Fishguard becomes a case study in how wishful planning can cripple an invasion before battle. Napoleon's balloon proposal supplies an intentionally absurd benchmark: enormous fires would heat the air, then unheated balloons would drift troops across the Channel. Operation Sea Lion offers a more modern comparison because German forces still had to cross defended waters, land coherently, and sustain troops ashore. Even control of the daylight sky would leave invasion traffic exposed to the Royal Navy at night. Logistics and maritime control are the practical tests that each grand invasion concept has to survive.
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Why the Fishguard invasion plan was unusually fragile
The opening compares Fishguard with other schemes to invade Britain and highlights the maritime and logistical assumptions that made the 1797 plan exceptionally weak.