Really unthickening the Canada/US border

Post World War I approaches:

1) First Canada, from Blessed Buster Brown:

...Director of Military Operations and Intelligence...

[In 1911 Col. Willoughby Gwatkin, Chief of the General Staff], agreed that war with the USA was remote but planning should be made for the contingency. Being Allies during the Great War made hostilities with the USA even more remote but the NDHQ still regarded it as a possibility for which they should prepare. [In 1922] it became Buster’s responsibility.

Three general plans were conceived by NDHQ for the Director to work on:

* Defence Scheme No. 1, (DS No. 1), defence against a possible attack from the USA, judged the most important...

[Stephen] Harris states in his book, [Canadian Brass]: “Brown did not take the problem of defending Canada lightly. The long border with the United States could not be manned everywhere, while the vulnerability of the Dominion’s population centres and transportation corridors was obvious. It was clear that British help was essential to offset the huge manpower advantage enjoyed by the Americans. The strategic problem, therefore, was how to gain time to allow the British to react before it was too late. ... Persuaded that a purely defensive strategy was doomed to failure, he preferred to throw the enemy off balance using surprise and shock action. ‘Flying columns’ of Militia battalions would be thrown across the border in a controlled penetration to a depth of a few hundred miles so that if all went well, and the US army was caught unprepared, the Canadian force would have a chance to prepare ground of its own choosing for a fighting withdrawal. By the time it got pushed back to the border British operations should be underway... [and eventually] a reasonable peace settlement was likely to follow.”.

The documents relating to DS No. 1 are found in Buster’s papers in the Queen’s University Archives...

... Chapter 2 is an outline of the organization and proposed distribution of the army (12 divisions) as well as the organization of the ‘flying columns’....Chapters 4 and 5 are missing, but they dealt with American Army strength and distribution; with the targets for the flying columns (Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Great Falls, and Butte in the West; Minneapolis and St. Paul in the Midwest; Albany and Maine in the East) [emphasis added], method of advance etc...

Following completion of the document, Buster and his colleagues conducted several reconnaissances of the northern States in civilian clothes; characterized as ‘spies’ by Eayrs and Taylor. The first reconnaissance included Buster, the Director of Signals and the three GSO 1s of MDs No.3, 4 and 5 (Photo 7-4).

Photo 7-4. Canadian ‘spies’ in 1923 on the road between Keene and upper Jay in New York State; from left to right they are Lt. Col. F.O. Hodgins, DSO; Lt. Col. E. Forde, DSO; Lt. Col. J.M. Prower, DSO. Photographer was probably Col James Sutherland Brown, CMG, DSO...

2) Then the US War Department:

...
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 [emphasis added].

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."

* * *

It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies [see, er, above]...

Any invasion of Canada by U.S. forces shouldn't underestimate the legendary Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (Patterson Clark -- The Washington Post)

Looks like armies would have collided on the eastern and central fronts, but we'd have had things pretty much our own way on the western.