Swapping UK and US positions

We need a map!



We need a map!


We need a map!


We need a map!



We need a map.
Do we swap leaderships or keep the same teams in place?



Internal politics? How is the isolationist movement?

When is the start date, because if it is 1935, Holland, Belgium and the Czech republic will get a lot of business.



Halifax is worse than Churchill. Yes I wrote that sentence. Halifax was a weakling. Is Attlee still in the mix?




Can we replace Pound and Stark? Can we shuffle the deck and shove Chennault and Dowding into the air power niches occupied by Arnold and Portal?

Does Kelly Johnson and Ed Heinenmann get cut loose and are they allowed to run wild? How about Gladeon Barnes, J.W. Christie, and John Carden? How about Ralph Christie (torpedoes). Does Claude Bloch get to push through his reforms and does Richardson stay at his post instead of being fired? Does Chatfeld get a clue and study the geography of the world ocean?

Does someone cut Mitchell's cancer out in time and does someone whack Sydney Camm upside the head and show him the NACA airfoil and screw profiles book? Better yet, send him to tour GRUMMAN and see how airplanes are supposed to be built? 

We have a map.



I used a semi-polar projection and tried to replicate the opening post conditions as closely as practical.

Now we have to make some working assumptions about historical military evolution between the two transposed nations and their military histories.

We know from the national histories that the British took the following lessons from WWI

a. Air defense was very important. Zeppelin and Gotha raids taught this lesson. They were one of the first nations to develop an independent air force and this was the primary reason.
b. Naval reforms in command and control was necessary because of the utter hash the Grand Fleet made of operational signaling during Jutland. The RN solution was to delegate authority down the chain of responsibility to improve tactical flexibility. The British reverted to area fleets and presence and adopted Julian Corbett's precepts about power projection and using the fleet as a force of national policy enforcement. This did not remove British battleship centric thinking or actually glom them onto the centric issue of trade protection as the primary naval mission for preserving the empire.
c. The British army learned motorization and experimented some with armored formations, but they never absorbed the lessons at all. Their infantry centric drill emphasized patrolling and scouting as functions and positional defense as a preferred tactic. They allowed branch rivalries to utterly unlearn the lessons of combined arms that the French and they had so painfully acquired on the western front. The way they misused artillery and kept charging German defenses with tanks without infantry bodyguards in WWII shows this happened.
d. Technologically the British were a shade better in aero engines and in infantry small arms than most of the planet. Their motor transport fleet was trash, their logistics at sea and on land second-rate and their outlook leading up to WW II definitely that of a "colonialist military" as regards the nuts and bolts of logistics.
e. The line infantry was probably the best trained on Earth, but their armored force was equipped with rubbish, though the British had John Carden of all people who could have, if he lived, been a one man source for excellent kit in tanks, self propelled guns and cross country vehicles.
f. The RAF had good aircraft but their air tactics and air staff work was horrible. True they had Dowding, but they flew the three plane vic long after the French, Germans and Russians flew the finger four. Their bomber doctrine was "questionable" as to both offense and defense and their RAF leadership aside from Dowding was utterly incompetent. Douglas Bader and Trefford Leigh Mallory were not fit to shovel out horse stables, much less lead an air campaign. Arthur "Bomber" Harris was a certifiable war criminal as to his incompetence in the strategic use of air power.
g. But how about the Royal Navy? Mixed bag. They had a set of plans for the Battle of the Atlantic Round II, which did not work, because they neglected the air coverage component. The plan for Italy was a bit of an ad hockery with a "surprise air attack and then we will give them a go", element to it. Nothing effective was war-gamed about Malta or interrupting Italy's communications to Libya. British naval evolutions consisted of trying to improve "tactically", such as night fighting and torpedo work and the command and control problems previously mentioned. The RN and the Foreign Office did repeat their signals intelligence work against Germany, but unlike the MYTH, this work piggybacked and success was largely due to French and Polish original work against the Germans. When they pitted themselves against the Japanese and Italians, British crypto failed miserably.
h. British naval leadership was "fair" once one gets below what passed for a naval staff in their admiralty. The fighting admirals: Tovey, Cunningham, Holland, the Ramseys, Vian, Lyster, Hunter (technically a commodore) etc. were quite good. But there were some fools in there. Boyd, Phillips, Pound, Harwood etc., were "execrable". Lord Mountbatten should have been sent to a fox hunting club and kept away from any responsible position.
i. Churchill. Great flag-waver and inspirationalist. Too trusting of some of the so-called military professionals with whom he surrounded himself. (Charles Portal and Smuts come to mind.). he was the author of hare-brained schemes that prolonged the war and led to unnecessary defeats and disasters.

