The US' Plan for a Hypothetical War with Britain

This video was made possible by Skillshare. Learn what you want to learn for free for two months by being one of the first 500 to sign up at the link in the description. American Civil War—bad. Captain America: Civil War—good. War star-ting—bad. Star Wars—good. War of the Worlds—bad. World War—go… wait, no. No War—good, for most. One of the few downsides for a lack of war is that there’s not much for generals and the like to do so they need activities to fill their time. One such activity is planning for war. After all, the US for example, has only been at war for 224 years of its 243 year existence—a measly 92%. That’s a lot of downtime. During the 20’s, there wasn’t much war stuff going on—only this small four decade-long war in central America where the US was fighting to be sure the bananas kept flowing—and so in order to prepare for a possible Great War part deux the US started making plans for what their strategy would be for hypothetical wars with possible contenders like Japan, China, Mexico, and the UK. Now, despite their very public break-up in the late 1700’s, relations between the US and UK mostly improved up until World War One when relations improved greatly after the US did Europe a solid by rocking up in the forth quarter and helping finish the job. Nonetheless, Britain was still a big scary empire—by some measures still the most powerful nation in the world—so the US still prepared a plan in the 30’s for war with the red coats. It was called War Plan Red and the idea was as follows. Of course, after the US quite boisterously declared itself as not part of the UK in the 1700s, one of the not-quite-united States of America, that is, Canada, remained part of the British empire. By the 1900s, Canada was independent but still very much integrated in the commonwealth and it had some fancy features like a 5,500 mile, 9,000 kilometer border with the home team in this hypothetical UK-US war. It was therefore believed that the UK would use Canada as a jumping-off point for an invasion of the mainland US so the idea was for the US military to yankee doodle doo its way up into Canada before the British could arrive. There were five main areas that the US would invade—Halifax and St. John, Montreal and Quebec city, the Great Lakes area, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. Step one was to launch an offensive towards Halifax by land and sea. Halifax was a crucial port for British-Canadian trade and therefore occupying it would greatly slow down the movement of British forces into Canada. From there, a land assault from New York and Vermont would be launched to occupy Montreal and Quebec City. These act as major ports on the St Lawrence River and controlling the St Lawrence would essentially split Canada in two preventing goods from the agricultural areas in the Maritimes from getting to the rest. The US would also seek to control the Great Lakes area around Toronto both because this area was and is one of Canada’s major population and industrial centers and because it’s dangerously close to the American midwest which, at the time, was a crucial industrial area of the US. They didn’t want the British to be able to set up bases here. Winnipeg was next on US’ wish list largely because it acted as the center of Canada’s trans-continental railroad so controlling Winnipeg would mean controlling and cutting off rail transportation. Lastly, Vancouver, while lower importance, was included in invasion plans to prevent Britain using it as a back-up port by going through the Panama Canal and in order to disrupt Canada’s pacific trade. It was believed that if the US controlled these five areas, they would effectively control Canada and this would be a significant enough blow that the UK would seek a peace deal—no conflict outside the western hemisphere was planned. Interestingly, this plan included a short little casual little line mentioning that the US had no intention of returning the captured territory. Canada would become part of the US. Who knows, maybe they have oil or something well that sure would be convenient, hahahahaha-please-give-us-oil. That being their worst nightmare, Canada developed their own war plan against the United States. They recognized that their own military alone did not have a great chance at defending their territory against the US long-term. The general idea was therefore to distract US forces by, as soon as credible intelligence about an impending US invasion was received, launching a surprise invasion on Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Fargo, Great Falls, Minneapolis, Albany, and Maine. Eventually, as American forces arrived to defend these cities the Canadians would retreat destroying infrastructure like bridges, roads, and railroads on their way back to slow an American invasion. Hopefully, according to the Canadian plan, by this time British troops would have arrived from the UK. Now, while they were far from the most credible threat to the US, some people really believed in the 30s that war with the British empire could happen. Today, any sort of conflict between the US and UK or Canada—two of the most culturally and economically linked countries to the US—seems ridiculous although, War Plan Red, the US’ plan, was only declassified in 1974. The US won’t acknowledge whether or not there’s a modern day equivalent. As far as we know, the American military could be prepping for war with the UK right now. Of course, what we can be pretty certain of is that if the US and UK go to war, the missiles’ll be flying! In the post-war apocalyptic nuclear wasteland you’ll want to re-build your social status through humblebrags like, “Oh well you know I’ve been soo busy with my candle business recently, it’s just doing so well, but I’ve finally gotten around to watching that Skillshare course I had downloaded on my iPad on how to make roast chicken and you know what, I think the recipe would work for cockroach.” You can do that because Skillshare’s iOS and Android apps let you download any of their more than 25,000 classes for viewing off-line. With Skillshare, you can learn pretty much whatever you want to learn whether that be knife skills, pilates, memory skills, animation, or more. To get started, visit the link in the description or skl.sh/hai19. 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Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 1,770,517

