We took a lot of interest in Zanzibar because it was a huge trading centre dealing in large quantities of British and Indian manufactured goods. On 25 August 1896, a sultan whom we liked died suddenly, and a man we didn’t like proclaimed himself sultan. We weren’t chuffed and we weren’t going to pretend we were. We issued an ultimatum and gathered a task force of cruisers, gunships and marines. Handily, a lot of the Zanzibar army were on our side under British Brigadier General Lloyd Matthews, who happened to be their commander. Not surprisingly, the war was short and indeed tends to be known as the ‘shortest war in history’, though frankly there have been an awful lot of wars and not all of them had a person with a watch timing them so we’ll never really know. Our ultimatum expired at 0900 hours, a suitably businesslike time for an ultimatum to expire. At 0902 we opened fire. The palace was hit several times and by about 0940 it was all over, leaving a lot of the people inside the palace dead, the palace on fire and the man who had proclaimed himself sultan fleeing to the German consulate.
Our involvement with Tanganyika took a very different course. British explorers like Burton, Speke and Livingstone took an early interest in the area, but ultimately it was Germany that won out here in the colonial sweepstakes.
So, in the First World War we decided to invade. It didn’t start well for us. Not well at all. In the Battle of Tanga, in November 1914, also known as the Battle of the Bees due to a strange bee intervention in which some of our forces and some of the Germans were attacked by a swarm, we landed troops at the strategic port of Tanga ,only for them to have to re-embark when the defenders defeated us. At the same time we also lost the Battle of Kilimanjaro.
We did have more success on the water, eventually cornering the German light cruiser Königsberg on the Rufiji and sinking it. Meanwhile, two British gunboats, HMS Mimi and HMS Toutou, after being brought overland to Lake Tanganyika, had helped push the Germans off the waters there.
In 1916 the situation on land changed radically. General C. Smuts invaded from three different directions with a large force, including South Africans, other Africans, Brits, and Indian troops, and the rest of the war turned into a bitter and brutal game of chase as our side pursued the forces of the German side led by Lettow-Vorbeck around East Africa. Lettow-Vorbeck did not, in the end, surrender until after the armistice that finished the First World War.
After the war we got the League of Nations Mandate to administer the part of German East Africa that became known as Tanganyika.
Thailand
A lot of Britons are hugely fond of Thailand, but relations between the countries have had difficult times as well as good times.
As early as 1826, when we had just finished fighting the Burmese for the first time, we signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the Kingdom of Siam. And in 1855 we signed a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce between the British Empire and the Kingdom of Siam. It all sounds terribly friendly and amicable (with quite a lot of commerce included as well, presumably), except that there was already a sense that growing British power in the region and British desire for commercial and political advantage was putting pressure on Thailand. Indeed, the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 transferred territory from Siamese to British control.
Nevertheless, Siam joined our side in the First World War in 1917.
In the Second World War, Thailand came under pressure from the Japanese and declared war on Britain. However, there were many Thais who resisted the Japanese presence in Thailand. Then in 1945, with the Japanese retreating, we were planning to invade Thailand, and British and Indian forces mounted attacks into Thailand (like a raid on Phuket in 1945) and advanced across the border in the summer of 1945, but as the war came to an end we abandoned our grandiose schemes for invasion.
In the period after the end of the war, British and Commonwealth troops were deployed in Thailand to help disarm Japanese troops and to assist liberated Allied prisoners of war.
Togo
Togo is a very long, thin country lying to the east of Ghana. It was a major area for the slave trade during the eighteenth century and when we became an anti-slaving instead of a slaving nation, British naval anti-slaving patrols operated off the coast of present-day Togo.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans, late entrants into the European competition to build empires in Africa and keen to grab territories not already controlled by their rivals, established the colony of Togoland, slightly wider than present-day Togo.
