Brigade XO wrote:Remember that they didn't hit the Philippines till essentially the next day
(yeah, "somebody" should have been not only fired but put in prison for not getting the US forces in the Phillippines on dispersal and full alert but 24 hours later.)
To be slightly fair, the US Army Air Force in the Philippines at least tried, they just had really rotten luck.
They didn't have time to build dispersion fields in that single day (which really should have been funded and authorized by Congress as tensions rose) but they requested permission to make a preemptive attack on the Japanese airfields on Formosa; and when that was denied they worked out the most likely time for the Japanese air strike from there to arrive -- and had all their fighters patrolling at altitude and all the B-17s up in a defensive formation. And then the airstrike didn't come, and didn't come, and didn't come, and then came at the worst possible time -- when the US planes got caught on the ground after they'd been forced to land and refuel. (And caught in neat rows - not because of fear of sabotage, as was the case with planes at Pearl Harbor, but to facilitate quickly getting them turn around and ready to be back in the air)
It was their bad luck that fog over the Formosan airfields, which the USAAF wasn't aware of, had delayed the departure of the Japanese attack by critical hours.
And because the Philippines hadn't been supplied with the long range early warning network you'd need to launch and get to combat altitude after the incoming strike was detected you had to guess and launch on an estimate or be caught at low altitude; which isn't a lot more survivable than being caught on the ground.
(The newly arrived P-40s were probably the fastest climbing planes in the Philippines, and even they took at least 8 minutes to climb from take-off to the 20,000 feet the incoming bombers were at. 8 minutes during which the escorting Zeros could swoop down on them)
With the benefit of hindsight you could argue that when the raid didn't show up as expected the USAAF should have started cycling planes down for fuel early, to keep at least some of them in the air at all times. But even that can only be sustained for so long -- unlike modern jet engines the high performance internal combustion engines used in WWII combat planes needed a lot of maintenance per flight hour. If they'd committed to keeping their planes constantly refueled and flying for an entire day they'd probably have to stand them all down for at least a couple days to do major engine overhauls!
They could have split the bombers up into penny packets spread around the other islands, but with only a day to do so wouldn't have been able to reposition the fuel, maintenance supplies, or ordinance -- which was still at great risk of being destroyed at their original fields. Having the planes survive but be combat ineffective, and shortly flight ineffective, wouldn't be vastly better that losing them like they did. And if they had caught the Japanese attack with their fighters they might have preserved the bomber formations as a usable combat formation -- at least for a while longer.
Can't speak for the ground troops though - just not as familiar with what their plans were and how obviously went wrong.