>Invasion literature isn't focused on plausibility of details. Chesney doesn't name any foreign power, talk about how British logistics got snarled, or explain the invader's logistics.
I'm not sure this is entirely true. The Riddle of the Sands, probably the most prominent invasion novel of the day (at least as far as influence on British military debates goes) apparently does have quite a bit of detail on how Germany might try to invade. (Of course, it wasn't always Germany, with The Great War in England in 1897 being about a French invasion and chronologically between Chesney and Childers.) A lot of this took place against the background of a very vigorous debate in the UK about how best to defend the country, with one faction basically believing that "the invasion will always get through" and would need to be defeated by a standing army. Astonishingly, this faction was usually associated with the Army. The other faction though that the RN would be able to stop invasion. That faction was right, although it is worth pointing out that the whole thing took place against a background of absolutely no experience with amphibious operations against a serious foe. Gallipoli probably did a lot to kill off the genre, as well as the whole "not being invaded in WWI" thing.
It's probably also worth noting that people saw conventional aerial bombing pretty similarly to how we view nuclear weapons in the interwar years, with a fair bit of paralysis and an absence of good stories, at least as I can recall.
> people saw conventional aerial bombing pretty similarly to how we view nuclear weapons in the interwar years
Absolutely; as they said then, "the bomber will always get through." At the time, this was actually true to a large extent - before radar, bombers couldn't be tracked except by actually watching the sky, which didn't give you much time to scramble fighters before they arrived in coastal or border cities. But fortunately, before WWII, radar had changed the story.
> The Riddle of the Sands... apparently does have quite a bit of detail on how Germany might try to invade
Thank you; apparently my limited reading had missed some elements of the genre!
That version is true for ships, but isn't actually where "the bomber will always get through" comes from because it isn't true for land targets. On land, you can push your detection perimeter out quite a bit using observers and telephones in a way you can't at sea, to say nothing of British experiments with sound mirrors (and the Italians at least also used those) which also don't work at sea. The phrase actually comes from the early 30s, when some quirks of aircraft development left bombers with a general performance advantage over fighters. This didn't last.
Re Riddle, I haven't actually read it, but it looks like the plan was "tugboats and barges sprinting across the southern North Sea", which, uhh, no, but I can see someone making that mistake in 1903.
Riddle of the Sands is a good read, and I also enjoyed Mark Steyn’s rendition of it in his “Tales For Our Time”. Even the film is not bad, though of course suffers from abbreviation. But it’s not really an invasion novel, since no invasion takes place, though it did try to show how vulnerable Britain could be to an invasion in the days when the Royal Navy was focused on patrolling the oceans less than protecting the homeland directly. I think Steyn called it the first instance of the “thriller” genre, though the first quarter of it actually reminded me of Three Men in a Boat!
>Invasion literature isn't focused on plausibility of details. Chesney doesn't name any foreign power, talk about how British logistics got snarled, or explain the invader's logistics.
I'm not sure this is entirely true. The Riddle of the Sands, probably the most prominent invasion novel of the day (at least as far as influence on British military debates goes) apparently does have quite a bit of detail on how Germany might try to invade. (Of course, it wasn't always Germany, with The Great War in England in 1897 being about a French invasion and chronologically between Chesney and Childers.) A lot of this took place against the background of a very vigorous debate in the UK about how best to defend the country, with one faction basically believing that "the invasion will always get through" and would need to be defeated by a standing army. Astonishingly, this faction was usually associated with the Army. The other faction though that the RN would be able to stop invasion. That faction was right, although it is worth pointing out that the whole thing took place against a background of absolutely no experience with amphibious operations against a serious foe. Gallipoli probably did a lot to kill off the genre, as well as the whole "not being invaded in WWI" thing.
It's probably also worth noting that people saw conventional aerial bombing pretty similarly to how we view nuclear weapons in the interwar years, with a fair bit of paralysis and an absence of good stories, at least as I can recall.
> people saw conventional aerial bombing pretty similarly to how we view nuclear weapons in the interwar years
Absolutely; as they said then, "the bomber will always get through." At the time, this was actually true to a large extent - before radar, bombers couldn't be tracked except by actually watching the sky, which didn't give you much time to scramble fighters before they arrived in coastal or border cities. But fortunately, before WWII, radar had changed the story.
> The Riddle of the Sands... apparently does have quite a bit of detail on how Germany might try to invade
Thank you; apparently my limited reading had missed some elements of the genre!
OK, did you just try to bombersplain me? :-)
That version is true for ships, but isn't actually where "the bomber will always get through" comes from because it isn't true for land targets. On land, you can push your detection perimeter out quite a bit using observers and telephones in a way you can't at sea, to say nothing of British experiments with sound mirrors (and the Italians at least also used those) which also don't work at sea. The phrase actually comes from the early 30s, when some quirks of aircraft development left bombers with a general performance advantage over fighters. This didn't last.
Re Riddle, I haven't actually read it, but it looks like the plan was "tugboats and barges sprinting across the southern North Sea", which, uhh, no, but I can see someone making that mistake in 1903.
Riddle of the Sands is a good read, and I also enjoyed Mark Steyn’s rendition of it in his “Tales For Our Time”. Even the film is not bad, though of course suffers from abbreviation. But it’s not really an invasion novel, since no invasion takes place, though it did try to show how vulnerable Britain could be to an invasion in the days when the Royal Navy was focused on patrolling the oceans less than protecting the homeland directly. I think Steyn called it the first instance of the “thriller” genre, though the first quarter of it actually reminded me of Three Men in a Boat!