staff in the south Pacific accessible as Foch's High Control Staff was to the Great Staffs of the British and French armies in France [during World War I]. He would receive his orders from an appropriate joint body who will be responsible to me as the Minister of Defence and to the President of the United States who is also Commander-in-Chief of all United States forces. Following the declaration by the four nations on 1 January 1942, the Allied governments formally appointed Wavell. 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. At Wavell's insistence, North West Australia (see map) was added to the ABDA area. The rest of Australia was under Australian control, as were its territories of Papua and New Guinea. 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. This was a nearly hopeless task, given the Japanese supremacy in naval forces in the western Pacific. The task was further complicated by the addition of Burma to the command; the difficulties of coordinating action between forces of four nationalities that used different equipment and had not trained together; and the different priorities of the national governments. 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. Wavell arrived in Singapore, where the British Far East Command was based, on 7 January 1942. ABDACOM absorbed this British command in its entirety. On 18 January, Wavell moved his headquarters to Lembang near Bandoeng on Java. On 1 February the air force portion of