Daily Archives: 13-September-2018

While looking for some good summer history reading, I found the book America's Hundred Thousand: U.S. Production Fighters of World War II. This book covers the production miracle associated with scaling up up the US aircraft industry to supply planes for every front during WW2. Its title refers to the fact that the US produced ~100K fighter aircraft during WW2, which lasted for 44 months for the US (Figure 2). I decided that I would look at the numbers for all forms of aircraft produced by the US during WW2. Fortunately, the Hyperwar website has put the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest online, which gives me easy access to the data. The Digest contains aircraft production data for both the US and Canada. Figure 1 shows the production numbers for the 11 categories of aircraft production listed in the Statistical Digest. In addition to 100K fighter aircraft, there were nearly 200K of other aircraft manufactured as well. Continue reading →