Naval Strategies in Collision: Britain, the USA, and Japan at the Beginning of the Pacific War

In the 1920s and 1930s, three important visions of future naval war in the Pacific were extant – the American ORANGE war plans, the Japanese "Attrition/Interception" concept, and the British "Singapore strategy." This article examines what relevance these expectations had to the situation after the outbreak of full-scale war in China (1937) and Europe (1939), and especially after the fall of France in May-June 1940. It discusses how the war planning of the USA, Japan, and Britain dovetailed, and how it developed in the light of geopolitical and technological changes in the two years preceding the attacks on Malaya and Hawaii; June-July 1941 marked a second significant turning point. Finally, the article considers the relationship between the two actions of the Imperial Navy planned for December 1941, the "Southern Operation" and the "Hawaiian Operation," and the connection between those two Japanese strikes and the American-British "ABC-1" strategy of March 1941.