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The Americans...

WWI lessons learned.

John Pershing.

a. Army. Pershing, an idiot, poisoned US army infantry doctrine. He had observed machine guns work the Russians over along with Japanese field artillery, and yet he came to the startling conclusion that it was the Japanese infantry storming the Russian trenches with the rifle that alone won the Russo-Japanese war. He insisted on this approach for the US Army and he slaughtered tens of thousands of Americans against third rate German troops in poorly constructed trenches. But did the criticisms of Fox Conner and Hunter Liggett, or Douglas MacArthur (Yes, that guy.) change the "rifleman is the heart of the offense." mindset of the Pershing crowd? Kasserine Pass and Anzio ring a bell? How about the Battle of the Bulge?

There were some people who paid attention. A colonel by the name of Adna Chaffee looked around and decided the horse needed to go away and be replaced by cargo trucks, motor gun carriages and people movers (armored personal carriers.). Another guy, Westertvelt, decided that artillery was the great WWI killer of men and recommended some things. Hunter Liggett and Billy Mitchell added air power to the killing mix, but all of these people strongly suggested that "combined arms" should be a thing.

Unfortunately... no money. The experimental motorized brigade designed to test these concepts in imitation of J.F.C. Fuller inspired British experiment was dissolved to save money.

Billy Mitchell.

Bless his murderous almost treasonable heart, William Mitchell saw the airplane for what it was, the means to paralyze an enemy army and navy. He did add Douhet's strategic bombing follies to the mix, but people forget that in a time of scarce resources, he forced the American government to spend money on experiments to bomb battleships. Mitchell's first intent was never to replace the American navy: it was to give it air cover and to provide the Americans with air power to allow them to move on land and at sea. If enemy cities were flattened as part of the deal, that was part of the air power equation for him; striking at the enemy war economy. Spatz, Lemay, Chennault, and even Jimmy Doolittle learned at the feet of the master even after his court martial. They cooked up an air doctrine of attack and defense and developed a concept in imitation of Mahan, called the "air campaign". In the late 1920s these "air force" army officers began to catalog what they would need to bomb in Germany and Japan.

William Moffett.

The American navy did not fight much in WWI. They spent two years convoying troops to France and their Marine Corps was shot up at Belleau Woods which led to an energetic infantry lessons-learned for the Marines that sort of mirrored what the Russo-Japanese war taught the Japanese about infiltration and close assault after a massive artillery bombardment. The navy otherwise had an experience where they tried to attack German Zeppelin sheds and submarine pens in German occupied Belgium. They had mixed results, but Moffett still became excited about naval aviation.

He developed some curious ideas about Zeppelins and flying aircraft carriers, but he more or less continued the USN fascination with taking airplanes to sea. After all, no less than Teddy Roosevelt funded the USN's first aircraft carrier.



It is a houseboat in the Potomac River. But... it is the world's first aircraft carrier.

Anyhow, Moffett was somewhat instrumental in the floating variety, too. The battlecruiser made no sense in the era of the airplane, so there is the USS Langley, USS Lexington and USS Saratoga. 5 years after commissioning these bird farms and a year before he, Moffett, dies in a Zeppelin crash, the USN bombs Pearl Harbor.

One might suggest that the USN had learned a LOT from its activities in WWI. And then there is Plan Orange.

Plan Orange or how to peel Japan.

