If a new command team joining the headquarters of a defeated army (whose staff officers feared for their own careers) did not watch each other’s backs, no one could be expected to do it for them. In fact, the association began as a marriage of convenience.
#Hindenburg tannenberg professional#
The professional relationship between Hindenburg and Ludendorff became so close that Winston Churchill in The Unknown War consistently refers to them by the anagram HL.
On August 22, 1914, he was offered command of the Eighth Army. Hindenburg’s imperturbability, his good health, and his imposing physical presence all worked in his favor. Ludendorff was arrogant, touchy, and humorless, a man with more admirers than friends someone calm and steady would be required to balance his mercurial temperament. His career took an unexpected upturn three years later when Erich Ludendorff was appointed chief of staff of the Eighth Army, reeling from defeat at the hands of the Russians. Hindenburg retired in 1911 as a corps commander. Although regarded as a possible candidate for chief of staff and Prussian war minister, Hindenburg’s talents were not sufficient to overcome his own well-founded opinion that he lacked the skills of the politician and the courtier required for success in the higher echelons of Wilhelm II’s peacetime army. He spent most of his active service with troops, alternating command and staff appointments. Hindenburg is often dismissed by critics as lacking intelligence and imagination–“wooden”–but his career established him as a man of force and integrity who at the same time understood the difference between honor and intransigence. The “wooden titan” of the wartime empire and the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg saw action in 18-1871. After retiring again in 1919, he became president of the Weimar Republic in 1925, and died shortly after naming Adolf Hitler the German chancellor. A national hero for his early victories, Hindenburg later drew the United States into battle with his use of submarine warfare. Recalled to duty at the start of World War I, Hindenburg shared power with Erich Ludendorff as commander of the Eighth Army and then as chief of the General Staff. He fought in the Austro-Prussian War and in the Franco-German War, and retired as a general in 1911. Paul Von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German World War I military commander and president.
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