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Steve Dunn is the author of 15 books, mostly on specific aspects of World War I at sea, from the Dover Patrol to the defence of the Western Approaches. In Spectre of Invasion, he has turned his hand to a more ambitious project. Although the core of the book focuses on German threats to the British coast before and during the Great War, and the Royal Navy’s response, Dunn starts his story much earlier. An opening chapter looks at actual and potential invasions, from the Roman forts of the Saxon Shore to the end of the Victorian era. This chapter notes landmarks along the way, such as the Spanish Armada and the Martello Towers of the Napoleonic Wars (though oddly omitting the Jacobite threat of the first half of the 18th century).
Dunn also examines the ‘spy mania’ of the Edwardian period and the turn of-the-century vogue for invasion-scare novels. Some of these, such as Erskine Childers’ classic The Riddle of the Sands, are well known. Others, like A J Dawson’s The Message, in which a German waiter triumphantly tells the hero ‘Vaire strong, sare, ze Sherman Armay’, have slipped into perhaps deserved obscurity.
German threat
The author gets into his stride with the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Despite a well-established concern about the security of Britain’s east coast, the army and navy disagreed about how they should respond to the German threat. It was no longer possible, as it had been in the days of sailing ships, for the navy to maintain a close blockade of enemy ports. The invention of the submarine and torpedo, and the need for constant refuelling of ships, pointed towards the logic of a distant blockade.
The navy’s preferred position was to keep its battle fleet far to the north and to seal off the North Sea at both ends to an invader. It favoured not a large standing army but a small expeditionary force that could be fired like a projectile at the Continent. This approach was opposed by Britain’s many vocal advocates of army expansion, who campaigned strongly for conscription – a debate that was only resolved after the outbreak of war.
Invasion fears were quite out of proportion to the reality.
For anti-submarine and minesweeping work, the navy’s ships were supplemented with an improvised fleet of armed trawlers, motor launches, and steam yachts. Many readers may be unfamiliar with the draconian restrictions imposed in naval and port towns such as Harwich and Dover, where buildings were requisitioned and citizens issued with identity passes. Dunn also looks at the state of Britain’s coastal defences, which were far from complete at the start of the war; even the main naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys was unfortified. Two forts for the protection of the Humber estuary were not completed until 1919, too late to be of use. In the event, as Dunn points out, Britain’s coastal artillery fortifications played little part in the war – though it is possible that they helped to deter German planners from attempting an invasion.
Terror from sea and air
Yet if the inhabitants of Britain’s North Sea coast never faced an invading German army, they were not immune from enemy action. In November-December 1914, German ships bombarded several towns, from Great Yarmouth up to Hartlepool, in a bid to draw the Royal Navy out to fight. Dunn’s description of the attacks, and the shocked reaction of these communities to their vulnerability, is one of the book’s strongest sections. Eastern counties became the focus of contingency plans, including one for the inland evacuation of the entire population of Essex. Entrenchments were dug, pillboxes constructed, and volunteers recruited to watch the seas. Scattered attacks on coastal locations continued, the last one a hit- and-run raid by a U-boat on the remote Outer Hebridean island of St Kilda in May 1918.
Fear of invasion played an indirect part in the war’s best-known naval action, the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. The naval force stationed at Harwich was ordered not to join the Grand Fleet, so that it could remain free to deal with a possible German landing on the mainland. This caused enormous frustration for the Harwich commander, Rear-Admiral Reginald Tyrwhitt, who was anxious to take part in the action.
Ranging beyond purely naval activity, Dunn includes a chapter on the aerial assault on Britain – first by Zeppelins and later by huge, twin-engined Gotha biplanes. Bizarrely, in the autumn of 1914, stories about a secret Zeppelin base at Grasmere in the Lake District were taken seriously enough for a scout aeroplane to be flown over the area. Like the seaborne shelling of coastal towns, although devastating to those experiencing them on the ground, raids by the ‘aerial baby killers’ were not a preliminary to troop landings.
The irony was that, although the German command had been intermittently working on invasion plans since 1897, and had carried out amphibious exercises in 1901, there was no coherent strategy for such an operation. Moreover, Germany’s spy network was broken up early in the war. Invasion fears were quite out of proportion to the reality. Government restrictions on information, combined with press agitation, fuelled rumours that kept the threat alive in the public mind throughout the war.
Spectre of Invasion is well written and based on an impressive range of sources. It benefits from a variety of photographs, many from the author’s own collection, which most readers are unlikely to have seen before. The book would have benefited, however, from closer fact-checking in places, especially in the pre-1900 section. It is not the case, for example, that in 1866 France held talks with Prussia with a view to ‘acquiring Belgian [sic] and Luxembourg’. The first head of MI5 was Vernon, not Gordon Kell. And there are some unfortunate typos – the first French ironclad is correctly named La Gloire in one place but La Glorie elsewhere. The legal term for an occasion for war is ‘casus belli’ not ‘causus bellum’. Overall, however, the book will reward readers looking for an accessible overview of an often-neglected area of Great War history.
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
Spectre of Invasion: the Royal Navy and the defence of Britain’s coast 1900-1918
Steve R Dunn
Seaforth Publishing, hbk, 352pp (£25)
ISBN 978-1399039901
