War Plan Red
In PLAN RED, the Atlantic Strategic War Plan, the strategists theorized that there would be a war with Great Britain. They did this because England was locked in a strategic alliance with Japan, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which was renewed and lasted until the Washington Conference of 1921-22. American planners thought that England’s imperial reach would bring it into conflict with the US.
Another contingency war plan they developed was the RED-ORANGE PLAN, which hypothesized a two-theater war, seeking to win first in the Atlantic, against England, while fighting a holding battle in the Pacific, and then defeating Japan. When World War Two broke out, military and naval planners simply dusted off the old RED-ORANGE PLAN and substituted Germany for England in the Atlantic Theater.
For Uncle Sam, the resentments arising from two wars, one for independence and one for sailors' rights, became traditional, an inheritance handed from one generation to another. Knowing little of Europe except England, he personified in that country, really most like himself, many of those assumptions of caste which he had discarded. John Bull, on the other hand, or at any rate his dominant classes who were the only vocal part of him in the Napoleonic era, agreed with most other European observers that our political system was a short-lived experiment, foredoomed to failure. Knowing little of democracies except the recent " red fool fury of the Seine," he believed as a matter of course that our great and growing empire and population would in time outgrow the ignorant turbulence of an unbalanced suffrage or else would crash in chaos.
One powerful influence for harmony was the English adoption of a free trade policy in 1846 which changed the traditional English attitude towards commercial competition, and drove even the sons of old Tories in Canada into the arms of the United States in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. When Cobden, the apostle of free trade, became the oracle of England's economic policies, colonists were considered only as customers. Their allegiance was a matter of indifference. Cobden was thinking of a federation of the world and not of British imperial unities. The Tories believed that colonies, which under free trade could not be exploited, would become an intolerable burden. The Whigs argued that free trade would be as advantageous for colonies as for the motherland, but that if a colony wanted political as well as economic freedom it ought to have it. In this doctrine all leaders. Peel and Disraeli as well as Gladstone and Russell, coincided. Consequently, English sentiment, intent more and more exclusively upon commercial wealth, agreed that the United States should assume control of Central America, and offered but mild censure of the many voices that were raised in Canada for annexation.
The genesis of this British view of Anglo-American diplomatic relations may be traced, long before the days of Cobden and free trade, as far back as the Rush-Bagot agreement of 1818, in which Lord Castlereagh prevailed over his colleagues in the Ministry who would have guarded Canada with fleets and armies. Instead it was agreed that neither the United States nor England should maintain a warfleet upon any of the Great Lakes. This was the most outstanding example of a diplomatic triumph of economic common-sense over political rivalries in the nineteenth century prior to the Geneva arbitration. In the same spirit the long-protracted boundary disputes affecting Maine and Oregon were settled in 1842 to 1846, the Central American and Isthmian questions disposed of in 1850 and 1856 on the basis of joint Anglo-American interest in a neutralized canal, and the old British claim to a right of search was abandoned in 1858.
Lincoln's repression of Seward's rash desire to quarrel with England and France in 1861 was exactly duplicated in England six months later by the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria, who took the sting out of Lord Russell's dispatch concerning the seizure of Mason and Slidell. Both nations were happy in the possession of rulers who remained sane, even when the people were angry and politicians lost their heads.
It was already determined in 1864 that the United States would not renew the Reciprocity Treaty with Canada, which would come to its term in 1866. That treaty was doomed not only by the resentment against both England and Canada, but also by the rapid growth of protectionist sentiment in the United States under the new war tariff.
At the time of the Civil War, Canada sheltered many Southern sympathizers and Confederate refugees who planned to wreck bridges and railway trains, to scatter disease germs in Northern cities, and who directed brigand raids across the border. For this menace upon our Northern frontier the North held both Canada and England responsible, although it is sufficiently evident that officers of the law in Canada were not intentionally remiss in preserving neutrality.
