All the Countries We've Ever Invaded

by Stuart Laycock

  El Salvador is on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Panama, south-east of Mexico, with Guatemala separating the two. It’s a little way away from some of our more usual spheres of military operation, but we have been in action in its waters and, on one occasion, we even got somebody else to invade it for us.

  Sir Francis Drake, for instance, captured a ship near Sonsonate in El Salvador and took cloth and Chinese porcelain from it, and on 19 July 1587 Thomas Cavendish captured a 120-ton prize off Acajutla.

  In 1721, a bunch of British privateers seem to have conducted a rather belated invasion of the area, belated in the sense that, by the time they invaded, the war was already over. Under Captain George Shelvocke, they arrived in Acajutla with a prize ship La Sacra Familia, which they had captured off the port. They were then informed by the local authorities that since the war of the Quadruple Alliance was over, they were now to be treated as pirates. Shelvocke eventually got back to London in 1722 and ended up being tried for piracy there.

  In 1932, during a peasant rebellion in El Salvador, fearful for the safety of British nationals, we persuaded the Canadian government to send two destroyers, Skeena and Vancouver, to anchor off Acajutla, El Salvador’s main port. A heavily armed landing party was sent ashore and a compromise was reached with reluctant port officials, who didn’t want any foreign troops ashore, whereby the Canadians were at least allowed to fortify the land end of the pier. Eventually, El Salvador’s government persuaded us there that was no threat to British nationals and the landing party returned to Skeena; invasion finished and not too much harm done really.

  Equatorial Guinea

  Confusingly, none of the land of Equatorial Guinea actually lies on the equator, it’s all north of the line, except for a little island that lies to the south.

  In 1778, Portugal ceded the territory of Equatorial Guinea to Spain, and in the nineteenth century we set up an anti-slaving base on the island of Bioko, then known as Fernando Po. In 1827, Spain abandoned the island and we took control. It wasn’t really much of an invasion since we leased the base from Spain, but we did make ourselves at home. We named the base Port Clarence after the Duke of Clarence, and William Fitzwilliam Owen conducted vigorous anti-slaving operations so that in three years his forces freed 2,500 slaves and detained twenty ships.

  In 1840, the naval ship Wolverine, under Wilham Tucker, captured the Island of Corisco, off what is now Equatorial Guinea, and destroyed the slaving establishments there. The fighting must have been fierce because of the landing party of forty, ten were killed or wounded.

  Gradually, from 1843 onwards, Spanish control was re-asserted over Bioko, and our lease finally ended in 1855.

  Eritrea

  Many Brits today would struggle to find Eritrea quickly on a map, but there is a clue in the name. The Red Sea used to be called the Erythraean Sea, from the ancient Greek word for red, erythros, and Eritrea has a long Red Sea coast.

  Despite the haziness of the knowledge of many modern Brits regarding Eritrea, we have invaded it a couple of times, and we have been intimately connected with some key stages in its history.

  Our first invasion was actually aimed at the Emperor of Ethiopia, Tewodros, who had taken some Brits prisoner and refused to release them, so we will deal again with this invasion in the section on Ethiopia. But let’s just note here that the British expeditionary force commanded by Sir Robert Napier landed in 1867 at Zula, about 30 miles south of Massawa, Eritrea’s main port. In an impressive feat of engineering, they rapidly built new piers (of the cargo kind rather than the promenade up-and-down kind) and started building a railway heading inland and roads for the force, which included a number of elephants to carry the heavy guns. What expedition would be complete without elephants I hear you asking? The expedition was a great success from the Victorians’ point of view, though clearly not from Tewodros’ point of view as he ended up dead.

  At about the same time as Napier’s expedition, the Khedive of Egypt was conducting his own invasions of parts of Ethiopia, or Abyssinia as it then was. In the process he leased the port of Massawa from the sultan. Subsequently, we ended up with troops there as part of our Egyptian operations, but frankly we weren’t very interested in it, so in 1885, to prevent the French getting it, we handed it over to the Italians.

