The Impossible Command

General Sir Archibald Wavell receives at Bandung a mission without precedent: to take command of ABDACOM, the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command, the first unified Allied command of the war. The Arcadia Conference has just invented it from scratch to coordinate the defence of South-East Asia, and it is Wavell whom Churchill and Roosevelt have chosen to lead it.

Yet the theatre he is handed is already collapsing under Japanese blows. Malaya is being overrun, the Philippines are under siege, and the Dutch East Indies are absorbing successive landings. Under his nominal authority stand British, American, Dutch and Australian units that share no common doctrine, no compatible communications systems, and no single language of command. Air cover is negligible, and the Allied naval forces too scattered to hold the straits. Wavell grasps at once that ABDACOM is a shell.

3 paths lie before him. He can accept the command as it stands, despite its glaring lack of resources, betting that Allied coordination, even symbolic, is worth more than chaos among 4 national armies answering to no one. He can instead refuse a charge that is plainly doomed, one that will consume only his reputation and leave him without credibility for the rest of the war. Or he can accept, but abandon any pretence of defending 5,000 kilometres of front, concentrating whatever forces remain on a single defensible redoubt — Java — rather than losing everything everywhere at once. The decision will shape Allied fortunes across Asia.