The Iron Dice

'It is easy to be ‘wise after the event’ but I cannot help wondering why none of us realised what the most modern rifle, the machine gun, motor traction, the aeroplane and wireless telegraphy would bring about…The modern rifle and the machine gun add tenfold to the relative power of the defence as against the attack'

Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force to France, 1914 -1915, writing in 1919

This is a yarn, an alternative history of the Great War, drawing on once-secret War Office, Admiralty and Cabinet documents that I found in the National Archives at Kew. Using the words of Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Lord Kitchener and Sir Ian Hamilton amongst others, this relates how a planned invasion of Schleswig-Holstein coupled with the destruction of the German High Seas fleet in the Jade estuary could have dragged the Germans to the negotiating table by early 1916.
I have used this tale to throw light on an appalling mystery. The mystery of why more than seven and a half million allied soldiers were casualties on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 compared with fewer than four million Germans. The mystery of why British generals, in the face of
• fifteen years experience of the supremacy of an entrenched defence using magazine rifles with smokeless powder
• eighteen years experience of the hindering power of barbed wire
• sixty years experience of the slaughtering power of machine guns
• perhaps 150 years experience of the strength of the defence over an attack when both sides have firearms,
went on attacking and attacking, against all logic and evidence. Their soldiers were killed because they attacked and the Germans defended. Only when the dwindling resources of the blockaded Germans and their allies in relation to the swelling flood of American troops and supplies made them attempt to force a conclusion by attacking in the West, were they, in turn, slaughtered en masse. Thankfully, by that stage this failure – and German losses were unexceptional when compared to those of the allies in their attacks - was enough to defeat them.
For, tragically, by 1914 the British Army had forgotten all the bloody lessons of the Boer War that had ended twelve years before, simply reverting to the habits of the ‘small professional army’ that existed in Victorian times, albeit now rearranged into Divisions on the European system. The novelist JB Priestley was injured three times in WWI (‘I had a lucky war’ he judged, being still alive at the end) and skewered this myth precisely –

The British Army never saw itself as a citizens’ army. It behaved as if a small gentlemanly officer class still had to make soldiers out of under-gardener’s runaway sons and slum lads known to the police.

And tragically again, the British Army’s reversion to ‘drill and pipeclay’ in 1919 meant that it forgot or ignored the lessons of the First World War, especially the moving, mechanised conflict of armour and air power that it was becoming at the very end. The Germans did not - and yet in 1915 there had been a real chance, a throw of the Iron Dice, that would have meant that only one World War blighted the 20thCentury.