Struggling to keep the air campaign over Europe alive in the face of disastrous bomber losses, the U.S. The problem was that while American pilots were generally well trained, they weren’t well trained for a complex twin-engine fighter. Although a fully loaded Lightning weighed more than 10 tons-nearly twice as much as a P-51 Mustang-a skilled pilot could fling the P-38 around like a lightweight. With tricycle gear, twin booms and a centerline fuselage pod brimming with guns, the P-38 was powered by two 1,600-hp Allison V-1710-111/113 liquid-cooled engines driving three-bladed, 9-foot Curtiss Electric propellers. “Jimmy” Doolittle would later call the P-38 “the sweetest-flying plane in the sky.” “If you played with Dinky metal toys and balsa wood airplane models, you wanted to fly it.” On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the P-38 captured the imagination of young Americans like no other fighter. “It looked like a beautiful monster.” “If you were a boy in America, you wanted to fly it,” said another future ace, Winton “Bones” Marshall. “We were in awe of the P-38,” said future ace Jack Ilfrey. So what happened in northern Europe, and how could things have gone so wrong?Ī survey of Stateside training bases in 1941 showed that 87 percent of prospective pilots requested to be assigned to the big, sleek, twin-engine Lockheed Lightning. It was, Olds hastened to add, “the most beautiful plane of our generation.” And it fought well in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Our enemies had difficulty defeating the P-38 but, as much as we gloried in it, we were defeating ourselves with this airplane.” “The fact is, the P-38 Lightning was too much airplane for a new kid and a full-time job for even a mature and experienced fighter pilot. “I loved the P-38 but I got those kills in spite of the airplane, not because of it,” Olds recalled. It was August 14, 1944, and Olds had just used his P-38 Lightning to rack up the first two of his eventual 13 World War II aerial victories. Olds shot down one of the Fw-190s moments later, then followed the second into a violent left break, fired and watched the pilot bail out. Until that instant, he hadn’t been certain the planes were German. 50-caliber machine guns.Ĭaptain Robin Olds kicked left rudder, slid his pipper across the nearest plane’s left wing and, in an instant of epiphany, saw the Iron Cross painted on the rear fuselage. He wanted them to be Focke-Wulf Fw-190s, falling nicely into the crosshairs of his nose-mounted 20mm cannon and four. The afternoon shadow of his P-38 Lightning raced across French hedgerows and fields as the pilot sought to identify the other two aircraft.
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He rechecked his armament switches, rammed his throttles to full power and went down low, as low as he dared, hugging the treetops. The American fighter pilot spotted two indistinct shapes cutting diagonally across a road just slightly above and in front of him. Celebrated as one of the Pacific War’s best fighters, Lockheed’s Lightning earned a less-than enviable reputation in European air combat.
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