In 1888, Brunei became a British protectorate. Unfortunately we couldn’t do much to protect it against the Japanese when they invaded in December 1941.
However, in 1945 we were back. Or to be more accurate, the Australians were, liberating the territory from the Japanese in the delightfully named Operation Oboe Six. Subsequently, an interim government was formed under the British Military Administration, which took control before civilian administration was re-established.
Then in December 1962 British forces were in action in Brunei again when the Brunei Rebellion broke out. Ghurkas were rushed by air from Singapore to assist the sultan, and with the help of subsequent British reinforcements and local support, the rebellion was eventually beaten. In one of the more dramatic moments of the action, marines of 42 Commando arrived in landing craft to raid Limbang and free prisoners taken by the rebels.
Brunei became independent from Britain on 1 January 1984.
Bulgaria
Bulgaria’s a lovely country in many ways but, for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention from British invaders. Not that I imagine it’s disappointed about that fact.
There is a rather confusing reference in a text to the presence of 1,000 English knights at the Battle of Nicopolis in Bulgaria in 1396. Nothing much confusing about the battle itself. The Turks had been making their presence felt in Bulgaria and a crusade was announced. But when the crusaders finally arrived to besiege Turkish-occupied Nicopolis, a Turkish army arrived to fight them and the crusaders suffered a crushing defeat. The confusion lies in the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much evidence in England of 1,000 English knights, plus all their assorted baggage and hangers-on heading east for sunny Bulgaria at the time. And frankly you’d think someone would have noticed, particularly if a large chunk of them had never returned from the battlefield.
We were definitely in Bulgaria during the Crimean War (1853–56) because on the way to the Crimea our forces popped into the country for about three months to help the Turks, who by this stage were our allies and controlled Bulgaria against the Russians, who had a Bulgarian Legion on their own side during the war. All very confusing but presumably our leaders at the time understood it. Varna became a major naval base, and even today you can see a memorial to all the Britons who died there of cholera during the Crimean War. So, not the happiest of times for our folks.
By the First World War, the Russians, who had been our enemies, were now our allies and the Turks, who had been our allies, were our enemies. Got that? The Bulgarians, at least, were still on the other side. Most emphatically. We fought a bitter campaign against them in northern Greece, of which more in the Greece section, but by 25 September 1918 the British 26th Division was poised to cross the Serbian-Bulgarian boundary. This they did and Bulgaria surrendered two days later. The 27th Division meanwhile advanced into Bulgaria as far as Krupnik and beyond.
After it was all over, we had troops stationed here for the occupation of Bulgaria for a bit.
Burkina Faso
It used to be called Upper Volta. Many Brits didn’t know much about the country as Upper Volta, and changing the name to Burkina Faso hasn’t altered things in that respect. It’s a landlocked country in West Africa. If you’re ever in a quiz where you’re being asked about countries that border lots of other countries, Burkina Faso is worth a thought because it has six neighbouring countries: Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast.
When the French occupied the area that is today Burkina Faso, they took control of territory previously controlled by a number of kingdoms with interesting histories and cultures that deserve to be much better known.
In 1898, we had the opportunity to come to the aid of the ruler of the Mossi kingdom, Wobogo. The French were attacking Ougadougou, and Wobogo requested our help. Wobogo was forced to retreat and launch a guerrilla war against the French, and we then sent an expedition under Colonel Northcott to take Ougadougou back. Our forces were only a short way from Ougadougou, however, when they received news that the British government had agreed with the French at the Conference of Paris that the area would be in the French sphere of influence. Northcott thereupon withdrew. Invasion over and Wobogo was abandoned by us.
Burma
Did you know that in the nineteenth century we fought not one, not two, but three wars against Burma? Yes, there was a First Burma War, a Second Burma War and a Third as well.
The first war was a bitter and bloody affair. The Burmese Empire had been expanding west into areas such as Assam, while British influence had been expanding eastwards from India. A clash between the two was perhaps inevitable.
