WI: No ABDACOM
The American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command was a short-lived and very unsuccessful attempt at establishing a unified command for the allied defense of South East Asia against the Japanese Empire. The problems started at it’s conception:
What if ABDACOM isn’t established? What was the alternative? Zones of interest under national commands? Bilateral agreements on an ad-hoc or island-by-island basis? What would the effect be on the war-effort? One could say that it couldn’t get worse than OTL. Or can it?
The American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command was a short-lived and very unsuccessful attempt at establishing a unified command for the allied defense of South East Asia against the Japanese Empire. The problems started at it’s conception:
- It was only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that ABDACOM was established. The U.S. refused anything but the most rudimental of cooperation in name of neutrality. Without U.S. backing the United Kingdom didn’t want to commit to the defense of the Dutch East Indies and even though the Netherlands became pretty eager for a deal in 1940 it’s century-old tradition of neutrality was hard to shake off.
- While negotiations were still very much in the early phase the U.S. and the U.K. announced the establishment of ABDACOM thus without consulting the Netherlands and Australia. This understandably caused a lot of bad blood.
- The political decision-making was totally in the hands of the United Kingdom and the U.S. even though a great part of the forces present were Dutch and Australian.
- To make matters worse the command structure was filled with officers from, you guessed it, the United Kingdom and the United States.
- To complete the picture, the Naval Air Service was added to ABDAAIR (the air force component) instead of ABDAFLOAT (the naval component) which caused a lack of information or ‘eyes’ for ABDAFLOAT and made any RNLN attempt to fight the war according to their doctrine an impossibility
What if ABDACOM isn’t established? What was the alternative? Zones of interest under national commands? Bilateral agreements on an ad-hoc or island-by-island basis? What would the effect be on the war-effort? One could say that it couldn’t get worse than OTL. Or can it?