This is my first go at an alternate history timeline, so I hope that my tone and/or format isn't too strange compared to other TLs on this site.
I'm sure many of you know of War Plan Red, but for the uninitiated, War Plan Red was a plan that was drafted up by the United States in about 1930-1931 and was last improved in 1935 before being retired in 1939. The plan wasn't for fighting the USSR, Germany, or Japan, but rather the the entire British Empire. It began with an invasion of Canada and the British parts of the Caribbean to deny the UK any possible staging areas against the US homeland, with the goal of then negotiating a peace (where Canada and the British Caribbean are kept and turned into American states and territories). The Wikipedia article is here, and I'll link two scans of two of different iterations of the document (that I found on the internet) at the end of this post.
Now that the introduction is out of the way, I've looked at various War Plan Red threads on this site, and the vast majority of those threads regard War Plan Red becoming enacted as the result of ASB activities because it seems that nobody has a good POD for it. I've been doing some research and trying to think one up, so here goes. I'm not good with politicians of the era (which is part of why I mention looking for feedback and improvements), so all of this is presented in terms of how nations interact with each other:
The first thing that happens in this alternate timeline is that from immediately after World War I to the earliest years of the 1920's, Japanese-American relations don't take the sharp turn downward that they did in OTL. Here's a list of possible ways I thought of as to how Japanese-American relations could be kept at 1912-1915 levels all the way up the 1940's; it could be any combination of these (I'm open to additional ideas and suggestions about this):
As far as this timeline's purposes go, this stops this War Plan Red scenario from becoming a War Plan Red-Orange scenario, since "Orange" (Japan) either never has, or quickly recovers from, tense relations with the US.
Late 1921 to early 1922: The Washington Naval Conference facilitates the demise of the Anglo-Japanese alliance as it did in our timeline, although maybe for slightly different reasons depending on where US-Japan relations are so far in this alternate timeline.
From 1918 through the 1920's: with Japan hardly being thought of as anything beyond a theoretical enemy, the United States is a lot less patient with Britain's refusal to pay or otherwise slow payments on its World War debts. Just like in our timeline, the guns and ammo that the US sent to the United Kingdom cost money, and the US wants its money back! Britain's excuse that they can't pay the US until Germany pays the UK doesn't fly in this timeline, as the more vocal members of the US congress point out that the massive Germany reparations were Britain and France's idea, while the US opposed it. Simply put, the US doesn't see why it shouldn't get its money just because Britain's ill-founded scheme with Germany didn't work out. From this view point, the Dawes Plan gets rejected as being ridiculous, since, as its opponents would successfully argue in this timeline, it asks the US to pay Germany most of the cost of an arbitrarily chosen British-requested fine so that Britain would, in turn, pay back less money to the US than the US would be paying Germany!
As the 1920's roll on, the USA, in this alternate timeline, offers Britain an alternative for paying off its war debts, if Britain is willing to negotiate. For an idea of the kinds of terms the US would offer Britain, look up the terms in the 1946 Anglo-American loan, and the repercussions those terms had, including the 1947 Sterling Crisis, otherwise known as the Convertibility Crisis. If the UK accepts these terms, America is willing to massively reduce Britain's debt to them from the World War.
Because this deal would come with awful and pervasive financial repercussions for the empire as (accurately) predicted by John Maynard Keynes, the United Kingdom obstinately refuses to to sign such an agreement. The mighty British Empire adamantly refuses to bring onto itself the sort of event that was called in OTL's 1946 a "financial Dunkirk" scenario, yet Britain continues to lag behind in its debt payments, and resentment continues to build between both countries. Britons see Americans as high-and-mighty latecomers to World War I, and Americans seeing the British as pretentious and ungrateful for the US's work to end the stalemate conflict (much the same way that both sides viewed each other after World War II). This anti-British sentiment is deeper in the United States among certain immigrant groups, such as the Irish and to some degree the Germans, and is especially prevalent in the Midwest.
1927: if the Geneva Naval Conference poisoned the water between the US and Great Britain in OTL (which it did), then it's absolutely disastrous in this TL! In our timeline, the US and British arguments over relative sizes and numbers of cruisers were ostensibly in the name of protecting their respective trade rather than to win a potential war between them. In this timeline, however, the two nations disagree at seemingly every turn in a thinly veiled naval arms race, against the backdrop of a full decade's worth of escalating tensions -- compounded by over 140 years of hostilities prior to the World War -- between the two former "associated powers".
