I think we are letting national pride intrude on the discussion of how mechanically adept the Americans were.
Not from me. I am, after all, American. I'm as patriotic as the next man. I just want to do so with clear-eyed comprehension, cognizant of the widest-possible breadth of facts rather than a nationalistic agenda that perpetuates myths based on false assumptions.
It is not a question of how good a small group of engineers or designers were.
Entirely agree. However, there persists this perception that countries other than America all had a "small group of engineers".
It is a question of how many troops (a percentage of total troops) had driven or worked on motor vehicles (or boats or industrial machinery).
What this means to an army (any army) is how much training is required to turn recruits into drivers or mechanics/fitters.
The army is going to put the troops selected for those jobs through some sort of training course and not just turn them loose.
How many hours or weeks should the course/s be given the average level of knowledge the troops bring from civilian life?
That's a nice idea but it doesn't work in reality. You can't guarantee that every entrant has the same basic level of experience, nor can you tailor courses to suit the needs of an individual class (one class might be packed with motor mechanics while the next is filled with clerks). There's also the risk that new recruits may have learned bad habits in their prior experience. Regardless of incoming skills, you have to start from square one and give every recruit the same training with an assumed zero level of starting knowledge. Certainly, that means some highly-skilled recruits will be bored out of their tiny minds but the training has to be of sufficient duration and tempo that a student with no prior knowledge can reasonably be expected to graduate. It's exactly the same today. I've run military training courses for many years and you have to assume zero knowledge to ensure they've all been training the "right way".
The American advantage was not that they were smarter or more mechanical adept 'naturally' but that they had much more experience driving/maintaining cars and machinery on average
per 1000 recruits. than other armies.
How good you were rebuilding a turret lathe in civilian life gives you some advantage in working on truck/tank but perhaps not as much as a guy who worked in a gas station and had seen any number of minor problems.
Ok...let's take a look at things from the other end of the telescope. The 1930s didn't happen in isolation: they built on existing structures from the preceding decades. The US was largely unaffected by the Great War while the European nations were impacted massively. Again, I'll focus on the UK because it's the nation I know best.
In 1918, the British Army operated enough vehicles powered by internal combustion engines to provide one vehicle per 350 of the British population (and that doesn't include the vehicles operated by the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force). The vast majority of those vehicles were trucks, ambulances and motorbikes which weren't scrapped at the end of the Great War; they were demobilized and put to civilian use. In personnel terms, the Army Service Corps had 314 Motor Transport Companies, each of around 400 personnel...and that was just the establishment, not including those in training, or those who had been demobbed but still capable of working.
The Royal Engineers had a personnel strength in 1918 of almost 300,000 men. Not all of them were technical but a great many were. There were Electrical and Mechanical Companies who maintained generators, pumps and plumbed electric lines in the trenches. There were Signals Companies attached to each Division (and the British Army had 70+ Divisions by the end of the War) to operate and maintain wireless, telegraph and other communication systems in the field. There were also Railway Companies, Light Railway Companies, Tramways Companies, and Transportation Works Companies (for maintaining vehicles...in addition to those belonging to the ASC which owned the MT Companies).
In 1918, the Royal Air Force was the largest air arm the world had ever seen, operating 22,000 aircraft--all powered by internal combustion engines--with a force of around 300,000 personnel, the vast majority of whom had a technical background. The RAF also made extensive use of motor vehicles which were critical to help the RAF keep pace with the rapid advances made in 1918 (my cousin served on 11 Sqn and moved airfields 4 times in 6 weeks towards the end of the war. These were not short trips and all personnel and equipment were moved in trucks. As the most technologically advanced service, the RAF had also adopted wireless for communicating within aircraft formations and from aircraft to ground forces for CAS coordination. All of this technology and innovation came was enabled because of the technical proficiency of the personnel.
On the Home Front, the entire national production switched over to making war materiel. Factories were repurposed and many jobs previously held by men were being taken by women who drove motorbikes, trucks, ambulances, and cars. They maintained and operated machinery, including precision work, gaining skills and proving their abilities so that the 1918 push for women's suffrage became an irresistible force. Britain had the largest rail network per capita in the world. If the US had cars, the UK had railways and, while rail is a mass transit system in which passengers are scarcely aware of the machine they're using, the industry itself employed literally hundreds of thousands of men who understood machinery and were mechanically-minded.
I've already mentioned the interwar fishing fleet and the many thousands of local fishermen who operated their own powered trawlers (again, internal combustion engines during this timeframe). None of the above has even touched the massive proportion of the British workforce engaged in maritime shipping. Yes, many were dockhands. But there were countless machinists, engineers and other technical staff, ontop of those employed in shipyards.
When the Great War ended, the UK Government's biggest focus was finding "jobs for heroes." It seems likely that well over 1.5 million former soldiers and airmen (not including Navy or Merchant Marine personnel) came home from war with technical skills, a great many related to internal combustion engines, electric power, wireless and telecommunications. That's 10% of the entire male workforce, not including the men who never wore uniform but also had the same or similar technical skills, nor does it include the hundreds of thousands of women who learned to drive and maintain machinery during WW1. Given the logistical demands of the Great War, it's not unreasonable to assume that at least another 1.5 million Home Front citizens developed similar technical skills directly as a result of the War.
These demobbed soldiers didn't just go back to pitchforking hay into the back of horse-drawn wagons. They went back to the cities (where most of them came from, anyhow) and into major growth industries related to automation and technology. Electricity and telephones were just being rolled out to the wealthy in 1913. After the war, there was an explosion in the use of these new technologies, with consequent increasing demand for generators (and staff to operate them), both as primary power sources and to provide back-ups. The demobbed trucks flooded the haulage market to the extent that use of horses went into rapid terminal decline in urban areas. The vast increase in road haulage also put the rail network under stress, and by the 1930s large sections were already being closed because they were no longer profitable.
These Great War veterans were the backbone of British industry in the 1930s....and yet you're telling me that, because they didn't own a car, they weren't as well-versed in things mechanical as their American counterparts?
Britain's servicemen in WW2 were the sons of these WW1 veterans and, like their fathers, the VAST majority came from industrialized, urban areas. They came from families where working with machinery was just second nature. It's what they grew up doing. My uncle served in the RAF as an engine fitter. As previously related, he didn't own a car until the 1950s...but he knew how to strip down an engine before he even joined up.
As stated earlier, the biggest flaw in the "American farmer-mechanic" myth is the assumption that other countries had similar demographics. The vast differences in the degree of urbanization between the US and the UK alone should make people question the assumption, before we consider the disparate proportions of the respective workforces relative to agriculture and manufacturing.
I am immensely proud of America's accomplishments during WW2. The spin-up was remarkable and turned our nation into the world's first Super Power. However, we do ourselves no favors if we denigrate other countries, particularly our Allies, by pushing cosy narratives that promote perceived superiority where none exists.