Early in the war, Burmese forces advanced further, and even managed to capture Cox’s Bazar (still the name of a town in Bangladesh) and cause some panic in Calcutta (Kolkata). We decided to strike back deep inside Burma, landing an expeditionary force at the port of Yangon (Rangoon) in 1824. Bitter fighting followed and cost both sides heavily, but with our forces slowly pushing the Burmese back, a month’s armistice resulted in September 1825. We demanded assorted territorial concessions and, among other demands, a £2 million indemnity, in the days when £2 million was a huge amount of money. Eventually negotiations broke down and the Burmese tried one more military move. This was repelled with the aid of a flotilla of gunboats at the Battle of Prome. Finally, in 1826, the Burmese agreed to a peace deal, in which the indemnity had been reduced to £1 million, still a vast amount at the time.
In 1852 we were back. The Second Burma War started in extremely dubious circumstances, which have led to accusations that Brits deliberately provoked it. We occupied Rangoon on 12 April and Prome in October. Even though no peace treaty was ever officially signed, we effectively won and annexed a chunk of southern Burma. During the war, Rear Admiral Charles Austen died of cholera at Prome. He’s a naval officer with an interesting career in his own right, but as the brother of author Jane Austen, it seems strange there hasn’t been more focus on him. Perhaps a biopic starring Colin Firth is in order.
In 1885 we were involved in the Third Burma war. We had been getting nervous about increasing French influence in the country and there was also a legal dispute over the amount of teak being extracted. We gave the Burmese an ultimatum. They rejected it. We invaded. And invaded quickly. In November, in a lightning advance, under the spectacularly named Major General Harry North Dalrymple Prendergast, a force moved along the Irrawaddy River and captured the Burmese capital at Mandalay and the Burmese king. On 1 January 1886 we annexed Burma. With our annexation of the country a resistance war started that dragged on for years.
Then in January 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma. They rapidly took Rangoon and our forces had to make an exhausting and grim withdrawal through Burma up the Irrawaddy. Despite the desperation of the situation, Lieutenant General William Slim managed to hold the Burma Corps together and, by May 1942, the withdrawal had come to an end. In late 1942 we struck back, attacking into the Arakan. Sadly the attack didn’t make much progress. But Orde Wingate’s first Chindit campaign managed to hit back at the Japanese far behind the front line. In 1944, the Japanese launched a desperate assault into India to try to take Imphal and Kohima. After bitter fighting the Japanese were thrown back, and Slim’s Fourteenth Army began to pursue them through Burma, while behind their lines the Japanese suffered continued Chindit attacks. Meanwhile, some Burmese nationalists who had previously sided with the Japanese in the hope of winning independence had already become disenchanted with them, and as the Japanese fell back, these Burmese switched sides. Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, brought his Burmese National Army over to us. Rangoon fell in the interestingly named Operation Dracula in May 1945 after a Gurkha parachute battalion dropped on Elephant Point and the 26th Indian Infantry Division landed from ships.
After the Second World War, Aung San helped negotiate the shape of an independent Burma but was assassinated in 1947. Burma became independent in 1948.
Burundi
Burun
di is one of those countries that may have to be classified as a bit of a near miss for us on the invasion front. In 1856, a British Indian Army officer, Hanning Speke, became part of a British expedition to explore the area of Central Africa where Burundi is situated, and he is sometimes quoted as being one of the first Europeans, or indeed, the first European to enter Burundi. But instead of becoming part of the British Empire as the European powers carved up Africa, the area eventually went to Germany.
In the First World War, the region became a battle zone between the European powers. A British naval force did see action on Lake Tanganikya and it may have operated in what are now Burundi’s waters and against targets on the shore, but so far I don’t have any evidence for that. Of course, if you do, please let me know.