The raids of Confederate sympathizers across the Canadian border in 186-4 directly impelled the Federal Government to notify Great Britain that the agreement of 1817 for mutual disarmament on the Great Lakes would end in the following year. Lord Lyons wrote to his chief: " There can, unhappily, be no doubt that three-quarters of the American people are eagerly longing for a safe opportunity of making'war with England. . . . The ill-will shows itself in many ways -— principally in vexatious proceedings in regard to the neighboring colonies." In the American and Canadian parliaments alike members began to talk of gunboats and fortifications on the frontiers. In the House of Commons Lord Palmerston in February, 1865, need these words of studied moderation : " We cannot deny that things did take place on the Lakes of which the United States were justly entitled to complain; and if the measures to which they have recourse are simply calculated, as they say, for the protection of their commerce and their citizens, I think they are perfectly justified in having recourse to them."
The new strength of the United States evoked an answering assertion of national power in Canada. This rising tide of British loyalty was swollen by a fresh threat of war along the border from Fenian organizations in the United States. The militant Irish on both sides of the ocean confidently expected that the controversies between England and the United States would result in war. as soon as our armies and fleets were free to act. Finding that the wounds showed some tendency to heal rather than to fester, the Fenian leaders started to conquer England by way of Canada on their own account in 1866, in 1870, and again in 1871, ridiculous affairs in which many ignorant honest men were dupes. These disgraceful provocations were ended forever by the triumph of peaceful diplomacy in the treaty of Washington in 1871 and the ensuing arbitration tribunal at Geneva in 1872.
The Fenian adventurers defeated their own object. Our Government could not afford to be lax in policing Canadian borders at the time when it was pressing upon England a claim for damages because England had been remiss in performing its neutral duties.
The worst obstacle to peaceful solutions was not the Fenian, but the incendiary talk of reckless politicians in our Congress and in our press, and the extravagant plans of dreamers like Charles Sumner. Senator Sumner in 1869 wielded for the moment an exceptional influence. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and by reason of his long martyrdom from Brook.0' assault no less than by reason of his abilities he was a dominant intellectual force in the Republican party. He was supposed to have the confidence of the new President, Grant, and he secured the appointment of his close friend, John Lothrop Motley, as Minister to England. Sumner agreed with Seward that England should be held responsible for all losses that Americans had suffered not only by the depredations of Confederate privateers, but by the substitution of the British merchant marine for our own. His bill for these losses was two and a half billions of dollars.
He told the Senate and the world that the only way to ensure peace in this hemisphere was to banish the English flag from it and substitute the Stars and Stripes. Estimating that the whole of British America was fairly worth about two and a half billions of dollars, he seriously proposed to cancel all claims against England and begin the new reign of peace and brotherly love on condition of receiving from England the title to all her possessions, continental and insular, within the New World.
English statesmen, on the other hand, were only waiting to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. The traditional belief among them that the American republic would not long endure died when Lee surrendered. English public opinion, except among a few extreme Tories, admitted that Americans had cause for complaint, and that some reparation was due for the mistakes of Palmerston's administration. With the Liberal party, which came into power in 1869, were aligned most of the English groups who had been staunch supporters of the North during the war. Mr. Gladstone, the new Premier, who had shaken off all relics of his original Toryism, was convinced of the wisdom of yielding to the claims of the United States as soon as it could be safely done.
Even on the subject of Canadian annexation responsible British lenders were still holding Cobden's doctrine. The London Times, discussing in 1869 the inchoate Canadian Confederation, declared that England would not withstand the colonies if they preferred to slip into the Union rather than the Dominion, and added : "Instead of the Colonies being the dependencies of the Mother Country, the Mother Country has become the dependency of the Colonies. We are tied while they are loose. We are subject to danger, while they are free." Lord Clarendon in 1870 wrote to Lord Lyons: " I wish that the Canadians would propose to be independent and to annex themselves. We can't throw them off and it is very desirable that we part as friends." Sir Edward Thornton, the British Minister at Washington, remarked to our Secretary, Hamilton Fish, in 1869, " England does not wish to keep Canada, but cannot part with it without the consent of the population."
