perfidy

There's been a veritable avalanche of articles about the United States invading Canada in the last few weeks. Which, for such an arcane topic, means three.

Back in the awkward in between phase of the Early 20th Century global war, the US War Department made plans for fighting pretty much everyone. Which is the sort of thing sensible War Departments do. It's not likely you're going to fight anyone in particular, but if the Pres picks up the red batphone and says, "We're invading Zimbabwe tomorrow," well, you don't want to get caught short. Back in the day, we had cool color codes for the war plans, and War Plan Red was the one in case shit got real between the US and the British Empire. Since Canada was the biggest and closest part of the Empire Upon Which The Sun Never Set, much of the war plan involved invading, oppressing and occupying Canada.

These plans were developed during the 1920s and ’30s by the U.S. Joint Planning Committee (later to become the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and each assigned a color to a particular world power the United States saw as a potential adversary. Black for Germany, Orange for Japan, and Red for the British Empire.

The first two articles are from War Is Boring and Vice, and cover the details pretty well. The War is Boring link also mentions Canadian Defense Scheme №1, which was a pre-emptive strike intended to slow the coming American onslaught by invading and then conducting a scorched-earth retreat to buy time until the Brits could come and save their (Canadian) bacon.

The hope was that the U.S. would be caught off guard, allowing enough time for the British to come to Canada’s rescue.

At the first sign of military aggression, Canadian forces would push into the states and take Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Fargo, portions of the Great Lakes region and Albany. When the inevitable retaliation came, the Canadian military would withdraw and destroy bridges, factories and other infrastructure as they went.

The Vice article quotes a defence analyst on the probable chances of Defense Scheme №1

Fortunately, there was also a Canadian counter-plan created in case of a US invasion during the same time period as War Plan Red, called Defence Scheme No. 1 (the Canadian military is apparently not that creative with naming battle plans), which would involve a pre-emptive strike on the States. At the time it was described as "suicidal," a sentiment that's only grown with the growing disparity between the two countries' armed forces.

"A pre-emptive strike of that nature just wouldn't work," said Coombs. "It would be completely out of the question. The people who did it would be a speed bump on the path of the US Army."

The last article, in the national interest, claims that tensions between the US and Britain were rather, well, tense in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and had it not been for general war-weariness and the Washington Naval Treaty that settled the issue - might have actually gone hot.

Even as the guns fell silent along the Western Front in 1918, the United States and the United Kingdom began jockeying for position. Washington and London bitterly disagreed on the nature of the settlements in Europe and Asia, as well as the shape of the postwar naval balance. In late 1920 and early 1921, these tensions reached panic levels in Washington, London and especially Ottawa.

The article goes on to present a short alt-history scenario for the War of 1921. Excerpts below - but srsly, read the whole damn thing:

Given the overwhelming disparity between available U.S. and Canadian military forces, most of these offensives would probably have succeeded in short order. The major battle would have revolved around British and Canadian efforts to hold Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and especially the port of Halifax, which would have served both as the primary portal for British troops and as the main local base for the Royal Navy. U.S. military planners understood that Halifax was the key to winning the war quickly, and investigated several options (including poison gas and an amphibious assault) for taking the port.

...

British war planning considered the prospect of simply abandoning Canada in favor of operations in the Caribbean. However, public pressure might have forced the Royal Navy to establish and maintain transatlantic supply lines against a committed U.S. Navy. While it might have struggled to do this over the long term, the RN still had a sufficient margin of superiority over the USN to make a game of it.

But how would the RN have deployed its ships? Blockading the U.S. East Coast is a far more difficult task than blockading Germany, and the USN (like the High Seas Fleet) would only have offered battle in advantageous circumstances. While the RN might have considered a sortie against Boston, Long Island or other northern coastal regions, most of its operations would have concentrated on supporting British and Canadian ground forces in the Maritimes.

...

Both the United States and the United Kingdom expected Japan to join any conflict on the British side. The connections between the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy ran back to the Meiji Restoration, and Tokyo remained hungry for territory in the Pacific. In the First World War, Japan had opportunistically gobbled up most of the German Pacific possessions, before deploying a portion of its navy in support of Entente operations in the Mediterranean. In the case of a U.S.-UK war, the IJN would likely have undertaken similar efforts against American territories.

...

In the end, however, the United States would have occupied the vast bulk of Canada, at the cost of most of its Pacific possessions. And the Canadians, having finally been “liberated” by their brothers to the south? Eventually, the conquest and occupation of Canada would have resulted in statehood for some configuration of provinces, although not likely along the same lines as existed in 1920 (offering five full states likely would have resulted in an undesirable amount of formerly Canadian representation in the U.S. Senate). The process of political rehabilitation might have resembled the Reconstruction of the American South, without the racial element.

The new map, then, might have included a United States that extended to the Arctic, an independent Quebec, a rump Canada consisting mostly of the Maritimes and Japanese control of the entirety of the Western Pacific. Tokyo, rather than London or Washington, would have stood as the biggest winner, hegemonic in its own sphere of influence and fully capable of managing international access to China.

It's interesting that pretty much everyone thought that the Japs would jump in on it - but given their behaviour in World War Phase One, just completed, maybe not such a stretch. Lose the Philipines and some Pacific Islands in exchange for pretty much all of English-speaking Canada? On the whole, probably a net gain, assuming that you don't end up with most of a century of die-hard Canadian loyalist terrorism. Even if Britain won on points in a War of 1921, they'd be proper fucked in a couple decades when the US doesn't come in on their side in the big one.