OK, the fact that this is the Papua New Guinea section is probably a bit of a giveaway, but otherwise not many Brits would have a clue that they are located off the northern tip of Australia.
The Spanish claimed the archipelago as far back as the sixteenth century, but by the 1870s we had one John Moresby (hence Port Moresby, the capital) surveying the south-east coast of New Guinea and in 1884, while we took the south-east bit, the Germans took over the north-east. This, as you have probably guessed by now, is when New Britain and New Ireland picked up their Germanic alter egos.
In 1914, Australian troops invaded the German-controlled bit and took it over. There was bitter fighting here in the Second World War between Japanese and Australian forces
Papua New Guinea became fully independent in September 1975.
Paraguay
Paraguay is a landlocked country sandwiched between Argentina to the south and Brazil to the north, plus it’s got Bolivia to the north-west. A lot of Brits get Paraguay and Uruguay confused.
It’s a long way from the sea, but it is linked to the sea by river and, yes, the British Navy has been up there. We have also been in conflict with Paraguay, but not in Paraguayan waters, so as far as I know at the moment we haven’t really invaded Paraguay.
In 1845, during the British and French blockade of the Rio de la Plata, Commodore Charles Hotham was operating with a British and French convoy and, despite Argentine attacks, in the Fulton he made it all the way to Asuncion, the present-day capital of Paraguay. The aim was to recognise Paraguay, lure the country into the war on our side and sign a treaty. The Paraguyans didn’t quite see it our way and we had to make the long return journey, again under Argentine attacks.
Then, in 1859, there was the Canstatt Affair, which led to the Buzzard/Grappler Affair. A lot of affairs. The president of Paraguay had imprisoned a certain Santiago Canstatt among a group of people he had accused of plotting to kill him by shooting him in a theatre. This was some time before Abraham Lincoln took his unfortunate trip to the theatre. Canstatt was a British subject and we weren’t very happy about him being chucked in jail. So two ships, Buzzard and Grappler, were dispatched to seize the Tacuari, Paraguay’s only warship, when it left Buenos Aires. The attempt failed, but shots were fired and the Paraguyan president reluctantly released Canstatt. The naval events took place outside Paraguayan waters, but it’s an interesting story anyway.
During the Paraguayan War of 1864–70, the Royal Navy was back in Paraguayan waters, running the enemy blockade into Paraguay on a number of occasions in attempts to get British citizens out.
Peru
Peru is a long way from these islands. Hidden away on the west coast of South America, the only way marauding British ships could reach it was either by travelling all the way around the Cape of Good Hope past Australia and across the Pacific, or by ships tackling the treacherous and fearsome Cape Horn. In the days before modern safety features and navigational equipment on boats, you might almost think Peru would have been out of harm’s way from us. But you would be wrong.
British raiders were already working the Pacific coast of South America by the late sixteenth century. Francis Drake, for example, sacked Callao in 1578, and in 1587 Thomas Cavendish sacked Paita. And in a now almost forgotten but true story, eighteenth-century Britain sent a fleet literally around the world to invade Peru.
The context is one of our better-named, though not better-known, wars. It is the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear conducted against Spain, starting in 1739, and was named after one Robert Jenkins, who arrived in Parliament prior to the war to complain about his rough treatment by Spanish coast guards and, in the days before computer presentations, used his severed ear to illustrate the point rather dramatically.
In 1740, in what must surely be one of the more ambitious military operations ever launched by Britain, Commodore George Anson was given the unenviable assignment of leading six warships, Centurion, Gloucester, Severn, Pearl, Wager and Tryal, across the Atlantic from Britain, around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast of South America. His mission (and this was just part of it) was to include capturing Callao and the port of Lima in Peru, and then if possible to capture Lima itself and raise a Peruvian rebellion against Spain. He was also supposed to do assorted other things on this extraordinary mission, including capture Panama.
The story of Anson’s journey round the world is a bit of a saga, quite a lot of a saga, in fact, so I’ll just touch briefly here on the Peruvian aspects of it.
