However, this was far from the last action between Britain and Denmark. In the so-called Gunboat War in the early nineteenth century, so-called, not surprisingly, because the Danes took to using smaller gunboats against us, there was a series of actions, including for instance, our invasion and occupation of the Island of Anholt in order to control its lighthouse, until the Treaty of Kiel finally ended hostilities in 1814.
Denmark was invaded and occupied by Germany on 9 April 1940. A few days later Britain occupied the Faroe Islands, which were then part of Denmark and are now self-governing under the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark. The British operation was called Operation Valentine and it seems a reasonable name, since apart from an official protest, the occupation was met with little resistance. British veterans have put up a plaque in Tórshavn Cathedral thanking the locals for their hospitality and a fair number of British soldiers married local girls. The occupation lasted until 1945.
During the Second World War, British ships saw action in the seas off Greenland, which is also autonomous within the Kingdom of Denmark. In the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the strait between Iceland and Greenland, HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck on 24 May 1941. And in the Denmark Strait again, in March 1943, HMS Glasgow intercepted the German blockade runner Regensburg. We did not, however, get involved in the slightly bizarre and little-known war on Greenland itself, in which US troops and Greenland’s own army, the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol, battled Nazis who had landed several times to set up clandestine weather stations on Greenland’s east coast, which in the days before satellites would have given them vital meteorological information for their war effort.
The RAF conducted assorted operations over Denmark during the war and SOE worked with the Danish Resistance.
In May 1945, our army marched into Denmark again, but this time it was to a warm welcome from the citizens, as we were there to help supervise the German surrender and work with the Danes, not against them.
Djibouti
Little Djibouti, tucked away on Africa’s eastern coast near the mouth of the Red Sea, has in some ways a fairly eccentric history. It was the site of an attempt by Imperial Russia to create an African empire to match those of other nineteenth-century European imperial powers. In 1889, a bunch of Russians led by one Nikolai Ivanovitch Achinov decided it would be a good idea to establish a colony at Sagallo. The French disagreed, since they were also busy establishing their presence in the area, and shelled the Russians until they surrendered.
British interest in the area comes in the Second World War. After the Fall of France in 1940, French Somaliland, as Djibouti was then known, came under Vichy control. And it stayed that way for a surprisingly long time. Even after British forces had wiped out Italian resistance in the surrounding regions and started to blockade the country, French Somaliland remained under Vichy control. In fact, when its governor, Dupoont, surrendered in December 1942, after a blockade of 101 days, it held the unenviable record of the being the last French African colony to abandon Vichy. After the surrender, Free French forces supported by British armoured cars moved into Djibouti to take control.
Dominica
One of a line of islands in the Caribbean running north from South America, some Brits tend to confuse Dominica with the much bigger, but similarly named, Dominican Republic.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus named the island after Sunday (Dies Dominica being Church Latin for Sunday and Domenica being Sunday in Italian), because that’s the day he discovered it. To be fair to him, I guess he wasn’t thinking too much about potentially confused people in the twenty-first century.
Dominica is part of the Lesser Antilles. The Antilles are nothing to do with antelopes or anteaters as some children, and maybe some grown-ups probably think. The name comes from the mythical island of Antilia, meaning the Island Opposite, which was a sort of Atlantis-like island that people used to stick on maps opposite Europe when they weren’t entirely sure what was out there.
For a long time after being discovered by Europeans, though, they only dropped in occasionally, usually while on their way somewhere else. For example, in 1606 George Percy called by before heading off elsewhere, and the same year Captain Henry Challons, heading for Virginia, rescued a marooned Spanish friar from the island. In 1607, Captain John Smith visited on his way to establish Jamestown.
Then in 1627 we launched a sort of virtual invasion. Charles I granted the island to the Earl of Carlisle without anything very much being done about it. Subsequently, in 1635, the French claimed it, but they didn’t do very much about it either, and in 1660 we agreed with them that Dominica shouldn’t be settled and should be left to the Caribs.
