Then, more importantly, we can use the fictitious interpretation of the battle to learn something about victory myths in general.
Tannenberg was one of the most decisive battles in history, yet it did not determine who would win the war. It was seen as the greatest victory of the war and certainly generated one of the biggest propaganda myths (Stone 1998:66). The victory enabled the Germans to fight on for four more years, and it validated the prestige and self-aggrandizing assumptions of the German army. The German High Command and the civilian government fabricated a myth of Tannenberg as a great victory over a numerically superior and uncivilized enemy, a myth which displaced the old, more historically based, legend of the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg in the 15th century at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians. After the Great War, the German government built a great monument that could accommodate 100 000 visitors at a time, modeled on Stonehenge and other symbolism, both Nordic pagan and Christian (Keegan 2000:149; Showalter 1991:348). Architects Johannes and Walter Kruger designed the monument to include eight large stone towers, an encircling wall, a massive sacred circle, and a dedication to the "savior of the fatherland" (Herwig 1997:87). It became a place of pilgrimage for the German people until the end of World War II. The monument was leveled by retreating German troops at the end of the Second World War. On the site the Polish government built a monument to the Polish victory of the 15th century. In a sense, Tannenberg belonged more to the people and their need for myth than to the event itself.
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