By the time Anson made it to Cape Horn, his force had already had quite a time of it. He had been allotted no soldiers so had been forced to make up his contingent of 500 from invalids at the Chelsea Hospital. The expedition had been hit by dysentery, malaria and other diseases. And they had had to dodge Spanish warships.
Rounding the Cape they were then hit by huge storms and freezing conditions, and the ships were scattered. Still without three of his ships, Anson took a census in September 1741 and found that of the 961 men he had started out with, 626 had already died. Nevertheless he pushed on, and when he received news that the authorities in the port of Paita had been told of his whereabouts, he decided to invade. Paita has one of the best natural harbours on the Peruvian coast.
Anson landed at night in an attempt to capture some treasure stored there for export. The inhabitants of Paita legged it for the hills when they saw Anson’s invaders. They had already been raided by Britons in the past, so perhaps they had decided this was the safest bet.
The British stayed in the town for three days, looting valuables and food, before Anson ordered the release of prisoners and the burning of the town, except for two churches. One sailor was killed, possibly accidentally by his own side.
After that, Anson headed north towards Mexico and eventually, after a further long string of dramatic events, back across the Pacific. He returned to Britain and became famous. Only about 500 of the original 1,900 members of Anson’s expedition made it back alive. The expedition left a legacy of disputes over the prize money in court. Not a spectacular end to such an expedition, but perhaps not surprising.
British volunteers played an important part in Bolivar’s campaign to liberate Peru. On land, many helped win Bolivar’s crucial victory at the Battle of Ayacucho in December 1824. At sea, Lord Cochrane, previously a captain in the British Navy, created a Chilean navy that fought in the campaign to free Peru and that had a very significant percentage of experienced British and Irish officers, midshipmen and sailors in it.
There is one last venture of our ships into Peruvian waters that is worth mentioning here, the Battle of Pacocha in 1877. This time, we were facing an opponent from the now independent state of Peru. There was revolution in Peru and the ironclad Huáscar was raiding shipping, only to make the mistake of attacking some British ships. We sent Rear Admiral de Horsey after it, and an inconclusive battle ensued. However, the battle is memorable for one thing at least: HMS Shah fired the first ever torpedo used in action. It missed.
Philippines
Today we don’t tend to think of the Philippines as a country that has seen much British influence, but, yes, we have invaded it and we have even ruled some of it for a bit.
The Philippines are, of course, named after Philip, the Philip in question being Philip II of Spain. Naming whole lands after ruling monarchs always seems slightly strange somehow, a bit like parents who name their children after themselves, though I’ve no idea whether Philip demanded or secretly suggested the islands be named after him, or whether Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, who named Samar and Leyte as Las Islas Filipinas, thought it would be a short cut to a bit of royal favour. To be fair, we have done the same (as with Carolina and Georgia).
Our links to the Philippines go back a long way. In the late seventeenth century a somewhat reluctant buccaneer, Captain Swan, ended up in Mindanao with his crew before joining the army of the local ruler Rajah Laut. When Swan tried to leave for London, he ended up being speared by the rajah’s men. Resignation
disputes could get very nasty in those days.
By the eighteenth century we were ready to try something incredibly daring and audacious, and unlike some of the incredibly daring and audacious things we have tried, this one actually worked. Sort of. For a while.
In 1762, a British fleet consisting of seven ships of the line, plus some frigates and store ships, set off from Madras in India with forces on board that even included a couple of hundred French deserters. On 25 September, Colonel William Draper and his troops landed a couple of miles south of the Manila city walls, and on 4 October Draper’s men and the fleet opened fire on the defences of Manila, breaching them. The defenders counter-attacked, but were driven back. At dawn on 6 October, Draper’s men stormed the breach and broke into the city. To save the city, the defenders of the port and citadel surrendered and agreed to give us 4 million silver dollars to protect the town and its inhabitants.
