The article takes a specific instance and implies that given allied innate allied moral and material superiority and persistence: 'you get victory' or 'something will turn up' as a general rule you have 'learned'.

Two errors there:

To mis-quote a French TV pundit/diplomat discussing his nation's collapse in 1940 relative to the position in 1918 "When you win a war you believe your nation is strong and clever and right. A dangerous state of mind…"

Then : Post hoc et procter hoc – i really hope i got that right, . A sequence of events is not the causation of the same – something like?

Put those together as they appear in your article:

B17, P51, air supremacy, victory- a sequence

Military deserving: a pleasant belief of victors an unpleasant belief of losers.

You seem to combine the sequence as a cause and the unfounded belief to conclude that earned destiny caused victory for the 'special' nation .. not even internally valid, and not, i believe, true.

Conclusion. If all that were true and valid and relevant your article risks planting the wrong lessons from history and inadequate standards of argument in a young mind.

But a loose opinionated rejoinder argument of this kind can't secure you any of those pre-conditions any more than serendipity can 'cause' a victory or a Churchillian speech can make a P51 appear by magic.

History is not bunk, but it is difficult. Academic standards rool.

Was this article "an exercise for the student"? Sorry if I shot your fox.
.
Best to you and K and the class.

Oh, an Zaver, man, I have serious doubts that, given a second chance, the US would have tried daylight bombing again. Yes they got through, but the Marines were statistically safer in 1943 than the Air Corps.
If Galland had gotten his way in 1944, the Luftwaffe may have combined their strength to launch hammer blows on US fleets with the sole purpose of killing off crews to the point the U.S. would abandon the bombing. However, they wasted that strength on Bodenplatte, and the rest is history. Between that and Hitler's refusal to push the jet force through ealier, is probably why strategic bombing managed to stave off defeat. Also the inability to replace the 109 with something that could perform at that altititude. Okay, they had a lot going against them…

Perhaps you would be so kind as to point me to a B-17 raid that did not get through. As far as I know the only major raid that risked complete destruction was the first raid on Polesti and even that raid got through. In that strictest sense the bomber always did get through. So to say the B-17 failed spectacularly is about as far from the mark as the average bomb dropped from a B-17 was from the aim point.

Though the B-17 was far from a perfect bomber it did have a lot going for it. Massive defensive armament and the box formation made the Luftwaffe pay at least until the roller coaster tactics were developed. Even accounting for the massive claims by the gunners, VIII AF bombers took a heavy toll on the defending fighters.

Making things even more difficult for the defenders was the bombers low wing single main spar design that gave the craft its incredible strength. Though this strength admittedly reduced both the bomb load and individual bomb size. The bomber was also able to fly above much of the German flak, leaving the lower flying and less robust B-24's to wade through the worst of it.

In the Pacific the few B-17's were a nightmare for the defending Japanese whose lighter and slower fighters packed less punch and did whose pilots did not use organized tactics. Few Japanese fighters other than the Tony had much hope of facing a B-17 and winning- against the Rising Sun the B-17 really was a flying fortress.

Nor did the Mustang magically appear as a long range escort fighter with the marriage of the airframe to the Merlin. The early Mustangs with the Merlin the B and [early] C models only had 189 gallons of internal fuel giving it a combat radius of less than 400 miles. Even with drop tanks the the radius was only 700 miles- not enough to get to Berlin.

It was the drop tank and the redesign and addition of the larger fuselage fuel tank that gave the plane the range to escort the bombers. Internal fuel was increased to 260 gallons and the combat radius jumped to over 500 miles on internal fuel and over 900 with drop drop tanks.

Also contributing to the Mustang's performance advantage over the Luftwaffe was the superb training given to pilots in direct contrast to the shrinking amounts of training their enemies were getting. Combine these things with other factors like fuel injection, high dive speeds and high octane fuel with the Mustangs admittedly excellent design and you get a much better picture of why the Mustang reigned in the Germans.