British forces also advanced south from what is now Uganda to Bukoba (in Tanzania) on the shores of Lake Victoria, but it was the Belgians advancing from the then Belgian Congo to the west who occupied Burundi. After the war Belgium took control of the territories as a League of Nations Mandate. We got the Bugufi area, which according to some evidence was administered by the Germans as part of Urundi, the forerunner to Burundi, to incorporate into Tanganikya. However, since the area in question stayed part of Tanganikya and is now part of Tanzania, it doesn’t really qualify as an invasion of Burundi.
2
CAMBODIA TO DOMINICAN
Cambodia
I grew up in the 1970s seeing images of death and destruction in Cambodia on TV.
When we think of violence and Cambodia, we tend to think of the Khmer Rouge and the horrors of their period in power. And many people will know of America’s war efforts here prior to that period, but it’s not a place many associate with the British Army. Yet we have been here.
During the Second World War, a Vichy French administration ran the country until March 1945, when the Japanese ended French control and interned many of the members of the French administration. In August, Japan surrendered, and in October 1945 our Lieutenant Colonel E.D. Murray moved into Phnom Penh with a detachment of Gurkhas to supervise the surrender and disarming of the Japanese troops.
In November 1945, our troops were involved in an operation with the cooperation of surrendered Japanese troops to take much-needed food supplies from Phnom Penh to Saigon. And by 25 November, the security situation was sufficiently under control for Murray to start formal surrender procedures.
The French were keen to return to Cambodia, and we assisted them. Shortly after our forces arrived in Cambodia, the French resumed control, though not for long. The fact is that, as we see later, particularly in the case of Vietnam, our occupation of this region did play a significant role in its dramatic history.
Cameroon
The country lies on the west coast of Africa, east of Nigeria. As with many other African countries, Britain took an early interest in this one because it wanted slaves it could transport across the Atlantic. And, again, as with a lot of other African countries, once we had turned against the slave trade we took an interest in suppressing it here, attempting to enforce a number of slavery abolition treaties.
However, it was the Germans who took over Cameroon, establishing their rule here in 1884. They weren’t to control it for long, though.
In 1914 we were at war with Germany and Cameroon was an early target for us, and we probably thought a pretty easy one. It wasn’t that easy. Things didn’t start well from our point of view. Three columns sent into Cameroon all ran into trouble due to difficult terrain and German ambushes. But the French and Belgians were also advancing from other directions. With British and French ships shelling targets ashore, Douala fell on 27 September 1914. Garoua fell to our forces in June 1915. But this, a fiercely fought and little-known war, did not finally end until 1916. After the First World War, Cameroon became a League of Nations Mandate territory and was split into a British-controlled part and a French-controlled part.
We sort of almost helped to invade Cameroon again during the Second World War. On 27 August 1940, the Free French emissaries LeClerc and Boislambert set off from the British Cameroons to the French Cameroons by canoe to take control of the territory. And after the disastrous episode of Dakar (see Senegal), in 1940, the British and Free French flotilla headed south to Cameroon instead. But when it got to the Wouri River in Cameroon, our ships were called elsewhere, and so it was without us that De Gaulle and the rest of his Free French contingent landed in Douala to popular acclaim on 8 October. It was a huge step on De Gaulle’s road to building up the Free French. A huge step he ultimately took without us.
In 1960, the French part of Cameroon became independent and in 1961 the UN organised a plebiscite in the British-controlled part. Under this plebiscite the northern part of the territory we controlled opted to become part of Nigeria, while the southern part opted to become part of Cameroon.
Canada
Bearing in mind the significant numbers of French speakers in Canada today, it won’t come as a surprise that much of Canada’s history has involved a competition for power between us and the French.
