Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
That one is hard to support, given that the American aviation industry was the first such industry, anywhere, and was doing quite well for itself prior to the outbreak of the war.
Did the orders help? Um. Yes? I mean they stopped paying for the planes after Lend-Lease so, mixed bag there, there was a war on and all. But I don't see how the gulf between "Without Britain and France paying for a few planes before the war started" and "$50 Billion in materiel provided free of charge with most of the debt written off and most of the production destroyed in combat" gets bridged. I'm calling shenanigans.
The UK, France (especially), Italy, and others were way ahead of the US until the Feds made the Wrights share their patents to support production of arms for WW I. This led to the rise of far more innovative competitors in aircraft design and production: Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., which rapidly eclipsed the Wright company's fossilized and already obsolete technology. (Note that Wright was soon more or less forced to merge with Curtiss...)
Also worth noting that it had been eleven years between the Wright brothers' first flight, and the outbreak of the Great War. By the time WWII was on the horizon, US aviation was a force to be reckoned with. By the end of WWII, it was about the size of all European aviation industry combined, but certainly not before.
To address the sibling comment as well, yes that's accurate as I understand history. The big benefit of the prewar orders was that it gave the US a head start on ramping up for war production, which was nonetheless a basket case for the first year or so after the US entered the war, just before 1942. Without that head start the entire timeline for winning the war would have been pushed back, I don't think it could have changed the outcome but the additional suffering would have been immense.