In the big picture I would actually agree with varsity's 'final limiting statement'. This is an airplane discussion board, and I'm a WWII airplane fan too, but you have to look at the basic seapower situation to evaluate the big picture of first PI campaign. As long as the US Pacific Fleet was crippled, or anyway wasn't going to sortie quickly and in strength to relieve the PI, the US position in PI was hopeless. Eventually the US force there would run out of fuel and munitions (although if it could hold large physical areas of the PI it could feed itself, unlike the actual situation where the main force was backed into Bataan then largely starved into defeat).I think you have correctly summarized the causal history, but in doing so also oversimplified a very complex situation, any element of which might be worthy of discussion. It's hard to argue with your last sentence but I don't think we (at least I don't) learn much by accepting it as a final, limiting statement.
Given all the cited problems encountered during the 1941 PI campaign were some factors more damaging than others? Was defeat simply the result of a poorly defined FEAF aircraft fleet requirements/capabilities?
The FEAF could conceivably have inflicted more serious losses on the Japanese invasion convoys at Aparri (N Luzon) Legaspi (S Luzon) and eventually the larger Lingayen Gulf landings (though never would have allowed the first two only to 'spring a trap' on the third: totally unrealistic). But in fact the Japanese were not that critically short of merchant type shipping at that stage of the war, and captured a good deal as they advanced. So FEAF delaying Japanese plans by causing heavier shipping losses and/or forcing JNAF units to dwell on Luzon longer is plausible. But FEAF 'defeating' the Japanese seizure of PI: not plausible. Only the main force of the USN could have done that by being ready to, then successfully executing, a decisive fleet action to relieve the PI. And that just wasn't going to happen after the PH attack; it's an interesting 'what if' whether the USN could have pulled it off *without* there having been a PH attack.
If you read personal recollections of many PI veterans, it was common knowledge among them that relief from the US by sea was their only real hope. And their morale was sustained by the belief that it would still happen, however impossible we know that was with hindsight.
Joe
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