As the Great Depression approaches, I would like to note that without the Dawes Plan tying the European economies to that of the United States, but with Great Britain and France now having war reparations as a pressing matter for each of them, western Europe would probably be in an economic slump, but it wouldn't be attached to the Great Depression in quite the same way as it was in OTL. With that in mind, I may or may not have just butterflied away Adolf Hitler's rise to power here, I'm not wholly sure. With that, onward to the Great Depression! Here are my thoughts: If I remember correctly there was a particular point during the 1920's when the Nazis almost seized power but were stopped because the effects of the Dawes Plan significantly improving Germany's economy. Without the Dawes Plan to stop Germany's economic plunge, the Nazis may seize power even earlier in this timeline than they did in ours.
1929: The American stock market crashes, and as the Great Depression becomes apparent, the United States decides that it needs that money owed by Britain. The United States of America figures that enough is enough, and, at some point between late 1929 and 1933, tightens the noose around Britain: In a last ditch effort to bring the United Kingdom to the negotiating table to either have it pay its debt or accept the US's terms for reducing its debt, the United States places an embargo against British shipping. Even more catastrophic for the British, the United States also denies passage through the Panama Canal for any ships coming from or bound for British or Commonwealth ports.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Britain's and America's corresponding war plans against each other evolve and are detailed virtually the same way they were in our timeline, but they're not regarded as merely "theoretically possible" as they were in OTL. I wish to mention here that Canada had a "Defense Scheme No. 1" for preemptively attacking the United States if war should appear to be inevitable, but it was scrapped in 1928, before War Plan Red was even drafted. In this timeline, Canada may put more resources into developing an anti-US war plan to be kept around longer. The result of this effort looks nothing like the shoestring Defense Scheme No. 1. Instead of a suicidal attack rush into the United States followed by a scorched earth retreat back north of the border, Canada would settle for a defensive war. This would have been the result of Canada wishing to be neutral, but probably not being able to with its Commonwealth obligations to the British crown. There's no way Britain's going to let a prime location for launching a land war against the US go to waste! Even if they're somehow able to convince Britain to let them remain neutral, War Plan Red dictates that the US will only accept this declaration of neutrality if Canada lets the USA occupy its ports and certain land until the war ends; Canada would probably find it more preferable to fight alongside the British against the USA than to have the United States encroach upon its sovereignty in this way.
The British War Plan, as it did in our timeline, figures that if a sizable American fleet were to arrive near the British Isles to form a blockade, that the United Kingdom would be forced to surrender. From this, both in our timeline and in this alternate one, the British war planners conclude that attacking the American fleet from Bermuda would be the most promising way to get an upper hand if hostilities were to break out between the UK and the US, but they would need to act fast, because their situation would quickly turn bleak if the industrial capacity of the United States catches up.
1931: The Star-Spangled Banner, a decidedly anti-British song, is adopted as the United States of America's national anthem. During the war, the song, and the conditions that led to its writing, will receive a lot of attention in various forms of propaganda, including its second, third, and fourth verses.
1935: Two events happen this year precisely as they did in our timeline:
If the events three months prior didn't convince the United Kingdom that the United States was preparing to fight, the Fort Drum exercises certainly would. Faced with a now all but certain prospect that the US is going to attack in the near future, and with the US's years-long trade embargo still in effect (and likely to get worse when war breaks out), London unknowingly takes a page out of Defense Scheme No. 1's book and decides that a preemptive strike is the best way to reduce the American threat at minimal cost to the Royal Navy, British shipping, and the British Isles' security (since British war planners, both in this timeline and in ours, regard Canada as basically expendable as far as the survival of the British Empire goes). To carry out this surprise attack, Britain starts sending war supplies (particularly ships and perhaps carrier-based aircraft) to Bermuda either in late 1935 or at some point in 1936.
Almost immediately after they arrive, the British warships that were sent to Bermuda are refueled and, as a fleet, travel to Norfolk, Virginia to deliver a surprise attack against the headquarters of the United States Atlantic Fleet. Think of it as a Pearl Harbor for the east. Like Pearl Harbor, this attack is followed up the next day by a rousing speech from the president and a unanimous declaration of war from Congress.
