That time the US almost went to war with Canada

Since President Donald Trump lambasted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “weak” and “dishonest” earlier this month during a trade dispute, many have been shaking their heads in disbelief. Isn’t the U.S. supposed to be friends with Canada, its largest trading partner by far, wartime ally, primary supplier of crude oil and home to as many as 2 million Americans living abroad?

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Not necessarily. Trump might not realize that his war of words with the younger and more handsome Trudeau is just one more cross-border squabble in a 200-year history of them. You think the U.S.-Canada relationship has always been as sweet as maple syrup? In fact, it’s long been beset by petty bickering and jealousies. The countries even once saw each other as serious geopolitical foes — going so far as to develop detailed war plans to invade one another. Let’s hope Trump doesn’t decide to make a trip to the Library of Congress archive anytime soon.

The animosity goes back to the War of 1812, when troops from Canada — then a British colony — marched to Washington, D.C., finished James and Dolly Madison’s unfinished dinner and burned down the White House. After that disastrous war, which both sides claim to have won, fighting between the U.S. and Canada devolved into a series of disputes over just where the border between the two lay, and, quite literally, whose trees or pigs were on which side — a question now thankfully answered by aerial imagery and GPS markers.

Most of these altercations have comical names, revealing the often flimsy reasons behind the disagreements. The Lumberjack, or Pork and Beans War — so called after the lumberjacks’ favorite meal — took place from 1838 to 1839. It started over an argument about who could chop down the dense forests on the border between Maine and New Brunswick. After Congress authorized a force of 50,000 men to march northward to defend what the U.S. believed to be its trees, Secretary of State Daniel Webster and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Baron Ashburton came to an agreement, redrawing the borders to increase the size of Maine. “The whole territory we were wrangling about was worth nothing,” Ashburton later sniffed, justifying his sacrifice.

We don’t need Trump to annex Canada; radio, TV, movies and the almighty dollar have done this for us without violence or too many hard feelings.

Twenty years later, in 1859, an argument about the value of a Canadian pig shot while rooting for potatoes in an American’s garden in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington quickly escalated into a full-on naval showdown, known as the Pig War. With 500 American troops and a single ship, the USS Massachusetts, facing off against 2,000 British troops and five warships, the governor of Vancouver ordered the British to attack the weaker Americans. Thankfully, the conflict was resolved with a bit of humor, when Royal Navy Rear Admiral Robert Baynes refused his orders, defusing the tensions by pointing out that “to engage two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig would be foolish.” Both sides agreed to retreat, keeping just 100 men each on either end of San Juan before the borders were made official in 1870. If calm-headedness and a sense of humor are needed to defuse cross-border tensions with Canada, there may well be cause for worry under the current administration.

The calm didn’t last long. In 1861, during the Civil War, the U.S. Navy arrested two Confederate diplomats traveling to Britain — which had remained neutral — on a British ship, the Trent. Both sides bristled, the governor general of Canada ordered troops to the border and the British accused the U.S. secretary of state of masterminding the whole affair as an excuse to invade Canadian territory. (Canadians had watched that “annexation” of Texas pretty closely.) Eventually, Lincoln decided that one war was enough for the moment and released the Confederate envoys — averting a military clash.

Six years later, Canada gained its independence from Britain, but the new country’s fears of an invasion by its voracious southern neighbor remained acute. Canada, which didn’t acquire its own official army until 1899, continued to rely mainly on Britain for defense. And after Britain withdrew its troops in 1871, Canada was left with only Britain’s verbal assurance that it would come to the rescue if the United States decided to try and annex its northern neighbor, as so many on both sides of the border assumed it would.

World War I, which gave America a new place among the world’s most powerful nations, sent these fears to a new high. After the war ended in 1919, Canadian military brass looked to assess their own preparedness for another world war fought closer to home, and commissioned war hero Buster Brown (no relation to the shoe) to create a war plan for invading the U.S.

Brown donned a disguise, grabbed his Kodak and set out in a Model T to do some reconnaissance along the New York and Vermont borders. He sent back some unintentionally funny commentary. “If Americans are not actually lazy, they have a very deliberate way of working and apparently believe in frequent rests and gossip,” and “the women of the rural districts appear to be a heavy and not very comely lot.” In 1921, following his undercover mission, Brown produced Defense Scheme No. 1, a five-pronged attack designed to invade the United States in “flying columns” of troops across the border and occupy such cities as Portland, Fargo, Niagara and Albany. Maine, of course, would be returned to Canada as well.

Meanwhile, American war planners feared Britain — chafing at the U.S.’s new power and its insistence that Britain repay U.S. war loans in full — might launch an invasion south from Canada, whose foreign policy was still under British control. The threat seemed credible enough that the U.S. War Department asked the Joint Amy and Navy Board to come up with an invasion plan of Canada, the best defense being a good offense.

The result, drawn up in 1930, was War Plan Red — a plan to invade Canada and defeat Britain on dominion soil that is an eerie mirror image of Defense Scheme No. 1. The plan began with a three-prong attack by land and sea, starting with a naval blockade of Halifax, sending troop columns from Detroit and Albany to take Toronto and Montreal, from Bellingham to capture Vancouver, and from Boston to capture Halifax, while columns of troops marching from Albany and Vermont, and troops marching from Buffalo take over Niagara Falls, disabling the Canadian power grid. The troop movements were devised with the help of U.S. aviation hero, and later Nazi sympathizer, Charles Lindbergh, who flew secret recon missions behind enemy lines up to Canada’s Hudson Bay to suss out weak points. He recommended the use of chemical weapons.

War Plan Red didn’t purport to be an easy win — it acknowledged “the RED race” (i.e. the British) is “more or less phlegmatic” but “noted for its ability to fight to a finish.” And the report actually warned not to underestimate the Mounties. But it was deemed a worthy cause, and in 1935, Congress spent $57 million on an updated version of the plan, including the building of three “civilian airports” on the border with Canada. A few months later, a U.S. government brochure accidentally revealed these airports were in fact military airfields, and the story ended up on Page 1 of the New York Times on May 1, 1935. At the same time, War Plan Red prompted the largest war games in U.S. history, involving 36,000 U.S. soldiers at Fort Drum, barely 30 miles from the Canadian border.

As we all well know, nothing ever came of these schemes. All but fragments of Defense Scheme No. 1 were burned by Brown’s successor. War Plan Red languished amid other secret government documents until it was declassified in 1974, and unearthed, ironically, by a Canadian journalist. You could even argue that today, given the realities of current-day economies, and global media and population flows, the invasion plots are moot: The takeover of Canada by the United States, and, to some extent, the incorporation of the best of Canadian culture in the U.S., from Joni Mitchell to Margaret Atwood to Justin Bieber, has already happened, without a single shot fired. We don’t need Trump to annex Canada; radio, TV, movies and the almighty dollar have done this for us without violence or too many hard feelings. In fact, maybe better to be quiet about all this, another trait Trump lacks, before too many more polite and friendly Canadians notice what happened while they were busily selling us shale oil. They might decide to unearth those fragments of Defense Scheme No. 1.