I sent this question to Cecil. Guess he didn’t like it, so I’ll ask it here.
Nations plan for every conceivable military scenario. And since the U.K. built (at least half of) the chunnel did they build in any kind of “self-destruct” system to collapse part of it in case, say, the new & improved Fatherland again feels the need for a little leibensprau (sp)?
I for one welcome our new insect overlords… - K. Brockman
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I think the word you want is “Lebensraum” (always capitalized), which means “living space.” The Nazis used the term to refer to conquered areas in eastern Europe that they hoped to depopulate of Slavs are repopulate with “Aryans.”
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
It probably wouldn’t be very difficult to stop a Chunnel invasion. I mean, worse comes to worse they can just set up a machine gun nest at the exit, and have target practice as the cannon fodder comes through. Think about it: suppose you wanted to send a couple hundred thousand soldiers through. Say they’re coming through at a rate of 10m/s and a spacing of 1 meter. That means 10 soldiers/second; 60/minute; 3600/hour; 86,400/day. So that means the invasion force would need several days of exiting an incredibly vulnerable spot. They might as well just have their soldiers all swim across the Channel and make an amphibious assault. BTW, why is no one concerned about the Brits invading the mainland? 
The first thing that occurs to me is why would anyone want to invade Britain? And who? If this is purely hypothetical, I agree with TheRyan. All we’d need to do is mine the entrance, and station some armour with a good field of fire.
If anyone was invading the UK, I’m sure there are better ways than going for the obvious “fish in a barrel” route. An amphibious assault at several locations simultaneously would probably do the trick given the tiny size of our current forces.
PS TheRyan, the French would probably wet themselves laughing at the idea of our one or two regular Army divisions attempting to invade.
I’m having trouble finding sources on the net, but I know the issue of security has always been a factor with the chunnel. I believe that Napoleon at one point talked about digging a tunnel to attack Britian, but the idea didn’t go very far.
The current concern is more about terrorists than invading armies. At least in theory the chunnel is heavily monitored to keep out unauthorized persons. But a few years back, there was a story that a Russian sailor, who had jumped ship in Britain, managed to sneak into the chunnel and walk all the way to France to before being detected. This greatly embarrassed the security people, since if he was a terrorist he could have attacked a train in the middle of the chunnel.
Ahem. It just so happens that I just finished reading a book on how they built the Chunnel.
It took them, altogether, about 190 years, from the time someone first proposed a tunnel, to the time it actually opened. In the modern era, it took over 20 years of fiddling around, negotiating, and actual construction before it was finally opened. Many times the whole deal was nearly off, what with contract negotiations and political situations. The whole project barely squeaked into existence by the skin of its teeth.
It took so long to get built that I don’t think anybody involved with it would even consider destroying it, not when, as The Ryan pointed out, the entrances on both ends would be relatively easy to defend.
It’s such a massive engineering project that I don’t think there would be any way that some kind of “self-destruct” could possibly have been integrated into it. Any flaw in the walls of the tunnel would bring the whole English channel rushing in.
It’s absolutely enormous. It’s not like in some James Bond movie where you have this tunnel that looks like a railroad tunnel, and the bad guy pushes a button and it collapses. Inside the Chunnel, it’s like, I don’t know, the Astrodome or something, just huge. You’d have to have something like a medium-sized nuclear weapon to blow it up, which would take out most of Folkestone or Calais, too.
And there are three tunnels, too. There are the two big tunnels carrying rail traffic, and then an access tunnel between them which is nearly as big as the main tunnels. All of them through solid rock.
And, anyway, why would anybody want to invade England, or France, either, for that matter? As Peter Pan says to Tiger Lily (in the Mary Martin TV version), “We’re all FRIENDS now…”
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
And how hard would it be to transport troops across the channel not using the Chunnel? Don’t imagine it would be too difficult nowadays.
