War Plan Red-America planned to attack UK!

War Plan Red-America planned to attack UK!

In the more than 200 years since the American Revolution, the United States and Great Britain have moved from enmity to a firm alliance often spoken of as the "special relationship." However, the road to this friendship was not smooth.

The hostility aroused in the United States by the American Revolution was inflamed by various disputes that arose between the two nations during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). The main issue was the forcible seizure of American seamen by the British Navy but disputes also arose about commerce, Indian policy, and boundaries. The spiraling anger culminated in what is known in the United States as the War of 1812, a conflict considered in Britain as a sideshow to the struggle against Napoleon. More or less a draw, the war was concluded in 1814 by the Treaty of Ghent. The treaty resolved none of the issues for which the United States had fought, but it created a framework for future friendly relations between the United States and Great Britain.

In the following decades, the two nations quarreled about the Canadian boundary but settled the disputes by negotiation. The American Civil War brought Britain and the United States to the edge of hostilities because of attacks against Union commerce by Southern ships fitted out in British ports. After the war the British apologized to the United States for their part in the actions of the Confederate marauders and paid a large indemnity for losses suffered, a sign that the United States had emerged from the war as a powerful nation whose good will Britain now wished to secure.

The last significant foreign-policy dispute between the United States and Britain occurred in 1895 over an American demand that Britain submit to international arbitration its dispute with Venezuela about the western boundary of British Guiana, near which gold had been discovered. Because neither the United States nor Britain wanted trouble, the dispute was resolved amicably.

Ever since the United States fought at Britain's side during World War I, relations between the two countries have grown so close that they habitually act in concert in war and diplomacy. The alliance of what Winston Churchill memorably called the "English-speaking peoples" in World War II is still fresh in many memories. The "special relationship" shows no signs of weakening.

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.

Read more here:

www.globalsecurity.org...

All you've done is copied and pasted almost an entire article and not even given your own thoughts or opinions on it.

it was to let others know about this as it has only just been released from secret papers that were hidden since then. if i gave my own personal thoughts to it i would be banned from here.

For future reference, do a search of the forums before you decide to post something. This has been discussed here before. I've never started a thread, so I don't know if you have the ability to delete your thread, but if you can, please go ahead and delete it, thank you.

reply to post by Terrorist


i did a search and there are plenty of posts here discussing this subject as it is pathetic that america was even thinking such a thing.
i will delete a post of mine when i want to, and not because you said so,
truth hurts a lot of people and this should never ever be allowed to be forgot that even when it was thought about, america knew it was a no brainer even then.
they need to get their own country in order without attacking others all the time. can anyone remember when they were never at war with anyone because i cannot.

reply to post by scotsdavy1


Who cares? What matters is we are friends now, and rely upon each other. What has passed is past, what matters is now and the future.

America, Britain and its allies, for the most part, fight against the evils of the world that cause misery and suffering to its peoples.

Those who live in the past are doing nothing but hinder progress.

Besides, look how much much bickering went on between the English and the Scots....long before America came to be.

Originally posted by scotsdavy1
reply to post by Terrorist

 

i did a search and there are plenty of posts here discussing this subject as it is pathetic that america was even thinking such a thing.

Why is it 'pathetic' that the US prepared plans to wage war on Great Britain? Perhaps the Great Unpleasantness of 1775-1783 and the Somewhat Lesser Unpleasantness of 1812-1814 slipped your mind? There was also the small matter of Great Britain's support for the Confederate States during the American Civil War.

Before you get all irate in my general direction, I'm not mocking you, I'm simply pointing out that as late as the beginning of the 20th Century, there was plenty of historical precedent for America's keeping a wary eye on Great Britain.

If you do a few seconds of really cursory research, you'll find that the US had War Plans drawn up for just about every possible international (and domestic) scenario...a literal 'rainbow' of plans, as seen here:

Taste The Rainbow!

It's not as though we were singling out Great Britain for special attention...and it's not as though the Royal Navy didn't have a matching set of War Plans drawn up in case it was ever deemed necessary to go to war with the US. To be blunt, that's one of the things that competent military services do...they make sure plans are in place *before* they're needed, rather than trying to make things up on the run.

i will delete a post of mine when i want to, and not because you said so,
truth hurts a lot of people and this should never ever be allowed to be forgot that even when it was thought about, america knew it was a no brainer even then.

Either you need to switch to decaff, or I need to get my brain retreaded, because I can't for the life of me follow the logical curve that led from War Plan Red to this rather ambiguous sentence. What, exactly, is a 'no-brainer'?
I'd also suggest that you consider the implications of 'never forgetting the past'. Great Britain might be in real trouble if America suddenly decided to exhume the hatchet we buried in 1814...or if France decided to come back and settle more old scores than I care to count. Take a deep, calming breath, and study history a bit...particularly the history of Great Britain, and of Europe in general...there's a lot more of it than there is of American history, and it provides ample proof that, over time, alliances change, and the things that are taken for granted by us will be seen as utterly absurd or unthinkable by our great-grandchildren.

they need to get their own country in order without attacking others all the time. can anyone remember when they were never at war with anyone because i cannot.

We're hardly alone in that...I could ask much the same question regarding the USSR, India, China, or even, to a surprising degree, Great Britain. Sad as it might be, it's not a peaceful world out there, much as we might wish it otherwise.

reply to post by Terrorist



Why should he delete it? I would never have known about this, I haven't seen it talked about and I thank the OP for posting it as it's very interesting stuff. Just because you've seen this subject before doesn't mean everyone has.

As late as 1940 the French navy had contingency plans for defense against a Royal Navy (British) attack on France, so nothing new there!
I bet some other European navies had similar plans, truth be known.

Originally posted by pikestaff
As late as 1940 the French navy had contingency plans for defense against a Royal Navy (British) attack on France, so nothing new there!
I bet some other European navies had similar plans, truth be known.

And as late as 1942, it turned out that the French navy *needed* plans for defense against a Royal Navy attack.
History can be a strange, strange place!.

Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer

Originally posted by pikestaff
As late as 1940 the French navy had contingency plans for defense against a Royal Navy (British) attack on France, so nothing new there!
I bet some other European navies had similar plans, truth be known.

And as late as 1942, it turned out that the French navy *needed* plans for defense against a Royal Navy attack.
History can be a strange, strange place!.

Cant argue with that statement. Plans are good things to have but someone always comes along and wont play ball with ya plans just ask the French Fleet.

As you said yourself, there are many posts and threads discussing this topic.

Why feel the need to start another thread? In fact, there was a thread started a few weeks ago which went into several pages of discussions about this exact same thing. Why not join that one?

reply to post by stumason


Here is one of the threads I was talking about (the latest one). Might be worth chipping in there, rather than re-hashing an old topic

reply to post by scotsdavy1


It is irrelevant. We have contingency plans to liberate or attack every country, even The Vatican, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, etc.