They were hurled back from their positions suffering horrendous casualties in the process. On August 27th von Francois hit the Russians with his heavy artillery. Nevertheless Samsonov decided to continue the battle as a holding action until von Rennenkampf could arrive to turn the tables on the Germans. By the evening the Russian position was becoming untenable and almost hopelessly confused one Russian division was pinned down around Lake Bössau. Generals August von Mackensen and Otto von Below drove Samsonov back. The following day General von François was ordered by Ludendorff to attack and there was fierce fighting. Samsonov hurried with undue haste to move forward but was forced to halt on August 25th due to the near exhaustion of his men marching in scorching heat. The German plan was aided by the fifty-mile chain of the Masurian Lakes which formed a natural barrier between the two Russian armies.The German First Corps were now detraining west of Tannenberg, commanded by General Hermann von François ( de). The Russian Second Army under General Aleksandr Samsonov had also crossed the East Prussian frontier on August 20th and the Germans decided to deal with this force first before the slow-moving Rennenkampf and the known fact that the two Russian generals were unwilling to co-operate with each other. The ageing German Eighth Army ( de) commander, Max von Prittwitz ( de), was replaced by his brother-in-law, General Paul von Hindenburg, who had been brought out of retirement, with Major-General Erich Ludendorff as his Chief-of Staff. The insufficient German forces in this part of East Prussia fell back. Three days later he defeated a German force at Gumbinnen, about ten miles inside the frontier. In the opening phases of World War I, the French had urged the Russians to take action to relieve the German pressure on them, and the Russian First Army under General Paul Georg von Rennenkampf (a Baltic baron) invaded East Prussia on 17 August 1914 in the direction of Königsberg (a fortress city). Some of the leading German commanders at Tannenberg meeting in Königsberg in 1924.
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