when did England invade England? and more importantly when did things that didn’t classify themselves as countries and nobody else classified as countries start being counted as countries?
Hey Brits, that Vatican City is looking mighty glittering with gold! I’ve also heard their current leader is very ill, sounds like the perfect opportunity for a friendly acquisition
When was Poland invaded by Britain?
You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis.
Here is the section on 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.
My history knowledge focus was on how Churchill stabbed Poland in the back and sold it to USSR, so I was surprised to hear Poland has been shanked by Brits even more.
Thanks!
Oh, and it’s Gdańsk, not Danzig. I pray the author never visits Poland, because if he called it that he might stay forever.
Britain was the first to be invaded by Britain.
Well UK hasn’t invaded Vatican but isn’t there a long feud between Vatican and English Church or something.
This is incorrect, England has never invaded Portugal. They have in fact formed one of the oldest alliances in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Portuguese_Alliance#Disruption_and_renewal
(The English Armada invaded on behalf of the deposed monarchy.)
They might be counting the Drake-Norris expedition. I suppose failing miserably at an invasion still counts as an invasion.
Or the USA - English troops were already there when it started.
Okay, during the war of 1812, Canadians (who were British at the time) marched on Washington and burned down the Whitehouse. That probably counts, but it wasn’t held territory.
I think if you declare independence then the British are an invading force and have by definition, invaded.
Not to mention the taking over from natives. Pretty sure they felt invaded long before the US existed.
that’s not what “invade” means - you can’t do it if you’re already there.
If you say so, then I suppose the next troop resupply would qualify as an invasion?
Regardless, outside of the Revolutionary War I was just reminded of the War of 1812.
I’m not “saying so” I’m repeating what the dictionary says.
The War of 1812 was declared against Britain by the US. British troops did land here once the war was on, if you call that an “invasion”. And I guess you could cite the Beatles etc.
There are other weird things on here.
Countries that didn’t exist during British actions, for example. Finland has only existed since 1917 in its current form – when did the UK invade them? Participate on the opposite side of a war? Yes.
And others, like Canada, were largely created by treaty. Canadians if different political stripes might argue that the treaties were unfair in retrospect, and thus it qualifies as an invasion, but that’s a bit of a stretch of the definition. True enough, the British fought the French in Quebec and that could constitute an invasion, but Canada didn’t exist then.
Then there’s the invaded vs liberated debate…
There are many others here and one could go on at length.
Finland has only existed since 1917
You can find an epub of the book on Library Genesis.
For Finland, it counts their invasion of what is now Finland during the Anglo-Russian War (1807–1812).
Yeah, see, that’s cheating. Finland was effectively occupied territory at the time.
The map is fun nevertheless. As an amateur history nerd, it just makes me wish I could click on it and find the details of said invasions, rather than trusting that the sources are accurate. Cause there are so many things on here that are really a stretch.
I’d also like to see a version with “Countries the UK has occupied after an invasion” and “countries the UK has seized land from after an invasion” – because if the definition of invasion is simply a “marine landing” or “battle fought”, it’s very broad haha.
Though I also worry that in the modern era, with imperialism suddenly in vogue again, that this is priming people for whataboutism. We could redo this map with “Countries the British have invaded since WW2 ended” and it would be a lot smaller. Probably still larger than we’d expect at first glance. And how would you classify the Falklands? ;)
Yeah, see, that’s cheating. Finland was effectively occupied territory at the time.
I think it is clear that the meaning of “invaded X” here is “invaded some place which today is part of X”.
As an amateur history nerd, it just makes me wish I could click on it and find the details of said invasions
Again, you can find the whole book on LibGen :)
Here is the section about Finland, which actually covers more than just the war of 1807-1812
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.
We could redo this map with “Countries the British have invaded since WW2 ended”
I don’t have that map handy but,
Though I also worry that in the modern era, with imperialism suddenly in vogue again, that this is priming people for whataboutism
fyi the the pejorative “whataboutism” was actually coined by an apologist for British imperialism 😂
Pro tip: if you want to show some things on a map, don’t make those things the same color as water.
‘Chad’ understandably, but what about the rest?
Don’t rush them! They’re doing their best. If anything, the Tories have been working with US Republicans to get things back on track.
