September 26, 1918 
LAND 6s? WATER 
An Invasion of England : By Arthur Pollen 
MONSIEUR GAUTREAU, a correspondent of 
the Naval and Militnry Record, contributed to 
last week's issue of that excellent journal an 
exceedingly interesting study of some of the 
problems which modern conditions have 
created for an invader of Great Britain. The writer raises 
a great number of points, and I have not space to discuss 
his conclusions — some of which, I venture to think, are 
fallacious. I am more concerned for the moment with 
what he tells us of prevalent French opinion, not of the 
character of the problem, but of this country's attitude 
towards it. He informs us that it is the general conviction of 
our Allies that our strategy has, from our first entry into 
hostilities, been primarily governed by the fear that the 
enemy would send an army across the seas and attack, and 
perhaps penetrate, our coast defences. And he rebukes 
those who make this a reproach to us for not perceiving 
that even so late as a year ago, the Boche Army withdrawn 
from Russia was, until absorbed in the general action on 
the French front, a potential danger which for our sake, 
as well as for that of the Allied cause, could not be ignored. 
England, he tells us, "could not afford to run the smallest 
risk" in this matter, in view of "the revolutionary changes 
njiade in the conditions of the naval war game." 
If M. Gautreau is right, and the majority of his countrymen 
suppose our policy to have been what he describes, then 
it is surely exceedingly important that so grotesque a mis- 
understanding should be put right without delay. I simply 
cannot believe that the British Admiralty have ever regarded 
the Fleet as primarily existing for coast defence, or that a 
home army to resist the German invader was, for the first 
four yeais of the war, what may be qalled a first charge on 
our military forces.^ It is an admitted commonplace that 
the prevention of invasion is one of the obvious and proper 
functions of a superior fleet. It is an admitted fact that 
at the opening of hostilities the disposition, both of our 
sea forces and of a small portion of our land forces, was made 
in contemplation of the possibility of a German raid. But, 
as was pointed out in these columns at the time, the course 
of the war in 1914 and 1915 made it quite clear that invasion 
was a mere chimera. And it would be fantastic to suppose 
that after, say, the autumn of 1915, great forces were kept 
at home to meet a possible invader of English soil, or that 
the Fleet's first business was still to prevent the invader's 
approach. 
The truth of the matter is that there have been so few 
successful invasions by sea in the history of war that it is 
highly improbable that the Germans ever even planned an 
experiment of this nature. And with all respect to Monsieur 
Gautreau, the "revolutionary changes made in the conditions 
of the naval war game" are very far from having made the 
operation of landing a force, from waters which the invader 
docs not permanently command, any easier than they used 
to be. We were able to throw an aYmy corps on to the 
peninsula of Gallipoli only because, first, the Turks had 
no naval forces capable of disputing our approach, or of 
driving our transports and battleships away from the coast 
after the first men were landed ; secondly, because there 
were no guns mounted in position of sufficient range and 
power to destroy the transports as they came near ; and, 
thirdly, because there were no under-water dangers of any 
kind whatever at the time of landing, nor any immediate 
prospect of this element being introduced into the operations. 
An enemy attempting to land a raiding force in this country 
would presumably count on sharing the second of these 
immunities. He would, that is to say, choose a point in 
the coast undefended by rrtillery, if any such point was 
known to him to exist. But even if we assume that he 
could reach the coast with his transports, his artillery-, his 
munitions, and his supplies in absolute secrecy, it would be 
quite inconceivable that he should be left undisturbed by an 
overwhelming battle fleet for more than twenty-four hours, ' 
wherever the point selected for the operations might be. 
The amphibious part of the operation, then, would be limited 
to what he could do in an incredibly short time, and the 
whole operation would have to be undertaken with the 
certainty that the invaders would be isolated the moment 
they were landed. The light war experience has thrown 
on the capacity of the submarine makes even so fugitive 
an affair as this almost inconceivable. The history of this 
is really rather curious. In pre-war discussions the three 
functions assigned to the submarine were, first, the attrition 
it might effect on the main forces of an enemy's fleet, by 
surprise attacks on individual ships, either in harbour or in 
issuing from harbour, or in the course of their normal cruising. 
