By the way, just for fun:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901412_pf.html
Raiding the Icebox
Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; C01
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."
The Sudbury Offensive
None of this information is new. After the plan was declassified in 1974,
several historians and journalists wrote about War Plan Red. But still it
remains virtually unknown on both sides of the world's largest undefended
border.
"I've never heard of it," said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute
in Washington, which thinks about Canada.
"I remember sort of hearing about this," said Bernard Etzinger, spokesman for
the Canadian Embassy in Washington.
"It's the first I've heard of it," said David Courtemanche, mayor of Sudbury,
Ontario, whose nickel mines were targeted in the war plan.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he'd never heard of the plan. He also
said he wouldn't admit to knowing about such a plan if he did.
"We don't talk about any of our contingency plans," he said.
Has the Pentagon updated War Plan Red since the '30s?
"The Defense Department never talks about its contingency plans for any
countries," Whitman said. "We don't acknowledge which countries we have
contingency plans for."
Out in Winnipeg -- the Manitoba capital, whose rail yards were slated to be
seized in the plan -- Brad Salyn, the city's director of communications, said
he didn't think Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz knew anything about War Plan Red: "You
know he would have no clue about what you're talking about, eh?"
"I'm sure Winnipeggers will stand up tall in defense of our country," Mayor
Katz said later. "We have many, many weapons."
What kind of weapons?
"We have peashooters, slingshots and snowballs," he said, laughing.
But the Canadians' best weapon, Katz added, is their weather. "It gets to about
minus-50 Celsius with a wind chill," he said. "It will be like Napoleon's
invasion of Russia. I'm quite convinced that you'll meet your Waterloo on the
banks of the Assiniboine River."
Gas Station Strategy
As it turns out, Katz isn't the first Canadian to speculate on how to fight the
U.S.A. In fact, Canadian military strategists developed a plan to invade the
United States in 1921 -- nine years before their American counterparts created
War Plan Red.
The Canadian plan was developed by the country's director of military
operations and intelligence, a World War I hero named James Sutherland "Buster"
Brown. Apparently Buster believed that the best defense was a good offense: His
"Defence Scheme No. 1" called for Canadian soldiers to invade the United
States, charging toward Albany, Minneapolis, Seattle and Great Falls, Mont., at
the first signs of a possible U.S. invasion.
"His plan was to start sending people south quickly because surprise would be
more important than preparation," said Floyd Rudmin, a Canadian psychology
professor and author of "Bordering on Aggression: Evidence of U.S. Military
Preparations Against Canada," a 1993 book about both nations' war plans. "At a
certain point, he figured they'd be stopped and then retreat, blowing up
bridges and tearing up railroad tracks to slow the Americans down."
Brown's idea was to buy time for the British to come to Canada's rescue. Buster
even entered the United States in civilian clothing to do some reconnaissance.
"He had a total annual budget of $1,200," said Rudmin, "so he himself would
drive to the areas where they were going to invade and take pictures and pick
up free maps at gas stations."
Rudmin got interested in these war plans in the 1980s when he was living in
Kingston, Ontario, just across the St. Lawrence River from Fort Drum, the huge
Army base in Upstate New York. Why would the Americans put an Army base in such
a wretched, frigid wilderness? he wondered. Could it be there to . . . fight
Canada?
He did some digging. He found "War Plan Red" and "Defence Scheme No. 1." At the
Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., he found a 1935 update of War Plan Red,
which specified which roads to use in the invasion ("The best practicable route
to Vancouver is via Route 99").
Rudmin also learned about an American plan from 1935 to build three military
airfields near the Canadian border and disguise them as civilian airports. The
secret scheme was revealed after the testimony of two generals in a closed-door
session of the House Military Affairs Committee was published by mistake. When
the Canadian government protested the plan, President Franklin Roosevelt
reassured it that he wasn't contemplating war. The whole brouhaha made the
front page of the New York Times on May 1, 1935.
That summer, however, the Army held what were the biggest war games in American
history on the site of what is now Fort Drum, Rudmin said.
Is he worried that the Yanks will invade his country from Fort Drum?
"Not now ," he said. "Now the U.S. is kind of busy in Iraq. But I wouldn't put
it past them."
He's not paranoid, he hastened to add, and he doesn't think the States will
simply invade Canada the way Hitler invaded Russia.
But if some kind of crisis -- perhaps something involving the perennially
grumpy French Canadians -- destabilized Canada, then . . . well, Fort Drum is
just across the river.
"We most certainly are not preparing to invade Canada," said Ben Abel, the
official spokesman for Fort Drum.
The fort, he added, is home to the legendary 10th Mountain Division, which is
training for its third deployment in Afghanistan. There are also 1,200 Canadian
troops in Afghanistan.
"I find it very hard to believe that we'd be planning to invade Canada," Abel
said. "We have a lot of Canadian soldiers training here. I bumped into a
Canadian officer in the bathroom the other day."
