Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I hear a lot of extraordinary claims being made in the last few posts and zero extraordinary proof.
This is the age of search engines. Opinions are meaningless unless you can connect them to the reasons you hold them. facts and data are easy to find. All the information in the history of mankind is basically at your fingertips .
Use it.
I do not buy the premise that most Pilots were flying around just avoiding combat. And nobody here is bothered to source that notion. Some facts are that we had more pilots coming through training than we knew what to do with. We washed out thousands of fighter pilots. My father was a Hellcat pilot. I know what he went through in flight training. Only the most aggressive true believers made it out of fighter pilot flight schools. If you didn't show the proper aggression you ended up being a flying truck driver in a c-47 or a B-17. Most all of them were itching for a fight. Read the books written by fighter pilots. They hated missions where they couldn't find a fight. My uncle was a bombardier on a B-17 shut down December 1st 1943 And spent 18 months in prisoner-of-war camps. He said B-17 bombing missions were absolutely terrifying. The helpless feeling of making long flights in broad daylight with German Fighters trying to kill you and the German 88's on the ground trying to kill you and all you can do is keep flying in a straight line. And this was before the Mustangs. But he says almost without exception everybody did the professional job they were trained to do. I've read the daily reports of the 91st Bomb Group 322nd Squadron through 1943. I see no evidence of the kind of cowardice you are inferring. I didn't hear it from my uncle, I didn't hear it from my father, I didn't hear it from my father's best friend who flew b-29s. I didn't hear it the air crew guys that I've met or the Guadalcanal veteran that I met and others.(as a long hair anti-war Counter Culture type I somehow became friends with this Guadalcanal veteran.... And a Korean War Navy SEAL now that I think of it.)
And cowardice is what several you are inferring by these claims that only a small percentage of World War II soldiers in fighter squadrons and an infantry actually participated in the fight. You're inferring cowardice.
What I've read, and what I've heard from direct sources is that by the time you made it to combat the thing you are most worried about was letting down the other guys in your squad or your squadron.
The kind of thing you're talking about more describes the later years of Vietnam more than it does World War II, but that's a whole different story. But even in Vietnam the combat infantryman feared most doing something that got one of his friends killed.
If you're in a Fighter Squadron in World War II and you end up in a fight with the Enemy you don't have a choice but to fight.
Even in the real world best defense is an offense.
One time long ago this huge tough guy took a swing at me at a bar. I have extremely fast reflexes and he missed badly. As his arm went across me he was close enough that I got hold of his shirt at the chest as we went to the floor I held him as close to my body as I could so that he couldn't get his arms out and swing. People stepped in and broke it up.
But that does not describe combat.
This is not a glorification of War. There is no glory in war, ever. I hate the war, not the warrior.