The war in Europe had not yet started. Our military was cut to nothing after WWI. Our troops had little to train with and little to no equipment.
The fighters in the Philippines were biplanes.
The fighters were P-35s and early P-40s with a few of the newer E models,not Biplanes. The Philippine airforce was flying Boeing P-26s at the time of the attack.
No, the USAAF had 100+ modern fighters and about 30 B-17’s in the Philippines.
If you want to know, in excruciating detail what happened to them, I recommend William Bartsch, “Doomed at the Start”, the title is a succinct summary. This is a massively detailed, almost plane by plane analysis of what happened to the air forces of the USAFFE.
Short answer - the biggest problems were
- that the USAAF was unprepared for the start of the war, more in terms of personnel and outlook/attitude than materiel; almost everyone from the top to the bottom grossly underperformed on the first few days.
- though they learned very fast, they could not recover from the losses of the first few days because there was no way to get replacement aircraft. It was not that a replacement convoy could not get through - perhaps, with enormous risks one could have, but that they needed replacement aircraft on day 1, and there was no secure supply line to get them to the Philippines, no chain of supplied bases and airfields from Australia through the Netherlands East Indies. The US just wasn’t on a war footing, and neither were any of the allies in East Asia.
“The war in Europe had not yet started’’.<< The Germans invaded Poland on Sept.1, 1939. They invaded Norway on April 10, 1940 and a month later they attacked Holland and then France. They attacked the Soviet on June 21,1941.