Huh. There were _800k_ aircraft built during the war. Hadn't realised it was anything close to that. That's easily over a million pilots - how on earth did they train them all?
Seems like an overstatement to say “an entire cemetery”. Per the Wikipedia page, the cemetery is 120 acres with 200,000 grave sites, but only 78 of the graves are RAF students (which still is a terrible amount of people to lose in training, of all things).
I think it's fair enough if it was enough they thought to make that a specific section. You probably wouldn't be commenting about it if it so happened that the entire site was .1 acre and only the student pilots.
A few days of classroom instruction, 40-100 flight hours of practical training (Less in the Axis, due to oil shortages, less in the USSR at the start of the war, due to the all-hands-on-deck state of emergency), and then it's off to war with you.
Axis pilots would fly until they were killed, seriously injured, or captured. Anglosphere bomber pilots would fly ~30 combat missions, and if they survived, would be rotated out to work as instructors.
The average combat survival rate for bomber pilots was ~10 missions, but due to the infrequency of flights, most Anglo bomber crews survived the war, without ever hitting their rotation limit. Meanwhile, in the Pacific theater, the more missions bomber crews flew, the bigger the rotation limits grew (Because survival rates improved, the generals in charge figured that it would be reasonable to ask crews to fly more missions.) The air crews were, understandably, not very pleased about this.
Fighter pilots had much higher quotas, before they could rotate out.
Just in case you or other readers don't already know. The phrase Catch-22 is from the book "Catch-22". The plot of "Catch-22" is about a bomber pilot who is caught in that situation, "generals in charge ... ask crews to fly more missions".
"Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."
There was an analog flight stimulator used by over 500k pilots which helped, but this was war they accepted extremely high casualty rates and not just from enemy action.
As late as the 1960s, the career death rate for US fighter pilots was about one in five, without any help from an enemy. There's a book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut", from someone who made it through astronaut training but then realized they didn't want to take the risk of pilot training in a T-38.
The T-38 jet trainer, first flight in 1959, still in use: 1,189 built, 210 crashes and ejections.
I recently read Masters of the Air, and it said that over 10,000 Americans from the 8th Air Force died over English soil, most from accidents during takeoff and assembling forces.
Not all the aircraft built were used by the US: a sizable minority (18% according to one contemporary source [0]) were transferred (by sale or lend-lease) to other allies.
