They’re coming! The invasion scares of 1803-05 & 1940

This article is from Military History Matters issue 137

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On 4 June 1940, as the last British and other Allied forces were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill gave what would become one of the best-known speeches of the 20th century. Addressing the House of Commons, the newly installed prime minister warned of the sacrifice that would likely soon be needed to deter the imminent threat of invasion by the most powerful armed forces ever assembled.

‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,’ he said defiantly. ‘We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…’ (As he sat down, he supposedly quietly remarked to a fellow MP: ‘And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!’)

It wasn’t the first time, of course, that Britain had faced invasion. With his unique ‘feel’ for history, Churchill was well aware of earlier ‘scares’ – especially those of the Napoleonic Wars, which in many respects paralleled that of 1940. As a new film opens in cinemas depicting Napoleon’s meteoric rise to power, we compare the two crises, which could so easily have ended in actual invasions. After all, as Churchill said in 1948, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’

The French menace: 1803-05

By the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the invasion of Britain had become a well-established feature of French military planning. Between 1700 and the outbreak of the Revolution of 1789, there had been at least nine such projected invasions, and the concept appealed strongly to Napoleon’s soaring ambitions. He was especially inspired by the successful landing of a tiny French force in Ireland in support of the 1798 rebellion, demonstrating that an invasion could avoid interception at sea.

Following a brief suspension of hostilities during the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803), Napoleon assembled a 200,000-strong force deployed in camps at Boulogne, Bruges and Montreuil, known as the Armée des côtes de l’Océan (Army of the Ocean Coasts) or the Armée d’Angleterre (Army of England). A Flottille de Boulogne (Flotilla of Boulogne) of roughly 2,000 invasion craft was built in the Channel ports and concentrated at Boulogne. Almost half the force comprised gunboats of various sizes, plus 765 armed transports and about 350 converted fishing boats and coasters. The largest vessels were prames armed with 24-pounder guns and carrying up to 150 men; the second and most numerous were the péniches, armed with howitzers and capable of transporting 55 men; while the chaloupes cannonières were armed with howitzers and were supported by smaller gunboats. All were shallow-draught vessels fitted with specially designed ramps to allow an assault force of 149,000 men with artillery and 8,600 horses to disembark across beaches. (However unseaworthy they may have been, the invasion fleet was seen as enough of a threat to justify a series of raids, including a major operation against Boulogne in October 1804, which achieved little apart from prompting the French to improve their coastal defences.)

Napoleon never fully appreciated the differences between naval and land warfare, and persisted in treating the invasion as little more than an opposed river-crossing. He habitually overruled his admirals when they attempted to explain the realities of coping with the Channel’s tides, shoals and unpredictable weather. In the summer of 1804, he ordered a review of the invasion fleet despite Admiral Bruix’s warnings of a storm, which broke just as the review was about to begin, wrecking scores of gunboats and costing the lives of at least 200 men. Despite this vivid illustration of the problems of handling the mass of barely seaworthy invasion craft, which would take days to put to sea and cross the Channel, he continued to devise a series of ingenious plans that largely ignored the naval practicalities of the era.