The entirety of Arcade Mode is an alternate universe DieselPunk version of WWII being fought with mercenaries.
Planes fight for the "wrong" side, and you're expected to pay for your own planes, as well as any ammunition outside of bombs or standard belts.- The Two Towns map would seem to support this. Two villages decide to go to war, but they wouldn't have a standing army. What do you do? Hire mercenaries!
- Further supported by the fact that many planes appear which were either never widely used or never used at all, such as the He-112 (which saw limited service in the Spanish Civil War but was out of service by WWII).
- This troper would like to point out that at least in the Russian locale of the game all of the "upgrades" for planes have descriptions that suggest repairing the old and worn out parts of your aircraft, and the upgrade for machineguns' reliability is literally called "New Guns" and is described as swapping your old and jam-prone guns for factory new ones. This means that we are either mercenaries using second-, third- or Nth-hand equipment, or...
The entirety of War Thunder is about military reenactors with way too much time and money on their hands.
- As pointed out above, this makes sense if you consider that all of the "upgrades" applied to planes are actually more like repairs, and instead of making a plane better than it should be stock, you are merely bringing it up to factory spec.