It promised, in other words, to be a form of force that could 
penetrate into the enemy's waters, making all approaches 
to his ports dangerous,' and even with the capacity of entering 
those ports, unless they were properly protected. The 
second function was the converse of the first. Just as it 
could operate off the enemy's coast depriving his fleet of 
the security he would otherwise derive from the proximity 
of his forts and other naval forces, so would it be an addition 
to, or even a substitute for other forms of coast defence, 
compelling an enemy to keep away. Its third business was 
its seemingl}' limitless power to attack and destroy merchant 
shipping unless it were properly convoyed and protected. 
It is an odd circumstance that this last capacity of the sub- 
marine, which has in fact altered the whole character of the 
war, and at one time came near ending disastrously for us, 
was the only one of these three functions that escaped public 
notice almost altogether, and was entirely ignored by official 
professional opinion. But to the other two great attention 
was paid. The Germans, as every one will remember who 
has read the egregious Bernhardi, reckoned confidently on 
the submarine's torpedo to redress the balance of Dread- 
nought strength in their favour. And though the British 
Admiralty paid little attention either to this or to other 
warnings to a similar effect given by their advisers at home, 
the threat of this attrition was for a time exceedingly for- 
midable. 
Stationary Targets 
It is the third function of the submarine, however, that 
concerns us most now. This was its assumed value for 
coast and harbour defence. But the earlier experience of 
war seemed to show that this value had been grossly over- 
rated. For, as we have often noted in this journal, rightly 
looked at, the British army landed in France in August, 
1914, was an army destined for the invasion of Germany, 
and the enemy's business was — assuming he possessed the 
power — not to wait to fight it until he encountered it in the 
field, but to prevent its ever reaching the field, by sinking it 
at sea. If, that is to say, the unaided submarine had really 
possessed the power of coast defence assigned to it before 
hostilities began, then the German submarines ought to have 
defended the ports of France from invasion by the British 
Army. The fact that that invasion continued month by 
month with only quite trivial casualties- seemed, then, to 
show that the under-water boat as an antidote to invasion 
was a hopeless disappointment. And, but for the Gallipoli 
expedition, it is quite possible that it never would have 
recovered its now tarnished character. But when the sub- 
marines turned up off Gallipoli and sank Triumph and 
Majestic within a few minutes of each other, it suddenly 
became clear that the unaided submarine, though seemingly 
valueless in the British Channel, was enormously formidable, 
in the Mediterranean. Clearly the two cases had to be 
distinguished. The difference between them was not obscure. 
Off Gallipoli our battleships and transports lay off shore — . 
the first as stationary forts, the second as stationary bases 
and depots. The merchant shipping carrying the British 
Army and its supplies over to France, on the other hand, 
went through the danger zone at full speed. Under way, 
in addition to such protection as their speed and zigzagging 
could afford, these ships could be efficiently protected by 
accompanying craft. But with moored ships the conditions 
were altogether different. Neither the arming of the vessel, 
nor surrounding her by fast destroyers, could either prevent 
a submarine attack or deter attacks by making them unduly 
dangerous. 
The application of this truth to an invasion of England 
was simple enough. So long as there was no point of the 
coast that a British submarine could not reach in a few 
hours, there was no point where a fleet of German transports . 
could anchor to disembark their men without running the 
risk of half, if Hot all, of them being incontinently blown up. 
In other words, just as a superior surface fleet made it incon- 
ceivable that the transports and supply ships could remain 
off the coast more than very few hours, so submarines made 
it to the last degree improbable that even two or three hours 
would be given to the invaders in which to get their men, 
guns, and munitions from their transports to the beach. 
From the moment this was realised all fear of an invasion 
was at an end. ' Arthur Pollen. 
