P38 Lightning
US long-range fighter and fighter-bomber

Lockheed P38 Lightning
Type: US long-range fighter, fighter-bomber, photographic reconaissance aircraft, night fighter.
History: The P38 Lightning shot down more Japanese aircraft than any other fighter plane. In April 1943 a P38 Lightning shot down the aircraft carrying Admiral Yamamoto, the man who had planned the Pearl Harbour attack. The Germans called the P38 Lightning 'Gabelschwanz-Teufel' ('The Devil with the Cleft Tail').
The two leading American WW2 aces, Major Richard I. Bong and Major Thomas B. McGuire, made their last kills in the P38. Bong shot down all his adversaries in a P38 and had a total of 40 kills, while McGuire's total was 38.

In February 1937 the US Army Air Corps issued a specification for a long-range interceptor (pursuit) and escort fighter, calling for a speed of 360 mph at 20,000 ft and endurance at this speed of one hour. Lockheed, which had never built a purely military design, jumped in with both feet and created a revolutionary fighter bristling with innovations and posing considerable technical risks.
Powered by two untried Allison engines, with GEC turbochargers recessed into the tops of the tail booms, it had a tricycle landing gear, small central nacelle mounting a 23mm Madsen cannon and four 0.5in Brownings firing parallel directly ahead of the pilot, twin fins, Fowler flaps, cooling radiators on the flanks of the booms and induction intercoolers in the wing leading edges.
This box of tricks ran into a ditch on its first taxi test and two weeks after first flight undershot at Mitchell Field, NY, and was demolished.
What made headlines, however, was that it had flown to New York in 7hr 2min, with two refuelling stops, demonstrating a performance which in 1939 seemed beyond belief.
In view of the efforts that the Germans made to put a heavy twin-engined fighter like the Messerschmitt Bf 110 into the field, the team which drew up the specification for the P-38 was subsequently able to congratulate itself on its part in producing one of the best fighters of WW2.

The first sub-type to have inner-wing pylons was the P-38 F Lightning.

At the end the enthusiasm of the Air Corps overcame the doubts and high cost and by 1941 the first YP-38 was being tested, with a 37mm Oldsmobile cannon, two 0.5s and two Colt 0.3s machine-guns. Thirteen YPs were followed on the Burbank line by 20 P-38s, with one 37mm and four 0.5, plus armour and, in the 36 D models, self-sealing tanks.
In March 1940 the British Purchasing Commission had ordered 143 of this type, with the 37mm replaced by a 20mm Hispano cannon and far greater ammunition capacity. The State Department prohibited export of the F2 Allison engine and RAF aircraft, called Lightning I, had early C15 engines without turbochargers, both having right-hand rotation (P-38s had propellers turning outward). The result was poor, and the RAF rejected these machines, which were later brought up to US standard.
The E model adopted the British name Lightning and the RAF Hispano gun.

Within minutes of the US declaration of war, on 7 December 1941, an E shot down an German Fw 200C near Iceland, and the P-38 was sub­sequently in the thick of fighting in North Africa, North West Europe and the Pacific.
The F was the first to have inner-wing pylons for 1,000 lb bombs, torpedoes, tanks or other stores.
By late 1943 new G models were being flown to Europe across the North Atlantic, while in the Pacific 16 aircraft of the 339th Fighter Squadron destroyed Admiral Yamamoto's aircraft 550 miles from their base at Guadalcanal.
The J had the intercoolers moved under the engines, changing the appearance, providing room for 55 extra gallons of fuel in the outer wings. Later J models had hydraulically boosted ailerons, but retained the wheel-type lateral control instead of a stick.
The L, with higher war emergency power, could carry 4,000 lb of bombs or ten rockets, and often formations would bomb under the direction of a lead­ship converted to droop-snoot configuration with a bombardier in the nose.
Hundreds were built as F-4 or F-5 photographic reconaissance aircraft, and the M was a two-seat night fighter with ASH radar pod under the nose.
Lightnings towed gliders, operated on skis, acted as fast ambulances (carrying two stretcher cases) and were used for many special ECM missions.

Total production was 9,942 and the P-38 made up for slightly inferior manoeuvrability by its range, reliability and multi-role effectiveness.

The deep engines of the much more numerous later models are seen in this unarmed photo reconaissance F-5E aircraft.

3d model P-38 J Lightning