P-38 Lightning, U.S. Fighter

National Museum of the USAF

Lockheed P-38E Lightning

Specifications:

The P-38 Lightning was one of the war-winning fighters in the southwest Pacific, where its long range, high speed, and excellent high-altitude performance made it immensely valuable. It was the only really successful twin-engine daytime fighter of the war. Unfortunately, it was just coming into production when war broke out, with only a single squadron assigned to the West Coast. Almost all the early production was sent to Europe and the Mediterranean, where it proved less successful. It was not until 1943 that the Lightning appeared in any numbers in the Pacific.

The design went back to a February 1937 specification issued by the U.S. Army Air Corps for a long-range interceptor and escort fighter. Lockheed responded with its first attempt at a purely military design, in which the company took a great many technical risks in order to produce the most innovative design possible. The prototype was completed in January 1939 but was written off in just two weeks, during which it ran into a ditch on its first taxi and lost its flaps on its maiden flight. However, by then it had demonstrated its impressive range and speed, and development continued, with the first production model flying in June 1941. The P-38D, with self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection, followed within a month.

The first Lightnings to see service in the Pacific were unarmed F-4 photoreconnaissance aircraft that tracked Japanese troop movements in the South Pacific. The first Lightnings to see combat were P-38Es rushed to Alaska in mid-1942, but the first model delivered in quantity was the P-38F.

The P-38 had an exceptionally heavy armament, including a 20mm Hispano cannon. Because of the placement of the guns in the nose of the aircraft, they could be aimed directly forward rather than converging from the wings at the likely attack distance. This aided marksmanship, as did the unusual stability arising from the counter rotating propellers, which neutralized each other's torque. Though its low-speed maneuverability was hardly anything to write home about, its high-speed maneuverability was actually greater than that of a Zero at altitude. Its brute power allowed it to carry large drop tanks for excellent range, and it was later turned into an effective fighter-bomber, capable of carrying up to two tons of ordnance.

On the other hand, two engines meant twice as much maintenance and twice the likelihood of combat damage starting a fire, which invariably meant the loss of the aircraft. If one of the engines cut off during takeoff and landing, the resulting unbalanced torque was often too much for the average fighter pilot to handle.

Famed Zero ace Saburo Sakai said of the Lightning:

On my first confrontation with the P-38, I was astonished to find an American aircraft that could outrun, outclimb, and outdive our Zero which we thought was the most superior fighter plane in the world. The Lightning's great speed, its sensational high altitude performance, and especially its ability to dive and climb much faster than the Zero presented insuperable problems for our fliers. The P-38 pilots, flying at great height, chose when and where they wanted to fight with disastrous results for our own men. The P-38 boded ill for the future and destroyed the morale of the Zero fighter pilot.

General Kenney was immensely fond of the P-38. As quoted by Bergerud:

I wanted the P-38 in the Pacific because of the long distances, but not only long distances. You look down from the cockpit and you can see schools of sharks swimming around. They never look healthy to a man flying over them. Say we were going into a combat and you go in with a P-51, a 100-percent warplane: Give it a status of 100 for combat. The pilot starts out with a rating of 100. But by the time he gets four or five hundred miles out over the ocean his morale has been going down steadily by looking at that water down there, and my guess was that he would arrive at combat about a 50-percent-efficient pilot. So the total score of pilot and plane is 150. Now the P-38 is not a bad combat airplane -- I'd give it a rating of 75 as compared to the P-51, easily -- maybe more than that -- but give it 75. But the pilot arrives there 100 percent -- he's just as good as when he took off because he knows one of those big fans can bring him home. He's got two engines. So his score - his fighting score is 175 against the other's 150. And you could hang gasoline on them.

References

Bergerud (2000)

Gunston (1986)

P-38 Lightning Online (accessed 2007-11-17)

Wilson (1998)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2007-2009 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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