[quote="War Plan Orange" by Edward S. Miller, page 109]
Telegraph companies were also eager to get island stations for a government-subsidized cable to the Philippines. Roosevelt and his national advisors insisted that the cable follow an all-Blue route. But a thirty-five-hundred mile uninterrupted span from Hawaii to Guam would have reduced profits intolerably because transmission rates fell off as the square of the distance between repeater stations. Of the uninhabited American atolls, only Midway proved suitable. By November 1898, when President William McKinley directed the peace commissioners to purchase one of the Carolines for the cable, Germany had negotiated a deal with a bankrupt Spain to buy them all. The Americans backed away. Berlin then offered to swap a Marshall atoll for one of the Sulu group of the southwestern Philippines. Bradford, who was also an expert on cable systems, contemptuously dismissed the Marshalls as ill-sited and useless for any purpose, while he thought the Sulus were essential for defending the the Philippines. Desultory negotiations continued through 1899 until an imbroglio over colonial rights in Samoa soured U.S.-German relations. Bradford had been right to sneer at the first German offer of Taongi, a low reef said to be awash, but he sorely underestimated the strategic virtues of Berlin's second offer, Eniwetok. That strategically located atoll had a vast lagoon with two deep passages and land sufficient for a base. (One may wonder at the subsequent history of the Pacific if the United States had gotten Eniwetok and Germany a port in the Sulus, which Japan might have seized in 1914.)[/quote]
So there is the point of departure. In 1898 or 1899, the Germans receive one of the Sulu islands in exchange for Eniwetok. What do we do with it then and how does that affect the Pacific War? Does the Fleet choose it over Guam to be the subject of its Great Base plans in the 1920s and does that effort succeed with the more suitable Eniwetok? Meanwhile, presuming Japan has taken and kept Sulu post-Versailles, what do they do with it and how does it affect the PI, both our defense of and their attack on?
Telegraph companies were also eager to get island stations for a government-subsidized cable to the Philippines. Roosevelt and his national advisors insisted that the cable follow an all-Blue route. But a thirty-five-hundred mile uninterrupted span from Hawaii to Guam would have reduced profits intolerably because transmission rates fell off as the square of the distance between repeater stations. Of the uninhabited American atolls, only Midway proved suitable. By November 1898, when President William McKinley directed the peace commissioners to purchase one of the Carolines for the cable, Germany had negotiated a deal with a bankrupt Spain to buy them all. The Americans backed away. Berlin then offered to swap a Marshall atoll for one of the Sulu group of the southwestern Philippines. Bradford, who was also an expert on cable systems, contemptuously dismissed the Marshalls as ill-sited and useless for any purpose, while he thought the Sulus were essential for defending the the Philippines. Desultory negotiations continued through 1899 until an imbroglio over colonial rights in Samoa soured U.S.-German relations. Bradford had been right to sneer at the first German offer of Taongi, a low reef said to be awash, but he sorely underestimated the strategic virtues of Berlin's second offer, Eniwetok. That strategically located atoll had a vast lagoon with two deep passages and land sufficient for a base. (One may wonder at the subsequent history of the Pacific if the United States had gotten Eniwetok and Germany a port in the Sulus, which Japan might have seized in 1914.)[/quote]
So there is the point of departure. In 1898 or 1899, the Germans receive one of the Sulu islands in exchange for Eniwetok. What do we do with it then and how does that affect the Pacific War? Does the Fleet choose it over Guam to be the subject of its Great Base plans in the 1920s and does that effort succeed with the more suitable Eniwetok? Meanwhile, presuming Japan has taken and kept Sulu post-Versailles, what do they do with it and how does it affect the PI, both our defense of and their attack on?