What if Australia (or metro Britain) occupies German Micronesia in WWI? How are interwar US & Japane

Very interesting response, thanks!

Australia...



Do you see what is missing between Alice Springs and Darwin? A railroad.

Now...



Explanation:

The only industrial area worth a dram is on the south and east coast of the continent. Follow the railroads and you follow the economy. From Adelaide to Cairn is about 90% of Australia that matters as far as industry.

Only the Japanese were crazy enough to operate aircraft carriers in the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpententa and they only did it once as they ran Kaga aground in some shallows during the Darwin Raid.   

Referring to the quadrangle...



It took the Americans a major battle (Coral Sea) and a two year naval campaign (CARTWHEEL) to crash through the Bismarck Archipelago. That is the southeast corner of that quadrangle. Failing to hold Rabaul, which was in Australian hands, was a horrible mistake.  

It only takes hours to dig a howitzer pit and only days or a few weeks to prepare a runway.  



That is a fighter strip at RABAUL. 



That is ONE "fortified" position prepared by a semi-industrialized power, using mostly hand tools, 5000 men and given TWO MONTHS. What you do not see, is the MASSIVE submarine pen and ship shelter the Japanese also dug by hand into the side of that expletive deleted volcano. 

TWO YEARS... About 15,000 lives and about 40 warships and almost 1,500 aircraft. 


 

Also very interesting - thanks!

Righto. On Australia and stuff:

- More properly, Brisbane to Adelaide is a good 95-96% of Australian industry in the interwar period; Perth was decent in its own right and by reasonable standards, but a long way away from anywhere.
- No real reduction in available forces for the AIF in WW1. 331,000 men volunteered for it over the course of the war, whilst the garrisons for German Micronesia would be ~1000 at most.
- In WW2, there really isn't the scope for mass forward deployment. There would be more than 1 battalion at Rabaul in such a circumstance, but for Truk, it wouldn't even been a battalion. That is too far away to warrant presence except in the latter half of 1941
- Look at what garrisons or defences were put in place in the likes of Fiji prior to December 1941 for the likely outcome: Sweet bugger al
- Why? The simple reason that Britain and Australia, along with the rest of the Empire, were at war with Germany and Italy on the other side of the world. Something has to give in terms of priorities
- No real scope for reduction in the 2nd AIF. What might well happens is an adjustment of the deployment laws/rules for the Militia
- Neither Australia nor Britain are going to attach the same importance to it as Japan or indeed the Americans, as it becomes a northern picket line rather than a jutting southern bastion/part of the Sacred Quadrangle interposed between the Phillipines and the American Pacific.
- Their primary focus will remain on the Malay Barrier and the South China Sea, which will likely leave the 'Central Pacific' as an open flank. This might be a bit of an error, but Britain never has any need or interest in pushing through any quadrangle to the Philippines in a war against Japan
- However, if these areas are in British/Australian hands in 1940, enter the interest of Brother Jonathan
- Destroyers for Bases was in the Atlantic, but if areas that can help secure the Pacific Loc to the Philippines are also in the same friendly and outstretched hands, I can't really see FDR looking a gift horse in the mouth

1. The two northern northeastern towns, oF Cairn and Townsville were logistics bases and air defense sites. I added them to the log/path. 
2. WWI; the problem for snapping up the German Pacific garrisons would be STUFT shipping.
3. 3. I expect Chu'Uk to fall, but not Rabaul. The distance factors favor the Australians. 
4. Fiji did not fall. Refer to 3. Also to the MAP.



5. Operation FS was thwarted; a, on the Kokoda Track, and b. at the Coral Sea.  I have seen those two actions compared to Thermopylae and Salamis as a two function outcome example.  I tend to find the mutual intersections, convergences and geographic dependencies of Kokoda Track and Coral Sea to be a convincing case study. Both had to be allied victories. One without the other would be meaningless.   
6.
The "Why" is Singapore, where 85,000+ Australian, Indian, and British troops were forward exposed within the easy reach of the Japanese who were based in South China and Vietnam. On the other hand; you have to get through the quadrangle to get to Rabaul. Garrison the quadrangle in those areas you control, and you buy additional time and force the Japanese to come at you without the nearby based forces in place to quickly reach Rabaul (About 52 days in the real history.). A brigade for Australia is quite doable. As far as Australia is practically concerned, she threw away 15,000+ men to no purpose based on British promises.  Besides; here is another practical question, what has Britain ever done for Australia?

7. The rules for the "militia" has always puzzled me. The Australians had to raise "Imperial" formations (volunteers) to send troops overseas. As I understand it, this issue was never resolved in WWII or down to the present, as it was in other nations in war, either by "federalization" or a national service act "draft".   

