INVADING ENGLAND.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4627, 7 May 1915, Page 3 (Supplement)

INVADING ENGLAND.

SOME FANTASTIC SCHEMES. Germany’s boast that she will land an army of 300,000 men from transports, which will sail between two complete lines of huge submarines, is almost as absurd as the plan depicted by an old print published in 1798, which shows a huge French raft propelled by windmills conveying thousands of French soldiers. This, however, certainly deserved the credit of being termed an ingenious idea, as steam was not then understood, wind being the best cower known.

Another print shows Napoleon’s army marching to Dover through a submarine tunnel, which had been constructed unknown to England; while another of Napoleon’s ideas was to invade England by the aid of a large fleet of barges, loaded with soldiers, and propelled with oars and escorted by warships. The Germans are apparently taking a leaf out of Napoleon’s book, for on several occasions they have threatened to invade England by means of shallow craft carrying 1,000 to 1,500 men each, so that the men could step ashore. They seem to overlook the fact that such a method would give us plenty of time to concentrate any troops at the particular part of the coast the Germans invaded, and that with a comparatively small force we should he able to destroy the transport boats. The practicability of such a scheme was first revealed some years ago by Erskine Childers in his remarkable novel, “The Biddle of the Sands,” in which the author endeavoured to show how men would ho assembled secretly on tlie rivers that flow from Germany into the North Sea, behind a fringe of islands. They would he niloted by German sailors familiar with the British (•cast, and would slip through to England while the British fleet was crushed or drawn in another direction by the German fleet.

There is no donht that the suggestion put forward hy the author in this remarkable book created no small amount of sensation. Indeed, its publication is said to have led to a complete change in the British naval policy. The British fleet was centred in home waters, instead of being scattered all over the world, and two naval bases on the North Sea —one on the Hi Humber and the other at Rosyth in Scotland—were constructed specially to watch Germany.