War Plan Red: One invasion too many
WASHINGTON — It sounds like the set up to a joke: Worried that a foreign power is planning to use Canada as a launch pad for an attack, the U.S. government develops a plan to invade and annex its neighbor to the north.
The punch line is that it’s true. In the late 1920s, U.S. military planners imagined, among other scenarios, a U.S.-British conflict over international trade. As a result, War Plan Red — which outlined a U.S. invasion and takeover of Canada — was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935.
According to the Washington Post, which recently ran a lighthearted story (“Raiding the Icebox”) on the long-declassified plan, “Invading Canada won't be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn't have a plan.”
Seriously, here’s how it was supposed to go: First, an Army-Navy force captures the port city of Halifax and seizes Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls. Then the Army invades on three fronts — a march across Vermont to claim Montreal and Quebec; a charge out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg; and an attack from the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.
As Peter Carlson explained it in the Post, once the U.S. Navy seized the Great Lakes and blockaded Canada's Atlantic and Pacific ports, planners figured that it would only a matter of time “before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees!”
Although most Canadians found the latest reports about the plan laughable (“They’d take Halifax; then we’d kill Kenny,” headlined the Globe and Mail), the Canadian press did note one recent and plausible invasion theory. In the 1990s, the Toronto Star and Floyd Rudmin, then a Queens University social psychology professor, advanced the idea that plans were underway for U.S. intervention if Canada experienced serious instability as a result of a Quebec secessionist movement.
Nevertheless, the Globe and Mail concluded that Canadians can probably relax for the foreseeable future: “The U.S. military is otherwise occupied at the moment. Or are they just practicing?”
posted January 6, 2006
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