“In 1941 Boeing required more than 140,000 hours of labor to assemble a B-17.”
By 1944 the same bomber took under 20,000 hours. In 1937 the whole country built about 3,100 aircraft, mostly small private planes. The government paid for the factories, and Ford’s famous Willow Run produced virtually nothing for two years and hit its stride on a bomber the army no longer wanted. Even a wartime emergency can’t skip the learning curve.