I've given some thought to your comments regarding the relationship between instructors and pupils. This is purely supposition on my part, but I think the differences you mentioned come down to a very simple conclusion.
My father was trained in the UK, during bombing raids, albeit at night, by instructors who had already been in combat and knew why and what they were fighting for. I have no knowledge of the Arnold scheme, but it seems that you had US civilian instructors, America not being at war at that time, and thus they had no knowledge of what they were training their pupils for. The shared dangers of RAF instructors/pupils probably lead to a mutual feeling of "being in this together" and if they could train their charges to their own level of experience, then that was a huge bonus.
The RAF had a system where combat-proven pilots were given a rest period, time off ops, to instruct tyros, that would permeate down. The Luftwaffe did no thave this luxury. It's been noted before that if an RAF pilot who had scored combat victoires, say 3 or 4, then taught 5 other trainees to shoot down say 2 or 3, that was a far better return than keeping the war-weary pilots on operations, where they could not pass on their knowledge and experience to the next batch of first-tourists.
Just a thought, and I'd be interested to learn of the ratios of your colleagues who went to Fighter Command or, like you, went to Bomber Command.
More from the Old Man later, first I've got to run around and referee a few chaps in shorts with odd shaped balls tomorrow!
