You know, it's funny, but you don't really think about the US Air Force and just what a brutal time they had keeping planes fixed. It's nice to see a game looking at this aspect of WW II, even if it is from the RAF angle.
Consider, from 1939 to 1945, the US saw approximately a 50000% increase in the size of its air force (and something like a 70000% increase in the total engine count). They had planes fighting in almost every theater of the war. Most of us could probably name at least a dozen US planes that saw mainstream, front-line service. Each one of those probably had 5 to 10 variants (some small, some large).
My dad was 20 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he marched down to his enlistment office in Los Angeles, and was promptly ruled unfit to serve (4F). Wanting to contribute, he promptly went to work at the Douglas Aircraft factory in El Segundo, where they built SBD Dauntlesses. He didn't have many of the technical skills that they were looking for, but they gave him a broom to push around.
After working there for three weeks, one of his supervisors found out through one of his coworkers that my dad not only had a college degree, but had been the Senior Editor for The Daily Bruin, a large college newspaper. Within two days, he was whisked into the Technical Writing Division, where he spent the next 3 years writing Technical Manuals.
To me, this always seemed much less glamorous than if he'd been riveting and welding together plane parts. It's only recently, as I studied the absurd expansion of the US Air Force during wartime, that I've come to appreciate just how important those technical manuals must have been to the flight crews seeing a brand new plane for the first time.
The way he tells it, he worked 50 and 60 hour weeks most of the year, without vacation, for 3 years. Most others in the war industries did the same. That is a marked contrast to the way the U.S. has waged our more limited wars over the last 40 years. Make of that what you will, but it leaves me deeply uneasy with our country.