With the beginning of a new administration at Washington in 1869, the ground was soon cleared for a complete reconstruction of Anglo-American relations. Sumner led in the Senatorial rejection of the first attempt to agree upon the questions in dispute— the Johnson-Clarendon Convention of 1868-9, but his influence was soon after shattered by his quarrel with Grant who could be led but not driven. Motley was forced to resign. Sumner was driven from his chairmanship, and Secretary Fish abandoned Simmer's grandiose plan of annexing British America. Sumner thereupon inscribed Fish also upon his list of lost souls.
England meanwhile had discovered during the Franco-Prussian battle summer of 1870 new and cogent reasons for amity with the United States on the basis of strict definitions of neutrality. It is perhaps not too much to say that England was hampered in its dealings with that European conflict by its relations with the United States. Sir Edward Thornton admitted that he could see how the ocean might swarm with Alabamas, preying this time on British instead of American commerce.
Both sides were now ready for the final definitive treaty of peace of the Civil War, which was finished at Washington, May 8, 1871, the Canadian Macdonald sitting at the table as one of the English Commission. Each nation yielded somewhat. The United States received fifteen and a half millions of dollars because England had allowed the Confederate cruisers to slip out of its harbors, and the United States paid to England two millions of dollars for damage that we inflicted upon British subjects during the war, and paid five and a half millions for ten years' use of the Canadian inshore fisheries. England agreed to submit her administration of her own statutes to an alien tribunal, and to accept the American definition of neutrality as better than her own. The United States dropped the question of annexation, indirect claims for damages and the alleged premature recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent. Each nation gained both materially and spiritually. Two great principles of concord were comprehensively applied, reciprocity in commercial relations so far as the American tariff system would permit, and arbitration in all pending controversies.
The Democratic party, obsessed by Bryan's quixotic vagaries, was imbued with the idea that imperialist England and capitalist Wall Street had combined to crucify the laboring world upon "a cross of gold." Cleveland's administration had become a political anomaly. The few friends it had were chiefly in the camp of the opposing political party. The wreck of the Democratic party in the Presidential election of 1896 resulted in the unbroken ascendency of the Republican party for sixteen years, 1897 to 1913. One fortunate result of such a long tenure of power was an unusual continuity in foreign policies.
John Hay, in the autumn of 1898, came from the ambassadorship at London to be Secretary of State for President McKinley. He was almost the only American who understood the aim of the Imperial German clique. During the Boxer trouble, he wrote of " the infamy of an alliance with Germany," and declared that he would rather be the dupe of China than the chum of the Kaiser. The first aim of Hay's diplomacy was to secure close and friendly co-operation between England and the United States in international affairs, and to remove all possible causes of friction between them. All such causes were reduced to two groups: one, disputes between the United States and British North America, some of long duration, but relating chiefly to fisheries, boundaries and trade; the other, difficulties hindering our construction of a transoceanic canal. In the latter problem England and Canada had, each, a primary interest.
English statesmen, especially those of the Liberal party, were eager to meet Secretary Hay half way. Fearful of Germany's vaulting ambition, they turned hopefully, as Canning had done a hundred years earlier, to the New World to redress the balance of the Old. Within their own borders, the obstacles to their success lay not so much in Great Britain as in Canada.
Hay's chief obstacles to success lay in the convolutions of party politics. There were, first the extreme Protectionists of his own party, watchful lest the oft-recurring pressure from Canadian Liberals should bring about a breach in our tariff walls; and, second, the lion's tail-twisters, both sincere and sham, whose uproar had been increased somewhat since the events of 1895-6. Hay's frame of mind is sharply expressed in a letter written in 1900 to John W. Foster, thus: "Every Senator I see says, 'For God's sake, don't let it appear we have any understanding with England.' How can I make bricks without straw ? That we should be compelled to refuse the assistance of the greatest power in the world, in carrying out our own policy, because all Irishmen are Democrats and some Germans are fools — is enough to drive a man mad."
War Plan Crimson
Canada and the United States were once part of the same empire. The Continental Congress had, on the first of June 1775, disclaimed the purpose of invading Canada; and a French version of their resolution was distributed among its inhabitants. But on the ninth of that month the governor of the province proclaimed the American borderers to be rebellious traitors, established martial law, summoned the French peasantry to serve under the old colonial nobility, and instigated alike the converted Indian tribes and the savages of the Northwest to take up the hatchet against New York and New England. These movements made the occupation of Canada by America an act of self-defence. Continental troops took Montreal, and Montgomery fell before Quebec.
