The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL 3, 1917. INVASION POSSIBILITIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume CVI, Issue 16235, 3 April 1917, Page 6

The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, APRIL 3, 1917. INVASION POSSIBILITIES.

;The suggestion of General Sir U'Moore Ureagli, who retired three years ago from active '■■'sex- -, vice, that the ". Germans will .attempt a series of great raids on Britain before they own themselves defeated in the war, is not ( a novel one. Less than sis months ago Lord French com-! mitted 'himself to the statement! that "Invasion is no impossibility; it may not be probable, but .it id perfectly possible, and it ia what we do not expect that al-i ways happens in war.'- ■ It has been supposed that by "invasion'' lie meant raids. An invasion oni a large scale would be the most desperate' of all enterprises foe the Germans. General Crep "ir ■' thinks it might be trier' and it is natural,to suppose that' the Germans will try every course cbnceivable to aver,t defeat, but the overwhelming l odds that would be against them lin an attempt of this sort . are well known to their General x Staff. If ithey were not, the attempt would have been made in the first' months of the war, when the chances of success, small as +hey were then, were nreater than they can ever be again. The British Government, trusting to the Navy to keep British shores inviolate, had sent first its Regular Army, th«n the Territorials formed for home defence, +o France. If the Germans could have got across the North Sea with, a fleet of transports they would have found a Britain undefended. The whole Empire had been left in the same state. There never'was a greater faith in sea that which the British! Empire showed when, trusting to its Navy,, it sent all its trained men across, the sea to attack- the enemy- on his own ground, and it/was -justified. The Germans dii- nofc dare to' risk the conflict between their men of voying" transports, and the'-Bri-tish Fleet, though there,is {small' doubt "that" a blow struck" with success at the nerve centre of the British Empire would have meant : the' ending of theywar. The Germans did not dare, of 1 care, to take the lesser risk of attem-nting to transport relatively small .parties of men across the sea, "'with the object of treating British coastal towns and villa "-eg as they have treated Belgium; They may have thought that it was not worth while, as any damage they could do, if they escaped "perils of the sea, and made good their landing, would be limited, and soon followed by their own destruction. But a policy that seems useless, or too dangerous, to a nation fighting successfully on land may he clutched at by a nation -facing* failure. The probability of such raids being attempted was expressed by Mr Hurd, the' naval writer, several' years before tha war, in words that were > recalled by him quite recently. "Raiding forces," he wrote, " each consisting of a comparativelv few thousand men, might be despatched by an enemy in the more or less desperate hope that, owiu£r. to tha small tonnage of shimnne- employed in transporting them, some way might be found through the

chain of rnobilo defence on the iuitAli cou&ts." Uircumstancet> iiugnt arise, m the course or tiie war, which would imiJie .such an uilventure —or a series 01 them, (jreneral Greagh suggests —seem to a daring enemy "well wortn tne and rials to which it .would-be exposed." The lightning sallies ox German light craft into the Channel, which havo been made more frequently in the last few months, may havo been designed as reconnoitring expeditions to spy out the possibilities for making such attempts. But the raids, if they are made now, will come too late to give promise even of such brief success as they might have had. if fortune had been very favourable 1o the German's, in the first months of the war. Britain is. no longer bare of trained men. The Volunteers have been organised to meet this very danger, land unless the large army of newregulars who served recently as a home defence force have been hurried across the Channel to take part in' the summer drive in [France, the defence will not rest with them alone. The Germans will be very desperate if they try teither raids or an invasion.