And, with the way warfare seems to be fought now, troops would be pretty much superfluous until the island was won. It would be bombarded with long-range missles, as well as air-to-air and sea-to-air.
“We are here for this – to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to withstand the blows and to hand them out.” Primo Levi
Yeah, Im with Milo, who needs it? Get a plane & drop some bombs. Too easy.
We covered the chunnel here a long time ago.
Hey, I was talking in Sept to a Brit about the Chunnel & he wouldn’t talk about it at all. Is it something one doesn’t talk about in England?
PS: I wouldn’t put troops in the chunnel, its got trains running thru it all the time.
Anyone else reminded of that scene from Escape From Sobibor when Leon Feldhendler (Alan Arkin) says that if they tried to tunnel under the fence, it would take so long that they would “still be escaping at nine-o’clock in the morning!”?
heh-heh. Light spot in an otherwise dark movie about a terrible time.
Seems to me that you would not try to use the tunnel to make the initial crossing.
You’d find some way across like airborne troops, secure the tunnel entrance and surrounding area ,and use the tunnel to ferry in more material.
Problem is that the build-up of equipment on the aggressors side of the tunnel might be hard to conceal/disguise and would be very vulnerable to a small nuclear strike.
So here’s the invasion scenario that comes to mind. Bad guys get their army together, somehow manage to sneak into the chunnel, make their way to England, strike, retreat back into the chunnel… Then the British army deploy troups on both ends of the chunnel and pick off the stupid invaders one-by-one as they exit the chunnel. Game over man!
Better yet, pull a Moses on them. Wait until the invaders are all in the chunnel and flood the sucker…
We could barely muster sufficient troops for a game of football, never mind manning both sides of the tunnel!
Oh, I don’t know about that. I can just picture it now:
Just FYI: There was considerable opposition in England to any idea of a tunnel for literally generations. “France, the ancient enemy…” etc. For a long time, most people in England were deeply, seriously afraid that either the French or the Germans would use a tunnel to attack. They really looked on the English Channel as their own private moat, keeping the bad guys out, so every time the subject of actually building the thing came up in Parliament, people would panic, muster up all kinds of opposition, and the idea would go away again. It wasn’t until the Common Market days in the 1970’s that people started to get a grip, and it wasn’t until Margaret Thatcher, with her private enterprise ideas, was able to get the ball rolling by keeping the British government basically out of it, and letting private contractors deal with it, that the project was able to move forward at all.
But even nowadays there are still some people who evidently feel that it was all a big mistake. “Someday, mark my words, you’ll wish we didn’t have that, when the Huns come marching through and take over Picadilly.” Or the “Frogs”, or whoever.
So I guess it’s still a very touchy subject.
Also, there are animal rights’ activists who don’t entirely believe the assurances about the anti-rabies guards. Great Britain has been proudly rabies-free since, I think, 1910, and they keep it that way by a rigorous, very serious 6-month quarantine for all animals entering the country, no exceptions. There are a variety of defenses, from chain link fences, to in-the-floor electric zappers, to keep unwanted mammals from crossing into Britain from France, but some people don’t have a lot of faith in them. They need something to worry about, so they worry that French mice and rats are going to reintroduce rabies into the British Isles. Maybe that was what had your friend’s panties in a bunch.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
I agree that if someone wanted to use the Chunnel for invasion they’d first land a conventional force, secure the mouth of chunnel and area (establishing a beachhead, basically) then bring the equipment the the rest of the men on through.
But I think you’re underestimating the vulnerability of the Chunnel. In a real shooting war I think it’d last about a day. a few ‘dambuster’ type bombs dropped onto the channel bed just above the Chunnel would probably breach it. It’s not that far below the surface. Shaped charges could transmit quite a shock wave to the concrete retaing walls. If that didn’t work, use a demolition team to hit it wherever it’s closest to the surface. As a last resort, drop a small tactical nuke on it. There’d be no damage to populations on the shore if a small nuke was detonated in the middle of the Channel.