Inevitably, some English pirates turned up, but so did English and French foresters looking for wood.
Finally, in the 1720s the French took control of Dominica. The scene was thus set for the British Invasion of Dominica in 1761. After the successful invasion of Canada we had a lot of spare troops with time on their hands. Pitt wanted to seize something to look good ‘at home and abroad’. Thus, on 6 June, a day usually remembered for a rather different invasion, the British fleet under Lord Rollo arrived at Dominica. At 1pm Rollo told the locals he was about to land and demanded they surrender. When by 4pm nothing much had happened, we landed 700 men. Firing broke out and eventually we stormed a French battery, with two of our troops being killed in the process. In the morning the locals surrendered and our troops were authorised to plunder until noon.
Thus we took control of Dominica. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 confirmed our control, but then the French took it back from us in 1778 during the American War of Independence, invading the island before our forces there even knew that the French were at war with us. Not very sporting. In 1783, we got it back under the 1783 Treaty of Paris (another Treaty of Paris), but not all the locals were that keen on our return and we ended up fighting some of those who had been armed by the French.
Dominica became independent in 1978.
Dominican Republic
New Year’s Day 1586 wasn’t a particularly happy New Year’s Day for the people of Santo Domingo. In fact, it was a pretty miserable one. Francis Drake turned up and attacked the city. While Drake distracted the defenders by firing at the city and pretending to attempt a landing, a landing party of 800 men under Carleill attacked the town from the west, scattering the defenders they met. Fairly quickly, Carleill’s men got inside the defences and, after that, Santo Domingo was theirs. For a time. Drake’s men set about looting it, and then Drake set about putting the town up for ransom. He started off by demanding 1 million ducats, and when the Spanish refused, Drake ordered his men to start destroying buildings as a bargaining tactic. The final price agreed was a mere 25,000 ducats – even today British tourists aren’t particularly renowned for their bargaining skills abroad.
Where Drake had gone, other English ships would follow.
In 1655, we were back, and back in strength, for what would turn out to be a major military fiasco. Cromwell had decided to strike a major blow against Spain and dispatched Venables and Penn with a massive expeditionary force to the Caribbean to do something about it. On 14 April they landed on the island, but some 30 miles from their target Santo Domingo. They had no water bottles and they needed them. Four days later, they had almost made it as far as their objective when they were ambushed by a few hundred locals. It was all a bit of a disaster from an English point of view.
Eventually, after bombarding the city and some other rather ineffective actions, the expedition sailed away to capture Jamaica instead.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the French had taken control of Santo Domingo. In 1809, after assorted actions in the area, the British Army under the command of Major General Hugh Lyle Carmichael helped the locals take it back from the French. Santo Domingo surrendered on 6 July 1809.
3
EAST TIMOR TO FRANCE
East Timor
East Timor was controlled by the Portuguese, and sinc
e the Portuguese have long been our friends, it’s not a place where armed Britons have spent much time. But they have spent some time there.
There was a possibility of conflict during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1812 we temporarily took over the part of Timor controlled by the Dutch. The problem was that the Dutch and Portuguese didn’t always entirely agree where the boundary lay between the bits of Timor they controlled. And since we had temporarily taken over the Dutch bit of Timor, we had also temporarily taken over its border disputes as well. This led to some encounters with our Portuguese friends that, as it turns out, were rather less than friendly. In 1812, a Dutchman had been dispatched in a ship with a British flag to inform people in some areas that they were now under British instead of Dutch control. He was trying to reach Maubara, a disputed region claimed by both sides (now in East Timor), but when he encountered the Portuguese commander at Batugade, he was told that he could not go there and that it was Portuguese. The commander, clearly no diplomat, underlined his message by pointing to the British flag on the boat and saying that it was only good for wiping their backsides.