German control was not to last for long. Hostilities between Britain and Germany began on 4 August 1914. The prospects for the German authorities in Togoland didn’t look great. And frankly they weren’t that great. They had a British colony to the west and a French colony to the east. There were no German military forces in Togoland, only a police force, and the radio station at Kamina in present-day Togo, designed to be a key part of the German worldwide wireless system, was a major target for the Allies.
British forces quickly advanced and took Lome, the current capital of Togo, while German defenders keen to protect Kamina retreated inland towards it, destroying railway bridges behind them. Despite some fierce clashes, British and French forces were soon advancing on Kamina from a number of directions. On 24 August, the Allies heard loud explosions from Kamina, and on 27 August British and French troops entered Kamina to find the radio station destroyed.
Two hundred Germans surrendered in what was one of the first Allied victories of the war.
German Togoland was separated into two League of Nations Mandates: British Togoland and French Togoland. The residents of British Togoland voted to join independent Ghana in 1957, which is why Togo is now slightly slimmer than German Togoland. French Togoland became independent in 1960.
Tonga
The explorer James Cook visited the Pacific islands of Tonga in 1773, 1774 and 1777.
By 1899, the Germans were taking an (to us) unwelcome interest in Tonga and the Tongans had run up substantial debts to a German trader. We sent in the navy. HMS Tauranga arrived and the Tongan king and government agreed to accept British protection.
From 1901 to 1952, Tonga was part of the British Western Pacific territories, though the Tongans always had their own Tongan government throughout the period.
The protectorate ended in 1970 and Tonga joined the Commonwealth.
Trinidad and Tobago
As anybody with some knowledge of Spanish is rapidly going to spot, Trinidad is the Spanish word for ‘trinity’, and Tobago is the Spanish word for ‘tobacco’. Curiously, because we know the name Trinidad and Tobago so well, the meaning of the words may not actually have occurred to us.
As the names suggest, the first Europeans to reach both these islands were Spanish, but the two islands have rather different histories, so let’s start with Trinidad.
Trinidad received some early interest from us when Sir Walter Raleigh on his way to El Dorado (or not as it turned out), dropped in to attack, capture and burn the Spanish settlement of San José de Oruña (now St Joseph) in 1595. After that, there was a period of assorted pirates, smugglers and settlers doing their thing, and there was also something of an influx of French settlers. In 1797, we turned up in force. General Sir Ralph Abercromby and Rear Admiral Henry Harvey arrived with a fleet of ships and the Spanish governor promptly decided to surrender. So, not our most dramatic invasion.
By contrast, things became very confusing in Tobago. As well as the French, Spanish and Brits competing for control, there were also Dutch and Courlanders from modern-day Latvia. The island kept on changing hands. You would think there was hardly time to change the flags on occasions. In 1704, it was declared neutral territory, which was excellent news from a pirate point of view. Then in 1763, the French ceded Tobago to us. The newly independent Americans got in on the act in 1778 by trying to take the island, but HMS Yarmouth was able to fight them off. The French invaded yet again in 1781 and caused a lot of destruction. However, we did eventually get the island back. Yet again.
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bsp; Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962.
Tunisia
Tunisia is a lovely country with some amazing scenery and plenty of brilliant archaeology and history. And we, of course, have played a part in that history. From quite early on.
In 1270, the future Edward I arrived off Tunis to join a French Crusade there, just as the French had given up, with their king dead, and were going home.
Then in the seventeenth century, England found itself at war with Tunis in a dispute over passengers sold as slaves. An English squadron happened to be roaming the Mediterranean at the time, so on 4 April 1655, rather than attacking strongly defended Tunis, Admiral Blake destroyed nine warships he happened to come across. Unfortunately for Blake, but not for the ruler of Tunis, the ships turned out to belong to the Ottoman Turks rather than the Tunisians and their destruction had zero effect on the position of the Tunisians. A peace was, however, negotiated in 1658.
In 1675 Sir John Narborough, with another squadron at his back, negotiated another peace with Tunis.