Going North, Heading South
Invading Canada is an old American tradition. Invading Canada successfully is
not.
During the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold -- then in his pre-traitor days
-- led an invasion of Canada from Maine. It failed.
During the War of 1812, American troops invaded Canada several times. They were
driven back.
In 1839, Americans from Maine confronted Canadians in a border dispute known as
the Aroostook War.
"There were never any shots fired," said Etzinger, the Canadian Embassy
spokesman, "but I think an American cow was injured -- and a Canadian pig."
In 1866, about 800 Irish Americans in the Fenian Brotherhood decided to strike
a blow for Irish independence by invading Canada. They crossed the Niagara
River into Ontario, where they defeated a Canadian militia. But when British
troops approached, the Fenians fled back to the United States, where many were
arrested.
After that, Americans stopped invading Canada and took up other hobbies, such
as invading Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Grenada and, of course, Iraq.
But the dream of invading Canada lives on in the American psyche, occasionally
manifesting itself in bizarre ways. Movies, for instance.
In the 1995 movie "Canadian Bacon," the U.S. president, played by Alan Alda,
decides to jump-start the economy by picking a fight with Canada. His battle
cry: "Surrender pronto or we'll level Toronto."
In the 1999 movie "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," Americans, angered that
their kids have been corrupted by a pair of foulmouthed, flatulent Canadian
comedians, go to war. Canada responds by sending its air force to bomb the
Hollywood home of the Baldwin brothers -- a far more popular defensive strategy
than anything Buster Brown devised. Moviegoers left theaters humming the film's
theme:
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
With all their hockey hullabaloo
And that bitch Anne Murray too!
Blame Canada! Shame on Canada!
But it's not just movies. The urge to invade Canada comes in myriad forms.
In 2002, the conservative magazine National Review published an essay called
"Bomb Canada: The Case for War." The author, Jonah Goldberg, suggested that the
United States "launch a quick raid into Canada" and blow something up --
"perhaps an empty hockey stadium." That would cause Canada to stop wasting its
money on universal health insurance and instead fund a military worthy of the
name, so that "Canada's neurotic anti-Americanism would be transformed into
manly resolve."
And let's not forget the Web site http://invadecanada.us/ , which lists many
compelling reasons for doing do: "let's make Alaska actually connected to the
U.S. again!" and "they're just a little too proud" and "the surrender will come
quickly, they're French after all."
The site also sells T-shirts, buttons, teddy bears and thong underwear, all of
them decorated with the classic picture of Uncle Sam atop the slogan "I WANT
YOU to Invade Canada."
What's going on here? Why do Americans love to joke about invading Canada?
Because Americans see Canadians as goody-goodies, said Biette, the Canada
Institute director. Canadians didn't rebel against the British, remaining loyal
colonial subjects. They didn't have a Wild West, settling their land without
the kind of theatrical gunfights that make for good movies. And they like to
hector us about our misbehavior.
"We're 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' and they're 'peace, order
and good government,' " Biette said. "So if you're a wild American, you look at
them and say, 'They're just a bunch of Boy Scouts.' "
The C-Bomb
Canadians are well aware of our invasion talk. Not surprisingly, they take it a
bit more seriously than we do.
When "The West Wing" had a subplot last winter about a U.S.-Canada border
incident, Canadian newspapers took note.
When Jon Stewart joked about invading Canada on "The Daily Show" last March,
Canadian newspapers covered the story.
When the Toronto Star interviewed comedian Jimmy Kimmel last year, the reporter
asked him: "Is it only a matter of time before America invades Canada?"
"I'm not sure," Kimmel replied.
In 2003, the Canadian army set up an Internet chat room where soldiers and
civilians could discuss defense issues. "One of the hottest topics on the site
discusses whether the U.S. will invade Canada to seize its natural resources,"
the Ottawa Citizen reported. "If the attack did come, Canada could rely on a
scorched-earth policy similar to what Russia did when invaded by Nazi Germany,
one participant recommends. 'With such emmense [sic] land, and with our cold
climates, we may be able to hold them off, even though we have the much weaker
military,' the individual concludes."
Etzinger, the Canadian Embassy spokesman, isn't worried about an American
invasion because Canada has a secret weapon -- actually thousands of secret
weapons.
"We've got thousands of Canadians in the U.S. right now, in place secretly," he
said. "They could be on your street. We've sent people like Celine Dion and
Mike Myers to secretly infiltrate American society."
Pretty funny, Mr. Etzinger. But the strategists who wrote War Plan Red were
prepared for that problem. They noted that "it would be necessary to deal
internally" with the "large number" of Brits and Canadians living in the United
States -- and also with "a small number of professional pacifists and
communists."
The planners did not specify exactly what would be done with those
undesirables. But it would be kinda fun to see Celine Dion and Mike Myers
wearing orange jumpsuits down in Guantanamo.
Eh?
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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