All the Countries We've Ever Invaded

by Stuart Laycock

  And it wasn’t just Italy’s western side we were interested in. We did a lot of fighting on its eastern side as well. In 1808, HMS Unite started lurking in Venetian waters looking for French targets and other British ships were to follow shortly after. Fairly soon we were raiding coastal towns and sending landing parties ashore to destroy fortifications. Eventually, it reached the stage where we were roaming up and down the Adriatic attacking targets pretty freely; HMS Bacchante raided Apulia; HMS Eagle blockaded Ancona; and a British squadron under Rear Admiral Fremantle attacked Fiume, destroying ships and stores and fighting in its streets. Later, Fremantle attacked Trieste and helped our Austrian allies capture it.

  After the end of the Napoleonic Wars we gave it a rest for bit, but then in 1860 we helped the Italians themselves invade Italy. This is in the sense that the British Navy lent a certain amount of quiet assistance to Garibaldi in his attempts to liberate Italy from foreign dominance and unite it. Our navy, for instance, helped organise an armistice to end the fighting in Palermo and leave Garibaldi in charge there.

  In the First World War we were once again back in Italy helping the Italians invade their own country. At the beginning of the war, big chunks of what is now northern Italy were under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Italians fought to free these areas and we sent troops to help. In October 1917, the Italians suffered a severe defeat at Caporetto and British forces were rushed out to Italy to help save the situation. British troops played a brave role in the Battle of Asiago in 1918. Edward, brother of author Vera Brittain, was killed here. And they played a significant part in the final decisive victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918. Three of the fifty-seven divisions in the victorious force were British.

  Early on in the Second World War we found ourselves on the other side from the Italians, after Mussolini declared war on us on 10 June 1940. We were soon, however, hitting back at Italian territory itself. On the night of 11/12 November, in Operation Judgement, Swordfish biplanes from HMS Illustrious launched a devastating attack on the Italian battle fleet in the Italian port of Taranto. Other actions, including the Battle of Cape Spartivento, off Sardinia, followed, and then by 1943 we were ready for the final invasion of Italy.

  Operation Husky was the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. In just over a month British, Canadian and American troops took the island from the German and Italian defenders. Then it was on to the mainland. A detailed account of the grim fighting that followed as British and other Allied troops battled their way through Italy is beyond the remit of this book and has been covered in great depth elsewhere. Basically, our Eighth Army crossed the straits of Messina on 3 September 1943. The Italian armistice with us was announced on 8 September. On 9 September British forces were back in Taranto, landing there in Operation Slapstick, while the Americans landed at Salerno. Bitter fighting against the Germans followed, including the grim struggle for Monte Cassino and the landings at Anzio. Rome fell in June 1944, and by spring 1945 British forces were fighting in northern Italy.

  Ivory Coast

  Ivory Coast has Liberia to its west and Ghana to its east. For a long time, the French controlled the territory that is now Ivory Coast (we controlled the territory that is now Ghana and signed a treaty with the French) and it’s not an area we have had that much to do with.

  In the late nineteenth century, an interesting figure people should know more about, Samori Ture, created the Wassoulou Empire that incorporated an area in the north of what is now Ivory Coast. In January 1885, as part of his attempts to resist the French, he offered to put the empire under British protection. We decided not to take up his kind offer, but we did sell him lots of modern repeating rifles, which Ture then promptly used against the French.

  In 2004, in what became known as Operation Phillis, with civil war gripping the Ivory Coast, a company of Gurkhas was flown into the capital Abidjan to evacuate British citizens, and deployed along routes to the airport, while HMS Albion was ordered to head for the area as extra support.

  Jamaica

  In 1494, Columbus was the first European to reach Jamaica and he named it Santiago. In 1523 the Spanish founded Santiago de la Vega as capital of the island. When we finally took over the island we, not very imaginatively, called it Spanish Town. We can’t have thought long and hard about that one.

  This being the Caribbean, an area where we tended to attack a lot of things, it’s hardly surprising that during the period of Spanish control, we attacked the island on a number of occasions. In about 1596, English Admiral Sir Anthony Shirley attacked and burned the capital. In 1635, one Colonel Jackson had another go. After a fierce battle at Passage Fort, he defeated the garrison and entered Santiago de le Vega and pillaged the town. Finally, in 1655, a major expedition under Venables and Penn arrived. They had failed in an attack on Santo Domingo and decided to take Jamaica as a consolation prize. Penn and Venables invaded and captured the island, and we kept it, despite two Spanish attempts to retake it. It didn’t save Penn and Venables, as they ended up in the Tower of London when they got back to England.

  Jamaica soon became a major destination to which slaves were transported.

  There were fears of invasion by the French and Spanish during the American War of Independence, but Rodney and Hood’s victory off Dominica prevented that. And, similarly, Admiral Duckworth prevented an invasion in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Jamaica became independent in 1962.

  Japan

  Japan is one of those countries where you know we’ve fought them across South East Asia, but aren’t so aware we’ve actually been there in their own water and on their own soil. But we have.