  This, as it turns out, may not have been a very wise move and shows the problems of always assuming that your former enemies will also be your future enemies and that your former friends will always be your future friends. Massawa became a key element in the Italian colony of Eritrea, which the Italians put together in the late nineteenth century and which then became a key element in Mussolini’s African Empire, with which we were at war by 1940.

  In January 1941 we were ready to invade Eritrea, and British and Commonwealth units, particularly Indian troops, crossed the border into Eritrea on 19 January. The key battle in the campaign was the bitter Battle of Keren, which lasted from 5 February until 27 March as two opposing forces in many ways quite well matched fought it out. Finally, our side won and Keren fell. Massawa fell shortly afterwards and in June, Assab, a port in southern Eritrea, was also captured. Though after that, and until Italy itself signed an armistice with the Allies in 1943, Italians, with some local support, conducted a guerrilla campaign against British forces.

  We continued to administer Eritrea until 1951 when it was federated with Ethiopia. In 1993, after a long guerrilla war against Ethiopia, and after a UN-supervised referendum, Eritrea was internationally recognised as independent.

  Estonia

  Estonia is the northernmost of the Baltic trio of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It’s right next to Russia, and indeed the territory has spent long periods under Russian domination. Bearing in mind that Britain and Russia haven’t always been exactly the best of friends, it’s no surprise then that we’ve spent a fair bit of time roaming around Estonian waters on military business.

  During the Napoleonic period when we clashed with Russia, some of the action took place in the waters off Estonia (then controlled by Russia). For instance, in June 1808, assorted encounters took place off the Estonian port of Rogervik. The same year, Victory herself, as part of an operation to blockade the Russian fleet, took control of the island of Nargen, finding a useful supply of wood there. And our Admiral Saumarez, when he was in charge of operations in the Baltic, spent a certain amount of time blockading Russian ships in Rogervik.

  With the Crimean War in the 1850s, we were back in Estonian waters reconnoitring Reval (Tallinn) for signs of the Russian fleet, and imposing a blockade (again) in the area. Again, our ships spent time hanging around ‘off Nargen’, obviously a popular Royal Navy destination. We also landed on and captured Arensburg on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, then called Ösel.

  We were fighting in the area again during the First World War, but this time, for a change, alongside the Russians as opposed to against them. The British submarine flotilla in the Baltic is one of those less well-known stories that is still, in many ways, fascinating. Some of the submarines reached Russian-controlled territory via a route that went round the North Cape, but others bravely made their way there through the Baltic under the noses of the German navy. The flotilla was based in Reval and saw a fair amount of action. HMS C32, for instance, was lost while trying to counter the German invasion of three Estonian islands. And the wreck of HMS E18 was discovered off Estonia just recently.

  With the revolution in Russia, the situation changed again, and by the end of 1918 we were helping the Estonians fight assorted Russians. On 26 December, we captured two Bolshevik destroyers, Avtroil and Spartak, that had been shelling Tallinn and handed them over to the Estonians to use, and broadly we gave naval and some air support to Estonian land operations.

  On 2 February 1920, under the Treaty of Tartu, Russia recognised Estonia’s independence. After the Second World War, Estonia would once again find itself under Russian control, and once again today it is independent. But we have played a significant role on
the way in Estonia’s history.

  Ethiopia

  Ethiopia is a fascinating country with a fascinating history that deserves to be much better known, and we, not surprisingly, have played something of a role in it.

  As far back as the early fifteenth century we have a letter from Henry IV intended for the King of Abyssinia. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, however, that we became a major player in the region. By 1855, we were signing a treaty with Abyssinia and by 1868 we were invading it.

  Emperor Tewodros (sounds an exotic name to the average Brit, but it’s basically Theodore), mentioned in the Eritrea section, was having a spot of trouble with local rebels and wrote to assorted European powers requesting their assistance in the matter. When he didn’t get the answers he was looking for, he took the unwise step of grabbing some hostages. After various negotiations had failed we sent in the troops.

  Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier and an expeditionary force from the Bombay Army was given the job. After extensive preparations had been made on the Red Sea Coast (see Eritrea), the force moved inland to face the emperor. Tewodros failed to unite the Abyssinians (Ethiopians) against us, and when his remaining forces faced Napier’s outside Magdala, his capital, on 10 April 1868, for the loss of just two dead from our side, the emperor’s forces were crushed and the hostages were released. Shortly afterwards Tewodros was dead.

  With the war over and having got his title (Napier was soon to become Baron Napier of Magdala, imaginatively enough), Napier withdrew his troops, in the process handing over a lot of expensive military kit to a helpful (to us) local leader, Ras Kassai, who then used it to help himself to become emperor as Yohannes IV. He also picked up a British military adviser, one John Kirkham.

  In the following period, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) had rather more to fear from other directions apart from us. For example, we were on its side against Muhammad Ahmed (see Sudan). It was Italy that started taking a rather intense and unwelcome interest in the area. This culminated in Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, bringing it under Italian control in 1936.

  The good news is that Italian control wasn’t to last long. In the summer of 1940, the Italians picked a fight with us in the region, with a series of probing attacks followed by their conquest of British Somaliland in August.

  We, however, were not going to let Mussolini take over. We soon struck back both in Somaliland and elsewhere, including Ethiopia. Our invasion of Ethiopia was to come from a number of directions. In the south, units advanced into southern Ethiopia from Kenya. In the north, units advanced south from Eritrea after its fall. In addition, Emperor Selassie himself crossed into Ethiopia to lead patriot Ethiopian forces in alliance with Gideon Force, led by Orde Wingate, in a sort of precursor to the role played by Wingate and the famous Chindits later in Burma.

  On 6 April 1941, General Cunningham’s forces advancing from the south took Addis Ababa. On 5 May 1936, the Italians had taken Addis Ababa from Haile Selassie, then on 5 May 1941, five years later, it was Haile Selassie who was entering the city. In July, the Italian stronghold at Jimma fell and finally, in November, the Italians at Gondar also surrendered to British, Commonwealth and Ethiopian troops.

  Fiji

  Ah, Fiji.

  Europeans first started settling permanently on Fiji in the nineteenth century. In 1858, under pressure from other chiefs and from the Americans, King Cakobau offered to sell us the islands. We turned down the offer, partly because we weren’t actually convinced that all of the islands were Cakobau’s to sell, since not everybody recognised him as king of all Fiji.

  By 1871, Cakobau had been made constitutional monarch of Fiji, though a lot of power actually rested with Australian settlers in the cabinet and legislature. Things did not entirely go well, however, with the new kingdom running up heavy debts, and by 1872 we got another offer to take over the islands.

  So eventually, in 1874, Fiji became a British colony. Cakobau himself became Fiji’s second most important chief, but allowed Queen Victoria to become Paramount Chief of Fiji. He died in 1883 and Queen Victoria lasted a bit longer.

  Fiji became independent in 1970.

  Finland

  We saw action in Finnish waters in our war against Russia of 1807–12, one of those wars set amid the chaos of Napoleonic Europe, in which we were temporarily at war with people who at other times were instead fighting the French alongside us.

  There were assorted naval actions. For instance, on 25 July 1809, Princess Caroline, Minotaur, Cerberus and Prometheus, not in this case the cast of some mythological movie, but a British naval squadron, fought a battle with four Russian gunboats and a brig near Hamina. After nineteen Britons and twenty-eight Russians were killed, the Russian boats were captured by the princess and her mythological friends.

  The Russians, not surprisingly, moved fairly fast to end the war when Napoleon invaded them in 1812.

  With the arrival of the Crimean War in the 1850s, we were invading Finnish waters again. We spent quite a lot of time bombarding Russian fortifications from the sea, but in the most dramatic of the incidents we landed and took hundreds of Finnish prisoners (Finnish prisoners from the Russian army, since the Russians controlled the area at the time). This was the Battle of Bomarsund, or rather two Battles of Bomarsund. The first battle was more of a bombardment of the Russian fortress at Bomarsund and notable because Charles Davis Lucas threw a live shell off the ship, performing the earliest act of bravery to be rewarded with a Victoria Cross.

