Everything We Had: a Novel of the Pacific Air War November-December 1941

Jack and Charlie Davis are second-generation pilots, growing up in the pioneering aviation world of the 1920s and 1930s. Charlie chooses a military career, graduating from West Point and entering the Air Corps as a bomber pilot. Jack wants to be a writer, but aviation is in his blood and seared into his memory when he witnesses the fiery death off his father in an air race.
War is being raged in Europe and China. Jack leaves college to join the Air Corps and becomes a pursuit pilot. Charlie is sent to one off the elite outfits of the Air Corps, the 19th Bomb Group. Both brothers are sent to the Far Eastern Air Force in the Philippines, a vulnerable garrison being equipped with the leftover, obsolescent weapons that are all America has its arsenal.
War with Japan becomes almost inevitable when America, Britain, and the Dutch embargo oil and scrap metal exports to Japan in response to atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China, which include indiscriminate aerial bombing of Chinese cities. The Japanese know the Dutch East Indies have all the oil they could ever need.
But the American forces in the Philippines, including Jack and Charlie as pilots in the Far Eastern Air Force, stand in the way of a Japanese force better armed and equipped and in vastly superior numbers.
Jack and Charlie know they are about to face overwhelming odds where their own lives will hang in the balance. Neither of them have faced combat before, and they know they will have to face the sort of peril and danger neither of them have ever endured, and somehow survive.