8. It is the same naval geography for everybody. Just because the British did not understand it at all, does not mean it functioned any differently for the use and denial of the world ocean in the western Pacific. It is not a picket line, which is land warfare thinking. It is use and denial of transit and access; which is naval / air warfare thinking. 
9. 
On 6 December 1941, (local time) ADM Tom Phillips flew to Manila, to meet with ADM Thomas Hart. The subject of that discussion was an attempt by Phillips to convince / coerce Hart to "lend" American warships to aid Phillips in a sweep into the South China Sea.

See MAP. 



Hart knew by this time that Japanese naval forces were massed off Cam Ranh Bay and Na Trang from his own recon, which the British had neglected. He expected that the Japanese convoys at sea already, would enter the Gulf of Siam as it was known then, within 30 hours.   He told Phillips that any idea of forward projection into the South China Sea by an Anglo-American fleet, which was a desperation measure Phillips pitched him that was in turn based on the last war plan that was drawn up by the incompetent British admiralty all the way back to Backhouse, was a non-starter since the Japanese at Hainan, at Taiwan and inside Vietnam were too close and had bath-tubbed the South China Sea making a foray into a landbased airpower crossfire suicidal. From what I read, the admirals had hot words at that point, which does not surprise me, since Hart did not suffer fools at all.  We know the results. Force Z was sunk and Hart's Asiatic Fleet, which fought a delay action through Indonesia and fell back on Australia, became the birth squadron for the 7th Fleet. 

The Japanese were between the Americans and British. Hart knew that Singapore, Malaya and the Philippines were gone. He was trying to figure out how to save Indonesia with what he had in time and ships.

So... as applied, in the "Malay Barrier Defense"; based as it was upon Singapore as a position, and not a sound integrated area use denial naval concept, the British screwed that one up.    
   
And lest you get the idea that I let my own countrymen off, Hart got into it with MacArthur, too. He thought "The Stage Actor" was a nincompoop who would mishandle the Philippine Islands defense with his "meet them at the beaches plan". But not even Hart could foresee that Brereton would be stupid enough to be caught on the ground 8 hours after Pearl Harbor. No air cover and Hart had to run for it, even sooner than he expected.
   
Normally, I would have some empathy for the characters involved; but Brereton, Sutherland and MacArthur should have been relieved "with extreme prejudice", after that one.  

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I prefer the term; Uncle Sam. Brother Jonathan is an "insult".

Would the USG have taken the transfer of the British controlled elements of the "quadrangle" in exchange for additional aid? Probably. I think it would have been more productive if the British had been less pigheaded at the ABC1 and ABC2 conferences and if the Americans had sent Stark to London earlier to play the cocktail circuit diplomatic fool, while some more sensible men hammered out a more workable American-British-Dutch-Australian scheme of defense instead of boozing it up and making empty promises to "cooperate" with each other.     
 

1. Nuance.
2. Time element. You need to beat the Japanese. 20 targets = 20 ships.
3. Glad we agree on time / distance factors.
4. If the British understood Mahan, there would have been presence in their plans. You will see that there was none.
5. Operation FS became possible after Rabaul fell. Use denial again. The Japanese were able to forward stockpile resources for the 4th Fleet to sortie from Rabaul and take Tulagi and Guadalcanal. If they had been able to consolidate before they were interrupted by WATCHTOWER, they would have made a lunge for Fiji and Samoa for the fertilizer they were after.  Kokoda Track and Coral Sea, plus some Yamamoto stupidity to go for Midway where the Americans were locally strong, all contributed to that denial.   
6. I rephrase that to the British methods and approaches and attitudes to the Pacific War (naval war) were 100% wrong. They did not understand naval geography or air power or the logistics. As for the Singapore issue, the British plans for war with Japan were based on the simple geographic naval fact that the fleet reinforcements they intended to send to fight the Japanese had to come from either Force H, the Home Fleet or from the Mediterranean Fleet. All would pass through the Indian Ocean and forward base at Singapore. From there; the British intended a single axis advance into the South China Sea until they met the Japanese along the way in a Pacific Jutland. After the Japanese were sunk, the British would seize an island base (Presumably Okinawa) and institute a blockade. Called the "Singapore Plan". It was unworkable when formulated in 1927, less credible in 1935 as reworked and sheer fantasy in 1938 when Tom Phillips updated it.  There was no way that an unsupported fleet, centered on battleships, was going to move up the East Asia coast and not be slaughtered by land based air power. And since the British had to pass through American controlled adjacent waters, according to their planning, the Philippine Islands were very much involved.          

