Today’s technology makes long distance communication something we all take for granted. But a hundred years ago, the capacities and capabilities of communications were relatively primitive. The story of how the military forces of World War One surmounted the challenges and seized the possibilities of technology reveals enduring lessons: for if, in the age of satellites, supercomputers, and fiber-optics, the transfer of data has become a thing of routine, the overidding necessity of communication and coordination remains a vital constant of modern 21st century strategy.

The state of long-distance telephony in 1914 was such that connections beyond ca. 200km (ca. 125 miles) were hardly practical because the amplifiers necessary were not available. This meant that at great distances the actual sound coming off telephone earpieces became so faint as to be almost inaudible. The difficulties that resulted from the technological limitations of early telephones are best explained with reference to actual episodes from the Great War.

Communication and coordination were vital to Germany’s survival in World War One, dictated by her geopolitical situation: engaged in a widely spaced two-front war, the German high command was compelled to juggle forces. This was the premise for the famed ‘Schlieffen Plan’ strategic war plan, originally developed in 1905 and continually updated thereafter.

Faced with two formidable opponents on her borders—France in the West, and Russia in the East—Germany had decided on a gamble: position almost her whole army on one border, knock out her nimblest and most dangerous adversary first (France) and then quickly redeploy her forces to deal with the Russian juggernaut. Accordingly, seven of eight German armies at the beginning of the war in August 1914 were on the Western Front and only one was in the East.

Germany’s lone army in the East was the 8th, composed of 9 infantry divisions, 4 second-line divisions (Landwehr), and 1 cavalry division, totalling 158 batalions, 78 squadrons, and 774 artillery pieces. Facing the Germans were the two Russian armies of ‘Northwest Front’, the 1st Russian army (known by the Germans as the Niemen Army—based on its position on the river Niemen), and the 2nd Army (known by the Germans as the Narev Army—based on its position on the Narev River). The combined Russian forces included 22 infantry divisions and 11 ½ cavalry divisions, totalling 354 batalions, 331 squadrons, and 1428 artillery pieces.

Compounding the numerical disparity was a geographic situation disadvantageous to the Germans: the German 8th Army was based in East Prussia, a narrow province clinging to the Baltic coast that extended perilously far East into Russian territory. Accordingly, the 8th Army was in a position that invited encirclement since, apart from its numerical weakness, it could be attacked from the East as well as from the South and quickly cut off from the German heartland. On the face of it, the fate of 8th Army—unless a lighting German victory in France were to permit its timely reinforcement—seemed destined either to encirclement and destruction by a Russian pincers movement, or to an inglorious withdrawal toward Berlin.

But the appearances of map and numerical balance-sheet were deceiving. The terrain of East Prussia favored the defense: the few roads that existed weaved between many lakes, fortresses, and forested massifs. Any Russian advance through these bottlenecks-even without resistance—would be painfully slow, especially since the Czar, fearing invasion, had long ordered his border zones to be deliberately kept in an unimproved state. Russian movement beyond the rail-heads were they detrained in this age of horse-drawn transport would therefore take considerable time.

Beyond topograhy and the road network, there were internal factors within the Russian armies that worked against a speedy, powerful invasion of East Prussia and the destruction of the German 8th Army. Rennenkampf and Samsonov, commanders of the 1st and 2nd Russian armies respectively, were known to dislike each other, and their immediate commander, General Shilinsky, proved unable to coordinate his two large forces, each of which was admittedly grappling with a different set of mobilization and transportation issues. Complicating the coordination of such large forces operating over widely scattered and difficult terrain, were the limitations of the Russian communications, whether wired or wireless: signals personnel were insufficient and often incompetent and, as if these were not already serious enough handicaps, a switch in code books upon the war’s outbreak added additional pandemonium. In short, Russian staff operations were generally permeated with chaos. Finally, we may add that the Russian army was also not usually up to par insofar as the quantity and quality of equipment arming its troops, even in the most basic weapons such as rifles, but especially in machine-guns and artillery.

And yet Russian deficiencies in matériel and, especially, in their communications and coordination might have mattered little. The commander of the German 8th Army, the rotund General Prittwitz, perhaps disconcerted by the rapidity of the initial Russian advance, seizing and accentuating the bad bits of news emanating from his corps along the border, was losing his nerve, even though the Schlieffen Plan as well as maneuvers as recent as 1912 had indicated he could hold out indefinitely.

It is at this juncture in events that a mostly forgotten story begins to emerge: as the first news of the frontier battles in East Prussia was received by the German supreme command (Oberste Heeresleitung--OHL) in Koblenz, the headquarters requested the ‘Deutsche Reichspost’ to set up direct communication with East Prussia, at a distance of nearly 1000 km (ca.600 miles). Only after considerable difficulty and delay were German post officials able to organize a telephonic link to East Prussia via a highly indirect route utilizing the lines most able to support long distance telephony: the 5 millimeter bronze cable from Frankfurt am Main via Milan, and Berlin, all the way to the 8th Army command at Bartenstein. Making this telephone call took several hours on the night of 20-21 August 1914, with numerous call-backs from local post officials along the routing, with the connection finally taking place around 9:30 in the morning, after which an eerie conversation took place with the officers of the Koblenz OHL questioning the ghostly, barely audible whisper of 8th Army chief of staff, General Count Waldersee. Now Koblenz learned of 8th Army’s planned withdrawal behind the Vistula. Despite several interruptions due to the Berlin station, a critical real-time consultation between headquarters and the chief of staff in East Prussia, including further very laborious long-distance telephone calls to the commands of I, XVII, and XX army corps on 21 and 22 August gradually presented a new picture to OHL in Koblenz. The corps commanders were more confident than army command, many Russian prisoners had been taken, and German troop morale was high.

