The US should be a lot more diplomatically constrained by "The Neutrality Act"

[j0nathan800]

The wildcats weren't even the worst of it. They came in 1940. A lot of american aircrafts were made in 1938 or before. Those were the ones I was refering to and were considerably worse than Japanese aircraft. For example:

Buffalo - Although in Finland it achieved high ratios of 33:1 vs Russians, on the Pacific vs the Japanese, american pilots started nicknaming it "the flying coffin".
TBD Devastator - another aircraft made in 1937-1939, during battle of mid way out of 41 bombers only 6 survived with 0 hits being made to japanese ships.

The only american aircraft that the Japanese couldn't match early in the war was the Douglas SBD Dauntless. The japanese had the Zero as everyone knows by now and also had some other superior designs like the Nakajima B5N.

Basically those are 1936 templates with bad designs.

The Devastator IRL had massive issues due to bad torpedoes and the need to fly low and slow against ships with AA and fighter cover. That is why they got shredded at Midway, also in part due to the Devastators not having a fighter escort. They weren't designed to dogfight but drop torpedoes.

 

[Caeric]

If I remember correctly, we were able to deal with the Zero even with Wildcats by maneuvering well, but that is an equivalent tech I believe.

I think it would be more apt to say tactics and doctrine since the A6M handily outperformed the F4F Wildcat in manoeuvrability. Tactics like the Thatch Weave, drilling pilots to never follow a Zero or Ki-43 into a maneuvering dogfights and exploiting their poor dive handling to escape, was what turned the fights around and generally Grumman fighters being hell of a lot more durable than the extremely lightweight and poorly protected average Japanese fighters just led to less pilot losses overall.

 

[BurningEGO]

Yes you could always improvise or try to negate the enemy advantages / or try to maximize your own.

This was partly why the Buffalo was better on Finland then on USA.

But in many cases this has little to do with tech in itself. At large, the whole thing doesn't even have much to do with tech but with the way the designs were made themselves. You see the Japanese didn't care that much about armor, so their aircraft were faster and to some degree had bigger range.

The buffalo for instance wasnt that bad airplane but the naval version had extra weight added in and I believe over time they even added more fuel and consequently more armor, and this combined with the fact the Zero was nimble proved to be a death sentence to the pilots using the buffalo. They were literally sitting ducks waiting to be shot. No one wanted to be in a flying coffin, man!

Also the american pilots at this stage were hastily trained and vastly unexperienced (usually), and I have even heard that they were told the buffalo could dogfight anything the Japanese threw at them, which, obviously, wasn't true. All of these combined contributed to several fiascos. The dutch buffalos were decimated and the americans didn't fare much better when using them either.

The funny part is that the Buffalo was considerated superior to the wildcat initially, but the wildcats ended up replacing the buffalo for a short while.

EDITED: in any case, an interesting find on wiki:

"Ralph Ingersoll wrote in late 1940 after visiting Britain that the Buffalo and other American aircraft "cannot compete with either the existing British or German fighters", so Britain used them "either as advanced trainers --or for fighting equally obsolete Italian planes in the Middle East. That is all they are good for". Even the Eagle Squadrons' American pilots used Hawker Hurricanes instead of the Buffalo"