Taking Manila was pretty much the high point of the whole episode from a British point of view. The destruction and looting that went with it did not endear us to the locals and resistance rapidly grew. In 1763, we agreed to give Manila and Cuba back in return for Florida and Minorca, and British troops left Manila in 1764. For some time afterwards we tried to get the 4 million dollars’ ransom, but somehow we never quite managed it. We also, rather cheekily, hung on with a base in the Sulu Islands until 1773.
We were involved in the Philippines area again in the Second World War, though the main Allied forces fighting in the area at that stage were Filipino, American and Australian. HMS Ariadne, for instance, along with a larger number of Australian vessels, such as the cruisers HMAS Australia and HMAS Shropshire, was part of the great armada assembled to invade and liberate the Philippines at Leyte Gulf in 1944.
Poland
Poland is a country that has seen so much war that when you consider everywhere else we have invaded, you feel vaguely confident that British forces must have seen a lot of action on Polish land or sea. Poland has had endless foreign military units moving through it, but very few of them have been ours, although we have had some conducting operations here.
We fought and lost a war against the Hanseatic League in 1470–74 with the Hanseatic port of Danzig (now in present-day Poland) taking a leading role in actions against us.
During the Thirty Years War assorted British troops fighting for foreign rulers roamed parts of what is today Poland. Many of these reached high positions, with the Scot, Major General Sir David Drummond, being made governor of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).
During the Napoleonic Wars, we took part in several operations linked to Danzig, then Prussian. In 1807, we sent ships to assist in the defence of Danzig against the French. The British sloop Falcon tried to help reinforcements get into the besieged city and the eighteen-gun Dauntless, dauntlessly tried to get 150 barrels of gunpowder into it, only, rather unfortunately, to run aground, and even more unfortunately, to do so next to an enemy battery, which not surprisingly shelled the ship until French grenadiers could capture her. Then in 1812, with Danzig occupied by the French, we tried something even more ambitious. Admiral Martin loaded a bunch of soldiers onto British and Russian ships and landed them near Danzig, behind French lines, in a daring manoeuvre.
After the end of the First World War, the Royal Navy was back in Danzig again, while the British Army got involved in its only major operations on Polish soil. Along with units from other Allied nations, our soldiers had the unenviable task of policing assorted plebiscites organised to decide the post-war frontier between Germany and Poland – unenviable because these were regions with mixed German and Polish populations where emotions could run extremely high about which side of the border people would finally be on.
The two major areas where we were involved were Upper Silesia and East Prussia. In East Prussia two British officers found themselves, under an atmosphere of pressure from both sides, in command of the local police. A battalion from the Royal Irish Regiment was also sent to help. When the plebiscite took place on 11 July 1920, most voters opted to be Prussian and the majority of the disputed territory went to Germany.
In Upper Silesia, the situation was even more tense. After a Polish uprising in the area against German control in 1919, an Allied commission including British representatives was sent to the area and a plebiscite took place on 20 March 1920. But the results were mixed and there was disagreement in the Allied camp over how to proceed. In the chaos and confusion, a second Polish uprising took place in August 1920 and a third in 1921. British troops were among the units struggling to bring peace and order to the area, which they eventually achieved. The Allies, however, could still not agree on how to divide the territory, but eventually agreed to hand the decision over to the League of Nations, which decided to hand the majority of Upper Silesia’s industrial heartland to Poland.
It’s one of the ironies of history that everybody could have saved themselves the effort since the disputed areas were generally going to end up as Polish or Soviet territory after the Second World War anyway.
In the Second World War, the SOE conducted assorted operations in Poland and the RAF flew heroic missions to drop supplies to the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising before the city was crushed by the Germans.
Portugal
In terms of countries, Portugal is supposed to be our oldest friend. That doesn’t mean we haven’t invaded its territory. We have, on a number of occasions. At least we were often doing it on behalf of the Portuguese, or a faction among them.
As early as 408, a British-born general, Gerontius, leading an army that probably included Britons, invaded Lusitania in what is modern-day Portugal on behalf of Constantine III. To be fair, Gerontius may not have had many local allies in his invasion, but, as the history of British intervention in the area progressed, that was to change.
