The entire concept of ACM we have is solely dependant on what the game condition brings. Like many have mentioned, in real life flapping the flaps up-down-up-down-up-down, jerking the throttle front-back-front-back-front back, pulling a 5G turn, blackout, lose vision, regain vis., pull another 5G another direction, black out, lose vision again, regain vision again, push -3G, redout, lose vision.. and etc etc.. is frankly all bollocks.
Every maneuver, every tactical decision is geared towards making it possible for the clandestine Elmer Fudd to help catch the two wascalwy wabbits named "survivability" and "mission objectives", and this required strict discipline and teamwork - and this is done solely by sticking to the principles which the pilots rigorously trained upon, and promptly chastisized when ignored.
Get target fixated on one enemy plane for more than a minute, and then you look around the sky. Your wingman cries for help, saying he's got a 109 behind him. Among all those 109s and Spitfires buzzing around over the cliffs of Dover, which one is your wingman? It was your duty to help him - but unfortunately, they don't have the neon signs hanging around to tell you which one is which. By the time you actually locate your friend, he might already be going down in smoke.
Real life ACM is committed to survival as a group. To know which plane is of your group you gotta constantly keep track of your own flight in the air. The point is to stick to the plan - you don't do that throttle zero, flaps dwon, gears sticking out into a 90mph rolling scissors crap in real life.
In real life all the ACM needed is just the basic scissors, and following a preset course in a classic defensive Luftberry, as practiced and promised by all pilots in your flight. The attacker has only a limited time until the target's wingman comes to the rescue, which in that case he'll have to bugger out and go into his own Luftberry, hoping his own wingman will come in time. It's a battle of awareness and teamwork, and its not the guys who got the most flashy maneuvering skills that wins, but the guys who have more tighter teamwork that wins.
So if you're saying how real life WW2 pilots would fare when they play AH2, they'll probably suck for real. None of them is going to be able to all that flapping, throttling, stick mashing, bag of tricks we do on an everyday basis, because in our AH2 world, we are governed by our own law of ACM. The rules are different, and thus the game is different. Even if a real WW2 pilot in his prime, can magically come play AH2 for several months I doubt he'd ever do any better than the average players.
On the other hand, if we change the rules of AH2 to that of real life (perhaps, excluding the death factor), remove every single bit of crutch we have and play it at their game, not ours, I can guarantee we gonna be owned.
In a loose sense, we leave all the awareness levels to the machine which automatically keeps track of your friends and enemies on screen, in the form of dot dar and icons... and we still get people who are target-fixated and gets shot down everytime, with their K/D going below 1.0. The real life pilots had only their eyes and hands to do everything the machine does for us currently, and not a single "death" was acceptable on their score card - and they had to do that almost every day.
Under those rules, even if it is a game, not a whole lot of people would be willing to do that "ACM" thingy.
Therefore, the comparison is itself meaningless. The only thing we've got in common with real life is that we use a roughly simulated version of their planes. Everything else is different. Even if we send the best of our AH pilot to real life, he'll soon be flying like real life, because it is real life.
