Invasion: Preview and Prevention The last time that an enemy (William the Conqueror) successfully invaded Great Britain, he assembled 700 transports (open barges) at St. Valéry-sur-Somme, waited for a fair wind, embarked an Army of 5,000 men, including 2,000 mobile armored units (mounted knights and their squires), sailed overnight across the English Channel (70 miles) and landed at Pevensey next morning. Immediately he marched to the nearest big city (Hastings), which he started fortifying (building a castle). The British (under King Harold of Wessex), though forewarned, had been drawn away by another invader on the east coast (Harold of Norway) whom they repelled (Battle of Stamford Bridge). Returning hurriedly to the Channel, their lightly armed forces (Saxon soldiers with shields and two-handed axes, peasants with javelins and stone-tipped clubs), were easy carving for the mounted, armored Normans. In October, Conqueror William won the Battle of Hastings, where King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye. William proceeded leisurely to London, where he was crowned on Christmas Day, 1066.
Three enemies since William have threatened Britain seriously with invasion. The first, Philip II of Spain, built a great armada for the try, but it got wrecked by battle and storm near the British coasts. The second, Napoleon, threatened from Boulogne in 1805, but his inept Navy and his elaborate feint to draw the British Navy off to the West Indies failed miserably. The third, Hitler, last week put out preliminary feelers over southeast England. Some chickens, a pony, a cow and two heifers were the first victims.
Last week Abbeville (eleven miles up the Somme estuary from William's embarkation point) and Boulogne were both in the grasp of Adolf Hitler. So apparently was Calais, nearest port to the British coast (25 miles from Dover). But the attempt by Hitler to invade Britain his power dream's dearest chapter—was not expected by experts to come from these beachheads.
If it came they expected it from Dutch and Belgian ports taken fortnight ago, from Norwegian beachheads taken in April, and perhaps from Eire, where beachheads might be established with the quisling connivance of the Irish Republican Army. Experts expected landing parties to concentrate on the southeast lowlands of England—Kent, the Thames valley, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk—with diversions in the Scottish lowlands and in Wales, for the invasion's main target would be the munitions-making Midlands. This plan has been openly recommended by Ewald Banse, professor of military science at Brunswick Technological Institute, whose writings have great weight in Nazi war councils.