I found this piece on an obscure and unsuccessful (for US)WWII fighter plane to be very interesting. It seems that while it was a failure in the Pacific for us, it worked for the Finns.
Raises the question of how much was the machine, how much the pilot and their training, and how much the opposing airforce? And to what extent does this illustrate a more general proposition about man/machine/environment?
I was born before Pearl Harbor. After the war was over I got a compilation of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons, depicting GI's in a picture of combat and service life that was more realistic than anything seen before, A tweet yesterday evoked this memory.
Been reading the John McManus books on the Army's role in the Pacific (so far two volumes,carrying the story through the end of 1944 and the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines).
It's good, not as good as the Toll trilogy on the Navy, with less focus on overall strategy and the home front, but it does do justice to the Army which McManus says has been overshadowed by the Marines. The first book is critical of MacArthur, the second book not so much. In the controversies between Marine and Army generals he usually takes the Army side, but seems to be fair in assessing the good and bad of the leaders.
I was struck by the fact that the US had overall commanders--Nimitz and MacArthur, while the Japanese apparently always separated navy and army chains of command. We had friction between Marine and Army forces which apparently didn't exist for Japan.
Interesting--in WWII the RAF bomber crews were self-selected with no divisions of rank or class--they stuck the men who had finished training as pilots, navigators, gunners, etc. in a big room and let them choose each other to form a bomber crew. Lots of diversity, at least by country (different parts of the British Empire, plus Poles, Free French, Americans, etc.)
In contrast America was very authoritarian, as the military tends to be, and strikingly was class-based. College men who were officers were the pilots and navigators; the rest of the crew were enlisted men. A new crew was formed by order from Washington; preferences had nothing to do with it.