Before that declaration of war, however, the United States armed forces, immediately after receiving word of the attack, begin their M-day preparations laid out in War Plan Red (as the plan explicitly states that M-Day may precede a declaration of war). They won't attack or enter foreign territory until they receive a formal declaration, but that's not going to stop them from moving troops into position within the US's borders!
From there, War Plan Red gets enacted as it is written, changing as the situation does, but the smaller aspects especially of those changes can't be predicted with certainty from our timeline.
One outcome that I'm certain of would be the US annexing Canada and probably much, if not all, of the British Caribbean at the end of the war. Beyond that, War Plan Red makes explicit that the US has no intention to claim any other British land, or even wage much of a war outside of the North American and Pacific areas.
I figure Japan, based on the parameters I described above, would either remain out of the conflict or side with the United States in this war. After all, Japan has the British possessions in Southeast Asia, Australia, and India to gain from this! Other than that, I'd like to hear what you think the alliances would shape up to be. After all, an Anglo-American war in this era would be such a massive event, it likely wouldn't be followed by World War II -- it would be World War II.
And so ends my four or five pages' worth of alternate history from 1918 to 1935 or 1936. I'm extremely interested in hearing feedback on this timeline concept, as well as the speculation on its ramifications.
On a final note, as I promised at the beginning of this entire post, here are scans I found online of two complete iterations of War Plan Red:
A 1930 version
A 1931 version
I'm sure many of you know of War Plan Red, but for the uninitiated, War Plan Red was a plan that was drafted up by the United States in about 1930-1931 and was last improved in 1935 before being retired in 1939. The plan wasn't for fighting the USSR, Germany, or Japan, but rather the the entire British Empire. It began with an invasion of Canada and the British parts of the Caribbean to deny the UK any possible staging areas against the US homeland, with the goal of then negotiating a peace (where Canada and the British Caribbean are kept and turned into American states and territories). The Wikipedia article is here, and I'll link two scans of two of different iterations of the document (that I found on the internet) at the end of this post.
Now that the introduction is out of the way, I've looked at various War Plan Red threads on this site, and the vast majority of those threads regard War Plan Red becoming enacted as the result of ASB activities because it seems that nobody has a good POD for it. I've been doing some research and trying to think one up, so here goes. I'm not good with politicians of the era (which is part of why I mention looking for feedback and improvements), so all of this is presented in terms of how nations interact with each other:
The first thing that happens in this alternate timeline is that from immediately after World War I to the earliest years of the 1920's, Japanese-American relations don't take the sharp turn downward that they did in OTL. Here's a list of possible ways I thought of as to how Japanese-American relations could be kept at 1912-1915 levels all the way up the 1940's; it could be any combination of these (I'm open to additional ideas and suggestions about this):
- Japanese imperial ambitions (especially in terms of China) are, if not kept in check, at least aren't as violent or rape-filled as in OTL.
- The "Yellow Peril" racism doesn't become widespread enough for the Immigration Act of 1924 to become law.
- Isoroku Yamamoto's time studying in the US is more widely known (it should be noted that Yamamoto, along with much of the Navy apparently, was an opponent of Japan's invasion of China, which ties in with the first point I suggested).
- The US adopts a more hardline neutrality/non-interventionism and keeps trading with Japan even as their ethics become... questionable, to say the least. Perhaps the US figures that a more powerful Japan can mean a larger volume of trade than China could ever offer?
- The US and the Japanese Empire sign some kind of nonaggression pact or other agreement that the US will not expand any further into Asia if Japan skips over the Philippines and the US's other Pacific possessions during its imperial expansion.
As far as this timeline's purposes go, this stops this War Plan Red scenario from becoming a War Plan Red-Orange scenario, since "Orange" (Japan) either never has, or quickly recovers from, tense relations with the US.
Late 1921 to early 1922: The Washington Naval Conference facilitates the demise of the Anglo-Japanese alliance as it did in our timeline, although maybe for slightly different reasons depending on where US-Japan relations are so far in this alternate timeline.
