Why Can't England be Invaded?!
- Thread starter aoravec75
- Start date
England (and I do mean England, not Great Britain) isn't like a continental European state which has land borders with enemies genuinely capable of invading it and which has, by necessity, got used to that fact. The English people aren't used to being invaded; England has had an invincibility complex about invasions from overseas since the days of the Spanish Armada. Unless there's a full-blown civil war in England or England is already being invaded by someone else, any foreign invasion in the 17th, century onward (except for something like the Glorious Revolution, where the King is hated more than the invaders) will excite mass panic and the government will respond to it as fast as possible.
A country like France, used to undergoing multiple land wars, might well ignore one invasion for a while as it tackles another continental war. England, which is by weight of wealth and population the centrepiece of Great Britain, is different.
Yes, but those 10 thousand men aren't all in southern england. Even the ones who are have other tasks at hand and were scattered over the area. If the French landed near Brighton for instance it would be at least a day before any soldiers from London or Portsmouth could show up. The French had built hundreds of transports and could disembark troops in a matter of minutes. The issue of landing troops isn't the problem. The French could have 10s of thousands sitting around training for the affair. Just give the British the bad luck for a change combined with a skillful French naval command (the ships don't really have to be better, just used better) and the invasion's easy. Just swap the luck and the invasions a tricky affair, but still has decent odds of success.
There's a good reason why Britain financed European coalitions against its enemies 
It kept the main threat too preoccupied with enemies on the mainland to be able to focus effectively on preparing a serious seaborne assault.
What the latter requires as much as a good navy and enough troops to carry it off is COMMITMENT. You can't half-heartedly invade Britain, like you could half-heartedly invade Prussia. Once your troops are across the Channel, you either win or lose your army
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
It kept the main threat too preoccupied with enemies on the mainland to be able to focus effectively on preparing a serious seaborne assault. What the latter requires as much as a good navy and enough troops to carry it off is COMMITMENT. You can't half-heartedly invade Britain, like you could half-heartedly invade Prussia. Once your troops are across the Channel, you either win or lose your army
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
Casualties...
Forcing a harbor is EXPENSIVE in terms of casualties, if it's competently defended. Use one fleet and army to force the harbor--then pull another out of your bag of holding to carry out the conquest. Even with overwhelming force, you'll pay a steep price indeed.
To invade England, you need the Royal Navy GONE, or allies already in Britain.
Forcing a harbor is EXPENSIVE in terms of casualties, if it's competently defended. Use one fleet and army to force the harbor--then pull another out of your bag of holding to carry out the conquest. Even with overwhelming force, you'll pay a steep price indeed.
To invade England, you need the Royal Navy GONE, or allies already in Britain.
katchen
Banned
The problem always was that the Vasas were unable to conquer Norway and Denmark (and the Danes were unable to reconquer the Swedes). Because the Scandinavians were divided, they were weakened. The Swedes in particular, were hemmed in by not having Norway into concentrating on their east and south where they faced too many enemies with too many people and too much land area, Russia, Poland and Prussia. And that's what got the Vasas into trouble. Let them have Norway and they can easily be a naval power the equal of Great Britain even if they do not choose to conquer Great Britain. They would have the harbours of Norway, the open ocean experience of Norwegian fishermen, the wood of Norway and Sweden's forests and the tall trees of Sweden's forests from which even the British needed to import trunks for masts. And tars for naval stores. And iron and wood for charcoal. In short, everything needed for a navy before the modern industrial era, Scania has.
And colonially, the Scanians have an asset that the British and the French do not; the ability to survive and get crops from the coldest climates and shortest growing seasons that crops can grow in, and people like the Lapps and Finns who can be settled in places like Labrador or Patagonia where they can raise reindeer and trap more intensively than the native Americans and Innuit they will displace. This will offset their initially lower population disadvantage. And like the British, they need to settle elsewhere, though in the case of Scanians, it is because of famine brought about by the Little Ice Age, not enclosures brought about by landlords maximizing wool production.
And from [at least] a fairly early point during the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars onwards, London was linked to the main ports by chains of semaphore stations through which the fleets could be quickly ordered to sea and -- the winds permitting -- to the right areas.
That's the tricky bit: Developing that "skillful French naval command" would probably have required a number of previous French successes at sea too, meaning that the British would have had to have had bad luck on several more occasions rather than just once...
because they dont fight alone and always get someone else to keep soon-to-be-invading armies busy on the continent.
Because the weather and food are so bad nobody want to really get there.
From London (and judging by today) I think you're onto something…
They landed while the king & his guards were away fighting against another invasion, up north, and still nearly got beaten when he & his surviving troops came back south again to face them. How many later potential invaders could count on a "diversion" of that scale to leave the door unguarded and weaken the defenders?The Normans did it just fine.
BlondieBC
Banned
When you have overwhelming force, it is still easier to land on a beach and attack the harbor from the lightly defended backside. Or put another way, you attack weak flanks over frontal assaults on heavily defended earthworks.
The French did win from time to time. It wasn't like the Royal Navy just sailed around sinking everyone. They one most of the time, but not every time. The War of Austrian Succession seemes to have been a lot closer than the Seven Years War at sea. In the Nine Years War they did even better, for instance the Battle of Beachy Head (and this was a war were they were fighting the Dutch and English at the same time). Until 1759 the French were doing decent, then British had a string of victories. Shift the tide of a few conflicts in the period from ~1650-1750 and you could easily see the French invade Britain.
The Normans did it just fine.
My memory of the Battle of Hastings is a little bit sketchy, but wasn't that at least partly because King Harold thought the Normans wouldn't invade so late in the year and sent his fleet home for the winter?
The French and Dutch were allied in the 17th Century - during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The only significant victory the Dutch won in all of the three Anglo-Dutch wars (the Four Days Battle) came about because the English divided their fleet to try to prevent the French joining the Dutch. Without the distraction provided by the French, the English would almost certainly have crushed the Dutch as they did in every other major battle during the century.
You might want to brush up your history as the Netherlands managed to defeat the English in both the second and third Anglo-Dutch War and in the third one it was the English that were allied to the French.