Thomas1195
Banned
You can read Corelli Barnett. He asserted that poor labour productivity, obsolete and incapable industrial base made Britain heavily reliant on Lend-Lease. Another factor was British education.Actually that an interesting point, using the american mass production system you set up a number of specific tools to make one item. the resulting production line then makes that item very well - the drawback is the time it takes to set up production lines.
Churchill as usual had the best quote about mass production, nothing the first year, a trickle the second and all you want in the third, You can produce very large numbers of items but only if you make the minimum number of changes. To cope with updates in aircraft the United states kept building the aircraft to the original specification gaining production efficiency then sent the finished aircraft to a second factory to be altered to the up to date specification.
in contrast the UK were able to continually alter in production models for aircraft by altering the production line this cost them efficiency in aircraft production but they were able to get improvements into the front line at the maximum speed. the introduction of the MkV and MkiX spitfires being the obvious examples -basically the original spitfire air frame with the minimum of changes required to accept different engines.
I would have said the Americans were more "wasteful" in the the use of machine tools in this process however I see that Germany and the United States had similar number of machine tools in use during WW2 however they (the Americans) seemed to manage to produce more of everything ...