U.S. Military Once Drafted a Secret Plan to Invade Canada

In the 1920s, American military planners produced War Plan Red, a secret scenario that imagined a war with the United Kingdom and its empire. The scheme focused on quickly seizing Canadian ports and transportation centers such as Halifax, Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver to deny Britain a base on the continent. It also detailed naval defenses to protect the U.S. East Coast against the Royal Navy’s superior fleet.

The plan was never executed and later historians view it as increasingly unrealistic by the 1930s, given Britain’s global reach and emerging threats from Germany and Japan. Nonetheless, the document offers a window into the paranoid mindset of an era before the U.S. and Britain forged their modern “special relationship.”