The old articles of Confederation provision was made for the admission of Canada into the Union.
Following the American Revolution, the United States of America became a significant force in naval commerce. This brought the young nation into conflict with England and other maritime nations concerning maritime trade. These problems led to the War of 1812. While the new administration under President James Madison emphasized the maritime issues with England, the war was largely a result of the desire for national expansion. The southern and western slaveholding states, led by War Hawks such as John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, wanted war with Britain in order to push the annexation of Canada, expand the western and southern frontiers, remove the threat of alliance between Britain and the Indians of the Great Lakes region, and help prevent slaves from escaping beyond American borders.
During the War of 1812, the Americans tried to annex Canada, while the British attacked major US seaports. Although the Americans lost most of the battles, they were able to secure an equitable peace. Nine months after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, before this treaty could take effect, American forces under Andrew Jackson defeated a numerically superior British force at New Orleans. This battle made Jackson a national hero and helped him to eventually win the US presidency.
The Treaty of Ghent in 1814, or rather an agreement that grew out of it, established on the Lakes the principle of non-armament. A Government patrol to prevent smuggling and illegal fishing is all that was required either of the United States or Canada and is all that suggested armed service on these waters.
In the century that passed since that Treaty was signed, there were many issues which might have driven the United States and the United Kingdom to arms. For many years there were boundary disputes. On Lake Erie, in 1837 and 1838, with the escapades of William Lyon Mackenzie, the burning of the steamer Caroline, and other incidents of the Upper Canada Rebellion, the so-called Patriot War, there were causes enough for international strife.
In late 1845 the question of the annexation of Texas became less a party and more a sectional issue, when Southern Whigs began to favor and Northern Democrats to resist annexing Texas. The annexation of Canada was advocated in turn. The addition of Texas to the South, it was said, demanded a like addition to the North to preserve the just balance of the Union.
The year 1849 witnessed the somewhat celebrated movement for the annexation of Canada to the United States. In 1849 a large number of leading Canadians signed a manifesto in favor of annexation. It is certain the matter of annexation was brought up at Washington the following year. It was hastily considered then only because the more vital question of slavery was also under discussion.
The question of Annexation connected itself most closely with that of "dissolution of the Union." "If Canada were annexed," said the free soilers of New England and New York State, during the dissatisfactions in Canada, "we should be able to master the slave States, and form, if we liked, a powerful free republic." On the other hand, "If Cuba were annexed, we should be able to retain our first preponderance," said the slavery defenders of the south; "and, if that were contested, to form a separate Confederation in spite of the free States, and equal to them in strength." The storms and compromises which attended the admission of California, showed the amount of opposition which the south would raise against the annexation of Canada.
During the American Civil War, Canada, then officially known as British North America, was against slavery, but not fully supportive of the North. As a British possession, Canada reflected Britain’s brand of neutrality, which tipped toward the South and King Cotton. Many Canadians worried about the possibility that the breakup of the Union might tempt the United States to add territory by attempting to annex Canada. As the war wore on and Canadians’ sympathy for the South grew, so did toleration for harboring Confederate agents. On the Great Lakes the Civil War period was marked with numerous episodes, notably the Johnson's Island plot, the exploits of certain Confederate raiders and the abortive Peace Convention at Niagara Falls.
After the Civil War, Britain agreed to pay for damage to the US fleet inflicted by each British-built Confederate ship CSS Alabama. Home rule in Canada also lessened tension. While not fully independent of Great Britain, Canada proved to be a peaceful neighbor.
Annexation was much discussed in one form or another during the 1880s. As late as 1891 the Liberal party of Canada made an open issue of annexation. But the discussion of 1889-1892 of the annexation of Canada largely subsided, as it had in 1849.
