British home army in the First World War bridge between Tilbury and Gravesend. There were fears that a German fleet protected by mines and submarines could land a 100,000-strong force before the British Grand Fleet could steam the south from its base at Scapa Flow. To counter this threat, the Admiralty redeployed pre-dreadnought battleships and submarines closer to vulnerable ports, expanded the coastwatch and increased patrolling of the North Sea. In October, Churchill responded to Kitchener's call for the Royal Navy to take more specific precautions against invasion by insisting that the role of the Grand Fleet was to eliminate an invader's covering fleet rather than defeat the
Romanian Black Sea Fleet during World War I machine guns. The minelayer "Alexandru cel Bun" was armed with two 37 mm guns and two machine guns, in addition to her load of mines. The main Romanian port of Constanța was leased to a Russian naval squadron, headed by the battleship "Rostislav". This, combined with the fall of the port to the Central Powers during the Second Battle of Cobadin, rendered the small Northern port of Sulina as the base for the Romanian Black Sea Fleet. On 13 November 1916, the German minelaying submarine "UC-15" set off to lay mines off Sulina. However, she only managed to lay two