Waiting for the Lightning

© 2023 Steve Feinstein. All rights reserved.

In the early days of World War II in the Pacific Theater, the situation was dire for the Allied forces. The Japanese had conquered the Philippines and handed the United States Army its worst land defeat ever, culminating in the brutal Bataan Death March, when thousands of American prisoners were forced to march over sixty miles from their point of capture to Japanese prison camps on the other side of the island. Thousands of prisoners died, under the most inhumane conditions imaginable and most of the ones who survived carried debilitating emotional and physical scars for the rest of their lives. This was the battle in which the commanding American General, Douglas MacArthur, was forced off the island by the approaching Japanese forces and he uttered his now-famous line, “I shall return.”

The Japanese were on the move in the late 1941 to early1942 timeframe. They had several overwhelming successes in the Pacific region and it seemed as if there was nothing the Allies could do to blunt their advances. Their aircraft, particularly their fighter aircraft, like the Navy’s Mitsubishi A6M Zero and the Army’s Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar, established reputations for near-invincibility. With their incredible agility, fast acceleration and amazing climbing ability, these Japanese fighter planes were extremely deadly adversaries and their superiority over most Allied fighters of the time was a major factor in Japan’s early triumphs.

Emboldened by their unbroken string of successes, Japan moved against the American territory of Midway Island in May of 1942. Midway was situated about 1100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian Islands. Midway’s location made it a vital stopping point for cross-Pacific journeys and its capture would give the Japanese a vital spot from which it could launch additional strikes against Pearl Harbor and allow the Japanese to menace all the major air and shipping lanes in that theater.

Despite their outstanding success at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, where they sank or disabled eight American battleships in less than two hours, the American aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor that day. The Japanese knew that if they were to have any long-term success in the Pacific, they’d have to engage the American carriers in battle and destroy them. So, the Japanese devised a complex plan to attack Midway Island, hoping to draw the American carrier forces into battle.

The Japanese attack started with an air assault against Midway’s defenses. Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers and Nakajima B5N “Kate” torpedo bombers, escorted by squadrons of Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters, attacked American installations on the island and the Americans responded by sending up Brewster F2B Buffalos and a few Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters to intercept. The carrier-borne Zeros, escorting the bombers, blasted through the outdated Buffalo fighters with sickening ease. It was a pitiful mismatch. In the words of noted air historian William Green, “The twenty-one Buffalos that opposed the Japanese at Midway were shot to pieces, the Mitsubishi Zero-Sen being infinitely more maneuverable.”

Besides the Buffalo, all the other American fighter planes of the time—whether land-based, like the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the Bell P-39 Aircobra or the Navy’s carrier-based Grumman F4F Wildcat—were generally outclassed by the Japanese planes. It was a constant struggle for the Americans. On the plus side, U.S. aircraft construction was more robust than the Japanese and that factor enabled the American planes to absorb serious battle damage and survive to fight another day. Additionally, innovative American air combat tactics meant that American pilots could overcome the Japanese planes’ pure performance advantages, providing the Americans adhered to flying and maneuvering in a strictly coordinated fashion. Still, it was a huge struggle for the Americans and the required discipline so essential to their success often went out the window in the excitement and adrenaline rush of combat.

The Bell P-39 Aircobra and Curtiss P-40 Warhawk were the main American fighters at the time. Neither plane could match the agility or fast climb rate of the Japanese fighters. In one of the greatest sarcastic military quips of all time, one Aircobra pilot, Edwards Park, described it as “really good at taxiing.”

What The United States needed were better planes, pure and simple. There was one coming. That plane was the distinctive twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

Barely a month after its first flight (which established its amazing speed) and long before it was actually in full-scale production, the Army Air Force arranged for the Lightning to make a transcontinental California-to-New York dash at high speed, confident that the Lightning would break the existing record and garner world-wide attention and acclaim.

Early prototype P-38 (U.S. Air Force archives)

This it did easily, and with the aid of a strong tail wind, its cruising speed at times exceeded 400 mph. Unfortunately, the test plane was lost when it undershot the final runway due to pilot error. This turned out to be a huge setback for the P-38 program. The record-setting plane that crashed in New York was the first and only P-38. The initial test flights had shown there were several developmental bugs that needed to be ironed out, but now the only plane in existence had been destroyed in what was, in all honesty, an ill-planned publicity stunt. Lockheed had to build new test planes from scratch and attempt to incorporate the improvements and modifications that were needed into the new ones without having the original to compare them to.

This wasted nearly a year. America was not yet at war. The shortsightedness of the country with respect to its military readiness was to prove nearly disastrous. When Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese—almost three full years after the P-38’s initial test flight— there were exactly zero P-38s available for defense. Had the program not suffered the crippling delay caused by the crash of the first and only prototype, America would have had P-38s in active service at the time of Pearl Harbor. The only Army Air Force planes that managed to get into the air that day were P-40s and P-36s. Rugged and dependable, perhaps, but they were in an entirely different, far inferior universe of performance compared to the P-38. A hundred or so combat-ready P-38s at Pearl Harbor combined with the proper interpretation of the Americans having spotted the incoming Japanese air attack force on radar (the radar operators sloughed it off as a scheduled flight of American B-17 bombers coming in from the mainland) could have made a huge difference that day. This remains one of history’s great ‘what ifs,’ no question.

However, when the Lightning finally got into the fight, it was well worth the wait. It performed an amazing variety of roles, far beyond just the interceptor/bomber destroyer role for which it was originally designed. Although the early versions struggled in Europe at very high altitudes, in the Pacific, the Lightning shot down more Japanese planes than any other fighter over the course of the entire war. The top two American aces—Richard Bong and Tommy McGuire—both scored all their victories in the P-38.

In North Africa, the Lightning performed an amazing variety of roles, from air superiority fighter to bomber escort to ground attack to reconnaissance. It was so effective that the Germans came up with a nickname for it that has stayed with the plane ever since: Der Gabelschwanz Teufel, The Fork-tailed Devil.

In the opinion of many aviation historians, the P-38 Lightning was unquestionably the best twin-engine fighter of World War II.

Excerpted from the upcoming book, "Winged Heroes," by Steve Feinstein, due for publication early in 2024.