![]() ![]() ![]() “He was an incredibly experienced staff officer and had already won the Pour le Mérite cross, similar to the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his leadership at Liege.” “I argue that Ludendorff is the brains of the operation,” says Lockenour, who wrote a book called Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Both sides suffered heavy losses and Prittwitz, envisioning a second Russian army on its way, lost his nerve. When the Germans learned that the Russians were invading East Prussia with two armies, one in the North and another in the South, they ordered Prittwitz to attack the northern Russian 1st Army at what became known as the Battle of Gumbinnen on August 20, 1914. It was a lot of reservists and garrison troops, people normally assigned to defend fixed positions.” “Also, the 8th Army was the weakest of the German armies. “What happened was the Russians mobilized a lot quicker than the Germans expected,” says Jay Lockenour, a military historian at Temple University. The lone German army dispatched to the Russian border region known as East Prussia was the 8th Army led by General Maximilian von Prittwitz. Meanwhile, Germany had committed seven of its eight armies to the West, believing that it would take at least six weeks for the sluggish Russian army to mobilize its forces and attack in the East. ![]()
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