From 1918 through the 1920's: with Japan hardly being thought of as anything beyond a theoretical enemy, the United States is a lot less patient with Britain's refusal to pay or otherwise slow payments on its World War debts. Just like in our timeline, the guns and ammo that the US sent to the United Kingdom cost money, and the US wants its money back! Britain's excuse that they can't pay the US until Germany pays the UK doesn't fly in this timeline, as the more vocal members of the US congress point out that the massive Germany reparations were Britain and France's idea, while the US opposed it. Simply put, the US doesn't see why it shouldn't get its money just because Britain's ill-founded scheme with Germany didn't work out. From this view point, the Dawes Plan gets rejected as being ridiculous, since, as its opponents would successfully argue in this timeline, it asks the US to pay Germany most of the cost of an arbitrarily chosen British-requested fine so that Britain would, in turn, pay back less money to the US than the US would be paying Germany!
As the 1920's roll on, the USA, in this alternate timeline, offers Britain an alternative for paying off its war debts, if Britain is willing to negotiate. For an idea of the kinds of terms the US would offer Britain, look up the terms in the 1946 Anglo-American loan, and the repercussions those terms had, including the 1947 Sterling Crisis, otherwise known as the Convertibility Crisis. If the UK accepts these terms, America is willing to massively reduce Britain's debt to them from the World War.
Because this deal would come with awful and pervasive financial repercussions for the empire as (accurately) predicted by John Maynard Keynes, the United Kingdom obstinately refuses to to sign such an agreement. The mighty British Empire adamantly refuses to bring onto itself the sort of event that was called in OTL's 1946 a "financial Dunkirk" scenario, yet Britain continues to lag behind in its debt payments, and resentment continues to build between both countries. Britons see Americans as high-and-mighty latecomers to World War I, and Americans seeing the British as pretentious and ungrateful for the US's work to end the stalemate conflict (much the same way that both sides viewed each other after World War II). This anti-British sentiment is deeper in the United States among certain immigrant groups, such as the Irish and to some degree the Germans, and is especially prevalent in the Midwest.
1927: if the Geneva Naval Conference poisoned the water between the US and Great Britain in OTL (which it did), then it's absolutely disastrous in this TL! In our timeline, the US and British arguments over relative sizes and numbers of cruisers were ostensibly in the name of protecting their respective trade rather than to win a potential war between them. In this timeline, however, the two nations disagree at seemingly every turn in a thinly veiled naval arms race, against the backdrop of a full decade's worth of escalating tensions -- compounded by over 140 years of hostilities prior to the World War -- between the two former "associated powers".
As the Great Depression approaches, I would like to note that without the Dawes Plan tying the European economies to that of the United States, but with Great Britain and France now having war reparations as a pressing matter for each of them, western Europe would probably be in an economic slump, but it wouldn't be attached to the Great Depression in quite the same way as it was in OTL. With that in mind, I may or may not have just butterflied away Adolf Hitler's rise to power here, I'm not wholly sure. With that, onward to the Great Depression! Here are my thoughts: If I remember correctly there was a particular point during the 1920's when the Nazis almost seized power but were stopped because the effects of the Dawes Plan significantly improving Germany's economy. Without the Dawes Plan to stop Germany's economic plunge, the Nazis may seize power even earlier in this timeline than they did in ours.
1929: The American stock market crashes, and as the Great Depression becomes apparent, the United States decides that it needs that money owed by Britain. The United States of America figures that enough is enough, and, at some point between late 1929 and 1933, tightens the noose around Britain: In a last ditch effort to bring the United Kingdom to the negotiating table to either have it pay its debt or accept the US's terms for reducing its debt, the United States places an embargo against British shipping. Even more catastrophic for the British, the United States also denies passage through the Panama Canal for any ships coming from or bound for British or Commonwealth ports.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Britain's and America's corresponding war plans against each other evolve and are detailed virtually the same way they were in our timeline, but they're not regarded as merely "theoretically possible" as they were in OTL. I wish to mention here that Canada had a "Defense Scheme No. 1" for preemptively attacking the United States if war should appear to be inevitable, but it was scrapped in 1928, before War Plan Red was even drafted. In this timeline, Canada may put more resources into developing an anti-US war plan to be kept around longer. The result of this effort looks nothing like the shoestring Defense Scheme No. 1. Instead of a suicidal attack rush into the United States followed by a scorched earth retreat back north of the border, Canada would settle for a defensive war. This would have been the result of Canada wishing to be neutral, but probably not being able to with its Commonwealth obligations to the British crown. There's no way Britain's going to let a prime location for launching a land war against the US go to waste! Even if they're somehow able to convince Britain to let them remain neutral, War Plan Red dictates that the US will only accept this declaration of neutrality if Canada lets the USA occupy its ports and certain land until the war ends; Canada would probably find it more preferable to fight alongside the British against the USA than to have the United States encroach upon its sovereignty in this way.
