Lockheed P-38 Lightning

The P-38 was Lockheed’s radical answer to a 1937 US Army specification for a high-altitude interceptor. The design team under Clarence “Kelly” Johnson broke with convention entirely, producing a twin-engine, twin-boom layout with a central nacelle for the pilot and guns. It first flew on 27 January 1939, and days later the prototype dashed across the United States in just over seven hours in a record attempt — only to be wrecked in the landing, a mishap that did nothing to dim the Army’s interest.

The twin-boom configuration solved several problems at once. It made room for two powerful turbo-supercharged Allison V-1710 engines, let the designers concentrate all the armament in the nose, and gave a combination of speed, altitude and firepower that no single-engine American fighter of the era could approach.

Two Allison V-1710 engines of up to about 1,600 hp each, with General Electric turbo-superchargers buried in the booms, gave the Lightning excellent high-altitude performance: a top speed around 666 km/h (414 mph) and a service ceiling near 13,400 m. The counter-rotating propellers cancelled engine torque, making it stable and easy to aim.

Its armament was concentrated in the nose: one 20 mm Hispano cannon and four 0.50 in (12.7 mm) Browning machine guns. Because the guns did not need to converge like wing-mounted batteries, they threw a dense, parallel stream of fire effective from close range out to nearly a kilometre.

Internal fuel gave a range of about 2,100 km; with two drop tanks the P-38L’s ferry range approached 4,180 km (2,600 mi), and combat radii beyond 1,000 km became routine — figures no other early-war American fighter approached. Early models suffered high-speed compressibility in dives and bitterly cold cockpits at altitude, problems progressively addressed with dive flaps, boosted ailerons and heating fixes.

The Lightning made its greatest mark in the Pacific, where its long range and the reassurance of a second engine over thousands of kilometres of open water made it the fighter of choice. From New Guinea to the Solomons and on to the Philippines, P-38 groups escorted the bombers, swept the Japanese airfields and fought the long-range battles the theatre demanded — often at the lower and middle altitudes where the type was at its best.

It was in the Pacific that the Lightning made the aces. America’s two top-scoring fighter pilots of the entire war both flew it exclusively: Major Richard Bong, with 40 victories, and Major Thomas McGuire, with 38 — the two locked in a running rivalry until McGuire was killed in January 1945 in a low-level dogfight while trying to better his rival’s score. No other American fighter carried its pilots to such heights.

The P-38’s most famous mission grew out of a codebreaking coup. In April 1943 American cryptanalysts reading Japanese naval signals learned the exact itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto — the architect of Pearl Harbor — for an inspection flight to the northern Solomons. Only the Lightning had the reach to intercept him, and on 18 April 1943 sixteen P-38s of the 339th Fighter Squadron set out from Guadalcanal after him.

The mission was a feat of navigation as much as of flying: more than 600 km flown at wave-top height in radio silence, by dead reckoning, timed to arrive at the precise minute Yamamoto’s two G4M “Betty” bombers appeared. In the brief, violent action that followed, the bomber carrying the admiral was shot down into the jungle of Bougainville, killing him. The credit was long disputed between the pilots Rex Barber and Tom Lanphier, but the effect was not: Japan had lost its most gifted naval commander, and the Lightning had flown one of the most audacious interceptions in the history of air warfare.

In North Africa and Italy from late 1942, the 1st, 14th and 82nd Fighter Groups flew the Lightning as escort and hunter over the Mediterranean; German pilots reputedly nicknamed it “der Gabelschwanz-Teufel” — the fork-tailed devil.

Over North-West Europe its record was harder: in the brutal cold above 9,000 m the Allisons proved failure-prone on the fuels then available, and compressibility limited diving pursuit, so by the summer of 1944 the 8th Air Force exchanged its Lightnings for the P-51 Mustang. In the Mediterranean and the Pacific, where it fought at lower altitudes, the P-38 remained a first-line fighter to the end.

Beyond the fighter role the P-38 excelled at photo-reconnaissance: the unarmed F-4 and F-5 variants shot a large share of all American aerial photography over Europe. The writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared flying an F-5B off southern France on 31 July 1944. “Droop-snoot” conversions with a glazed bombardier nose even led formations of bomb-laden Lightnings in level attacks.

Total production reached 10,037 aircraft — and the P-38 was the only US fighter kept in continuous production from before Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender, a span matched by no other American fighter of the war.

Fast, heavily armed and uniquely long-legged, the Lightning was one of the most versatile and recognisable aircraft of the war — a fighter, a photo-reconnaissance platform, a level bomber and an assassin of admirals, and the mount of the men who became America’s greatest aces.

Where the single-engine fighters of 1939 had been built for the last war’s dogfights, the P-38 anticipated the next one: range, altitude, firepower, and two engines to carry the pilot home across an ocean. Those four priorities — and not manoeuvrability — defined what the United States asked of a fighter for the rest of the war.

• Warren M. Bodie, The Lockheed P-38 Lightning (Widewing, 1991) — the definitive reference.
• Martin Caidin, Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38 (1971).
• John Stanaway, P-38 Lightning Aces of the Pacific and CBI (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• Jeffrey L. Ethell, P-38 Lightning (Warbird History).