The Chunnel is not that big. Whoever said it’s the size of the Astrodome inside is completely wrong. The main tunnels are big enough for the trains and not much more. Maybe 30-50 feet in diameter? The return tunnel in the middle is even smaller.
Oh, I don’t know about that. I can just picture it now…
…as the massed hordes of the Bundeswehr and l’Armee Francaise stream through the Channel Tunnel in armoured Eurostar trains, the 1st Battalion of the Sarcastic Guards finish morning tea, pack up the stumps and prepare for war. With the working-class oiks forming the unusual “human minefield” tactic, the Eton-educated companies man the machine-guns. A fierce desire to fend off the alien invaders, with their evil openness regarding matters sexual, and their fiendishly classless social welfare programs, stiffens the sinew of every Briton on the front line.
As the invaders reach the tunnel’s mouth the unshaven ranks of the 5th Royal Souvenir Regiment, recruited from London’s cut-throat heart, line up, striking terror into the hearts of the French and German soldiers with their fearsome battlecry of “Apples and pears, dog and bone, cor blimey strike a light, Fergie commemorative tea-towels only £15 a throw!”. The invaders, already in disarray, are further broken by the withering scorn poured down on them from the ridges surrounding the tunnel. As morale crumbles the retreat becomes a headlong rush, with many a soldier captured in through the cunning plan of blocking the tunnels with trains abandoned by striking rail workers.
…and the rest of us Brits look forward to another sixty years of “Well I didn’t fight on the Normandy beaches for homosexuals / communists / liberals / sex and violence on TV / drugs on the streets / the youth of today…”
Perhaps I should elaborate…
As some of you have mentioned I’m assuming securing the chunnel as part of an overall invasion, not sneaking an army in exclusively thru it.
The night before D-day you drop several dozen squads of commandos behind the lines to take control of the entrance. Then once the main invasion has secured a beach head along the coast, if it includes the tunnel entrance, the tanks start rolling in.
I’m wondering what Britain’s (or France’s) worst case, last ditch, when all else fails plan is (short of nuking it) if the above were to happen. Blowing out a section and flooding it would make sense. It would render it useless for the immediate future, but it would not come close to destroying it.
Maybe I’ve just read too many Tom Clancy novels but I know somewhere, in somebody’s file cabinet, there’s a detailed plan for this.
Guess I’ll just have to wait until Rupert Murdoch oks “Secrets of National Security Revealed” for Fox…
I for one welcome our new insect overlords… - K. Brockman
This is not really relevant to the discussion at hand, but:
In Switzerland many of the roads and bridges in mountain passes are mined. It’s a cliché amongst older swiss to say “Hitler didn’t invade Switzerland because he knew it wouldn’t be worth it, since we could have destroyed all the roads.” I personally think that the Axis didn’t bother to invade Switzerland because it was a handy place to hide their money in the eventuality of a defeat, and Switzerland was very accomodating to the Axis powers in many ways (turning back refugees at the border, allowing weapons trains to go from Germany to Italy through Switzerland, etc…)
Also a little off topic; I like the hydrofoil. The view is better and you get all your stewardess instructions(oxygen dance) in 5 different languages
Aw heck, Arnold, you beat me to it! :o
Actually, Switzerland has maintained an armed neutrality since about the 15th Century. The Swiss are quite able to blow up any highway, tunnel, and bridge entering the country; I once read “Switzerland could be taken, but the price would be high.” And remember Cecil’s discussion in the first Straight Dope on Swiss banks? Their purpose was to keep the Germans from finding out about foreign deposits before and during World War II.
Actually, it’s baffling to me that, having sent his forces hundreds of miles to conquer Roumania, Norway, France, Estonia, and the western part of the Soviet Union (it took Mussolini’s stupidity to screw this up), Hitler couldn’t have managed to send the German Navy or the Luftwaffe (or both) 22 miles to invade England. And Switzerland was surrounded by Axis-controlled territory…