American-British-Dutch-Australian Command

On December 27 Marshall and Admiral Ernest King proposed an ABDA Command led by Archibald Wavell to Charles Portal, Dudley Pound, and John Dill.

Winston Churchill warned Marshall about the difficulties faced by Ferdinand Foch as Supreme Allied Commander while simply trying to coordinate operations across the Western Front of World War I. Marshall rebuffed this and other historical analogies from Churchill, telling him that he "was not interested in Drake and Frobisher, but I was interested in having a united front against Japan."

The formation of ABDACOM meant that Wavell had control of a huge, but thinly spread force, covering an area from Burma in the west, to Dutch New Guinea and the Commonwealth of the Philippines in the east.

Other areas, including the British Raj and the Territory of Hawaii, remained officially under separate commands, and in practice General Douglas MacArthur was in complete control of Allied forces in the Philippines.

ABDA was charged with holding the Malay Barrier for as long as possible in order to retain Allied control of the Indian Ocean and the western sea approaches to Australia.

British leaders were primarily interested in retaining control of Singapore; the military capacity of the Dutch East Indies had suffered as a result of the defeat of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940, and the Dutch administration was focused on defending the island of Java; the Australian government was heavily committed to the war in North Africa and Europe, and had few readily accessible military resources; and the United States was preoccupied with the Philippines, which at the time was a U.S. Commonwealth territory.

On 1 February the air force portion of ABDA moved its headquarters from Lembang to Bandoeng when it became clear that the former place lacked sufficient accommodation.

In the meantime, the rapid collapse of Allied resistance to Japanese attacks in Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and other countries had soon overwhelmed the Malay Barrier.

Perhaps the most notable success for ABDA forces was the guerilla campaign in Timor, waged by Australian and Dutch infantry for almost 12 months after Japanese landings there on February 19.