Why Did Britain Invade French Madagascar in World War II? British forces were compelled to invade the island off the coast of East Africa amid fears of a Japanese invasion. Here's What You Need to Know: Churchill called the campaign for Madagascar “our first large-scale amphibious operation since the Dardanelles.” “The first I saw of Madagascar and the last after adventurous months ashore was the eerie color of the soil,” a British novelist turned security sergeant would write a decade later. “It gave to the sky, the vegetation, and the people a strangeness, even a deathliness which still shadows my recollections of the island. For the soil and the dust which rose from it to cake our skins and clothes, our eyelids and nostrils was not brick-colored or terra cotta but the color of dried blood.”