Will Hitler Come With a Fleet of Barges?

Just as Napoleon at Boulogne threatened an invasion of England 136 years ago, so today Hitler stands on that same shore, threatening, blustering-and preparing. Amongst his preparations are said to be an armada of small craft, of which (as is told below) he has a number of varied kinds and uses at his disposal.
Night after night for weeks past, and sometimes during the day, too, amongst the objectives of Britain's bombers in the raids 611 Germany and German-occupied Europe have been concentrations of barges in the waterways of Holland and Belgium and Northern France. The reason is obvious; those barges which have been splintered and burnt and left high and dry on the banks of canals whose lock gates have been blown up, may well have been chosen for inclusion in that armada which Hitler is reported to be assembling for his often threatened invasion of England.

Certainly the Fuehrer has plenty of vessels to choose from; vessels of many different shapes and sizes, vessels designed for many a varied use. There are the great barges, some so big that they can carry the contents of three hundred 10-ton coal wagons which in peace time make the passage up and down the Rhine and Maas. There are the Diesel engined river craft which have appeared in increasing numbers of recent years on the waterways of the Low Countries and of Eastern France as far as the Swiss border; many of these make coastal trips from Rotterdam to Antwerp, and there is little doubt that given reasonably line weather they could make the passage of the North Sea under their own power. Then there are the big cargo lighters used extensively in the docks of Amsterdam, the powerful ferry boats, driven by steam or Diesel engines, which are used for crossing the Scheldt between Antwerp and Flushing: there are the tugs attached to the Dutch and Belgian ports, and the big flat-bottomed paddle tugs which paddle their way up and down the Rhine.
Again, there are the Dutch motor coasters, 500 to 600 tons apiece, engined with Diesels, which are good sea boats and are often used to cross the North Sea.
Altogether there must be some hundreds of small craft which might be used to carry considerable numbers of German troops across the narrow strip of water which separates the Continent from our own shores: and quite a number of these boats are of a sufficient size and or sufficiently strong construction to carry tanks, field artillery; anti-aircraft guns, and heavy equipment.

We may presume that they would be assembled at a number or enemy ports on the coast of Western Europe in particular, Rotterdam, the Hook or Holland, Flushing, Antwerp and the Scheldt estuary, Zeebrugge, Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne; Brest and Cherbourg might be used if it were decided to attempt a landing in the south-west of England or on the shores of Ireland. Numerous as these possible assembly points are, we have good reason to believe that several of them have been so damaged by British demolition squads and aircraft that for a time, at least, they must be quite unusable. Moreover, the communiques or the R.A.F. abundantly testify that Boulogne, Calais, and the rest are closely watched, and any suspicious concentrations are immediately bombed.

Hitler's invading army could have crossed the North Sea in a bluff-bowed motor craft like the “rapid" 190 tons, seen below. Many of these vessels were engaged in trade with British ports, carrying merchandise from Holland. Some were a good deal larger, and all were built especially to stand rough seas.

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Of the bases mentioned, probably Flushing and Antwerp are the nearest to England of those which are reasonably intact. To make the crossing from the Scheldt to the Lincolnshire coast the armada would have to travel some 240 miles, but to the Kent coast the distance would be only some 135 miles. The slow-moving barges would require from 24 to 48 hours to make the crossing, and it need hardly be said that it should be quite impossible for them to move any distance, even in thick fog, without their presence being discovered by the British Navy and the R.A.F. Even air action alone might be expected to have a devastating effect on the flotilla, although it should be remembered that the German air force was unable to stop the embarkation of the B.E.F. and French from Dunkirk-in the broad daylight of early summer.

Suitable craft to cross the Channel were Dutch coastal motor barges such as this

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As we have been told by Winston Churchill, even five divisions (say, 100,000 men), very lightly equipped,
"would require 200 to 250 ships, and with modern air reconnaissance and photography it would not be easy to collect such an armada, marshal it, and conduct it across the sea, without any powerful naval forces to escort it and with the very great possibility that it would be intercepted long before it reached the coast and the men all drowned in the sea, or at the worst blown to pieces with their equipment while they were trying to land."
Then, in addition there is a great system of minefields, recently strongly reinforced.

If the weather were fine and the sea fairly calm, if the British Navy were temporarily or permanently out of the picture if the Germans had superiority in the air, if they had a reasonable share of Hitler's customary luck then the passage across the narrow seas might be made by these lumbering, slow-moving flotillas of strangely-assorted craft. But there are altogether too many "ifs." When Napoleon prepared a similar invasion he was in some ways much better situated than is Hitler. He was able to assemble his great army of 100,000 men at Boulogne without any fear of bombing attacks or prying reconnaissance planes, he had practically the whole Continent under his complete control, political and economic, he had collected a great fleet of flat-bottomed ships which had to fear no lurking submarines, no raiding planes, no speeding warships, but simply men-of-war which were dependent on the wind for their movement. Yet for two years Napoleon waited, and then in a fit of disgust shook his fist at the unassailable white cliffs of England, and marched away to Ulm and Austerlitz. Will Hitler have to, or could he, wait so long?