Danny 42C:
My own stupid fault for trying to be a historian! No more!
Danny if you stop posing questions and interpretations then who else is likely to do so? The one really positive advance in Flight Safety in my time has been the introduction of Crew Resource Management (nee Cockpit Resource Management, nee Flight Deck Management) started in civil aviation as a response to pilot error accidents occasioned by the "God sits in the LHS" syndrome. It is now making uncertain but continuing moves into Military Aviation. What is it about? You could say it is about the boy who is the only one prepared to say what everyone else can see, ie that the Emperor has no clothes!
If you can see in retrospect seeming inconsistencies in the US interpretation of neutrality then I am sure that is right. Lease Lend was scarcely an established traditional neutral position. Actively defending convoys far out into the Western Atlantic was scarcely an established traditional neutral position. Offering training facilities for thousands of Allied Aircrew was scarcely an established traditional neutral position. Yet the USA did all this and more as a neutral power, at a time when there was great opposition from within from both pro-Axis and Isolationist pressure groups. It would be only natural for a certain amount of back-tracking and regional variations to occur given these pressure I would suspect. Like Chamberlain's Britain the USA needed time to gear up for the inevitable war that it would have to face. Appeasement gave us that precious time, neutrality before 7/12/1941 gave the USA the same thing. I would submit that on the whole both nations made good use of that time, which was well spent.
It's strange, but your tale so far invokes in me a relevance not so much to my own early RAF days but rather to those spent living in a Nissan hut as an RAF CCF Cadet at Thruxton (The Wiltshire School of Flying) on a Flying Scholarship. Like you I was taught to fly bi-planes (Tiger Moths and Jackaroos). Like you we put up with many impositions (rising at dawn as Duty Cadet to walk out to the well on the far side of the airfield to start the water pump for morning ablutions and breakfasts, sweltering in the summer sun in our serge BD's until the Chief Flying Instructor allowed us to revert to shirt sleeve order) just as long as we could learn to fly! I especially relate to your celebration of open cockpits, though it was only for the aerobatic, stalling and spinning dual instruction phases that we were allowed to swap the Jackaroo's cabin for the Tiger's cockpit. You remember well, for the grass did indeed show up as individual blades at round out. That is the sort of detail that Ernest K Gann would have observed!, Well, that and the sound of Cows pissing on tin roofs to describe a tropical downpour!
More please Danny, much more! Oh, and please keep pondering on the many contradictions. That is what makes your tale one of reality rather than fiction.