From 1941 onward aircraft production in the United States exceeded the combined output of both its major enemies by a generous margin. The implications of this disparity become more pointed when one probes behind the bare figures. Over the years shown, both Germany and Japan turned out progressively fewer heavy bombers as they were driven step by step to take the defensive. By 1944 more than 50 percent of the production reported for Japan and 75 percent of that for Germany consisted of fighter aircraft.
In the United States, on the other hand, the trend was in the opposite direction with increasing emphasis on the construction of heavy bombers. These big aircraft required up to four times as many engines and propellers as fighters and absorbed far larger allocations of all other types of resources—labor and facilities as well as materials. As a consequence, the spread between the output of the United States and its combined enemies was really substantially greater than the production totals alone may at first appear to indicate.
That was Irving B Holley’s excellent book, Buying Aircraft. Here’s a bit more:
Designs changed with such rapidity during the war period that bombers in 1945 were very different from the bombers of 1940. The rising curve of airframe gross weights makes this point clear. Where bombers in the United States averaged 7,709 pounds in 1940, by 1945 they had increased to more than 20,000 pounds. In short, the figures for total production in the later years of the war represent more airplane in every sense of the word than they did in the earlier years.
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