During the Second World War, Portugal was neutral. However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to help protect the flank of the Dutch-controlled part of Timor, a combined Dutch and Australian force took control of the Portuguese part of Timor on 17 December 1941. In February 1942, the Japanese invaded and the Allied troops with local Timorese volunteers fought back in a bitter and brave year-long guerrilla campaign. In 1943, most of the remaining Allied troops were evacuated, and an American submarine, the USS Gudgeon, took off twenty-eight men – Australian, English, Portuguese and Filipino – pretty much the final survivors, on 10 February. After this evacuation, some of the Timorese fought on against the Japanese. The Australian Brigadier Dyke, commander of Timforce, arrived in Dili on 22 September 1945 to help organise the Japanese surrender.
In 1974 a left-wing coup succeeded in Portugal, and Portugal announced that it would withdraw from East Timor. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor. A long guerrilla campaign ensued against the Indonesians, and in August 1999 a referendum showed a majority of East Timorese in favour of independence. Violence errupted and in September 1999 INTERFET, the International Force for East Timor, arrived to help restore order. Units of the British armed forces played key roles. With HMS Glasgow offshore, British Army Gurkhas and SBS Royal Marines moved in with the vanguard of INTERFET on 20 September. British troops helped to secure the airport, harbour and key road junctions. On 1 October, a Gurkha patrol fired the first shots of the mission, helping to free refugees.
Ecuador
Ecuador has avoided official British invasion, but in its early period, when under Spanish control, it did receive a fair amount of semi-official and unofficial British attention.
The Galapagos Islands, part of Ecuador, were first unintentionally discovered by a Bishop of Panama who was somewhat off-course. But it was British buccaneers and privateers who were among the first permanent or semi-permanent settlers. It was a British buccaneer, William Ambrose Cowley, who first charted the islands and gave them British names like James, Charles, Albemarle and Narborough. While they weren’t engaged in such cartographic pursuits, the Brits spent some time invading the mainland of Ecuador. A particularly favourite destination was, perhaps inevitably, Ecuador’s main port, Guayaquil. In 1687, British pirates under George d’Hout attacked the port. And again in 1709, because we were at war with Spain, Rogers, Courtney and Dampier – not in this case an advertising agency or law firm, but in fact, another bunch of privateers – looted the town and demanded ransom, only to have second thoughts and depart hastily when there was an outbreak of yellow fever. Rogers also managed to rescue Alexander Selkirk, the reputed model for Robinson Crusoe, and Rogers himself later became the first royal governor of the Bahamas.
Another Brit, Darwin, famously did less military things with finches on the Galapagos Islands in the nineteenth century.
As with Colombia, Brits played a crucial role in the liberation of Ecuador. For instance, English, Scots and Irish volunteers of the Albion unit, who had been protecting the ammunition train at the Battle of Pichincha, outside Quito, in 1822, arrived in the battle just at the crucial time when a veteran Spanish unit, the Aragon, looked likely to smash the rebel lines. Instead, largely thanks to the Albion, it was the Aragon who suddenly found themselves in deep trouble and shortly afterwards the rebels were able to advance towards Quito.
Egypt
We have invaded Egypt quite frequently, starting first with the Crusades. People tend to think of the Crusades as purely happening in the Holy Land, but there was quite a lot going on elsewhere at times. And Egypt’s one of the places Brits invaded.
An English contingent in 1249 decided to join the Seventh Crusade, led by Louis IX. It wasn’t a wise decision, and the English knights would have lived to regret it. That is, if they had lived. First, when they arrived at the port of Damietta, they fell out with the French, but the quarrel was patched up in time for the English to join the march south towards Cairo. The leader of the English contingent was one William Longsword. Longsword but perhaps not quite long enough, since, along with all but about one of his followers, he was cut down at the Battle of Mansourah in February 1250. Mind you, the French didn’t do much better there. In fact, they had an even worse time. Thousands were killed or captured in the battle and the pursuit after it, and Louis IX himself ended up as a prisoner.
