OMG! US invasion plans target Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg . . . and Sudbury?
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.”
Old news indeed, but still of historical interest. The plans in the other direction were held in Defence Scheme No. 1:
Lt. Colonel Brown himself did reconnaissance for the plan, along with other lieutenant-colonels, all in plainclothes. These missions took place from 1921 and 1926. As historian Pierre Berton noted in his book Marching as to War, these investigations had “a zany flavour about it, reminiscent of the silent comedies of the day.” To illustrate this, Berton quoted from Brown’s reports, in which Brown recorded, among other things, that in Burlington, Vermont the people were “affable” and thus unusual for Americans; that Americans drink significantly less alcohol than Canadians (this was during Prohibition), and that upon pointing out that to Americans, one responded “My God! I’d go for a glass of beer. I’m going to ‘Canady’ to get some more”; that the people of Vermont would only be serious soldiers “if aroused”; and that many Americans might be sympathetic with the British cause.
