8am in Hawaii is midnight in the Philippines. MacArthur had time to scramble his planes but didn’t. Saturday night-everyone drunk? 10+ hours to do something and the planes were all lined up impossible to miss when attacked. Asleep at the switch. Too much of that in world history.
stay vigilant.
You mean we haven't even learned to withdraw from Afghanistan properly?
The Philippines is separated from Hawaii by half the width of the Pacific Ocean. Kind of hard to protect Hawaii from there.
Gen. MacArthur did authorize the USAAF to put up its P-40 pursuit planes over the airfields on Luzon and the B-17s also took off. What MacArthur did NOT due which his air commander, BG was to send the 30 B-17s to attack Japanese airfields on Formosa (aka Taiwan) which was 600 miles away. All of the pursuit aircraft landed around 11am-noon local time to refuel and the bombers also landed. The Japanese, whose air attack was delayed by several hours due to the airfields on Formosa being fogged in, arrived during this time when the aircraft were on the ground being refueled and the pilots were eating lunch.
I recommend reading “December 8, 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor,” William H. Bartsch. It is the best book currently written about this topic.