London Sunday Times January 17 1999 IRELAND http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html?1121757 Paranoia that led US to plan invasion of Ireland by York Membery THE American army was so fearful of a British invasion in the 1920s that it drew up plans for a counterattack against Britain, including landing an expeditionary force in Ireland. As late as 1936 the American military believed that the possibility of a British attack "should be the governing consideration in our peacetime preparedness". In response, it drew up "War Plan Red". The plan, discovered by a British historian at the Naval Historical Centre in Washington, proposed intercepting supplies of wheat and meat bound for Britain and sending US marines into British possessions including Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda. The plan remained operational until the mid-1930s. "War Plan Red runs to more than 100 pages," said John Major, a history professor at the University of Hull, who uncovered the document while researching a book about the Panama Canal. "My initial reaction was one of shock. I had never been aware that there were any such contingency plans, particularly as Britain and America are such close allies." The possible cause of an Anglo-American conflict was judged to have been American penetration and expansion into regions formerly dominated by Britain which might have caused economic damage. The diagnosis concluded that Britain would aim to eliminate America as a commercial threat by destruction of US shipping and foreign trade, the acquisition of American overseas possessions such as the Panama Canal and ultimately the invasion of the United States from Canada, then part of the British Empire. "Within 40 days of the outbreak of hostilities, the Americans thought the admiralty could assemble 14 battleships, 38 cruisers, five aircraft carriers, 130 destroyers and 34 submarines at the Canadian port of Halifax," said Major, who is no relation to the former prime minister. The US army believed the focus of the British onslaught would be industrial cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, vital to America's war machine. It also feared the RAF would launch air strikes on Boston, New York and Washington, and "an expedition, probably led by Australia" would target America's Far Eastern colony, the Philippines. To meet the supposed threat, the American army would have sent 25,000 men to Halifax and attacked Montreal and Quebec. Elsewhere, American forces would have tried to seize British possessions in the Caribbean and secure a base of operations on the Irish coast, while the US navy would have harried British cargo ships in the Far East and the Atlantic. Preposterous as the notion of a 20th-century Anglo-American conflict now seems, the US military had grave doubts about its capacity to win a war with Britain, Major discovered. "For a start, the US navy had its fleet stationed on America's west coast," he said. "It would have taken eight days, at the very least, to move the fleet to the Atlantic via the Panama Canal." War Plan Red was approved in 1930 and issued in 1931. It was revised in 1935 and during the winter of 1935-36 the US First Army enthusiastically simulated the ground campaign against Halifax. War was the last thing on Britain's mind even though relations with America in the years after the first world war were "unsettled", according to the British-born head of history at Yale, Paul Kennedy. It was not until May 1936 that War Plan Red was placed "on low priority" and in the following October it was officially declared obsolete by the military chief of staff. By then, Major said, "it had been made redundant by changing international conditions". Professor Robert Love, a lecturer at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, said: "From today's perspective, War Plan Red might seem bizarre, if not comical, but it was a useful military exercise. For instance, I'm certain that second world war military planners drew on the amphibious landing section of the plan when they drew up Operation Overlord." Even so, as General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, former commander of British land forces and commander-in-chief of Nato forces in Northern Europe, said: "The idea of Britain invading the US in the 20th century is so utterly absurd as to be beyond belief. My only explanation for War Plan Red is that the US army, which was starved of funds between the wars, must have drawn it up in an attempt to get more money out of the US government."
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