The Marines got excited about this item. Pete Ellis was the father of amphibious warfare, British as well as American in WWII. If you did not do it his way, (Dedocanese Islands), you were slaughtered.

Hiccups...

a. National Defense Act of 1920. This idiocy prevented the formation of an independent air force, hobbled shore based naval aviation, split tanks between the cavalry and infantry, made Pershing's ideas about the army into law and cut the military budget to the level that only a fifth of the American navy had sailing time and the army was reduced to growing its own food to feed its troops.

b. MacArthur. Something happened to him during the Bonus Army incident. But before he became an adulterer and a drunk and a press prima donna: as chief of the American army, he screwed up the following programs:

--- the Christie tank
----first attempt at the squad machine gun (The ancestor of the T10/23E1)
----the M1 Garand Rifle (Rejected the 7 mm bullet for the 7.62 mm.)
----the Browning M1919A2 machine gun. (See Garand rifle for that mistake.)
----was caught with his mistress and forced to leave town one horse ahead of the posse and thus derailed the Conner reforms which he championed.

And by the way, his was the deciding vote at Billy Mitchell's court martial. How does one think the USAF thinks of MacArthur? They hate him more than the USN does.

But that is some of the background on the American army side. I should add that the bumblers (Bradley, Short, Fredendall, Wainwright, etc.) were not just MacArthur.

Navy problems.

When one traces the American torpedo crisis, one winds at the person of Harold Stark.
When one traces the American naval command crisis, one winds up at the person of Harold Stark. (Kimmel was to Stark, what Phillips was to Pound.).
When one traces who shafted Admiral Richardson, one winds up at the person of Harold Stark. (It was his advice, FDR followed.)
When one traces who screwed up the Two Ocean Navy Bill and emphasized battleships over aircraft carriers and escorts; guess who?
When one traces who agreed with that British "gentleman", Dudley Pound, upon the wrong allied naval strategy, well it was Stark.
When one asks who told Roosevelt not to fire MacArthur, because it would damage the country's morale...
When one asks who threw Kimmel under the tram in an attempt to save himself and LIED to the American congress about his own guilt...

The list of Stark's crimes are many, but those will suffice for starters. Worst allied admiral of WWII and with Phillips as the low bar for incompetence that is really something awful.

Air force problems?

Brett, Bissell and Brereton. Then toss in Hap Arnold.

If one wants any hopeful elements in the 1930s American military history?

Chester Nimitz works on American submarines.
Gladeon Barnes is a one man American army super-genius. He works through 1400 line items from mortars to trucks to tanks to artillery and he makes it all work. He can do nothing with the Hispano Suiza machine cannon and he NEVER gets the T23E1 machine gun or the T23 tank ready in time, but he manages to undo MacArthur's other major material mistakes.

Eisenhower and Marshall and Patton. It would have been a quadrumvirate if Chaffee had not died from overwork.

Nimitz for the Pacific, Ingersoll in the Atlantic and King for the global naval war. They reverted to Mahan and fixed what Pound and Stark screwed up.

Next we will look at that map and using this background figure out what the transposition effects could be.

====================================================================================

By the way the British do have Slim, Montgomery and Cunningham. Too bad they canned Dowding or the RAF would have a hammer in the tool box, too.

The criticisms, I level, come from a post-mortem autopsy bias.  I see human factors and lessons learned as applicable in a lot of the observations post facto, but then again, I have read documentation about what was known then, too.

1. I agree the collapse of France could not be foreseen. On the other hand, the failure of allied tactical aviation, especially based on the French lessons learned in the skies over Verdun, when the French were only able to stabilize the land campaign when they finally were able to overfly the German side of the front and perform reconnaissance and close air support to neutralize German assaults, should have taught both the French and the British that air superiority was the most important aspect of the air ground campaign. 

2. Coastal Command is inexcusable. I mentioned USN and Marine experience in trying to neutralize German submarine pens and Zeppelin sheds? The other bunch bombing was the Royal Navy.   



