Reply #26: More info

[yardwork]

I emailed this link to a friend who knows a lot about WWII planes, and he responded:

I can't post in the DU forum but there is a lot of wrong information posted there. The Germans never called it the "Fork-Tailed Devil". That was propaganda dreamed up by a post-war aviation writer named Martin Caidin. He was quite fanciful with his prose. To the Germans it was simply a "P-38". It was a big and heavy twin-engine fighter that was plagued with a problem called "carburator icing", which caused the airplane to lose power when flying at high altitudes over Europe. It was later attributed to the low octane found in British aviation gasoline. For that reason (and others), P-38s were mostly deployed to the Mediterranean (Italy, North Africa) and the Pacific. Here, they excelled because of their excellent range, better quality US gasoline, and lower combat altitudes. Charles Lindbergh was retained by Lockheed to show pilots how to obtain the best possible gas mileage, thereby stretching out their combat radius even further. Lindbergh, although a civilian, participated in several combat missions and is rumored to have had at least one kill. These tactics were used when P-38s intercepted a flight of Japanese bombers in 1943 in which Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was shot down and killed.

The top US Army Air Force aces flew the P-38 in the Pacific. Richard Bong had 40 kills, and Thomas McGuire had 38. In Europe, the top US ace was Francis Gabreski, with 28 kills, but he flew the P-47 Thunderbolt. Of course, this pales in comparison with the top German ace (Erich Hartmann, 352 victories), but being in the Luftwaffe was different: you flew until you were either dead or the war ended. US pilots enjoyed being rotated back to the States when their tour of duty was up.

A campaign to fly P-38s from the US to England in 1942 was undertaken, instead of the usual method of shipping them via container vessel. One flight got lost and had to land on the ice in Greenland. All the pilots were rescued, but the six P-38s and a single B-17 were abandoned. Fifty years later, the airplanes were found, buried under 250 feet of ice. One was recovered and restored to flying status. In honor of its heritage, it has been named "Glacier Girl".

The P-38 found in Wales is most likely an oxidized hulk now. Note that the Army removed the guns and any ammunition right after the crash, but left the airplane as unrecoverable. There is no depleted uranium on board -- that didn't exist in 1942. Salt water is not kind to aluminum, so they be able to pull it up from the sand, but it will have to be essentially rebuilt from the ground up if it is to ever be displayed in a museum or fly again. All it takes is a lot of money, ala Glacier Girl.