The German Fourth Army in the First World War

The German Fourth Army was one of the eight armies that Germany put into the field against France in August 1914, and for most of the war it fought in Flanders. Under Duke Albrecht of Württemberg it beat the French in the Ardennes, and in the autumn of 1914, moved north and made up of new reserve corps, it attacked on the Yser and at Ypres. In 1915 chlorine was used on a large scale for the first time on its front, in 1917 under General Friedrich Sixt von Armin it withstood the longest British offensive in Flanders, and in 1918 it took Mount Kemmel, only to give up the whole Belgian coast in the autumn.

The Ardennes and the Marne (1914)

The Fourth Army’s command was created on mobilisation, on 2 August 1914, in Berlin, from the former VI Army Inspectorate, and its corps assembled around Sankt Vith. Together with the Fifth Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm it formed the centre of the German front, which under the Schlieffen Plan was to support the great wheel of the right wing through Belgium. When Joseph Joffre threw the French Third and Fourth Armies into the forests of the Ardennes, on 22 August, in the Battle of the Ardennes, which the Germans called the Battle of Neufchâteau, they ran into Albrecht’s troops, about 180,000 men, ready for battle.

After the victory the Fourth Army spent several days forcing the Meuse at Sedan and Stenay. In the Battle of the Marne it attacked around Vitry-le-François, but the French Fourth Army of General de Langle de Cary held. When the German right wing began to fall back, on 11 September Albrecht received the order to retreat, and his army took up positions in Champagne, where the front froze into trench warfare.

Flanders: the Yser, Ypres and gas (1914–1915)

In the Race to the Sea both sides tried to outflank each other to the north. The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, then took the Fourth Army’s command out of the line, gave its corps to the neighbouring armies and moved its staff to Belgium. The new Fourth Army consisted of the corps of General Hans von Beseler, which had just taken Antwerp, and of four new reserve corps, largely made up of young volunteers with a few weeks’ training. From 20 October 1914 its headquarters stood at Tielt, where, with short breaks, it remained for four years.

The army was to take the coast and reach the Channel ports. In the second half of October it attacked along its whole front from the sea to Ypres. On the Yser the Belgians of King Albert I held out until they flooded the ground in front of them, and at Langemarck the reserve regiments advanced in dense waves into the fire of British and French infantry. On 10 November the army took Diksmuide, but on 17 November Albrecht halted the attacks and the First Battle of Ypres died down. In Germany the defeat of the poorly trained volunteers became the Langemarck legend, a tale of the heroic sacrifice of the nation’s student youth.

At the beginning of 1915 Falkenhayn chose the Fourth Army’s front for the first large-scale use of poison gas. On 22 April chlorine was released from thousands of cylinders against French troops north of Ypres. A gap several kilometres wide opened in the front, but the Germans had no reserves to exploit it. In the Second Battle of Ypres the army used gas several more times and greatly reduced the salient around the town, but did not eliminate it, and on 24 May its command forbade any further major operations.

Sixt von Armin and Passchendaele (1916–1917)

The year 1916 was relatively quiet in Flanders, and the army’s largest action was the attack of the Württemberg XIII Corps on the Canadians at Mount Sorrel in June. At the turn of February and March 1917 Albrecht took over an army group in Alsace and Lorraine, and the Fourth Army passed to General Friedrich Sixt von Armin: the German record compiled by Hermann Cron gives the date as 25 February, other sources as 1 March. The army held the sector from the coast to the area of Armentières and came under the army group of the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht.

On 7 June 1917, after the explosion of huge mines, the British took the Messines Ridge in a single day. The German official history put the blame on the army staff, which had misjudged the enemy’s intentions, and the Supreme Army Command gave Sixt a defence specialist, Fritz von Loßberg, as his chief of staff. Loßberg rebuilt the defence in depth: behind a thin front line stood further positions, and behind the front, counter-attack divisions. In the Third Battle of Ypres, from 31 July, this system took back the British gains until in September Herbert Plumer switched to shallow attacks under the cover of powerful artillery. The army did not break and kept the ports of the Belgian coast, but according to German medical statistics it lost about 217,000 killed, wounded and missing from 21 July to the end of the year.

Kemmel, retreat and the end (1918–1919)

In April 1918 the Fourth Army attacked for the first time in a long while. After the Sixth Army had routed the Portuguese on the Lys, on 10 April Sixt’s divisions crossed the river and retook the Messines Ridge, then captured Armentières and Bailleul. The British gave up the Ypres salient together with Passchendaele. On 25 April the army stormed Mount Kemmel, defended by the French, but on 29 April the attack on the Scherpenberg and Mont Rouge broke down under fire and the Battle of the Lys died down. It was Loßberg himself who advised Ludendorff to call off the attack.

By the autumn the army was weak. On 28 September the Belgians, British and French under King Albert, in the Fifth Battle of Ypres, retook the heights around the town within a few days, and in October, at Courtrai, they broke through the Fourth Army’s last prepared position. The army, which by then also included the Naval Corps with two naval divisions, had to abandon the Belgian coast with its U-boat bases. On 17 October the Germans gave up Ostend and Lille without a fight, and on 21 October the army’s headquarters left Tielt.

After the retreat to the Scheldt the army was falling back towards the Antwerp–Meuse position when the armistice ended the fighting. Sixt von Armin then took over command of the whole army group from Rupprecht and led it out of Belgium into Germany. The march home of the Fourth Army’s staff ended on 28 November 1918 at Münster, and the army itself was disbanded during demobilisation, on 28 January 1919.