Why Anglo-Japanese tension competed with Atlantic planning

Close-range encounters between British and Japanese cruisers show why planners could not treat Germany as Britain's only credible opponent. Six- and eight-inch guns were sometimes trained at one another during incidents in the late 1930s, giving the Pacific contingency an immediacy that hindsight can obscure. British strategy expected Singapore to constrain Japan and Gibraltar to help contain Italy, while escorts were most useful against the German case. The unexpected falls of Norway, France, and French Indochina undermined those geographical assumptions. Escort shortages therefore do not prove that the Admiralty ignored submarines: it was distributing limited ships across several plausible wars.