Return to the Philippines

History & service

As a prelude to the long-anticipated campaign to retake the Philippines, AAF air power carried out maximum-range air strikes against petroleum facilities in the Netherlands East Indies. The Allies invaded the Palau Islands and Morotai to gain airfield facilities, and targets in the Philippines were struck beginning in August 1944, seriously reducing enemy air strength in the area. Supported by carrier-based planes of the 3rd Fleet, U.S. forces landed on Leyte on Oct. 20, 1944. Seven days later, 34 P-38s landed at a just-completed airstrip, thus becoming the first AAF planes to be based in the Philippines since early 1942.

The Japanese reacted swiftly, but in a series of decisive naval engagements in the Leyte Gulf, U.S. naval forces turned back enemy attempts to halt the invasion. It was during the Battle of Leyte Gulf that the enemy unleashed a new air weapon -- the Kamikaze or suicide plane. In the skies over Leyte, the enemy fought tenaciously but dissipated his strength in frequent small attacks. By Dec. 31, 1944, AAF and Marine pilots had destroyed at least 356 Japanese planes at a loss of only 23 U.S. fighters.

Aircraft change the battlefield

In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.

The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.

Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.