A three-month delay creates two different clocks

The estimate allows about three extra months for an all-out Japanese effort to prepare Indochina. Japan urgently needs fuel, but that urgency cannot remove the limits on how quickly it can build facilities and concentrate forces. A scheduling exercise could justify as much as a nine-month delay, but three months assumes Japan makes the build-up a primary effort. February 1942 also fits the weather and the historical January to March timing of the Dutch East Indies campaign. The delay may give Force Z a carrier, but Japan retains the full Kido Butai because this scenario never sends the carrier force to Pearl Harbor. A strengthened British force is still a manageable naval problem for Japan in this scenario. The more serious danger lies in the North Atlantic, where relations between Germany and the United States were already worsening. Japan is trying to avoid American belligerency, yet every month spent building bases increases the chance that Hitler brings the United States into the wider war first.