FD2 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:34 pm
The UK has been threatened by invasion though, hasn't it?
Not credibly. Not for a very very long time.
Operation Seelöwe was a non-starter. The Wehrmacht's amphibious capability was limited to river crossings and the Kriegsmarine was hollow in the middle. They had big heavy hitters which couldn't manoeuvre in the narrow confines of the Dover Straights and little u-boats which couldn't operate in the shallow sand-banks of the Western end. Not much in the way of frigates or destroyers in between. The Luftwaffe never came close to gaining air superiority, never mind air supremacy.
Sadly for we who admire aeroplanes, it was the RN, not the RAF, who won the Battle of Britain by precluding Seelöwe from taking place. Those Rhine barges were never fit for sea duties and with such low seaboards they'd have been swamped in a beam sea of any more than two or three foot waves. The ones which hadn't sunk through natural causes would have been pummeled by gunnery of the RN's Destroyers. If a rump of an invasion force had managed to struggle ashore on the beaches of Kent and Sussex, they'd have been unsuppliable and would run out of ammo and other stuff and would have had to surrender. Hitler would have gone nuts and executed several dozen of his best Generals in one of his rages.
Last time there was a hostile invasion of the British mainland was nothing more than nuisance raids on a few seaports by the Septics in 1812.
Napoleon never gained enough sea power to seriously attempt an invasion. Another example of the RN saving the country from invasion. Pusser's slick copper-bottomed war canoes had a two or three knot advantage over ffroggie ones with their moluscean dangleberry skin friction. That sort of thing makes all the difference when you want to cross the T.
The postulated Commie invasion was nothing more than a hoax. A cheap way of maintaining vastly overbloated military expenditure. We really didn't have any rationale for attacking North Korea, for example. That little peninsula was never of interest to the British Empire. Suez was never going to be tolerated by The Empire and so was doomed from the start.
As for TB Liar's dodgy dossier, we all now know that it was a hoax too. The "threat" of British sovereign territory being nuked with Ayrab missiles at 40 minutes notice was total bollocks.
There was the Norman invasion. I'll give you that, but that was so long ago and technology has advanced so much that it's scarcely relevant to the 21st century. Same-same the Viking and Roman invasions.
As for the Falklands, that was easily preventable in 1982. A few years earlier the Callaghan government did the right thing when GCHQ/SIS Int gleaned from radio intercepts that the Argies were planning a minor invasion of the islands. Callaghan sent two or three Frigates and Destroyers down there and told the Argies what he was doing and why. They cancelled their plans and that was that. No need for carriers.
Peter Carrington's office dropped the ball when faced with an identical situation, and being the honorable noble man that he was, he took full responsibility for his dozy Department and resigned. Madam Handbag was delighted to have an opportunity to fight an election-winning war. Rejoice at that, rejoice.
Sooner or later the Argies and the Brits are going to have to come to terms with the oddity that those islands fell into the hands of the Coalite Company who saw them as a vast treasure trove of peat. It's anomalous that the islands are British. Eventually some sort of rapprochement arrangement is going to have to be agreed. Now that Argentina is a democracy and now that there's a reasonably proportionate defence capability at MPA and its remote radar sites and its usual frigate or destroyer within the vicinity, as well as the occasional A-boat as well as a very robust short-notice contingency plan to bolster those forces, the chances of a surprise pop-up invasion by Argentina are nil.
For tired old Lady Britannia to have a "Strike Force" poncing about in the South China Sea in the 21st century is absurd. Dangerously so.