We left Egypt alone after that, but by the late eighteenth century we were back. To be fair, it was Napoloen who started it. He decided he would invade Egypt partly as a way of getting at British India. It does rather make you wonder about Napoleon, since it is still a long, long way from Egypt to India.
Anyway, Napoleon took Egypt fairly easily, in 1798, but then Nelson destroyed his fleet at the Battle of Abukir Bay, or Battle of the Nile, on 1 August. Nelson managed to get his ships on both sides of the French fleet, which from the French point of view was definitely a bad thing. After failure at the Siege of Acre, Napoleon returned to France, and then it was our turn to invade Egypt. Our Admiral Keith cooperated with the Mamelukes to attack the remaining French troops, and even though the French won the Battle of Heliopolis, they lost a land battle to us at Abukir when we landed a British army under General Abercromby there. Eventually, the French surrendered to us and we got the Rosetta Stone as well, which was handy from an Egyptology point of view.
We invaded Egypt again in March 1807, but, in the face of opposition from locals, we didn’t achieve very much.
Then we were back in 1840. In the Syrian war (or second Syrian war, or Egyptian-Ottoman war, or second Egyptian-Ottoman war – why have one name for a war when you can have several?) our naval forces helped push back the Egyptian forces that had taken a lot of ground from the Ottoman forces (hence the Egyptian-Ottoman thing) in Syria (hence the Syrian thing, though quite a lot of it was in what is now Lebanon) and the coast to the south (see Israel). Commodore Charles Napier followed this by turning up at Alexandria with his squadron in November 1840 and blockading it before negotiating a peace treaty.
In 1854, the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps was granted permission to build the Suez Canal, and its opening in 1869 gave us a whole new strategic interest in Egypt. In 1875, with the Khedive of Egypt in serious financial difficulties, Disraeli stepped in to buy the Khedive’s Suez Canal company shares. Gradually, British and French influence over Egypt increased, and in 1881 there was a national uprising. On 11 July 1882, British ships opened fire on the defences at Alexandria with HMS Alexandra firing the first shot. The defences were silenced, but a resulting fire in the city destroyed many buildings. In August 1882, a British force under Lieutenant-General Garnet Wolseley landed and took control of the Canal Zone before destroying the rebel forces at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Prince Arthur, son of Victoria and Albert, was present at both the action at Mahuta and at Tel el-Kebir in command of the 1st Guards Brigade. Cairo was taken the next day. To a great extent we now con
trolled Egypt, even though there was still a Khedive. Sorry if this all sounds a bit condensed, but, as you can see, the story of our involvement with Egypt is a big one, and this is only a modest book.
In 1914, the Khedive was pro-Ottoman, so we chucked him out and put a Khedive more friendly to us in power. And when the Turks invaded Egypt we pushed them out. But after riots in 1922 we gave Egypt independence. Sort of. Then in the Second World War, we had to push the Italians and Germans out of Egypt on the other side. In the period after the Second World War relations between Britain and Egypt became increasingly tense, with Britain keen to hang on to control of the Suez Canal and Egyptians keen to see us depart.
In 1954, Nasser came to power and an agreement was reached between Britain and Egypt for Britain to withdraw its forces from the Canal Zone in 1956. This went ahead, but a separate crisis had developed over funding of the construction of the Aswan Dam. When Britain and the US withdrew their contributions to the dam project, Nasser retaliated by nationalising the canal. On 29 October 1956, Israel attacked Egypt from the east. On 5 November, we and the French launched our invasion of Suez. Air attacks targeted the Egyptian air force and British and French paratroopers went in. On 6 November there were sea and helicopter landings. Militarily, the British and French invasion was on its way to being a success. Diplomatically, though, it was a disaster. UN pressure forced a ceasefire at midnight on 6 November and pressure from the UN, US and the Soviet Union forced Britain and France to withdraw their forces.
El Salvador
All the Countries We've Ever Invaded Page 8