Oh, Canada. They’ve given us Ryan Gosling and Justin Bieber. Drake and Shania Twain. Alex Trebek and Celine Dion. We have a love-hate thing with their pop culture these days, laughing at fictional wars against our benign neighbor to the north in “South Park” even as we embrace Seth Rogen as one of our own.
But things were once much more serious. So serious that as late as 1939, the United States military had a top-secret plan that detailed how to invade Canada on multiple fronts.
So-called War Plan Red, first drafted in 1930 and updated through 1935, was actually put in place in case of war with all of the United Kingdom (code name: Red). Though there hadn’t been any real hostility between the nations since the War of 1812, the British Empire’s considerable reach in the 20th century meant America (code name: Blue) would be in deep trouble if relations between the two powers soured.
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Not that Canada should have felt singled out by the plan — the U.S. had a whole rainbow of color-coded plans on file in the wake of the Great War, which created a drive toward isolationism. If the U.S. found itself at odds with the UK, which had a pretty strong navy at the time, strategists concluded that preemptively invading the British dominion of Canada (code name: Crimson) would offer the best shot at victory.
The United States had actually failed at fighting Canada during both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. This would be a more concerted effort. It would begin with a poison gas attack on Halifax, Nova Scotia, to keep the British from this eastern province. If Halifax didn’t work, they’d take New Brunswick by land. Next, troops would come in to Quebec City and Montreal from the St. Lawrence River, cutting off access to the east coast. From the Great Lakes region, troops would take over the industrial hub of Toronto and block Canadians’ access to the power supply from Niagara Falls. From North Dakota, Americans would seize the railroad in Winnipeg. Then from Washington, more troops would attack Vancouver by land and sea.
In 1935, the War Department experienced a blunder of Edward Snowden proportions when a classified congressional hearing–held to appropriate $57 million to build three military airbases near the Canadian border–was accidentally made public. The New York Times published President Franklin Roosevelt’s letter of reprimand to the congressional committee for the error, which no doubt caused a giant diplomatic headache.
“This government does not in any way envisage the possibility of a change in the friendly relationship between the United States and any foreign country,” Roosevelt wrote. “I call your especial attention to the fact that this government not only accepts as an accomplished fact the permanent peace conditions cemented by many generations of friendship between the Canadian and American people, but expects to live up to not only the letter but the spirit of our treaties relating to the permanent disarmament of our three thousand miles of common boundary.”
War Plan Red was withdrawn in 1939, at the start of World War II, and the 94-page document was finally declassified in 1974. (You can read the whole thing here.)
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—Sabrina Rojas Weiss