Could be a bit of a long frontage to cover with a couple of divisions?
Meanwhile their already inadequate Merchant fleet disappears to subs off the coast of Australia.
Yep. Quite agree. It was entirely untenable to the Japanese to conduct a ground war against the allies on Australian territory.
Even holding anything they managed to grab would have been an unachievable goal.
There were secret plans to cede half the continent to the invaders and let the country defeat them. This would have been an extremely unpopular decision, but you can appreciate the logic.
From a military perspective that was the right plan. It was logical, rational, reasonable.
But from a political perspective it was probably not a realistic plan. Japanese troops on the Australian landmass would probably have been intolerable. Of course I do not have any first-hand appreciation for the spirit of the Australian citizenry, now or in 1942.
But the Japanese actions in the Aleutians give a useful comparison. The likelihood of a Japanese garrison doing anything useful on Attu or Kiska was about 2 degrees Kelvan (really close to absolute zero). Providing enough supplies just to sustain such a garrison, much less to support defending it and using it as a base for further actions, was
just not in the cards.
But … it was intolerable. It could not be left to wither, it had to be attacked until it was defeated or withdrawn.
Any chess player can appreciate the construct of a plan that uses a bold move, whether genuine threat or only a symbolic affront, to bait the opposition into moving in ways you have predicted and prepared for.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)
adds a tower to his 15mm trainyard.