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On Dec. 6, 1941 Admirals Hart & Phillips held a conference in Manila (in the afternoon, following P.'s morning meeting with "Move Over God" MacArthur); the conference centered on the use of Manila Bay as a forward operating base for the British and American fleets against the Japanese....The British planned to utilize Singapore for "defensive purposes" until Manila could be upgraded. The facilities there were expected to be adequate to operate the Eastern Fleet by April, 1942. .... In the end, Hart allowed Phillips only the use of the Asiatic Fleet's DesDiv 57 (then at Balikpapan, Borneo) as screen for Force Z, but of course events unfolded too rapidly for these units to be in position in time...not that they would have made ANY difference to the fate of the British heavy ships.

My understanding is that the conference between Phillips and Hart ended when the news arrived in Manila that RAF patrols had sighted Japanese invasion convoys on the move toward Malaya. Phillips hurriedly returned to Singapore, to be there when the war started. Hart was under no illusions about his ability to defend the Philippines, or even just Manila, and he must have expressed these reservations to Phillips. Therefore, It's difficult to believe that Phillips seriously thought the plan to use Manila as a forward base would ever come to fruition.

if Tom Phillips believed he could take his force out into the South China Sea with minimal (or no) aircover, and moreover, stated that the Japanese had no torpedo bombers in the air about to attack him, it's hard to argue that his thoughts were "seriously" realistic in any event. None of the pre-war plans by the British or the Americans seem particularly viable in retrospect, and ALL were to some degree marked by illusions it seems to me.

Who knows? But I doubt that there were more than one or two British admirals, and not many more in any navy, who would have strongly disagreed with Phillips at the time, and they weren't all stupid or hopelessly blind either. Very few military thinkers anywhere were able to accurately predict the future course of naval warfare in 1941. Actually, the American pre-war plans, as outlined in Rainbow 5, were relatively viable as it turned out. The last minute, and ill-judged, attempt to reinforce the Philippines was due to the influence of the strategic bombing advocates who completely over-estimated the power of the big bomber as a defensive weapon and under-estimated what kind of airpower would be required to degrade a country's ability to prosecute an aggressive war. Dugout Doug had no concept of the strengths or limitations of either air or naval warfare; he essentially thought at the level of a battalion commander and was more concerned with self-promotion than professional military concepts.

As for Hart, he may or may not have believed Manila was tenable. Probably he knew that ultimately it wasn't UNLESS it had adequate air support, which they hoped would arrive in time (per Mac's fantasies, which were the product of Stimson & Washington more than Mac himself, apparently)---However, Hart DID acknowledge (grudgingly) that his own thinking had been swayed a little by Mac's optimism.

Hart knew and actually said as much, that Manila was not defensible given the then current state of the Asiatic Fleet. "Adequate" air cover might prolong the naval defense, but he needed enough naval power to take on the Jap fleet. As of December 6 (the date of his conference with Phillips), Hart knew there wasn't going to be time for the air power in the Philippines to be made "adequate". Yeah, he was caught up in Mac's enthusiasm for awhile, so were the Army planners, but Hart never completely bought into the idea that the Philippines were defensible with what Washington was willing to spend on their defense. Stimson, like Mac, and even Marshall, were gulled by the bomber advocates like Arnold who basically sold them a bill of goods while trying to get funding for their pet projects.

One might argue that Hart/USN knew in their gut they would be forced back to the Malay Barrier eventually, but this was not something the British--so wed to Singapore/Malaya--could accept.

No doubt about it. In the late 1930's Admiral Stark, in conceiving Rainbow 5, explicitly called for the defense of the Malay Barrier line, but implicitly hedged the USN's bets by making the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama Canal line the one to be held at all costs.