-- WAR PLAN ORANGE was based on a different approach axis and had a different logic after 1935 showed the 10% loss of fleet for every 1000 nautical miles traveled logistical bleed out. It was a slow methodical advance through the quadrangle until a blockade could be mounted (Again Okinawa). It would take three years, and it was estimated that the USN would have to build to 2x its treaty size to gain a 3 to 1 superiority. The army element would be at least a million men for air garrisons and logistics support across the "Pacific Desert" behind the fleet. The Philippine Islands and its initial garrisons were assumed "written off".   
7. I use quotations to differentiate systems; being British, Spanish and French. Much of the world operates (outside of the British sphere) according to the French martial system. That part of it includes the United States. Our formal "federal" military traditions, laws and customs are French-originated and rather Napoleonic.  
8. Refer to 6. 
9. Admiral Tom Phillips was the last supervisor of the last British war-plan staff drafted for use against Japan, the 1938 version. He was put in charge of Force Z. to carry out a rump bluff version of that plan. He should have had the professional judgment to understand that the Japanese cannot be bluffed. He was not alone in that mistake, for Churchill, Pound, Stark, FDR and Turner were also wrong about that one. It was the collective professional judgment of the competent component of the United States Navy (That would be O'Richardson, Hart, McCain, and Ingersoll among others.)  that once the Japanese started, there was not a whole lot that could be done to stop an initial successful offensive as the Japanese had the logistics, numbers and war experience to go wherever their tanker support and air cover allowed them. Hart, realistic, fell back and tried to harass and delay the Japanese with some success dueing rthe ABDA campaign. Hart made that offer to Phillips, to join up once war started and fight a combined delay back towardsa Australia. Or alternately, Phillips could have retreated out of Japanese airpower reach to Sri Lanka or the Andaman Islands.  Instead he tried to "break uyp landings upon the Kra Peninsula despite Brook Popham telling him the RAF would not be there to cover him.  
10. The history of the perjorative term goes back to the American Revolution, when British officers mocked the Continental Line, and even further back to Cromwell when the Cavaliers mocked the "Roundheads". 

I use maps to give visual representation since most readers have no idea what something like the "quadrangle" means or where Rabaul is, or how even on a Mercator distortion a single glance will give an idea of who operates on interior lines, exterior lines or what air coverage looks like, or how shallow seas inhibits capital ship operations.

The links are for historical background. I supply the points that the background fleshes out. 

Finally; the incident between Hart and Phillips was a contrast and compare for attitudes about the OP situation made manifest in real history. Only someone who did not understand how things actually worked, (Phillips was not a line officer, nor was he a war college trained officer in the American manner.) would dare presume a foreign (American) admiral would disobey GO100 and start a war without orders, written orders from Washington. Hart told Phillips that much.  It was meetings like this one and subsequent similar ABDA interactions that set the tone for the Anglo-American war in the Pacific. If Montgomery rightly thought the American army, he saw, was a clown show, then the American navy, who thought the same exact same about the American army, thought the British navy was the whole circus and an amateur one at that.

One specific point... needs elaboration;

It is not an anti-British rant to point out that the British promised to defend Australia against the Japanese and used Singapore as their proof of their commitment. Never mind that the British asked for and recieved 3/4 of the Australian "Imperial" formations for the EuropeaN war, never mind that post hoc analysis shows this was not the proper plan of defense for Australia, never mind that the British collapsed. never mind what "I" think about the whys and wherefores that caused about that collapse or about imperialists of any stripe. Think strictly like Curtin must have thought after the British surrender. 

Would you not want your troops to come home? Would you not scramble to try to repair the mess your too trusting predecessor left you?   

Singapore was not the place to defend Australia. The quadrangle and by extension the Americans in the Philippine Islands were. if the British had figured that one out, they would have made the proper arrangements and adjustments. But the reason the British fixated on Singapore was because it was the barrier to INDIA, a country they wished to continue to exploit.   

Sure they were fighting the Germans, but they had millions of available corvee labor. They used Indian troops in the Middle East and North Africa. Why not for Pacific garrisons?   

These were facts well known to the Canberra government, especially after Curtin was disappointed by Churchill's explanation to him for why Singapore fell. 

Was Churchill going to officially tell Curtin, "My admiralty lied to me. I believed what they told me." Surely not. So Churchill blamed it on an intelligence failure.    

So, that is why Singapore fits into this narrative and is on point. It was the British plan. It was the wrong plan. It was a stupid plan, even from the British point of view.

It was a Corbett type plan.