I saw a program or read an article about plans the Japanese had to invade Madagascar and then possibly go on to attack British possesions in the Middle East from the south. It indicated that the Doolittle raid caused the Japanese to focus their attention on Midway instead. Does anyone have the source of this material? or know what TV program this was?
I don't specifically recall the show but I would hazard a guess that it was 20th Century Battlefields.
The problem with the Madagascar argument is that it is too far south to be an effective surface or air basing mode for attacks on the Canal. You would want the Horn of Africa (Somalia/Eritrea) more than anything for this.
That said, Diego would be just as effective in interdicting the IO which gives you all the phosphates, cattle, hides and other goods coming out of Australia as well as 'troops and services' from India proper. Possibly even including mine attacks on the Canal as a milkrun alternate, every other sortie.
My difficulty with such a scenario is that despite having a large and generally superlative technology submarine fleet (the Japanese started the war with Type-IX equivalent, long range, platforms, as well as the best torpedo of any service), the IJN did an awful job prosecuting the very kind of unrestricted naval warfare by which we were starving them to death in attacks on civilian transports.
Without better evidence of a superior understanding of maritime commerce interdiction (which could have been undertaken from bases in occupied Malaysia and covered the entire IO with ease), the notion that Japan would or could do anything useful with bases further West isn't tenable.
Both Japan and Germany were looking for a creeping/expansionist attempt to build their own spheres of influence if not Empire. Both failed in considering how much force-as-security they would need /beyond/ their 'new borders' to secure what they had stolen.
For the Japanese, this was not the Western Pacific (nor certainly Australia) but rather all the oil, manganese, bauxite, lumber and similar mineral wealth secured in SEA and the Java/Sumatra/Borneo triangle.
While it took a good long while (the RN came in 1945) these were the resources that should have been protected and expanded upon because they were ultimately _non threatening_ to U.S. interests (excepting rubber) and critical to Britain.
The attack on Pearl Harbor shows what I consider to be a power-fixation psychology with USN PacFleet and an abrogation of the very kind of warfare (deep blue, empowered by heavy BBs, carriers and those same cruiser subs) that -both sides- had originally developed their navies (WP Orange etc.) to fight 'if it became necessary'. With the Pacific fleet at the bottom of pearl, necessity became as submarine war's mother and the Japanese were just as vulnerable to having their supply network disrupted as we and particularly the British were.
Here too, Hitler had limited goals in the M.E. until the Italians started losing, badly, to the British forces in North Africa. So while the ultimate goals may have been there, the seeming organizational coordination and logistical planning was not.
I will go one step further: when Japan failed to create a working second front in Eastern Russia after Hitler risked all to declare war on the America, the Axis became a name-only defacto diplomatic and technology exchange hollow body.
Hitler could not win in the East with 20 new divisions arriving in late 1941 and the rail lines out of Moscow not effectively cut. Japan could not win with her unfortunate choice of jungle islands and Australia as the point of focus in the East.
ONLY BOTH TOGETHER could have effectively knocked Britain out of the war and thus denied the Allies the ultimate springboard effect in both resupplying a Russian technology base brought to it's knees. And ultimately granting the impetus to stage a 'third front' airwar which would so badly cripple Germany's own materiel and manufacturing base efforts in fighting an attritionary logistics campaign that began east of the Urals if not the U.S..
It all comes down to the submarine war effort and the realization that the West's wealth and Industry existed on a perilously fragile distributionist capital system.
With Japanese subs a serious presence in the IO, German boats spend less time there or in the Med and the Royal Navy is spread even thinner trying to stand up another convoy system out of Oz (possibly through the Panama Canal).
With Japanese forces acting as a serious threat to Chelyabinsk in Eastern Russian (perhaps via treaty with the Chinese Communists), the effort to swing the U-Boats to interdict the PQ convoys might have actually yielded somehting.
And by keeping the U-Boats 'centered up' in the Atlantic Corridor, Britain could not hold out as late as the early February-March period of 1943.
