FROM ASSOCIATES TO ANTAGONISTS: THE UNITED STATES, GREAT BRITAIN, THE FIRST WORLD WAR, AND THE ORIGINS OF WAR PLAN RED, 1914-1919 Mark C. Gleason, B.S. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2012 APPROVED: Geoffrey Wawro, Major-Professor Robert Citino, Committee Member Michael Leggiere, Committee Member Richard McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Gleason, Mark C. From Associates to Antagonists: The United States, Great Britain, the First World War, and the Origins of WAR PLAN RED, 1914-1919. Master of Arts (History), May 2012, 178 pp., bibliography, 144 titles. American military plans for a war with the British Empire, first discussed in 1919, have received varied treatment since their declassification. The most common theme among historians in their appraisals of WAR PLAN RED is that of an oddity. Lack of a detailed study of Anglo- American relations in the immediate post-First World War years makes a right understanding of the difficult relationship between the United States and Britain after the War problematic. As a result of divergent aims and policies, the United States and Great Britain did not find the diplomatic and social unity so many on both sides of the Atlantic aspired to during and immediately after the First World War. Instead, United States’ civil and military organizations came to see the British Empire as a fierce and potentially dangerous rival, worthy of suspicion, and planned accordingly. Less than a year after the end of the War, internal debates and notes discussed and circulated between the most influential members of the United States Government, coalesced around a premise that became the rationale for WAR PLAN RED. Ample evidence reveals that contrary to the common narrative of “Anglo-American” and “Atlanticist” historians of the past century, the First World War did not forge a new union of spirit between the English-speaking nations. The experiences of the War, instead, engendered American antipathy for the British Empire. Economic and military advisers feared that the British might use their naval power to check American expansion, as they believed it did during the then recent conflict. The first full year of peace witnessed the beginnings of what became WAR PLAN RED. The foundational elements of America’s war plan against the British Empire emerged in reaction to the events of the day. Planners saw Britain as a potentially hostile nation, which might regard the United States’ rise in strength as a threatening challenge to Britain’s historic economic and maritime supremacy. Copyright 2012 by Mark C. Gleason ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Great thanks is given to Drs. Geoffrey Wawro, Robert Citino, and Michael Leggiere, whom I have been privileged to work with over the past three years; the staff of the office of the North Texas Department of History; and fellow graduate students, who have aided in the development of this work. Additionally, much appreciation is expressed to the most friendly and helpful archivists at the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division in Washington, D.C., at the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, and at Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2. CONTROVERSIES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR ...........................................14 CHAPTER 3. RETURN TO RIVALRY BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE .................................48 CHAPTER 4. THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE ...................................................................83 CHAPTER 5. THE ASSOCIATION SOURS .............................................................................118 CHAPTER 6. RED INAUGURATED: THE FOUNDATIONS FOR ANGLO-AMERICAN WAR PLANS...................................................................................................................150 CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................161 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................164 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION WAR PLAN RED occupies a curious position in military historiography. American military plans for a war with the British Empire, first discussed in 1919, finally developed in 1927-1930, and retained up through 1939 – one of many colored plans the Army and Navy jointly developed in the post-First World War period – have received varied treatment since their declassification in 1974. The official plan assumed a long war, “involving the maximum effort of the armed forces and civil power of the United States, directed...toward...the defeat of [the British Empire’s] armed forces in North America and the Western North Atlantic, including the Caribbean Sea and West Indian waters, and finally toward the economic exhaustion of the...United Kingdom.” British forces would concentrate land and naval forces on Canada. Over the course of a year, the Joint Army and Navy Board estimated British and Canadian military forces in the Dominion could amount to 1.29 million men; the Royal Navy in Western Atlantic waters, operating out of Canadian and Caribbean ports, could possess 16 battleships, 5 aircraft-carriers, 143 destroyers, and 52 submarines; and the Royal Air Force could send up to 72 squadrons to North America. PLAN RED anticipated a British-Canadian invasion of the United States, primarily the northeast, at the earliest possible moment to arrest American mobilization. Against this possibility, an American expeditionary force of some 25,000 men would capture Halifax to prevent British reinforcement of Canada, followed by amphibious assaults on other harbors to prevent effective British naval operations in the Western Atlantic. Ultimately, the Joint Board estimated 4.6 million men could be mobilized into 9 armies and support organizations. Besides Canadian ports, 1 other offensive operations into Canada would be launched, as well as against strategic British locations such as Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas in the Caribbean. Additionally, the United States Navy would embark upon a campaign of guerre de course against Britain’s worldwide commerce, attempt a distant blockade of the home islands, and force the British Empire to terms.1 The most common theme among historians in their appraisals of PLAN RED is that of an oddity. One of the most valuable sources on the details of American war plans, Steven Ross of the Naval War College, dismisses RED as lacking “serious political rationale,” a contention he repeats in several iterations in two separate works on American war planning.2 In full agreement, an Army War College production, Henry Gole’s Road to Rainbow, implies that these plans “bore little relation to contemporary developments in international affairs.”3 Its only value, these scholars contend, existed in providing United States military planners “practice in dealing with problems of a major war,” for study of “the complexities of an Atlantic-centered conflict,” or merely “exercise [of] skills in defending the Atlantic coast.”4 One reviewer reduces it even further: it remained simply “to give colonels and captains something to do.”5 These and other authors maintain that PLAN RED provided little more than a phase on the “Road to Rainbow.” Even those willing to concede some element of the realistic in the plans remain focused more on the premise that, “for both the Army and Navy, planning for war against RED...provided valuable experience from which the services drew when they confronted really 1 Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan – RED, Estimates of the Situation, 16 May 1930, JB 325, Serial No. 436, Records of the Joint Army and Navy Boards and Committees, 1903-1947, Record Group 225, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, M1421, Roll 10. 2 Steven T. Ross, American War Plans, 1890-1939 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), 145. 3 Henry G. Gole, Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934-1940 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), x. 4 Steven T. Ross, American War Plans, 1919-1941, vol. 1, Peacetime War Plans, 1919-1935 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), ii; idem, American War Plans, 145; Gole, Road to Rainbow, xvii. 5 Thaddeus Holt, “Joint PLAN RED,” Military History Quarterly (1988): 48. 2 dangerous enemies...on the eve of World War II.”6 Indeed, one of Road to Rainbow’s main arguments asserts that, however illogical RED or the other colored plans were, they provided direction on the path to the eventual – presumably more logical – planning for coalition warfare entailed in the Rainbow Plans that emerged in the late 1930s. Near incredulity underlies these perceptions – that American Army and Navy planners would even devise plans for an Anglo-American war. Ross declares, “The idea that the United States and Britain would engage...against each other...was at best remote.”7 Gole counts RED as unrealistic because he considers Britain a most “unlikely foe” during the Inter-War period.8 In this premise, that a serious notion of such a war between 1919 and 1939 must have been “unthinkable,” and such planning therefore nonsensical, Ross and Gole have much company. The idea of a true friendship between the United States and the United Kingdom, emerging prior