Only 22 countries have never been invaded by Britain
Only 22 countries have never been invaded by Britain
...yet
Brazil?? When did that happen?
Wait when did they invade Italy? (The WW2 business doesn’t count)
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.
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.
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).
Pro tip: if you want to show some things on a map, don't make those things the same color as water.
Well UK hasn't invaded Vatican but isn't there a long feud between Vatican and English Church or something.
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.
'Chad' understandably, but what about the rest?
Britain was the first to be invaded by Britain.
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
Excuse me, when has Britain invaded Finland?
I think this relies on seeing Finland as part of the Russian empire at the time Britain has invaded a part of it.
Perhaps?
But I do not think they've invaded Finland. By the time Normans got going, they invaded England, not the other way around. And Sweden has never been invaded. So how would Finland have been?
Nah.
Bs