I always thought the Hitler picked bad allies. If the Japanese had just stayed away from the US and kept quietly taking over Asia... I don't know whether they could have taken all of Australia - but they certainly could have given it a shot. I'm just thinking of the difficulty logistically in invading Australia - if you do it from the North then you have to slog through the desert, and if you come around to the cities on the south east coast - say, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, then you have to come down a long way (from wherever your bases air). Even if the Japanese had invaded Northern Australia their planes wouldn't have had enough range to fly down from bases in the north to Sydney or Brisbane to provide air coverage for an invasion fleet. So, the Japanese would have had to have taken all the South Pacific islands - Fiji, New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, you name it, in order to "island hop" their way closer to Australia. I expect that they might have tried to establish a base on Norfolk Island to give them a chance of striking at Sydney. I think their planes would have had the range to strike from there, although the Australians would easily have been able to strike back at Norfolk Island too.
As you can see, I've been giving this quite a bit of thought. I would say that what would have happened (with no USA to help in the Pacific) would be that Australia (and New Zealand) would have been cut off from the rest of the world, and would have had their hands full fighting off repeated attacks from the Japanese. Bear in mind that Australia could have recruited a lot more troops if necessary and would have presented a more formidable fighting force than the other nations that the Japanese defeated in the war.
I expect that Roosevelt would have eventually have found a pretext for the USA to enter the war - sooner or later a US ship would have been attacked - just like in WWI, and then he would have had his excuse. However, the US entry into the war could easily have been delayed by over a year, which would have meant that the war could have dragged on and on.
Posted on Jun 1, 2003, 11:23 PM from IP address 210.193.236.20