Quicker US victory over Japan in WW2

Japan wins the Battle of Midway, raids the East Coast, attacks the Panama Canal, that might force FDR to move more resources to fight Japan instead of Germany.

Patton and MacArthur, the Pacific War cannot handle thier ego, unless MacArthur dies during the Japanse invasion of the Philippines.

Well, you might have come to the right place.

It always helps, when a foreign viewpoint makes the American argument. 

I can summarise the situation as it was and then tell you what "sixes" the Allies have to roll to make an early Japanese defeat possible. 

To put it succinctly, the Allies had about equal naval power and TWICE as many troops and aircraft as the Japanese devoted to the Southern Road. The factors that caused the Japanese to win so clearly and quickly, was the stationing of 3rd rate commanders (British and American) and  political leaders (Dutch, Helfrich specifically ), cross national jealousies (British, Chinese, American) , inadequate defense planning (British), utter incompetence, (British), wishful thinking, (British), arrogance (British and American) , and fabulous stupidity at the highest command levels, (Pound, Phillips, Wavell. Percival, Brook Popham, Stark, Kimmel, Short, Pye and Wainwright, and Brereton) and such factionalized and compartmented and narrow-minded applicatiion of available assets that the Japanese were able to exploit interior lines, shorter supply distances and  locally concentrate at contact at the necessary 2 to 1 offense / defense odds to easily defeat the untrained amateurs who opposed them, despite some incompetents of their own (Namely Yamamoto, Nagumo, Takagi, Oto, Inouye, Fukedome and Homma.).

See MAP.
          


To defend against the Malaya action was IMPOSSIBLE. The reason was because British Eastern Command was filled with incompetents, who misjudged the range of Japanese twin engine bombers, the IJNAS antiship land based aircraft anti-ship capacity, and the basically idiotic British army command that had refused to prepare a series of retirement lines across the neck of the Kra Peninisula once they knew the Japanese had landed in Thailand and seized the "Churchill aerodromes" just across the Thai / Malay settlements border. Those Japanese forces headed for Singapore, came out of southeast Asia, what used to be French Indochina, and was supported by those bombers that killed Force Z in the Gulf of Siam, that flew out of FRENCH air fields around Saigon. 

I should mention that Malay nationalists and British traitors gave Yamashita, the complete British order of battle, and plan of operation.

It is also easy for the attacker to win when the defender does not know how to establish a defense line (Percieval), lets his air force be committed piecemeal (Brook Popham) and has a defense led by two complete imbeciles whose experience on land in WWI (Percieval) was to become a shell-shock casualty, and at sea, (Pound and Phillips) was to parade battleships in a pass in review.     

Compared to them; the Philippines command, who let their air command get slaughtered on the ground (Brereton) and whose army command bungled the counterattack at Lingayen Plain (Wainwright, the drunk, and MacArthur the stage actor.), turned in sterling performances against heavier odds. 

The Dutch had Conrad Helfrich as their political albatross, but below that poltroon, the senior army, navy and especially air force commanders did better than their better armed and supposedly more capable British and American counterparts.  Dutch submariners and airman proved far more competent than their allied cousins for as long as they lasted. 

If there were any Shining Moments among my countrymen, it was ADMS, Hart and Glassford. Some of their fights were well planned raids against Japanese landing attempts. They had too few ships and had to dance to Helfrich's and Wavell's directives, which made no military sense, since the only logical moves in January to March 1942 was to delay and buy time.    

Commander Far East Asia Submarines, Thomas Withers, however, should have been court martialed for dereliction of duty and summarily imprisoned. He demoralized, and misused the submarines under his command in such an appalling manner that five which need not have been lost, were sunk, and NONE of them were effective in the defensive plans in place.    

I do not think there were any British remedies possible for Malaya, for that was how fouled ujp British Eastern Command was. The only hope lay with the ANZACs, Dutch and Americans.          

