RE:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/52754.html
Why Planning to Invade Canada Made Career Sense
Here are three facts: 1) soldiering is a young man's
game; 2) armies are hierarchical organizations, with little room
at the top; and 3) soldiers only get to practice their profession
in the full sense every twenty or thirty years, on
average. The combination of these facts in a peacetime army
tends to produce a body of middle-aged men, typically majors, with
plenty of time on their hands. Their early
education and experience often tends to unfit them for
alternative occupations, particularly if they would have to
start at the bottom. Since the spread of German-style staff
corps and staff colleges, the middle-aged majors have vented their
surplus energy by doing war plans for every conceivable
contingency. It is a bit like graduate students scrambling
for thesis topics.
In the case of the United States Army in the 1920's, there is a
further complicating factor, that of institutional jealousy.
In the nature of things, the Army could not fight overseas wars
unless the Navy took it overseas. This meant that there was an
incentive to find a mission which did not depend on the
Navy's transport and patronage. A curious story: in 1942, the
first Army troops arrived on Guadalcanal, bearing the new
semi-automatic Garrand rifles, to reinforce the Marines. The
Marines took the new rifles away from the Army, on the
grounds that their own need was greater, giving the soldiers their
own bolt-action Springfields in exchange. It was understood that
the Marines were the Navy's favorite sons, and the Army's
encounter with "Howling Mad" Smith on Saipan a couple of years
later confirmed the impression.
Alternatively, an overseas operation might work out to
reinforcing a foreign ally. American forces were likely to
be viewed as replacements for a combat-experienced army. That
could be even worse. The Americans might be sent American
instructors who had learned their trade in the French
Foreign Legion, and who were being lent back to train
"les pauvres petits enfants."
Naturally, the Army tended to have a preference for battlefields
it could reach on its own two or four feet, as the case
might be. In 1941, General Short in Hawaii would
comically overinflate the threat posed by the Japanese-Americans
because that was the only threat he really "owned." Everything
else was work for Marines, or else for aviators and similar
disreputable types. In the 1920's, the Army could see Canada as a
threat, or it could see Mexico as a threat. Canada was more
plausible than Mexico, because it was part of the British
Commonwealth.