A military blueprint to attack Canada has been on the books for almost a century now. Former Washington Post feature writer Peter Carlson recounts how he came across it 20 years ago.
In 1930, the U.S. crafted a top secret plan to invade Canada, as mapped out here. Amid rising tensions today—and as crazy as it sounds—the Trump administration may well be dusting off it’s own version. (Princeton Architectural Press map)
ONE DAY IN 2005, WHEN I WAS A REPORTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I was in the National Archives, researching a story that has long ago escaped my memory. But I remember well what happened next: A PR lady for the Archives introduced me to an ancient gentleman who'd been an archivist there for 50 years.
Being a reporter, I blurted out what seemed like the obvious question: "What's the weirdest document you've seen in your 50 years?"
He did not hesitate even a second before replying, "War Plan Red."
"What's War Plan Red?" I asked.
"It's the American war plan for invading Canada," he said.
Visions of winning the Pulitzer danced in my head, "The US plan for Invading Canada!!
Has anybody ever written about this?"
Yes, he said. When War Plan Red was declassified in the 1970s a few papers ran stories about it.
That ended my Pulitzer fantasies, so I went back to researching that now-forgotten story I was working on. When I returned to the office, I told my editor,Henry Allen, about the ancient archivist who mentioned a document detailing our plans to invade Canada.
"That's fabulous!!" Henry said. He was practically apoplectic with excitement. "Did you get it?"
"Ah, um, no," I mumbled. "Well, It's not a scoop. It's old news. It was released back in the 70s and got some press back then."
"You idiot," Henry said. "Go back and get it."
So I did. I Xeroxed the 90-plus pages of War Plan Red for 15 cents a page, and started reading. It detailed exactly how the USA's Army and Navy could blockade, invade, conquer and colonize our friendly neighbor to the north. Henry and I found it hilarious. I called the mayors of the Canadian cities that the Pentagon planned to attack and most of them seemed to think the whole idea was amusing. I wrote it up as a preposterous comedy and it ran in the Style section under the headline "Raiding the Icebox."
And I didn’t think much about "War Plan Red" until recently, when President Trump repeatedly mentioned his desire to make Canada "the 51st State." Canadians, as you might expect, didn’t take too kindly to the threat. “”Elbows up,” a hockey thing, has become a national war cry.
Anyway, I dug out the story and...well, it's still kinda funny, but maybe not quite so innocently amusing anymore.
But you can decide for yourself. Here it is:
Raiding the Icebox
Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada
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.
The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It's a 94-page document called "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan -- Red," with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It's a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:
First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies.
Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark.
Then the U.S. Army invades on three fronts -- marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada's Atlantic and Pacific ports.
At that point, it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: "ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL."
It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.
War Plan Red was actually designed for a war with England. In the late 1920s, American military strategists developed plans for a war with Japan (code name Orange), Germany (Black), Mexico (Green) and England (Red). The Americans imagined a conflict between the United States (Blue) and England over international trade: "The war aim of RED in a war with BLUE is conceived to be the definite elimination of BLUE as an important economic and commercial rival."
In the event of war, the American planners figured that England would use Canada (Crimson) -- then a quasi-pseudo-semi-independent British dominion -- as a launching pad for "a direct invasion of BLUE territory." That invasion might come overland, with British and Canadian troops attacking Buffalo, Detroit and Albany. Or it might come by sea, with amphibious landings on various American beaches -- including Rehoboth and Ocean City, both of which were identified by the planners as "excellent" sites for a Brit beachhead.
The planners anticipated a war "of long duration" because "the RED race" is "more or less phlegmatic" but "noted for its ability to fight to a finish." Also, the Brits could be reinforced by "colored" troops from their colonies: "Some of the colored races however come of good fighting stock, and, under white leadership, can be made into very efficient troops."
The stakes were high: If the British and Canadians won the war, the planners predicted, "CRIMSON will demand that Alaska be awarded to her."
Imagine that! Canada demanding a huge chunk of U.S. territory! Them's fightin' words! And so the American strategists planned to fight England by seizing Canada. (Also Jamaica, Barbados and Bermuda.) And they didn't plan to give them back.
"Blue intentions are to hold in perpetuity all CRIMSON and RED territory gained," Army planners wrote in an appendix to the war plan. "The policy will be to prepare the provinces and territories of CRIMSON and RED to become states and territories of the BLUE union upon the declaration of peace."
Read the rest of Peter Carr’s hilarious storyhere—> at The Washington Post.
A former reporter for The Washington Post and columnist for American History magazine, Peter Carlson is the author of four books. His latest isKnuckleheads: A Comic Memoir of A Father, A son and a Jamaican Jail.
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