WWII awesome story!...................
AVIATION HISTORY PING!....................
The P-38 was an awesome twin engine airplane . My good friends father was a mechanic in the pacific Islands and worked on those planes. I wish he was still alive to ask him about this. I’m sure he new Sergeant James McKenna.
It’s proof that engineers don’t know everything. Mechanics with dirty hands who actually work on machines see things that the engineers miss.
What a wonderful story. Great find.
Lindbergh also contributed by showing how to run higher boost at lower RPMs could add literally hundreds of miles to missions for free.
Democrats could learn a lesson about group think.
American Exceptionalism!
“I don’t care what the book says, they are idiots because this is just too loose!”.
My good friend, top aviation author Jeff Ethyll’s father flew a P-38 all through WW-II, and Jeff was an expert on the plane. It and not the P-51 were his and my fav plane.
But in 1996 Jeff died flying one in Portland, OR preparing for an air show the next day.
A strong Christian and ordained minister, we all miss him.
I have most of his books - all autographed by him.
I happen to be currently reading Martin Caidin’s P-38 book.
The early P-38 versions had problems in the ETO. The Allison engine (also used in the P-39 and P-40) was a good engine at low altitudes but were terrible above 30,000 feet where most of the fighter combat took place in the ETO. The Allison engines blew up in the colder temps. The cockpit was also freezing cold. At high altitudes, the P-38 could not dive away from an ME-109 or FW-190 due to compressibility. The German fighters would Split S to escape a P-38 as the German pilots knew that the P-38 could not chase them in a high altitude dive.
When General Doolittle took command of the Eighth Air Force in early 1944, he banished the P-38 (except for the reconnaissance version) from the Eighth Air Force. The P-38 squadrons were converted to P-51s. The P-38 was still used in the 9th and 15th air forces.
The P-38 performed well in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific as the combat was a lower altitudes where the air temperature was warmer and compressibility was not an issue in high speed dives from lower altitude.
The P-38J was introduced in the spring of 1944. Many of the problems of the earlier P-38 versions were fixed starting with the P-38J. Of the 10,000 P-38 built total for all versions, 2,970 were P-38J’s and 3,810 were P-38L’s.
The dive flap modification was also added in late 1943. This modification kit was sent out in late 1943 to upgrade all of the existing P-38’s. In a high-speed dive, this flap was used to push the nose up enough so that the pilot could pull out of the dive. A lot of pilots were killed in high-speed dives before this flap was installed.
I have been reading about WW2 airplanes since I was a kid. My Dad was a private pilot and we went to many airshows and aviation museums. My Dad’s best friend was a B-24 pilot in the south Pacific. The airport in Northern California were my Dad’s friend kept his small plane also had a Stearman, PV-2 Harpoon, Republic Seabee, and and AT-6.
Here is the problem I have with all these brand new WWII vids that are out there.
They’re brand new.
They’re AI generated.
Are they based in reality?
Give me an original source for this information.
One of the top comments is “There’s no historical record of any of this.”
As Abraham Lincoln said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!”
Now with AI-generated video content, you can’t believe what you watch.
FR has been a means to get around Fake News since its inception. We need to bring back those ways of thinking, big time. Because there is a lot of new Fake News being thrown around out there.
Laz, you’ve been doing a bit of an AI deep dive, any comments?
Great story !!!
I loved this story - the silent heros
This is why capitalism beats central planning. This happened throughout the war as the tip of the spear was where the best ideas happened while communists were waiting for approval up the chain.
Might be a kernel of truth to the story, but in the history of the ETO, there was never a P-38 that could outmaneuver a Zero or Oscar… didn’t happen. The 38s ran up big scores with energy tactics, not maneuvering fights.
The internet is suddenly filled with these “one weird trick” and “Japanese we’re terrified of the 1911 pistol and here’s why” stories of WWII. They are morality fables about how one lowly soldier suddenly won the war and left the engineers in slack jawed amazement.
These fables were everywhere in the USSR.
“A three-eighths inch delay between stick movement and aircraft response. That tiny delay was killing pilots.”
Sounds bogus. Don’t know about WW2 aircraft, but I had no problem moving the stick of an F4 a lot more than 3/8” in no time at all...
This story is not even remotely plausible let alone an accurate narrative of real events.
SORTA LIKE THROTTLE LAG
Recently there has been a plague of these AI generated, AI narrated WW2 videos. They all feature wildly exaggerated stories, preposterous claims, and almost never provide a verifiable source. They are essentially made up. They are overly long, endlessly repetitive - 45 minutes to tell a 5 minute story to get the guppies to watch more ads.
They are dishonest in another way: they appear under a large number of channel names, so if you block the channel, a new channel (by the same creator) will still clog up your recommended list, in essence a low risk but annoying virus. This last is enough reason to never go to a site like this.
You should have read some of the viewer comments on this one - a mix of uproarious derision and outrage - before polluting this site. You have done FReepers a big disservice.
Admins should remove this post.
LOL! No P-38 ever came close to outmaneuvering a zero. They were faster - especially in a dive. They could be very effective using boom and zoom tactics of diving on their targets from high altitude, shooting them up and using their superior speed to zoom away before the Zero could do anything about it. Then they’d climb and do it again....and again....and again....etc.
But hang around and try to fight a maneuver battle with a zero? No. That was a recipe for certain death.