The German so-called siege corps were equipped with steel built gunboats
which could be disassembled and assembled at every location to be desired. They
could be used in [very] shallow lakes or at locations which were inundated
making a normally impossible approach possible. The journalist wondered why the
Dutch army and navy didn’t possessed such gunboats even if they were not detachable
and replace with these ‘floating batteries’ the boats called in the past ‘armed
uitleggers’ [armed guard vessels]. They could be used in the lakes around
Aalsmeer, het Spaarne and so on.
