so it looks like 'Blame Canada' isn't just a South Park bit...

     'Meanwhile, one might have expected the American Civil War to have refocused American military thinking, but as Richard A. Preston shows in The Defense of the Undefended Border, until 1940 anglophobia remained a central motivating factor in the United States, and Canada a target for conquest. Between the world wars the United States developed three major war plans: one against Japan, one against Mexico, and War Plan Red, against the United Kingdom. (Germany was color-coded black, but there never was a War Plan Black.) In 1935 secret congressional hearings for air bases to launch surprise attacks on Canada, based on War Plan Red, were mistakenly published by the Government Printing Office and reported by the New York Times and the Toronto Globe. The story was re-discovered in 1975 and again in 1991 before being dug up once more in 2005. The existence of such a plan was treated with a sense of disbelief and laughing up the sleeve. But War Plan Red was not funny: it was detailed, amended and acted upon, and . . . it was no defense plan. The United States would start the war, and even if Canada declared neutrality the United States would still invade and conquer it, planning to "hold in perpetuity" all territory gained and to abolish the Dominion government. The plan was approved in May 1930 by the secretary of war and the secretary of the Navy in expectation of "consequent suffering to the [Canadian] population and widespread destruction and devastation of the country." In October 1934 the secretaries approved the strategic bombing of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City "on as large a scale as practicable." A second amendment, also approved at cabinet level, directed the U.S. Army to use poison gas at the outset as a supposedly "humanitarian" action that would cause Canada to surrender quickly, and thus save American lives. Even as late as 1939, as the free world was mobilizing to fight fascism, the U.S. Army War College and the Naval War College set as their planning priority "Overseas Expeditionary Force to Capture Halifax from Red-Crimson Coalition." This enduring hostility to Britain and Canada within the U.S. military was a legacy of the War of 1812 and was finally extinguished only by the Second World War, which ushered in the "special relationship,"' Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America, p. 407-8.