Having said that, the first Europeans who reached what is now Canada were probably Vikings. Some claim that Irish Saint Brendan, Welsh Prince Madoc and Scottish Prince Henry Sinclair may also have visited. And the Portuguese definitely had a go at it as well. Labrador, for instance, is named after a Portuguese explorer Lavrador, and assorted Portuguese turned up in the area in the early sixteenth century, either claiming bits of it or just going fishing for cod. Would a Portuguese Canada be a very different place? Probably, but we’ll never know. Perhaps, being used to the Algarve and all that, they just found Canada’s climate in winter a bit too challenging. Anyway, for whatever reason, they subsequently focused their attention elsewhere.
Instead, it was the French who started taking a serious (and from our point of view unwelcome) interest in the area. In 1534, Cartier turned up and claimed a chunk for France, and by 1608 Champlain was founding Quebec City.
And we were keen on the area, too. After all, we’re not used to Algarve-style weather in this country. John Cabot had already visited Newfoundland at the end of the fifteenth century, and in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert occupied a part of Newfoundland (which curiously enough was ‘Land Newly Found by Europeans’, although it had been found a long time beforehand by both the locals and the Vikings) and established St John’s. By 1610, Henry Hudson was lurking in Hudson’s Bay. It’s good that he’s remembered through the bay because his immediate future after 1610 wasn’t a particularly bright one. In fact it was pretty grim. Well, very grim. In 1611, his crew mutinied and dumped him and a few others in a small boat never to be seen again. In the 1620s, the Scots tried to settle in Nova Scotia (New Scotland), but found the French (and the locals) weren’t too keen on the idea. Then in 1670 the Hudson Bay Company was founded.
There was a lot of fighting against both French and locals ahead before we could take control of the whole of Canada. Already in the mid-seventeenth century the Beaver Wars erupted in parts of what is now the USA and Canada. These wars in some sense sound amusing, but in fact they were a bloody conflict between the Iroquois Confederation, backed by us, and the Algonquin, backed by the French, for control of the fur trade. And then there were numerous wars with us and our local allies fighting the French and their local allies, some of which were part of wider wars with different names and some of which have different names even in North America. It can be quite confusing.
Thus, the first war from 1689 to 1697, which we’ll call King William’s War, has also been called St Castin’s War and the Second Indian War, and it happens to also be the North American section of the Nine Years’ War which is also known as the War of the League of Augsburg or the War of the Grand Alliance. Confused? You should be. Anyway, King William’s War was a sort of draw, in which, after assorted fighting, everyone pretty much ended up back where they began.
Queen Anne’s War ran from 1702 to 1713. When it was over, the French accepted our claims to the areas o
f Hudson’s Bay, Acadia and Newfoundland (but not Cape Breton) at the Treaty of Utrecht.
The next war is Father Rale’s War (also known as Dummer’s War, Lovewell’s War and Gray Lock’s War – always nice to have a choice). Father Rale was a missionary who was connected with the start of the war, and in it we faced locals rather than the French. We sort of won on the mainland, but weren’t so successful in Nova Scotia and were forced to make concessions to the Mi’kmaq.
Then there was King George’s War from 1744 to 1748. In 1745, after a six-week siege, we took Louisbourg (on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia) only to hand it back at the end of the war in return for Madras in India, a global swap that, understandably, didn’t go down too well with the local New Englanders who had fought to capture it.
Anyway, the war didn’t really end in 1748 because in some sense it dragged on into Father le Loutre’s War of 1749–55. This was us against the Mi’kmaq and the Wabanaki Confederacy, who had French support. Our founding of Halifax sort of started the war and it ended with our victory at the Battle of Fort Beausejour.
But just as King George’s War led into Father le Loutre’s War, so that war led into the French and Indian War of 1754–63. In 1755 we started expelling the French-speaking Acadians and continued doing so after the siege of Louisbourg in 1758. By 1760, following assorted battles, including the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Battle of the Thousand Islands, we had taken control of Quebec and Montreal. After the treaty that ended the war, all France had left in what is now Canada were the small islands of St Pierre and Miquelon.
All the Countries We've Ever Invaded Page 5