Conquest by Air 1945 US Army Air Forces; Air Power in World War II

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'Reel 1 shows a flashback of French troops storming German trenches during World War I; B-26's, B-17's, and P-38's in the air and bombs falling on Rouen, France, on Aug. 17, 1942; unescorted B-17's over Schweinfurt, Germany, under heavy attack by FW-190's; Gen. Eisenhower and his aides conferring; the unloading of dead and wounded from B-17's returned from the Schweinfurt raid; panoramic views of ruined Schweinfurt on Aug. 20, 1943; P-47's and P-51's in the air; bombs falling on German aircraft plants; and Folk-Wulfs on an assembly line in Germany. Reel 2, Allied officers confer prior to the Normandy invasion. B-24's raid Romania's Ploesti oil fields; gun-camera footage records dogfights and the strafing of grounded German planes. Gen. Marshall confers with British officers. Allied troops land in Normandy and advance in the Ardennes Forest. Bombs fall on German tank factories. Shows the ruins of a factory in Bomark. Reel 3, U.S. and British officers confer. Berlin and Bremen are bombed. Shows ruins in Germany. Transportation and communication centers are bombed. An atom bomb is tested.'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

America's manufacturers in World War II were engaged in the greatest industrial effort in history. Aircraft companies went from building a handful of planes at a time to building them by the thousands on assembly lines. Aircraft manufacturing went from a distant 41st place among American industries to first place in less than five years.

In 1939, total aircraft production for the US military was less than 3,000 planes. By the end of the war, America produced 300,000 planes. No war was more industrialized than World War II. It was a war won as much by machine shops as by machine guns.

Manufacturer for manufacturer, factory for factory, worker for worker, America outproduced its enemies. By 1944, each American worker produced more than twice his/her German counterpart, and four times the output of a Japanese worker. The profit motive proved to be a greater spur to production than were the edicts from the generals running the totalitarian societies[citation needed]. As Donald Douglas observed, "Here's proof that free men can out-produce slaves."

In January 1939, Roosevelt appealed to Congress for $300,000,000 to be spent on procuring aircraft for the Army Air Corps. At the time the Corps had approximately 1,700 aircraft in total. Congress responded and authorized the procurement of 3,251 aircraft.

The American aircraft industry was given impetus at the early part of the war by the demand from the British and French for aircraft to supplement their own domestic production. The 1939 Neutrality Act permitted belligerents to acquire armaments from US manufacturers provided they paid in cash and used their own transportation. The British Purchasing Commission had been set up prior to the war to arrange purchase of aircraft and the British and French dealt directly with manufacturers paying from their financial reserves. After France fell to Germany, many of the orders for aircraft were taken over by the British. By 1940, the British had ordered $1,200,000,000 worth of aircraft. This led to some aircraft, such as the P-51 Mustang, being produced to meet European requirements and then being adopted by the US. In their need for aircraft the Anglo-French commission also ordered designs from manufacturers that had failed to win US Army contracts - e.g. the Martin Model 167.

The American aircraft industry was able to adapt to the demands of war. In 1939 contracts assumed single-shift production, but as the number of trained workers increased, the factories moved to first two- and then a three-shift schedules. The government aided development of capacity and skills by placing "Educational orders" with manufacturers, and new government-built plants for the private firms to use.

Aircraft companies built other manufacturer's designs; the B-17 was built by Boeing (the designer), Lockheed Vega, and Douglas Aircraft. Automotive companies joined schemes to produce aircraft components and also complete aircraft. Ford set up the Willow Run production facility and built complete Consolidated B-24 Liberators as well as sections to be assembled at other plants...

WWII Total US Aircraft Production

Grand total  295,959 

Combat aircraft  200,443