Some Americans still dreamed of war with Britain. Just six years before his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “the greatest boon I could confer upon this nation” would be “an immediate war with Great Britain for the conquest of Canada... I will do my very best to bring about the day..." [Theodore Roosevelt, letter to General James Harrison Wilson, November 5, 1895. Quoted in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris, pp. 530-531.] Ironically, it was Roosevelt’s own uncle, James Bulloch, who obtained the Alabama for the Confederacy — the same warship that threatened New York City, where young Theodore was born and raised.
A dispute in which England must fight the United States or sacrifice Canada seemed quite possible in the late 19th Century. It is palpably not to England's interest to fight the United States for the sake of retaining Canada as a piece of red upon the map ; but the chief use of the Mother Country to Canada is as a safeguard against American expansion northward. Of course did Canada desire to unite with the States the Mother Country would offer no military objection ; but the question is : In what way does the Canadian colony benefit the Mother Country ? This is a hard question to answer, except on the grounds of sentiment. Corn comes thence, it is true ; but corn, wherever it comes from, is sent by people who wish to make money by selling it.
The Red / Crimson Plans (war with Great Britain / Canada) received a great deal of attention from American war planners in the inter-war years. As such, the un-likelyhood of an American-British war seems to have had little dampening effect on American planning.
Plan Red called for a defensive concentration of the main US fleet in New York harbor. At the same time, the American Army was to mobilize and launch raids to cut the rail lines linking Western Canada with the East. A rapid landing, in the first few weeks of war, was called for in St. Margaret's Bay in order to seize Halifax and deny its use to the Royal Navy. After the US Army was fully mobilized, operations would commence to seize the major Canadian cities within 200 miles of the US border. The plan recognized that it was unlikely that the Royal Navy could be defeated. In all of its variations, Plan Red never came up with a solution of how to ultimately defeat Great Britain in a protracted war with the United States.
The Americans were not the only ones to be toiling away at plans involving the “undefended border.” In Canada, Colonel J. Sutherland Brown (who detested Americans), the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence, planned to repulse an American invasion. Defence Scheme No.1 was the basic military doctrine of the Dominion for over a decade from April 1921 onwards. The fact that no one in the civilian end of the Canadian government had much of an idea of its (Defence Scheme No.1's) existence did not alter the fact that it provided much of the basis for planning a US-Canadian war.
American strategical planning in the period immediately following World War I was largely conditioned by the postwar political system and by the wide popular reaction against war. The Versailles Treaty, the Washington Treaties of 1921-1922, and the League of Nations (to which Germany was admitted in 1925) gave promise to the war-weary peoples of the world of an international order in which war would be forever banished. That promise seemed to many to have been fulfilled in 1928 when representatives from most of the nations in the world met at Paris to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. During these years of disillusion with war, isolationism, and Congressional economy, military planning in the United States was largely theoretical. Germany had just been defeated and stripped of military power. Russia was preoccupied with internal problems and, though Communism was recognized as a menace, the Bolshevik regime was in no position to engage in military adventures. Neither France nor Italy had sufficient naval force to attempt any major operation the Western Hemisphere and had no reason to do so in any case Of all the powers in Europe, only Great Britain was theoretically in a position to engage the United States in war with any prospect of success. The British had extensive holdings in the Western Hemisphere from which to launch attacks on American territory and they had enough dreadnoughts and battle cruisers to obtain naval supremacy in the Atlantic. But the possibility of a contest with Britain was extremely remote, for there was no sentiment for war on either side of the Atlantic. In the early 1920s, the war plans divisions of the War Department and the Navy Department drew up contingency plans for what they envisioned to be a two-theater world war fought in the Atlantic and the Pacific theater. In PLAN ORANGE, the Pacific Strategic War Plan, U.S. strategists theorized that there would be a war with Japan over resources and territory in the Pacific.
In PLAN RED, the Atlantic Strategic War Plan, the strategists theorized that there would be a war with Great Britain. They did this because England was locked in a strategic alliance with Japan, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which was renewed and lasted until the Washington Conference of 1921-22. American planners thought that England’s imperial reach would bring it into conflict with the US.