  After a brief flirtation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century when English traders first visited Japan and a trading post was briefly established on the island of Hirado, the British and the Japanese largely left each other alone for the next couple of centuries or so, until Japan started opening up to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. But it was an uneasy opening-up, with misunderstandings and apprehension on both sides. In 1862, a party of Britons on the road through the village of Namamugi were deemed to have shown insufficient respect to the regent of the Satsuma region of Japan and his bodyguards. The subsequent assault on the British party led to the delightfully named Satsuma War. Tragically, this has nothing to do with small orange citrus fruit, and everything to do with large cannons on both sides.

  Britain demanded reparations for the assault, but the Satsuma region refused. So after a year of fruitless (no joy, no citrus) negotiations, we sent a Royal Navy squadron to Kagoshima to put just the right amount of pressure on Satsuma (too much pressure and there would have been Satsuma juice everywhere). When the arrival of the squadron wasn’t sufficient to get our money, we decided to increase the pressure by seizing three Satsuma vessels in Kagoshima harbour. Ultimately, perhaps, this was a little too much pressure, because the Satsuma forts then somewhat surprised the British squadron by opening fire on it. Our boys retaliated and the end result was five killed on the Satsuma side and eleven killed on our side, but we caused a lot of damage to the town and the result was a British win on points, with Satsuma paying £25,000 compensation and entering into a treaty with us.

  After a number of other hiccups, including the 1864 Bombardment of Shimonoseki by us, the French, the Americans and the Dutch, we eventually started to get along very well with the Japanese. In fact, by 1902 we were good buddies, happily signing the Anglo-Japanese alliance, and in the First World War the Japanese fought on our side (pinching a bit of German-held territory in China). By the Second World War that had all slightly changed.

  I have touched elsewhere in this book on the titanic struggle between the British Empire and Allies on one side and the Japanese Empire on the other, and most of the action between Britons and Japanese took place a long, long way from Japan.

  In the last few months of the Second World War in the East, however, we were preparing for a fighting invasion of Japan. As the
tide of battle moved closer to the Japanese home islands, feverish planning started for Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan. It would have been on a scale that would have dwarfed D-Day and, though it was mainly a US operation, British forces were intending to make a major contribution with, for instance, British ground troops destined for Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu, and British naval forces planned to play a major role in Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu. As we all know now, the nuclear bombing of Japan and the country’s surrender made the fighting invasion unnecessary.

  So when British forces did finally march into Japan, it was as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. This contained, among others, numerous Australians and the British 5th Infantry Brigade. BCOF’s role ended in 1952, but already by 1951 we were getting distracted by events elsewhere in the region, in this instance how our forces and their enemies were doing in the Korean Peninsula.

  Jordan

  When you think of British military operations in Jordan, you tend to think of T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Hard not to, really, with the powerful image of Lawrence standing in swirling white robes staring out over the desert sands – particularly after the film.

  It has to be said that Lawrence was by no means the only Allied officer engaged in working with the Arab rebels against the Ottoman Empire and, even more importantly, it has to be pointed out that without the Arab rebels and the Arab leaders there wouldn’t have been much of an Arab rebellion for Lawrence and other Brits to work with. Nonetheless, it’s still a great story and one that is comparatively well known, so I’m not going to deal with it in great detail here. Also, some of the key events, such as those after the capture of Damascus, happened outside the borders of what is now Jordan.

  Lawrence arrived in the area in autumn 1916 to work with the Hashemite forces in the Hejaz and to help them to attack the crucial strategic Hejaz railway that ran from Damascus to Mecca, linking Ottoman forces in Arabia with those in Syria. In July 1917, Lawrence, with Arab forces and with the support of British Navy vessels, managed to take Aqaba, now in Jordan. This was long before Aqaba became a holiday destination, but it was an important victory both strategically, in allowing British (and French) supplies and support through to the Arabs, and psychologically as well. In January 1918, Arab forces with Lawrence beat the Ottomans at the Battle of Tafileh, and in April 1918 Arab forces clashed with Ottoman units at Ma’an in what is now Jordan.

  After the war, in one of our more disastrous and morally unappealing decisions, we carved up the Middle East with the French according to the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The effect of this can still be seen in the political conflicts of the region today. This process, however, meant that when it first emerged, the Emirate of Transjordan was under British Mandate.

  Gradually, the emirate acquired more independence and it eventually became fully independent and a kingdom in 1946. But in 1956, at a time when the King of Jordan feared trouble from a coup or from Syria and/or Iraq, we rushed troops back to Jordan for a temporary stay, in the suitably steadfastly named Operation Fortitude.

  6

  KAZAKHSTAN TO LUXEMBOURG

  Kazakhstan

  Kazakhstan is a huge country. By the mid-nineteenth century it was part of the Russian Empire and out of our reach, both geographically and politically.

  However, Kazakhstan does have a coastline on the Caspian Sea and in the period around the end of the First World War the Royal Navy was in action there, so yes, our forces have been there.

