Battle of tannenberg12/3/2023 We knew we wanted to capture the essence of the front. We worked on this in early access on Steam. With Tannenberg we wanted to capture the sense of maneuver warfare, Tannenberg itself being a prime example of that, where two Russian armies were effectively outmaneuvered in the field and surrounded, cut off, with huge numbers of Russians captured. With Verdun, we had the static back-and-forth. Unlike Verdun, it allows for battles of maneuver. GamesBeat: The way you approached development of the tactics and the battlefields is different in Tannenberg. Just like with Verdun, which was for us the symbol of the Western Front, with its attrition warfare, the longest battle, Tannenberg is the symbol of the Eastern Front in that regard. Also, for us, it was the most known battle, and very impactful. There’s a great cultural theme built around it. But Tannenberg obviously being the battle where the Teutonic knights were defeated - the whole idea of the battle of Tannenberg at the time was thought of as a revanche for their defeat in the 1300s. The battle didn’t take place at the actual location called Tannenberg. There’s this giant cultural clash behind it. It’s the point where two civilizations clashed, the eastern Russians versus the western Germans. The Nazis used it later on, mystified it. It has an almost cultural phenomenon to it. It goes a bit beyond just the operation or the strategic victory that took place there. Why Tannenberg specifically? Tannenberg being the most known battle on the Eastern Front, where the tide of the Russian assault toward Germany was slaughtered in the early days of the war, that had massive symbolic value. We try to encompass the entire front, and all these different visual themes. You go to the Carpathian mountains, the Polish plains, all the way to the Black Sea, where it’s a very dry area in Bulgaria, a grassland. We tried to represent each sector of the front, each different, unique environment and strategic frontline in the game. We have maps from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jos Hoebe: With Tannenberg, just like Verdun, we wanted to try to encompass the entire Eastern Front. GamesBeat: I can understand going to the Eastern Front after Verdun, but why Tannenberg? This is an edited transcript of our interview. We discussed the history of the Eastern Front, the roles smaller countries like Bulgaria and Romania played amid the greater empires of Germany and Russia, and how to adapt the tactics and weapons of such warfare for a video game. It’s hard to make a multiplayer shooter like this 100% historically accurate, so they instead aimed to preserve the feel and spirit of these battles.īack when Tannenberg was getting ready to hit the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (it’s on PC as well), I interviewed Blackmill owner and founder Jos Hoebe. In 1941, Hitler’s Wehrmacht grossly underestimated Soviet military capability, leading to disaster in World War II.Tannenberg developers Blackmill Games and M2H wanted to capture the feeling of the Eastern Front. For years its legends helped to shape German nationalist ideology and military policy. Tannenberg’s mystique later served the Weimar Republic and Third Reich propagandists. In addition, he demolishes many myths about the battle, such as the supposed superiority of the German military, the animosity among Russian field commanders, and the assumption that the Germans viewed their opponents as a horde of uniformed illiterates. Examining the battle in the context of contemporary diplomatic, political, and economic affairs, Showalter also reviews both armies’ social settings and military doctrine, and shows how the battle may be understood as a case study of problems that military organizations face in the initial stages of a major war. The author carefully guides the reader through what actually happened on the battlefield, from its grand strategy down to the level of improvised squad actions. In this first paperback edition of the classic work, historian Dennis Showalter analyzes this battle’s causes, effects, and implications for subsequent German military policy. The battle of Tannenberg (August 27–30, 1914) opened World War I with a decisive German victory over Russia-indeed the Kaiser’s only clear-cut victory in a non-attritional battle during four years of war.
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