An early appearance of British forces in Portugal on the side of the Portuguese was in the Second Crusade. This Crusade started in response to the fall of Edessa, one of the Crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land created by the First Crusade. But like other Crusades, the Second Crusade had a slight tendency to spread beyond its original remit. In 1147, a detachment of Crusaders set off from Dartmouth by ship. They were aiming for the Holy Land, but due to weather they had to take a break in Portugal. Here they were duly recruited to the campaign of King Afonso I to take Lisbon from the Moors, and after four months of siege, with the help of Briton’s Crusaders, Lisbon fell to Afonso.
In 1384, English troops were rushed to Portugal to help the Portuguese in the vital battles of Trancoso and Aljubarrota against the Castilians.
Then, with the arrival of the Spanish in Portugal, things became temporarily more complicated. For instance, we all know that the Spanish Armada was a famous disaster for the Spanish, but what doesn’t get such wide publicity in Britain is that our own version, the English Armada, which set sail for the shores of Portugal and Spain just after the Spanish one, was not a great success either. Spain had occupied Portugal, and the Portuguese clergy and aristocracy had accepted Philip of Spain as their king at the Cortes of Tomar in 1581. The British idea was that we would arrive in Lisbon with a fleet and the Portuguese would rise up, shower us with flowers and plentiful supplies of fortified wine, and throw out the Spanish. The reality was rather different. Sir Francis Drake as admiral and Sir John Norreys as general led a fleet of almost 150 ships along the northern Spanish coast, failed to take Corunna and landed finally at Lisbon. Unfortunately for them, instead of finding welcoming Portuguese, they found determined Spanish defenders and no sign of a mass Portuguese insurrection. Eventually, after burning the Lisbon granaries, but not achieving much else, they had to give up and try their secondary mission of establishing a base in the Azores. When that failed too, they were left with little other option but to limp home. Drake managed to plunder Porto Santo in Madeira as part of a series of minor plundering and ship-seizing operations, but all along Britain’s armada had been steadily losing ships, men and hope. Many ships didn�
�t make it home and nor did a lot of men.
In the seventeenth century, after the English Civil War, in a little-known but interesting saga, Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I, commanded a Royalist squadron that refused to give up even after the execution of the king in 1649. By 1650 it had been forced out of its former base in Kinsale and had taken refuge in Lisbon harbour. An English fleet under Robert Blake arrived off the Tagus and blockaded Rupert inside, while molesting Portuguese shipping. After unsuccessful attempts to escape, Rupert finally managed to get his ships out and into the Mediterranean, only to lose most of them to Blake near Cartagena. Eventually, Rupert made his way across the Atlantic to the West Indies looking for a safe haven, before heading back to France. Rather a long way round, really.
Assorted other examples of military involvement with Portugal followed. During the Seven Years War we were back to rushing British reinforcements to help Portugal against the Spanish, and a combined British and Portuguese force under John Burgoyne and Charles Lee retook the Portuguese town of Vila Velha in a battle in October 1762.
There were other naval operations in Portuguese waters, including in 1780, when we defeated a Spanish squadron at the Battle of Cape St Vincent.
During Napoleon’s assorted rampages across Europe we returned to Portugal once again, this time to help kick out the French. After a period moving to and fro across Portugal’s frontier with Spain, much of the action in the Peninsular War took place in Spain, so we will look at it in more detail in the Spanish section. It is worth briefly mentioning two incidents: the unfortunate Convention of Cintra, in which, rather embarrassingly, we agreed for the Royal Navy to transport a trapped French army with all its equipment out of Portugal, causing a massive political scandal in Britain; and the Lines of Torres Vedras. When things were a bit problematic with the French, Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, decided to secure his base in Lisbon by constructing a massive, intricate system of defensive fortifications protecting the Lisbon Peninsula. The French arrived, the British sat back all cosy behind the lines, and eventually the French were forced to retreat to Spain.
All the Countries We've Ever Invaded Page 21