Then in 1796, yet another British squadron dropped by Tunis to recapture the twenty-eight-gun frigate Nemesis, which had been captured by the French. Boats slipped into Tunis harbour on the night of 9 March and achieved their objective with almost no opposition and no loss.
In 1816, we were back in Tunis again. This time Lord Exmouth sailed in with a squadron to secure the release of captives and an agreement to abolish slavery.
Our major incursion into Tunisia came in the Second World War. On 15 November 1941, after the Operation Torch landings in Algeria, British forces pushed eastwards along the Mediterranean coast, reaching Tabarka just across the border from Algeria into Tunisia. But as the Allies advanced eastwards, at the same time the Germans and Italians were rushing in reinforcements to try to stop them.
Fighting raged through November and December as the Allies attempted to advance to take Tunis, with among other operations, 1 Commando landing west of Bizerte on 30 November in an attempt to outflank enemy positions, and with a bitter battle at the end of December in an attempt to take Djebel El Ahmera, Longstop Hill. Eventually, the advance was forced back and the Allied push into Tunisia from the west ground to a halt.
In February 1943, Rommel struck back at the Battle of Kasserine Pass with an offensive that surprised the Allies and did some damage, but ultimately came to a standstill in the face of stiffening Allied resistance and because of British advances on the other side of Tunisia.
Here Montgomery’s Eighth Army had reached the Mareth Line, an old French line of fortifications designed originally to protect Tunisia from Italian forces in Libya, which had now been occupied and put to use by Tunisia’s Axis defenders. On 25 March, X Corps under General Horrocks managed to outflank the Mareth Line, and its defenders were forced to retreat north. American units joined the attack and eventually the Axis defenders were forced all the way back to Enfidaville.
In the west, the Axis forces mounted more attacks, but eventually the Allies regained the initiative and by mid-April the Axis forces were in a desperate position. On 6 May, the British IX Corps began the final assault, and on 7 May, while the Americans entered Bizerte, British tanks entered Tunis. On 13 May, Axis resistance ceased and over 230,000 prisoners of war were taken.
Turkey
Our military involvement with Turkey may have started pretty early, because it was a frequent stopping-off or transit point for Crusaders heading for the Holy Land. However, the Crusades that spent the most time in what is present-day Turkey weren’t the ones that seem to have involved the most Brits.
Having said that, there was definitely some English, or at least Anglo-Norman (this is so early on that English in some ways still means Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Norman), participation in the First Crusade. So, for instance, involved in this Crusade along with their retinues were William Percy, who founded Whitby Priory, and Ralph de Gael, former Earl of Norfolk. People have also claimed that the English Edgar Atheling – an interesting character, the last male member of the house of Wessex – was also involved in the First Crusade, or in the Byzantine Empire, or in the Holy Land in some way. It’s all frankly a bit hazy and confused. There also seems to have been some kind of English fleet operating somewhere in the area too, as a letter exists from Lucca in Italy stating that Bruno, a Crusader from there, travelled with English ships to Antioch in present-day Turkey in 1098.
There have been times the Eastern Med hasn’t been an area of great British activity, but the Napoleonic period saw a big increase. By 1807, it was looking as if we might end up fighting Turkey, so perhaps not entirely tactfully we sent Vice Admiral Duckworth with six ships to sail up the Dardanelles and put a bit of pressure on Istanbul. Duckworth got through the Dardanelles after clashing with Turkish ships and after a Royal Marines landing party had made a raid onto an island to seize guns, but he wasn’t able to achieve anything significant when he finally reached Istanbul. Instead, on his return journey he came under fire from the Dardanelles guns, the oldest of which had been made in 1453 when the Turks were trying to take Constantinople, before it became Istanbul. An 800lb marble shot (that’s a big marble) hit the ship Windsor Castle. Also fighting the Turks at this point were the Russians. They were about to start fighting us as well, but that’s a different story.