In the unlikely event of a conflict between Great Britain and the United States, there was a real possibility of invasion of the United States as well as attacks against the Canal and American interests in the Caribbean and Latin American. In such a war, the major threat clearly would lie in the Atlantic. Plans developed to meet the remote danger of a RED war, in contrast to ORANGE, called for the immediate dispatch of the bulk of the U.S. Fleet to the Atlantic and large-scale ground operation to deprive the enemy of bases in the Western Hemisphere. As in ORANGE, it was assumed that neither side would have Allies among the great powers of Europe and Asia, and no plans were made for an invasion of the enemy's homeland by an American expeditionary force. This was to be a limited war in which the United States would adopt a strategic defensive with the object of frustrating the enemy's assumed objective in opening hostilities.
RED-ORANGE PLAN
Another contingency war plan they developed was the RED-ORANGE PLAN, which hypothesized a two-theater war, seeking to win first in the Atlantic, against England, while fighting a holding battle in the Pacific, and then defeating Japan. When World War Two broke out, military and naval planners simply dusted off the old RED-ORANGE PLAN and substituted Germany for England in the Atlantic Theater.
In 1923, the Army draft of RED-ORANGE started with the statement, "Under existing conditions a coalition of RED and ORANGE is unlikely," and twelve years later the Director of Naval Intelligence, commenting on another draft plan, stated that a RED-ORANGE combination was "highly improbable" in the next decade, if at all.
The broader strategy and the resources to carry it out, including defense construction and mobilization of reserves, was essentially the same. The main point to be learned here is that a theoretical planning construct does not make an enemy of a country. England made a strategic policy choice at the Washington Conference, deciding to cast its lot with the United States, and turned out to be a close ally by the late-1930s. But the RED-ORANGE PLAN stayed on the US Joint Army-Navy Board’s agenda through 1939.
The problems presented by a RED-ORANGE coalition, though highly theoretical, were more complicated. Here the American strategists had to face all the possibilities of an ORANGE and a RED war-seizure of American possessions in the western Pacific, violation of the Monroe Doctrine, attacks on the Panama Canal, Hawaii, and other places, and, finally, the invasion of the United States itself. Basically the problem was to prepare for a war in both oceans against the two great naval powers, Great Britain and Japan.
As the planners viewed this problem, the strategic choices open to the United States were limited. Certainly the United State did not have the naval strength to conduct offensive operations simultaneously in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; she must adopt a strategic defensive on both fronts or else assume the strategic offensive in one theater while standing on the defensive in the other. The recommended solution to this problem-and it was only a recommended solution, for no joint war plan was ever adopted-was "to concentrate on obtaining a favorable decision" in the Atlantic and to stand on the defensive in the Pacific with minimum forces. This was based on the assumption that since the Atlantic enemy was the stronger and since the vital areas of the United States were located in the northeast, the main effort of the hostile coalition would be made there. For this reason, the initial effort of the United States, the planners argued, should be in the Atlantic.
A strategic offensive-defensive in a two-front war, American strategists recognized, entailed serious disadvantages. It gave the hostile coalition freedom of action to attack at points of its own choosing, compelled the United States to be prepared to meet attacks practically everywhere, exposed all U.S. overseas possessions to capture, and imposed on the American people a restraint inconsistent with their traditions and spirit. Also it involved serious and humiliating defeats in the Pacific during the first phase of the war and the almost certain loss of outlying possessions in that region.
But the strategic offensive-defensive had definite advantages. It enabled the United States to conduct operations in close proximity to its home bases and to force the enemy to fight at great distance from his own home bases at the end of a long line of communications. Moreover, the forces raised in the process of producing a favorable decision in the Atlantic would give the United States such a superiority over Japan that the Japanese might well negotiate rather than fight the United States alone. "It is not unreasonable to hope," the planners observed, "that the situation at the end of the struggle with RED may be such as to induce ORANGE to yield rather than face a war carried to the Western Pacific."
This plan for a RED-ORANGE war was admittedly unrealistic in terms of the international situation during the 1920's and 1930's. The military planners knew this as well and better than most and often noted this fact in the draft plans they wrote.
