ASSAULT OR SIEGE?

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 3, 3 July 1940, Page 6

ASSAULT OR SIEGE?

Britain had experience of German siege tactics (attack on sea-lines by submarine, by mine, and bj raider) in the last war. In that kind of attack, there is nothing new today save the elaboration of air-tactics and the introduction of the magnetic mine, plus the increase in the number of enemy sally-ports arising from Hitler's capture of the European coast from Narvik to Cherbourg. But if Hitler, not willing to wait for slow siege results, decides to try to win the war quickly by a grand assault on "the island fortress," then something new to British experience, or new to the last century thereof, will arise. Possession of so much European coast-line tempts Hitler towards trying to send invading land forces by sea, starting from various Continental ports and converging on England and Scotland. The price of his failure would be a blow to Hitler's military prestige—its first blow; the price of his success would be, among other things, to put to the test the resistance value of the British Empire oversea. But what are the prospects of success of a German grand assault on Britain? Careful analysis reduces those prospects to a degree which must be discouraging to the attacker, unless he is temperamentally set (as Hitler may be) on backing his lucky star in the wildest enterprise. Much has been heard about the eight million French refugees who surged across France and clogged the movements of the defenders. But in the British districts in which enemy attack in force is possible— coastal districts in the east —plans for evacuation of civilians are com-

plete. In other British districts, remoter from attack from the sea, the chief panic-factor would be German aerial attack of an unrestricted, con-vention-defying character; herein the contest lies between German airferocity (the limits of which are hard to guess) and British nerve. Reviewing the outlook, the military correspondent of the "Sydney Morning Herald" dismisses the likelihood of a clogging of British highways by refugees. He writes:

The German tactics are no longer a novelty. The "fifth column" has been rooted out in Britain; there are no cells of pro-German refugees or extreme' political parties; and nobody imagines, in his wildest dreams, that there would be in Britain _any repetition of the large-scale treachery that typified the German invasion of Norway, Holland, and apparently France. The parachute-strategy has been learned, and, quite apart from the ceaseless watch-and-ward of the Fleet and the R.A.F.. half a million persons are specifically charged with the task of spying out surprise landings, not to speak of the armed forces and a forewarned civil populace.

In the absence of such civilian confusion as panic causes, an enemy army in England, even assuming the best of luck in evading the Navy, must be heavily outnumbered; and the Navy, if under cover of night it misses the invader's entry, can hardly fail to be present at his retreat. Even in the last few days, naval-protected British forces have landed on the enemy coast and have come away again. That experience in itself must have thrown some light on the difficulties which the Germans will meet when, minus superior sea power, they put their prestige to the issue in a grand assault.