3. The Greek campaign was inexcusable. Wavell told Churchill... that he had the Italians on the ropes and just needed one more push. But Churchill, the romantic, did not see that italian Libya in British hands would mean Malta was sustainable at far less cost than it would eventually require and the Mediterranean would be closed to the Axis. The British would be at a loss until they could bring along an ally to exploit the victory, but then that is the point. They would have had the resources to secure the Indian Ocean and the added resources to ramp up an air campaign. They might have even been able to mount Sicily on their own?

4. The Japanese were underestimated by Pound, Phillips, and Churchill. On the other side, Kimmel and Stark and Short because of their racism were similarly myopic. The ones who were not; were Percival, Brooke Popham, Slim (No-one listened.), Richardson, King, Claude Bloch, MacArthur (He said the Japanese were the most efficient users of incompetent or poorly trained infantry he had ever seen.), and especially Claire Chennault who was reading the reports that American volunteer aviators from 1938 onward wrote him about the kinds of air warriors and type of air warfare the Japanese threw at the ROCAF.   

5. Ultimately, when it comes to cultural arrogance and racism, the British were just as hobbled as the Americans. The Americans did not invent the term "wog" which is just as despicable and indicative as the utterly unacceptable American equivalent, "gook". The British treated the Malays abominably. India was ... well, part of the misrule was that the British thought the Indians were "inferior". Sure the British used Indian army formations as cannon fodder, but that is the other criticism.  Spending your troops as file fillers is not good human resources practice in the military sense. The Americans, at least, put African American troops to work making roads and handling logistics and aboard USN ships, while the mess stewards were mistreated, they were still part of the fire fighting and damage control parties and they had their assigned gun stations when the bugles blared "general quarters".   And as the USAAF demonstrated, fighter pilots know no skin color. 

6. The Americans knew their empire. Filipinos were expected to fight hard and they did. The racism in the FEAA did not extend to the Philippine Scouts as it did to the colonial Malay Settlement "territorials" as exhibited by the British army. .   

7. An independent air force allows for an independent air mission. The USAAC was already committed to bombing Germany. There is solid planning in their air warfare planning documents from 1937 onward. The B-17 was partially intended to carry out this campaign and the chosen flyoff platform was the Eastern UK.. Now the Regular Army was more battlefield interdiction mission oriented. They assumed they would be fighting in France at some moment and they wanted to bomb the Ruhr bridges. Hence all those B-25s, A-20s, B-26s, A-26s and other 2 engined specials that the Germans will come to hate. 

8. The Battle of the Atlantic is going to have to be fought with an air eye on the National Defense Act of 1920. I presume that the Americans get to play in France in WWI for 4 years in this timeline and that Washington and New York have been Zeppelinned and Gothaed and that the Battle of the Atlantic Round 1 has happened.  I also assume it is the USN that has to fight in the North Sea, so we can expect that the post war USN is going to have a vastly different Mahanic experience to the RN and exercise a more air-minded attitude toward reconnaissance. Add the fleet problems to the interwar years and I expect a lot of activity in the Mediterranean Sea, the North Sea, and the South China Sea as Green, Black and Orange are simulated as the Op-foes. Admiral Henry Yarnell (Not Lumley Lyster) will bomb New London or maybe Norfolk as a step exercise and proof of concept to wipe out the Regia Marina at Taranto.             

9. I cannot begin to imagine how Georgie Patton or Adna Chaffee will manage army maneuvers in Egypt or what Wedemeyer is doing in Burma, but I think the Americans will be doing their "oil wars" in lieu of the Banana Wars and tac-air and accompanying motorized formations may be seen in Iraq and possibly the Saudi Peninsula.  If Matador is drawn up, it will be implemented and I think a Thai war is in the offing much as Bolivia, Columbia, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Panama and Nicaragua happened. 

