WWII naval aviation was miracle on many levels. The industrial output was immense. The technology evolved by leaps and bounds over the course of just a few years. The pilots got the glory, but the enlisted aviation maintenance rates were the men who kept the planes in the air. Before the war there was no real system to train these men, it was a small community of a few thousand men who learned on the job. But in the first three years of WWII the demands for this skilled labor exploded. The community expanded by more than 20x in three years and developed the complex systems naval aviation continues to rely on today to keep planes in the sky.

Sustaining the Carrier War by Stan Fisher

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