The Pacific War depended on aircraft, on submarines, on engineers, on logistics and on amphibious assault infantry. That takes time to create if you do not have them. The big showy naval battles  are less meaningful than helpless Japanese ships stuck at Chu'uK because there are no Japanese oil tankers to bring fuel forward, or freighters  to bring food and ammunition to stranded Japanese troops. The Pacific War was not about land armies, it was about use and denial of the sea.  It was about getting into a position of blockade and bombardment to starve and shock the Japanese home islands' population into surrender. 



Plan Orange was the only plan that formed the basis of decisive action.

Fighting the Japanese in the South China Sea, as Dudley Pound intended, showed an appallingly amateurish grasp of naval geography and effectors. To call the British plan, moronic, was to insult morons.



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But given the nature of Plan Orange and the need to bomb Japan into rubble; while sending its merchant fleet to the bottom, the prime effectors=> aircraft and submarines, and MARINES which should have been the focus of American naval effort, was shortchanged by the "gun club".   

Once you know what your tools are and what you need to do with those tools, you quickly understand what you have to have to effect your national strategy.
      
a. Your fleet has to attain control and use of the sea and the air above it. You can use land based air forces to achieve this end, but you might need a blue water navy to fight enemy surface fleets to prevent the enemy from invading islands which hold your airfields. Conversely, you want to neutralize his land-based air and invade his island airfields.  In an aircraft carrier centric surface fleet, you will quickly find aircraft carriers (dive bombers) neutralize each other, so you need torpedo bombers to sink enemy aircraft carriers and you need destroyers and cruisers to SCREEN aircraft carriers and island airfields from their enemy counterparts. The best way to handle your enemy counterpart effectors is via torpedo.

b. American saying: "Bombs and shells create portholes. TORPEDOES sink them and drown them." Whether by Devastator, Porter class destroyer or Sargo class submarine, the TORPEDO has to work.  The Marks 13, 14, and 15 clanged into 150 IJN warships and 800 freighters in 1942 and did not function. What if they had?  

3 aircraft carriers killed.
2 battleships killed.
11 cruisers killed.
200+ transports sunk.
50 oilers sunk. 

c. Do in 1942 what was done in 1944? The war at sea is decided in early to mid 1943, instead of the latter hald of 1945. You still  have to wait for the Lemay firestorms to raze Japanese warmaking and that depends on B-29s and city killing. I still think the war goes into 1945. 

Battleships are a waste of steel. Get the torpedoes to work and learn how to night fight before Pearl Harbor. Also Learn from the Canadians how to ASW. The British on the other side of the Pond were TERRIBLE at it.

I see no reason why anything could have been changed before the start of the war. Building up the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Army Air Force and Two Ocean Navy Act would have been as IOTL.

As soon as PH, some "little" changes could have been of huge impact.

The first is taking into account the war declaration to put into alert airfields in Philippines and launch retaliation raid on Formosa. It could have disrupted the initial Japanese attack and extended the American-Philipos resistance, leading to a delay in the whole Japanese invasion timeline. This could have helped Allies to stop them earlier.

"Germany First!"
There was no chance FDR would have assigned more ressources to Pacific War, even if Hitler didn't have declared war to USA. FDR would have find a way to start the fight with Germany, probably with a sunk US destroyer by an U-Boot (or vice versa).

Anyway, there were plenty of ressources in the Pacific Ocean Theatre and choosing Nimitz strategy to invade Formosa instead of the Philippines after the island hopping through Micronesia would have given earlier a closer plateform to bomb Japan and a base to threaten either Japan and China coast, allowing USA to help TKS and KMT to repel Japanese from the southern China. The supply lines would have been cut between Japan and SE Asia as well as with Pilippines invasion but also communication lines between Japan and China would have been theatened as well with bombers in addition to the submarines historically used.

IMHO, having Nimitz as single commander in the POT from the beginning would have eased the definition of the strategy and speed up the Japan blockade.

Taking into account the British experience against U-Boots in the Atlantique to impose convoys in American waters from the very beginning of the war would also have saved a lot of ressources and eased the ramp up of the American power overseas, including in the POT.