The British War Plan, as it did in our timeline, figures that if a sizable American fleet were to arrive near the British Isles to form a blockade, that the United Kingdom would be forced to surrender. From this, both in our timeline and in this alternate one, the British war planners conclude that attacking the American fleet from Bermuda would be the most promising way to get an upper hand if hostilities were to break out between the UK and the US, but they would need to act fast, because their situation would quickly turn bleak if the industrial capacity of the United States catches up.
1931: The Star-Spangled Banner, a decidedly anti-British song, is adopted as the United States of America's national anthem. During the war, the song, and the conditions that led to its writing, will receive a lot of attention in various forms of propaganda, including its second, third, and fourth verses.
1935: Two events happen this year precisely as they did in our timeline:
- On May 1, the New York Times publishes a front-page article that mentions the existence of three secret airbases near the Canadian border, one of which was to be disguised as a civilian airport, for the purpose of launching surprise attacks against Canada. This information comes from a hearing in a United States House committee that was meant to be kept secret but was accidentally published by the Government Printing Office. In OTL, this report goes unnoticed by the British insofar as anybody can find. In this TL, however, the United States publicly attempts to claim, essentially, that it's not what it looks like, while the British public and government both start to worry at the prospect that the US appears to be seriously preparing for war against them.
- In August of 1935, Fort Drum, an Army base situated extremely close to the Canadian border in northern New York State, holds the largest peacetime war games in US history: 36,500 soldiers from across the American northeast (covering two or three of the future theaters of war in Canada) come to Fort Drum to spend 36 hours training and maneuvering over 100 miles of land.
If the events three months prior didn't convince the United Kingdom that the United States was preparing to fight, the Fort Drum exercises certainly would. Faced with a now all but certain prospect that the US is going to attack in the near future, and with the US's years-long trade embargo still in effect (and likely to get worse when war breaks out), London unknowingly takes a page out of Defense Scheme No. 1's book and decides that a preemptive strike is the best way to reduce the American threat at minimal cost to the Royal Navy, British shipping, and the British Isles' security (since British war planners, both in this timeline and in ours, regard Canada as basically expendable as far as the survival of the British Empire goes). To carry out this surprise attack, Britain starts sending war supplies (particularly ships and perhaps carrier-based aircraft) to Bermuda either in late 1935 or at some point in 1936.
Almost immediately after they arrive, the British warships that were sent to Bermuda are refueled and, as a fleet, travel to Norfolk, Virginia to deliver a surprise attack against the headquarters of the United States Atlantic Fleet. Think of it as a Pearl Harbor for the east. Like Pearl Harbor, this attack is followed up the next day by a rousing speech from the president and a unanimous declaration of war from Congress.
Before that declaration of war, however, the United States armed forces, immediately after receiving word of the attack, begin their M-day preparations laid out in War Plan Red (as the plan explicitly states that M-Day may precede a declaration of war). They won't attack or enter foreign territory until they receive a formal declaration, but that's not going to stop them from moving troops into position within the US's borders!
From there, War Plan Red gets enacted as it is written, changing as the situation does, but the smaller aspects especially of those changes can't be predicted with certainty from our timeline.
One outcome that I'm certain of would be the US annexing Canada and probably much, if not all, of the British Caribbean at the end of the war. Beyond that, War Plan Red makes explicit that the US has no intention to claim any other British land, or even wage much of a war outside of the North American and Pacific areas.
I figure Japan, based on the parameters I described above, would either remain out of the conflict or side with the United States in this war. After all, Japan has the British possessions in Southeast Asia, Australia, and India to gain from this! Other than that, I'd like to hear what you think the alliances would shape up to be. After all, an Anglo-American war in this era would be such a massive event, it likely wouldn't be followed by World War II -- it would be World War II.
And so ends my four or five pages' worth of alternate history from 1918 to 1935 or 1936. I'm extremely interested in hearing feedback on this timeline concept, as well as the speculation on its ramifications.
On a final note, as I promised at the beginning of this entire post, here are scans I found online of two complete iterations of War Plan Red:
A 1930 version
A 1931 version
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