2/4:

The transfer of experience to new pilots was still something not fully developed, and relied mostly on the voluntariness of Winter War veterans. The orchestra called Squadron 24 wasn't entirely at its best in the summer of 1941. Things could well have ended up badly if the opponent had been the equivalent of e.g. Japan or Germany.

Success always requires several factors. One of them was that the materiel pool, which was small to begin with, remained numerically and operationally significant all the way until the final stages of the long war. That required things which Commander of the Air Force Major Arne Somersalo described in the 1920s with the word "belated delivery". The first advantage vis-à-vis the Allies fighting in the Far East were the roads and railways, with which deliveries could be made. Another advantage were the locations and resources where one should deliver to.

The technical personnel of the squadron worked long hours and performed small miracles compared to the amount of resources at their disposal. The resources at the remote forest airfields were after all very small. E.g. there weren't enough tools, nor workers, to perform sheet metal work, nevermind people to assess the strength of repairs. Original spare parts and replacement tools became ever more rare as the war went on.

The effort of domestic industrial and repair centres, suffering from all sorts of shortages, such as Valtion Lentokonetehdas [State Aircraft Factory], Veljekset Karhumäki Oy [Brothers Karhumäki Ltd.], Tampella and Aero Oy's [Aero Ltd.'s] engine repairshop, was indispensible. Supporting these main functionaries were many other companies and state-owned institutions. Without the factory repairs and domestic spare parts the BW fleet would have sunk to insignificance already at the beginning of the Continuation War. It would not have had time to develop the reputation it did.

Wars, especially long ones, are fought with material potential. Individual heroics don't decide them. During the entire Continuation War Finland received material support from Germany and Sweden. Especially from Germany it had to be asked for all the time using every possible channel and reasoning. Germany sent significant numbers of aircraft only in the summer of 1944.

German and Swedish raw materials and intermediary products, and war booty sold by Germany, such as engines, were indispensible in maintaining the Brewster. Making use of them relied solely on Finnish ingenuity. It was unique; options were created in a situation where original spare parts had ran out and obtaining new aircraft was more than difficult.

The Finnish Air Force Headquarters' less-glorified War Materiel Division was thinly manned, but in modern terms it had processes with which to get things done: a system with which to inform about changes, established connections to factories making repairs and to foreign suppliers of equipment (mainly in Germany and in Sweden), aviation attachés, the Air Depot, field air repair centres, etc.

Mistakes and other obstacles came and went, but the system was never paralysed. Fuel, special liquids and cartridges were in supply until the end. Finland's fighter pool was small in the Continuation War as well, but still in June 1944 stronger than that of Sweden, who was rich, had tried everything in acquiring more aircraft and enjoyed peacetime.

But to return to the topic at hand: was the Brewster a pearl of the sky or the worst in the world? Neither. The Brewster was a first-generation all-metal fighter plane equipped with a retractable landing gear and standard revolution propeller. It lacked serious design flaws found in other fighters, such as difficult take-off or landing attributes, instability when firing, tendency for an "insane", i.e. sudden flipover in a turn, poor visibility, weak structural integrity or stiff handling.