10. Fast battleships were not used in the North Atlantic to escort convoys. Not even the RN did that silly thing. As for the Bismarck and the pocket battleships, remember USS San Francisco? It kind of wrecked the Hiei. That was what it was designed to do. If one needed to kil the Germans hiding their battleships out at Norwegian fjords, then one does not send the USS Washington in. One sends Liberators and 2,500 kg bombs to carpet bomb an anchorage.         
11. Ah... make the air service part of the USN. See video. 
12. I think I will leave that headache for you. But as for the bomber barons, they were not exactly wrong, the technology was not ready yet. 
13. The British army, like the American army, has to subordinate its artillery to the commander of the maneuver formation. The clique who declared themselves to be the only practitioners of indirect fire will need to be taken to the wood shed to be taught "We are all one army.", and everyone from Henry Private to General Obnoxious will need to learn the tape and grid system for calling fires off a map via the radio. The tank crews will need to be taught that they are as much artillerymen as they are tankers.  The infantry have to learn that the tanks are not there to guard them. It is the other way around. 

14. The British need to clarify their armored doctrine. The infantry tank or the cruiser. Pick one and build combined arms around it. If it is the cruiser, it is RADIO, guns, mobility, endurance, maintenance and protection. If it is infantry, then t is RADIO, guns, protection, endurance, maintenance and  mobility.     

I had to modify that one a bit. For example, MacArthur will be in Singapore and Percival will screw up the Philippine Islands. Tom Phillips screws up in the South China Sea and  Thomas Hart does better in the Gulf of Siam.

Next we will speculate on differences in this ATL kit?
 

Rats.... Formatting error?

I have been interspersing commentary on examples of what the US did historically, in response to problems it encountered that were parallel to the types of problems that the British encountered. One thing I pointed out, was that the Americans war-gamed a lot more than the British did at the operational art level. One example is the annual fleet problem. The British Royal Navy held gunnery exercises and tactical evolutions but they did not simulate naval war as the Americans did against Orange and Black. Some twenty joint armky-navy wargames were held between 1922 and 1939 that played out mock full scale wars that simulated Japanese attacks on the US "empire" in the Pacific or an unnamed European country seeking presence in US areas of interest in the Caribbean, central America or South America. the unnamed European country was usually Germany afte3r it supported a fascist coup. The target countries regarded as vulnerable were Venezuela, or Argentina.



I was unclear? My apologies. I thought the reference to Zeppelins and Gothas would have been plain. It was not. But as a further clarification, the final American offensives in the overall 100 days campaign were combined arms efforts, with Mitchell directing army air service light bombers and fighters in air actions to bomb and machine gun German trenches, and harass the Germans behind their front lines to hinder their reinforcements and efforts at reconnaissance. The American air power was supposed to close air support and battlefield interdict German troop concentrations and supply efforts behind the trenches, while the tanks (FT-17s supplied by the French.), advanced and passed the infantry through the German wire and past the German outpost line and through their artillery and machine gun beaten zone to allow the doughboys to work the Germans over with aimed rifle fire and the bayonet. Still could not get away from the Pershing idiocies despite George Marshall, George Patton and Fox Connor planning to use combined arms to get through the no man's land. Presumably, if the war goes into 1919, Pershing will be fired and Hunter Liggett and the two Georges and Billy will figure out what the French have been trying to tell them. Send bullets, shells and air dropped explosives and not men.



I have read Sledgehammer. The "allied army" envisioned was about 20-25 divisions (10 American and the rest British), which were to land on the Cotentin peninsula, work its way south and fort up between the Loire and Seine rivers in Normandy and Brittany. As I understand the lunacy proposed, the allies would build a fortified enclave and try to draw off 20 to 30 German divisions and defends that lodgement until US reinforcements could be trained and equipped to come into the liberated enclave, breakout and liberate France and then drive east to take Berlin. It was supposed to last a year in the static phase and then the mobile phase would take anywhere from 1 to years to fight across France. It would have still been 1944 before the allied armies were at the Rhine. Now I ask me, what was Army Warplans smoking, when they drew that nonsense up? My guess is that the hashish must have been a spoiled batch.




