The Fear of Invasion

The British army’s enormous losses in the First World War can be traced back to the decision to despatch the British Expeditionary Force to fight on the continent alongside the French army, a choice that ultimately led to the creation of the mass army that would be thrown into the bloody, attritional battles of the Western Front in 1916 and beyond. Scholars have carefully examined the British armed services’ preparations for a major European war prior to 1914, but attention has tended to focus on the army’s success in persuading prewar governments to contemplate direct military support to France—the so-called ‘Continental Commitment’—and the rejection of the Royal Navy’s preferred maritime strategy. One feature common to such studies is an emphasis on the armed services’ plans for offensive action against Germany in the event of a European conflict. Scholars have generally been dismissive of the idea that Wilhelmine Germany could have carried out a full-fledged invasion of the British Isles, a tendency reinforced by our knowledge that no such enterprise was in fact ever launched. As a result, the effort the army and navy put into home defence is usually characterized as either irrelevant or misguided

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