  On 21 May 1919, the Emile Nobel, an ex-Russian ship and one of a flotilla of British ships on the Caspian, was reconnoitring Fort Shevchenko (now Alexandrovsk in Kazakhstan) when Bolshevik gunners fired a shell at her, killing eleven of her crew. In response, the Emile Nobel opened up with her 4-inch guns. The flotilla then destroyed nine boats in the port and later RAF attacks forced the Bolsheviks to take the rest of their vessels from the harbour there.

  Kenya

  Not one of our most dramatic invasions.

  In the late nineteenth century, we were competing with Germany for control over territory in East Africa, and in 1886 Germany signed a treaty setting out who could operate in which territory. We were given an area that included Kenya, and the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA), was sent in to make British control a reality by signing treaties and setting up trading ventures. In 1887, they leased coastal territory from the Sultan of Zanzibar. However, IBEA Co. was not a huge success. It ran into huge and expensive difficulties in Uganda and, in 1895, the British government took over and created the British East African Protectorate of which today’s Kenya was part.

  There was fighting in what is now Kenya during the campaign against Lettow-Vorbeck in the First World War (see Mozambique).

  In 1963, some years after the Mau Mau rising, Kenya became independent.

  Kiribati

  Kiribati is an island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean comprising thirty-three atolls dispersed over millions of square kilometres. Although the islands aren’t large, Kiribati has a total population of over 100,000.

  And if you’ve ever wondered where the name Kiribati comes from, it’s the local version of Gilberts. Yes, because we used to call these islands the Gilbert Islands, after the British captain Thomas Gilbert, who sighted the islands back in 1788. Although, we didn’t start calling them that until the late nineteenth century. It was a Russian and a French captain who started the fashion.

  British settlers seem to have arrived in 1837. By 1892, we were worried about the possibility of German and American influence spreading in the Gilbert Islands and Captain Davis, on board HMS Royalist, toured the atolls establishing a British Protectorate and helping sort out assorted local disputes.

  There were bitter battles here in the Second World War between the Japanese and Americans, in particular the Battle of Tarawa.

  Kiribati became independent in 1979.

  Korea, The Democratic People’s Republic of

  This is the country we usually call North Korea.

  Our main military involvement with North Korea has, of course, been the Korean War. This bitter war, though deserving of a lot more attention than it usually gets, is very well known and very well documented in other books, and with a vast subject like All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded, I’m sorry to say that space is limited so I can’t go into much detail here.

  Basically, after the Second World War, Korea, freed from Japanese occupation, ended up divided along the 38th Parallel between a Soviet-backed regime in the north and an American-backed regime in the south. After increasing border tensions, North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. The United Nations called for forces to resist the North Korean advance, but the North Koreans pushed deep into South Korea. However, the North Koreans were prevented from taking the key strategic port of Pusan and in September 1950 General MacArthur landed two divisions at Inchon in the North Korean rear, forcing the North Koreans to retreat rapidly as our side pursued them deep into their territory. At this point the Chinese came into the war and it was the UN forces’ turn to retreat, eventually to a line well south of Seoul. Gradually, UN forces pushed the enemy back again until the fighting ground to a halt in something of a stalemate in the area of the 38th Parallel.

  British forces fought bravely in many locations during the Korean War, including the stage where UN forces pushed deep inside North Korea.

  Korea, The Republic of

  This is the country we usually call South Korea.

  Pretty much everyone has heard of the Korean War, but did you also know that we occupied a bit of South Korea in the late nineteenth century and set up a naval base there?

  Port Hamilton, or Geomun-do, is a group of islands off the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula. Sir Edward Belcher (great name) dropped in on board HMS Samarang in 1845 and named the place Port Hamilton after the then secretary of the admiralty. By the late nineteenth century, we were worried about expanding Russian influence in the area, so w
e decided to do a bit of expanding ourselves, and in April 1885 (in what for fairly obvious reasons became known as the Port Hamilton Incident), three British warships arrived to establish a base on one of the islands here as a counterbalance to Vladivostok on the Russian coast. There are still British graves here, including two sailors from HMS Albatross who were killed in 1886 by their gun exploding. In 1887 we demolished the base and abandoned it.

  As with the push into North Korea during the Korean War, British forces played a key role in the fighting in South Korea. The 27th British Commonwealth Brigade, for instance, helped defend the Pusan bridgehead and joined in the subsequent push north from there to meet up with the forces put ashore in the Inchon landings.

  Kosovo

  Kosovo is recognised as a country by the UK and many other nations, but not by Serbia and Russia, among others, and it is not a member state of the United Nations.

  Most readers will remember the Kosovo War, so I won’t go into great detail here. The RAF was involved in sorties against targets inside Kosovo and elsewhere in 1999. When Slobodan Milosevic finally agreed to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, British forces played a key role in the UN Kosovo Peace Implementation Force (KFOR) as it moved into the territory in June 1999. KFOR itself was based around the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps Headquarters, with British Lieutenant General Mike Jackson in command, and it included a British brigade composed of elements from the 4th Armoured Brigade and 5th Airborne Brigade.