Based on these toilsome remote conferences, OHL came to a momentous decision: 8th army’s commander von Prittwitz was replaced with the team of Hindenburg and Ludendorff (who, in reality, did little more than execute the operational plan previously devised by 8th Army’s excellent chief of staff, Max Hoffman). Then came the smashing strategic victory of Tannenberg and the course of the First World War was definitely altered—in part because of a tenuous long-distance conversation over primitive telephones.

At Tannenberg signals struck a double blow: most notoriously via German eavesdroping on Russian wireless communications, but the less-well known telephonic “virtual conference” that masterfully exploited this intelligence windfall was both equally important and significant for the future of war.

The Morse telegraph had enabled long-distance communication for more than a half-century before Tannenberg. But the immediacy and flexibility of the two-way dialogue permitted by the telephone opened entirely new possibilities in communication, allowing headquarters and local commanders separated by great distances to exchange information and advantageously adjust planning to rapidly evolving situations.

In this new era of mass armies operating rapidly on wide, multiple fronts, the communications network (even though it was mostly civilian administered) connecting the ‘brains’ of headquarters to the ‘fists’ of front-line armies became just as important as the control, operational, and logistical military functions. Lack of, or insufficiently effective real-time communications could jeopardize operations: again, the critical opening campaigns of 1914 provide us with a telling illustration.

On the Western Front, it was naturally among the wheeling outer right flank of the advancing German forces in France—specifically the 1st Army—that the need for communications was most acute. With the advance moving so far so fast, neither conventional telegraph communications, nor wireless communication could be consistently relied upon. Most significantly, during the battle of the Marne the headquarters in Luxemburg of the German C in C, Moltke the Younger, was unable to keep in touch with the individual Corps commands marching deep into Northern France. Some of these difficulties were self-inflicted: roving German cavalrymen destroyed telephone lines indiscriminately. At other times enemy action impeded communications: from Paris a powerful transmitter set up in the Eiffel Tower was jamming the German frequencies. In the instance of the I corps during the height of the Allied counter-attack on the Marne (which, incidentally, was crucially assisted by two other fledgling technologies: the aircraft that first spotted the growing gap between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies thereby exposing their vulnerability, and the somewhat exaggerated feat of transporting a French infantry division by 1,500 Paris taxis to the front) it proved impossible to communicate with headquarters via telephone on 9 September 1914 on a circuit Ferté Milon-Compiègne-Noyon-Luxemburg: the 350 km (ca. 200 mile) distance over a patched-together enemy network was simply too great to be bridged without amplifiers. The vital strategic discussion between Moltke and his army commanders Kluck (First Army) and Bülow (Second Army) had to be conducted via messenger, with the dispatching of Lieutenant-Colonel Hentsch on an epic journey by motorcar to the headquarters of five armies. One must here make an effort to recall what automobiles and roads were in 1914, when a fifty-mile drive was considered an odyssee by most motorists and a day without tire trouble or a breakdown worthy of note; the Leutnant-Oberst’s trek over worn and unfamiliar roads clogged with marching infantry and supply columns was therefore quite an achievement in of itself. By the time he finally arrived at Bülow’s HQ, Moltke’s messenger was beyond telephone or telegraph coverage. There would be no real-time consultation with headquarters: incredible as it may seem, isolated as they were Bülow and Hentsch decided on withdrawal independently of OHL. Germany thus conceded the Battle of the Marne and with it, probably its last best chance of victory in the war. General von Kuhl, 1st Army Chief of Staff, confirms the importance of poor communication as part of the Schlieffen Plan’s failure: “We suffered continually from the defective liaison between GHQ and the army commands. The telephone detachments were much too weak and were insufficiently outfitted with modern equipment.”

Where the telephone had crucially assisted operational flexibility on the Eastern Front in allowing German forces to adjust to their opponent’s moves, in the West, the rigidity of a largely blind and deaf advance helped doom the Schlieffen Plan: lack of communications, compounding the inevitable massive transportation/logistics problems involved in conveying the attacking host of 3.12 million men and 865,000 horses across Belgium and France proved the fatal causes.

These two examples—success at Tannenberg, failure on the Marne—showed that not even a most meticulously researched, planned, and prepared strategic plan as Schlieffen’s was impervious to the myriad vagaries of happenstance or, more seriously, the unrealistically optimistic assumptions underlying the plan itself. Absent the illusory ideal of a perfect plan able to absorb the shock or friction of any and all contingencies, only the speedy and constant flow of information could both allow strategic and operational ‘visibility’ to commanders and, based on that awareness of developing situations, allow them amend or extemporize plans as necessary. In 1914, the first faltering steps of technology made instant two-way communication via telephone and radio possible