US forces in the Philippine Islands, ground, air, and naval amounted to 155,000 men of which 85,000 of the troops were Filipinos. Percival had 100,000 troops when he packed it in. Some 40,000 more had been lost in the rout when his command ran for the supposed safety of Singapore. The Japanese never had more than 70,000 men in that campaign. The British forces surrendered; does not include air and naval personnel. Percival's command collapsed in less than 70 days. At sea the British lost an entire surface action group. The Japanese wiped the RAF out and took their airfields intact, including the air defense network system. Worse, the British gave up a first-class naval base with capital ship repair and maintenance facilities. The Japanese also captured British sonar and radar technology which the Americans will encounter during WATCHTOWER (Guadalcanal Japanese radar and the warning center was the system the Marines used to alert five at Henderson Field before they brought in their own gear.) and especially at the Battle of the Santa Cruz. Where did the Americans screw up in the Philippine Islands like that? The answer is... they did not give up in a rout. They wrecked their facilities as they retreated and when they finally surrendered, it was because they were out of ammunition and sustenance, they were out-numbered on the ground and in the air and they were besieged to the point of starvation. The Japanese had to bring in their best general and most of their heavy artillery to beat Wainwright. And he did not have a walkover, did Yamashita.



The deployment of Task Force 1 of Atlantic Fleet was well before December 7, 1941. The Marines landed in Iceland in March 1941. Long before that happened, it was not the British who garrisoned the island. It was the Canadians.

Tirpitz was commissioned February 1941. It had only 30 days free run? It takes at least six months to work a commissioned warship up into a ready to fight unit (HMS Prince of Wales example.). How is that the Royal Navy preventing Tirpitz from trying the Denmark Strait before the Americans slammed it shut? Yet again, after the Twins made it back to Germany and then Scharnhorst sortied to Norway (Channel Dash February 1942 and then August.), how does that look to the USN as to the capacity of the Royal Navy? Not too good. Hence USS Washington and USS Massachusetts show up as Anti-Tirpitz patrollers... in the North Sea.

Until the sea lanes could be sanitized by cover groups and better ASW methods, the U-boats would persist to take an unacceptable % of allied shipping. See chart.



(Note the British admiralty comments on when US coastal defenses become "effective"? July 1942. Also notice the slaughter of allied shipping near Capetown South Africa? Drumbeat kind of pales into lesser significance?)

and map.



Note the gaps the US CVE ASW groups have to close, which they will close by 1944.



By '44 the Luftwaffe had been attritted to the point where it was not able to contest the air. No effective bombing was possible until then. Once the Germans committed their night fighters to combat the USAAF, it finally became possible for the RAF to actually do something useful besides dehousing. Did they? According to the USSBS, the damage to German transportation and to their oil industry was a USAAF achievement in 1945. Better late than never.


Of course they learned. The Americans held the Eisenborn Ridge, fought a delay at St. Vith and blew bridges and blocked roads before and behind the Germans (Peiper) in the Ardennes. They fought in a weather so cold that German veterans of Moscow '41 claimed it was the worst winter they experienced. I blame Bradley for not paying attention to his juniors and credit Patton and Montgomery for the successful results.

As for the Hurtgen Forest, it was the worst terrain in the western front and the Germans still lost.

Have you walked on Omaha Beach? Reminds me a lot of Salerno. The Americans cleared the bluffs in 24 hours against the best German troops and defenses present on the best defensive terrain. They did all right.

Anzio was a mess, it was a Churchill inspired mess, and yet once again, the Germans lost when they should have pushed the ANGLO Americans into the sea. The British screwed up their half of the landing worse than the Americans did.



The British under Slim would do better. The Americans under Courtney Hodges or Walter Krueger would do better. The assumption was MacArthur and Percival would switch places. Percival was a rotten racist and a moral coward. I know about his WWI physical heroics, but so what? MacArthur was just as physically brave. He was unusual in that he was without a degree of prejudice as to how he treated people. He treated his Chinese Filipino mistress, FDR, Eisenhower, the Australians *(Curtin and Blamey), the entire US Navy, Nimitz, the press, the British, (especially Mountbatten), and his own troops like they were his servants or extras in his grand stage production. The only ones who managed to put MacArthur on the back foot, were Kenney, his air force general and Truman (Korea). The Filipinos loved him, because he treated them like dirt, but then they saw he treated everybody that same way. No prejudices.



