Martin Caidin, in his book Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38, tells of brand-new surplus P-38s being sold for $1,250 in Kingman, AZ, January 1946.
They were giving them away! Cheaper than paying maintenance on them and better than letting them rot in a boneyard.
As a kid I loved the look of the P-38, still do. The pilots that flew them loved them. It was a flight of long ranging P-38’s that took out Yamamoto.
Eighth Air Force commander Lt. Gen. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle would later call the P-38 “the sweetest-flying plane in the sky.”
But the Lightning had problems with the Allison engines and were “too much plane for the average pilot” according to 20th Fighter Group commander Colonel Harold J. Rau.
The P-38 Lightning
https://www.historynet.com/p-38-flunked-europe.htm