Rating: 4.9001346 out of 5

Keywords: war plan red, war plan, war game, us, military, army, generals, planning, canada, empire, maps, interesting, half as interesting, britain, uk, united kingdom, animated, quick, funny, fun, educational

Id: hXOhzLgHV-w

Length: 5min 29sec (329 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RMS_Gigantic]

I've been intrigued by this plan for years! Here are some additional tidbits not mentioned in the video:

• The Canadian plan was actually drafted first; it completely mistook where the US was actually planning to attack (the Canadians thought that the US was going to want to invade through the more Americophilic regions in the Prairie Provinces), leading to the baffling situation of Canada throwing most of its peacetime troop count straight into where the US planned to install a defensive line between Washington and North Dakota. Other delusions of Defence Scheme No. 1 (Canada's plan) included believing that they would receive help from Mexico, Japan, and Britain at the same time. The plan was shelved before War Plan Red was even drafted.
• The British spitballed what their strategy might be in a war against the US from 1918 until 1921. The British plan actually intended to only send a nominal force to Canada if requested, but to otherwise let Canada fall because it was not considered to be essential to the survival of the empire. Instead, the British intended to offset the loss of Canada by taking the Philippines, expecting that that loss would mean that they could negotiate a peace treaty with the US on favorable terms once a stalemate was reached. This means that both sides intended to bring the other side to the peace table by taking over an area the other side anticipated losing during the war due to poor defenses anyway.
• The US and Britain both had similar thoughts on how this war would most probably start, namely that it would involve trade. The US had concerns that they would become the latest target of the pattern of nations Britain fought upon rivaling the British Empire as a commercial power (following in the footsteps of the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, and most recently the Germans), while Britain feared essentially being economically cornered by the US and being forced to fight the United States for its survival, such as if the US practiced freedom of the seas in trading with a nation Britain was at war with.
• The 1920's was a bit of a rough patch for Anglo-American relations at times. There was a dispute over war debts that the British Empire owed the United States until the Dawes Plan was enacted, the US initially favored France's approach to Germany over Britain's when the Ruhr was occupied, Britain was in an alliance with Japan at the start of the decade and the two wanted to prevent the US from building up the Philippines or Guam, and a 1927 naval arms control conference failed to produce a treaty despite relative Japanese cooperation with the US because of Anglo-American squabbling over cruiser sizes and numbers, to name just a few areas where the US and Britain weren't seeing eye to eye. It was after that 1927 conference that War Plan Red was drafted, because that conference's failure was a signal that neither nation was prepared to discount the possibility that they would be on opposite sides of the next war.
• War Plan Red was last updated in 1935, and only shelved in 1939 once it became absolutely obvious that the US and UK were indeed going to take the same side in the next major war.

Finally, here's a direct scan of one of the iterations of War Plan Red, from the National Archives and Records Administration, for those of you who like primary sources: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/16749799