“EIN PROSIT,” Let’s Invade Cornwall!


The old adage that “fact is stranger than fiction,” was never truer, than when Imperial Germany planned to invade Canada through border towns such as Cornwall, during World War I.

Due to the significant German immigrant population living in the United States, the Imperial German government believed that they could mobilize their former citizens to invade Canada if, and when war broke-out between Germany and Great Britain.

To any military observer the narrow river border between Northern New York State and SDG provided an ideal and vulnerable path to conquering Ottawa and strangling needed military supplies from Southern Ontario and Western Canada to Allied Forces in Europe. And except for a peculiar twist of fate, a scheme to invade Canada, may have taken place.

The plot, concocted by Captain von Papen, Military Attache to the German Embassy in Washington, revolved around one Max L. Louden, who assumed the alias Count von Loudow, posing as an officer of the Prussian Guard.

Travelling to Ottawa, before the War, to obtain military maps of the St. Lawrence frontier from the Canadian Department of Militia, von Loudow planned to take these maps back to Washington, and then have them distributed to various loyal German-American organizations acting as fronts for the German army.

Armed with a $16 million dollar budget (over $516, million today), rifles and ammunition were stored in the numerous German breweries located near the Canadian border.

Once War was declared, “…it had been arranged to send the German reservists, numbering 150,000 men), from large cities following announcements of feasts and conventions.”(In other words the reservists were to assemble, in plain sight at brewery “biergartens”, to roar “ein prosit” over a pint or two, and receive their marching orders.

Once organized, the reservists were to go to nearby strategic border crossings, and then sail across the International Boundary on rented charter boats and seize the Welland Canal, Windmill Point, near Prescott, Windsor, strike at Kingston and invade Cornwall.

At Cornwall, von Louden was to have his troops cut and destroy telegraph, telephone and railway lines connecting to Ottawa, to undermine the Canadian Department of Militia and Defense’sability to issue general mobilization orders.

The enterprise was not uncovered by Canadian police, but was stymied by officials in the American Department of Justice, intent on maintaining their country’s neutrality, arrested von Louden on charges of bigamy in Buffalo, at the outbreak of War.

Even though Canadian authorities were unaware of this plot, on the very eve of the outbreak of World War I, the St. Lawrence was patrolled by “D Squadron of the 4th Hussars, along the Prescott-Cornwall riverfront, “E” Company of the 56th Grenville Regiment (Lisgar Rifles) was posted at the canal locks at Cardinal and Iroquois and “A” and “B” companies of the 59th Stormont and Glengarry Regiment picketed the locks at Morrisburg, Farran’s Point and Cornwall.

Headquartered at Morrisburg, the force numbered 22 officers and 258 men.It was disbanded on June 17, when it was replaced by the RCMP.