By the mid-nineteenth century, we were fighting on the same side as the Turks, while the Russians were, by this time, on the other side. The Crimean War, which broke out in 1853, was fought on many fronts, though, not surprisingly, a lot of it was fought in the Crimea. One front that’s often forgotten nowadays was Turkey’s then eastern border with Russia. This didn’t involve many Brits, but did see heroic action by a small number, led by one Colonel (then General) William Fenwick Williams, who ended up leading the gritty Turkish defenders of Kars in a bitter battle against Russian attacks. Kars fell in the end, but not before the Brits had gained a lot of respect.
With the arrival of the First World War we found ourselves back on the same side as the Russians, and back fighting against the Turks in Turkish waters and on Turkish soil.
To begin with, as in the Napoleonic period, the Royal Navy played the main role. As early as November 1914, HMS Indomitable and HMS Indefatigable, along with French warships, shelled fortresses at the entrance to the Dardanelles. Then in early 1915, the navy started seriously probing Turkish defences of the Dardanelles. On 19 February HMS Cornwallis and HMS Vengeance engaged in a duel with Turkish batteries, and later in February Royal Marines’ demolition parties attacked forts. This all led up to the disastrous (from our point of view) battle of 18 March when we and the French mounted a full-scale assault. Our ships came under heavy fire, but mines caused the major damage. We lost a number of ships, forcing us to withdraw.
The result of all this was that we decided we needed to attack on land next instead. The Dardanelles campaign has been so well covered elsewhere that I won’t go into depth here. The idea was that a ground offensive in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli area could clear the way to take Constantinople/Istanbul and open a convenient sea route to our Russian allies.
On 25 April 1915, British troops, including the 29th Division, landed at Cape Helles, while Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the Anzac beaches. A French brigade landed across in Anatolia, but later had to be withdrawn. When, after bitter fighting and heavy losses on both sides, the invading troops failed to make a breakthrough from the existing beachheads, a gamble was taken to make another landing, this time at Suvla Bay on 6 August. This attack, too, became bogged down and eventually it was decided to withdraw. The last British troops left Lancashire Landing on 9 January 1916.
After the Gallipoli debacle, our war against Turkey continued on other fronts. By 25 October 1918, Allenby’s forces were advancing rapidly and had taken Aleppo in Syria, less than 50 miles from the current Turkish border. Turkey capitulated on 30 October. After the armistice of Modros, we formed the Army of the Black Sea to supervise the armistice terms. The Allied fleet finally
steamed through the straits on 12 November 1918, British occupation troops entered Constantinople/Istanbul the next day, and we also sent troops eastwards towards the Caucasus.
As the situation in Turkey became steadily more tense in the period after the First World War, with resentment of the Allies rising and Greek forces fighting a war against Turkish forces, the position of the occupation troops was not always an easy one. For instance, in June 1920 Turkish Nationalist forces clashed with elements of the 24th Punjabis at Ismid and HMS Ramillies ended up engaging assorted targets with its guns.
Then in September 1922 we almost declared war on Turkey yet again, in the Chanak Crisis, when it looked like Turkish troops might advance on our troops guarding the Dardanelles. Finally, another deal was done and British troops eventually departed from Constantinople/Istanbul in September 1923.
Turkmenistan
Here is another huge country that most Brits know little about. But we have invaded parts of what is now its territory.
In the late nineteenth century we were sort of there by proxy as part of the Great Game. Our Afghan allies were in control with our support of the oasis of Panjdeh (or Pandjeh), in what is now Turkmenistan, a strategic area controlling the approach to Herat in Afghanistan, but the Russians also claimed it because they controlled Merv. In March 1885, the commander of local Russian forces, General Komarov, demanded that Afghan forces withdraw. We immediately told the Afghans to send reinforcements to Panjdeh, demanded assurances from the Russians that they wouldn’t attack unless attacked and mobilised two corps of the army in India to march north if necessary. Our General Lumsden sent three engineers from his staff to Herat to work out how it could best be defended. We seemed to be on the brink of war with Russia.
All the Countries We've Ever Invaded Page 26