B-17s can reach the Mekong Delta from the Kra Peninsula. The Japanese special attack force dies on their runways and USS Colorado and USS New Mexico get to go to work on the Japanese invasion convoys with air cover overhead that is friendly. That of course rests on the assumption that Louis Brereton does not screw up the air op for Matador, as he did at Clark Field and like he did everything else he touched in WWII. (Market Garden, he was the air commander.)



The history in the CBI shows the Burmese fought for the Americans and tolerated the British. I am no fan of Stillwell, but his operations were sounder than the British until Slim took over that fluster cluck and sorted the 14th Army out. Might also remind one that Slim had to rely on the USAAF for his air logistics in region since the RAF in Burma was worthless.

Nonwhite forces... 10th and 11th US Cavalry in the First Nations Wars. United States Colored Troops in the American Civil War. Spanish American War "Immunes" of the 7th Corps and of course the Filipino Scouts in the Filipino American War and the Moro Wars. The Americans had experience of 80 years commanding non-white ELITE combat troops. Navajo units for example in the Apache Wars, and again in WWII against the Japanese. It was Woodrow Wilson's administration that interrupted that practice and makes the myth of Americans not having experience with non-white troops a thing.

Ever hear of the 442 Combat Regimwent or the Red Tails? That would be Mark Clark's Japanese troops, and the Tuskegee airmen. Those fighter pilots I mentioned who were non-white flew with the 15th Air Force.

But that still does not answer what Americans would have done using this map.




1. Got to fight the Germans somewhere.
2. Got to fight the Italians somewhere.
3. Oil fuels everything.
4. Sea lines of communication need a major foreign base. (Aden)
5. Burma is the gateway to India.
6. If Aden is the western base in the Indian Ocean, then Singapore is the eastern base in the Indian ocean 
7. There is an extinct volcanic harbor and anchorage and air complex called Rabaul. That is the guard station to the east coast of Australia and more important than one realizes. The nation that holds the Bismarcks and New Ireland and New Britain holds the Australasian gate. 
8. Halifax is the gate to Canada.
9. The corner turn for the most secure route to India and the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea is the Cape of Good Hope. Might as well make it a major naval base.

Geography drives military necessity. The ATL Americans have the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans to cover and a North Sea to defend. They need to slam the GIUK shut, and protect trade routes to Canada, South America, and India / Australia / New Zealand. 

Most of that problem is a seaplane and land based long ranged patrol bomber problem. Shore based anti-ship strike forces are necessary. The fleets at sea have to be balanced between trade protection and combat. In the North Sea, the forces can be supplemented by shore-based airpower. One sees those purple lines? Air coverage, assuming B-17s designed for anti-ship work. 

Fleets against the Germans: 4BB, 1BC, 2 CVs, 3CAs, 4CLs, 64 DDs, 12SS, 15 naval air wings. 2CV based. 
Fleets against the Italians:    4BB, 1BC, 2 CVs, 3CAs, 4CLs, 64 DDs, 12SS, 15 naval air wings. 2CV based.         
Fleets against the Japanese: 8BB, 2BC, 6 Cvs, 6CAs, 12CLs, 64 DDs, 100SS, 30 naval air wings, 6 CV based.

Army units for France (500,000 men) 10 infantry and 3 armored divisions plus 10 tacair wings.
Army units for Egypt. (100,000 men) 3 infantry and 1 armored division plus 5 tacair wings.
Army units for Burma (100,000 men) 4 infantry divisions plus 10 tacair wings.

Metro air force 10 bomber wings (240-300 heavy bombers)
Metro air force 30 fighter wings (1800 fighters) Includes SCR 260 mobile radar defense network.

That is prewar establishment. Note that 70% of these air-land forces are national guard units?