Dave Bender wrote:
You've left out a few important details.
1. The Americans, British and Germans all had decent air warning radar by 1941. A competent commander would incorporate this into his aerial operations center. The P-35s based in the Philippines should almost always have a positional advantage, attacking from a superior altitude and out of the sun.
2. The defenders can avoid a fight if the tactical situation is not to their advantage. Ground control radar simply maneuvers you out of the way, to an alternate landing strip.
3. The Formosa based A6M2s must fly 550 miles (1 way) just to get to the Philippines. By the time they form up on the bombers and make the trip the Zero pilots have been flying for close to 3 hours. The pilots are fatigued and even those ultra long range A6M2s are starting to worry about having enough fuel to return home. The P-35s have been flying for less then an hour and finding a friendly place to land is not an issue.
4. The 550 mile return trip means that even relatively minor damage to the IJN aircraft can be fatal. A tiny, barely noticable leak in your fuel or coolant system means you go swimming somewhere between the Philippines and Formosa.
Still the situation remains the same, meaning the inexperience of the Phillipine pilots cannot be transformed into a highly experienced one, without any sort of additional training or combatexperience, something the IJN and IJA already had. Besides that, it seems very, very plausable wether the Phillipines would have gotten state of the art radar, since not even the USA had such in large quantities in the first place and only the UK and Germany were using it in ever growing numbers and different forms. So radar is not quite an option, since a second rate power, which essentially was what the Phillipines would have been at best, was not expected to have such technology.
Besides that the P-35 is not a very usefull aircraft, since it is quite heavy and underpowered, making it difficult to fly and turn. That is all worse against experienced, IJN and IJA pilots, who already have had their share of combat in the past. They are heavily trained mostly for longrange missions, as was in reality seen over Guadalcanal, when the A6M pilots made 700+ mile trips from Rabaul to Guadalcanal and back to engage Allied aircraft over Henderson Field. A mere three hour trip from Formosa to Clarkfield is peanuts then. Unless the Phillipines Army got more up to date equipment, the result would have been as historical. (perhaps throwing away the P-35 and replacing it for the Supermarine Spitfire might have been better, although Britain was not likely to spare some for other nations.) Even the US Army airforce could have used these magnificent fighters with much more effective than the old P-35, P-36 and early variants of the P-40.
