TIMJOT wrote:Your assumption is incorrect. I am not quoteing any author's precieved fantasy. The FACT is the Allied high command had made the strategic decision that the "Malaya Barrier" was to be held. Australia and India would be defended along this line. The defence of the Barrier was made the priorty, shipping and forces were diverted from the USSR, UK, and Middle-east to this end. The brits even allocated the two largest troop transports in the world (Queen Mary & Queen Elizabeth) for this task.
The plans/logisitics for this reinforcements were drawn up the the Allied high command by men who most definitely had a sober and "Real World Grasp" of logistics. A certain Gen. Eisenhower being just one who contributed significantly to the plan.
All the reinforcements I have sited were either in route (air/sea) or already partially deployed along the "Barrier" when it collapsed due mainly by the totally unexpected debahicle in Malaya. All these forces were conseqently redirected to Australia, Burma, India arriving between March - April 42.
Given time the situation was not hopeless. The only significant advantage the Japanese would maintain would be naval assets, but the "Malaya Barrier" is not just a name. The Makassar, Sunda, Banka, and Flores Straits could not be forced if the projected airpower was implaced.
If you are interested, here is a reading list for your edification.
1) "US Army in WWII, War in the Pacific"
(Strategy&Command the First Two Years)[Morton]
2) "US Army Campaigns in WWII"
( The East Indies ) [Anderson]
3) "The USAAF in WWII" Volume 1
(Plans & Early Operations) [Craven & Cate]
4) "Empires in the Balance" [Wilmott]
5) "Barrier and the Javelin" [Wilmott]
6) "They Fought With What They Had" [Edmunds]
7) "Japan's War" [Hoyt]
8) "But Not in Shame" [Toland]
This is just too silly!
This is my best response, and it's meant to serve you down the road.
As it turns out a Prussian General Staff officer named von Paulus drew up a somewhat similar "appreciation" for the German Army prior to its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. This cockamamie plan called for Germany to simply "sweep" the entirety of so-called European Russian clean of Soviet forces right up to the foothills of the Ural Mountains by the end of the 1941 campaigning season, after which in this officer's singular "appreciation" he managed to "envision" the likelihood that German "mobile police units" would suffice to keep an eye on whatever remained of the Soviet forces (presumably huddling in abject fear and defeat) to the east of those very same Urals while Germany nonchalantly commenced the day-to-day business of transforming the steppes of the Ukraine into a convenient breadbasket for the Third Reich. It was then further "appreciated" by this deep thinker called Paulus that in 1942 (if not as early as 1941!) the oil of the Caucasus region would then also duly fall under German Army control . . . and so forth.
The world has always abounded with ordinary men who were not able to do a competent job during their time and place at work, whatever that work happened to be, and the results from these misdirected labors have always been unhappy.
You're guilty here, TIMJOT, of running off helter-skelter with a "little bit of knowledge" you ripped from some reference somewhere. If it's primary in nature then you're without any good context for all that I can see and surely haven't made sense of this "knowledge" in the least; if it's from an author who unearthed it from a primary then it's the case you've
chosen to believe this author's extremely flimsy theory, which falls a long shot from the cold, hard actuality of history.
Basically you're just talking through your hat. That's because you don't bother to actually sit and think these things through for yourself, or even to cross-reference the many bozo theories propounded by countless authors armed with impossible schemes and personal conjecture. Everything written does
not make sense, and if you go through life granting credence to everything you read or even most of what you read you're bound to learn nothing useful at the end of your studies. There's just too much conflict of thought out there.
You need to learn the discipline of scholarly discrimination and you also should develop some better self-esteem so that occasionally you have the guts to tell one of these authors, "No, that just doesn't make good sense! To me."
Meanwhile the case remains the Allies could never have supported for long or even supported
initially any defense of Malaya or the greater SRA in 1941-42. The men and materiel and shipping and air assets, which is not even to mention leadership, just weren't in place or capable of arriving in time to contest this region with Japan. Supplying any such madcap venture afterward would have fallen (if possible) even further out of the realm of reality. This talk amounts to no more than one gigantic pipedream. And should the
WitP model so allow for such a goofy eventuality then it would be as far out in this regard as it is in other ways with respect to its pro-Japanese bias which is so blatent in
UV.
Indeed, the only way to even attempt to accurately model this kind of global grand-strategic thinking would be to design a world model of the war and place all the players back to around 1934 or thereabouts and then award or penalize them victory points on a strict basis for diplomatic decisions and whatnot with communication between all the players handled on a kind of Avalon Hill
Diplomacy level . . .. and even there to be frank I can hardly conceive of this model even in outline form and as an abstract, much less as anything in actual game form. It surely would amount to a life's undertaking for someone like Grigsby. Something similar on a much more modest scale has been attempted for
World at War but last I heard no AI was extant and again, at that scale I doubt much "sense" could ever be arrived at anyway.
As always, I wish you well.
