CHANNEL’S VAGARIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 April 1941, Page 7

CHANNEL’S VAGARIES

OBSTACLE TO INVASION. BULWARK AGAINST ATTACK.. To attempt an invasion Hitler has not only to vanquish the Navy and the R.A.F.; he must also conquer the English Channel (says a writer in the “Daily Mail’). And the Channel has already swamped a few of his invasion barges. Creeping along the French coast on a glass-like sea towards secret assembly points, these barges suddenly found themselves fighting a stiff offshore wind and rough seas . . . just one of the Channel's unadvertised frolics . The Channel, some 350 miles long and varying in width between 21 and 150 miles, is one of the most contrary stretches of water in the world.

The struggle for supremacy between the North Sea and the Atlantic has much to do with the Channel’s contrariness.

•These two great masses of water meet at the Dover-Calais bottleneck, and out of the turmoil the Channel’s vagaries are born. No set rules can be offered to cover even its tides.

A bay may have its high tide at noon-, while a nearby inlet knows high water as much as two hours later, or earlier, greater and even more strangely mannered currents. The story is told of a submerged German submarine which was trying to enter a Channel port on a making tide in the last war.

Its captain put a tea chest over its periscope. By rights his venture should have been successful, but' he had chosen as his point of entry a lane along which the current raced out even when on the make. The tea chest, therefore, ■■floated'’ against the current, and the submarine was spotted by a look-out man. At one point the tide saunters along at one knot; by tile wreel;-strewn Goodwin Sands it tears along nt five knots . . . which is probably faster than the fastest Rhine tug laden with a siring of tank-carrying barges can hope to travel. It can be calm oil Dover and choppy off Calais; delightfully sunny off France and foggy off England ... at the same time!

One of the common enough southwesterly gales would render the Nazi invasion ports untenable to such craft as Hiller hopes to use cn his Channel crossing.

Hitler’s needs for invasion have been described as “a foggy (or; alternatively a moonlight) night, calm sen. and a high tide!" Such are the English Channel’s vagaries that it is highly improbable that these three conditions will present themselves at the same time. It is the Channel's inetfnsist-encics that make it Britain's surest bulwark against invasion.