  The Second Battle of Bomarsund was a more dramatic affair. On 13 August 1854, a British fleet landed thousands of French troops and then shelled the fortress until it surrendered. After the surrender, British and French forces made the fortress unusable. About 300 mainly Finnish grenadiers, with Russian officers, were taken to Britain and held prisoner in Lewes, where you can now see the so-called Russian Memorial commemorating twenty-eight Finnish soldiers who died here. The story of their incarceration also makes an interesting aside, with the officers going out riding and shooting, and the soldiers becoming a tourist attraction for some Brits, while other Brits complained that the prisoners were being too well treated.

  Then, bizarrely when you consider that we had been fighting Russians in what is now Finland, about the only time we have attacked Finland, we attacked it in what was then Finland but is now Russia. Confusing eh? On 30 July 1941, to show Churchill’s sudden enthusiasm for Stalin, once the German invasion of Russia had brought him into the war on our side, we managed to get two aircraft carriers into Arctic waters north of Finland and tried to bomb Kirkenes in Norway and Petsamo in Finland (now in Russia). It was a bit of a disaster all round for us, with many Fleet Air Arm planes shot down and not much damage done to the ports.

  France

  When we think of France and invasions, we tend to think of two things: the Norman invasion of England and, going the opposite way across the Channel, D-Day.

  What many Brits are less aware of is the vast number of attacks that went across the Channel into France before that landmark day, 6 June 1944. This is only a small book, but this section on France is going to be quite a big one. It has to be. Our record of sending armed forces south across the Channel has been so persistent over so many centuries that this section can’t be anything other than the longest section in the book.

  One of the first historical references to Brits is to them fighting in France, or Gaul as it then was. Caesar writes that he regularly came across Brits fighting in France. Now, if Caesar was telling the truth here, rather than just making up an excuse to invade us, then he is talking about Brits allied to Gauls, or even perhaps mercenaries. It has been suggested that the presence in Britain of significant numbers of Gallic gold coins may represent what survives of mercenaries’ wages.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t to be long at all until we were seriously invading Gaul/France. Towards the end of the second century, Clodius Albinus led an army from Britain, which probably included plenty of Brits, across the Channel in an
attempt to seize the imperial throne. He got as far as invading Gaul, but not much further. In February AD197 he was decisively defeated by Septimius Severus at Lyon.

  Constantine I tried the same trick, a lot more successfully, in the early fourth century. Again there were probably plenty of Brits in his army. Certainly, Brits would have been in his army in AD312 when he smashed the army of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, before taking it.

  In AD383, Magnus Maximus set off on the same path, leading an army across the Channel from Britain into mainland Europe. He was successful for quite a long time, until it all ended in disaster for him at Aquileia in AD388.

  And in our last outing to mainland Europe, before we walked out of the Roman Empire entirely, in the early fifth century Constantine III led an army from Britain, this time including a general from Britain, Gerontius, south across the Channel into mainland Europe. In 411, though, Constantine III was dead and Britain had rebelled against Rome and resigned from the empire. Our lack of enthusiasm for one of the world’s most famous ancient empires is somewhat ironic, considering how much time we spent building our own in more recent centuries. Or perhaps it just shows we found it more interesting running an empire than being a part of someone else’s.

  Leaving the empire hadn’t removed our interest in invading Gaul, or indeed invading France as it was about to become. The ensuing decades and centuries were to make that very clear.

  One of the first actions taken by Brits that we know about after Roman control ended was when a bunch of them set off to invade Gaul/France. In about 470, the Emperor Anthemius invited a British king (probably from Britain itself, but just possibly from Brittany) to help him against the Visigoths in Gaul. So Riothamus sailed with 10,000 men to Gaul. It wasn’t our most successful invasion of Gaul/France. In fact, it was definitely one of our less successful ones. After a long and bitter battle, Euric and the Visigoths smashed Riothamus’ army and Riothamus took refuge with the Burgundians.