Things were pretty bad until we came up with fighters that could make the round trip with the bombers. Things got a lot better as the war ground along, the Luftwaffe was able to introduce jet and rocket propelled planes with limited success because they had lost most of their experienced pilots. If the "wonder weapons" had been introduced earlier in the war things would have been a lot bloodier but we still would have won because we could build planes faster then Hitler's Germany. We won because we had the Atlantic Ocean for a moat.
Regards,
GtG
Randall Hansen
The first two deal with politics/policy before/during WWII; the third, with the carpet bombing campaign of Bomber Harris. Highly informative.
It was interesting to learn from Forge, for example, that form the start of the war in Europe FDR was doing everything he could - within the constraints of political reality - to help the British while simultaneously preparing for mobilized production. The result was that, upon entry into WWII, the US had little military inventory but an industrial base spring-loaded to ramp up production vastly outstripping Germany and Japan. The factories and, critically, the machine tools were already in being.