1 It's a Supermarine product, but not the SeaFang.

Nope, it's a Spitfire, specifically the Spitfire Mk Vb (Trop).  The scoop under the nose is the sand filter.

2 The wings look like a Spitfire.  The second one shows part of what looks like that distinctive wingtip, and they're all set very low on the fuselage like a Spitfire.  The intake does look odd, though.

I read an interesting story some many months back that claimed (with good-looking sourcing) that the Navy (and possibly the Army) wanted to go all-cannon throughout the war, but that domestic cannon production was almost worthless because of things as simple as idiotic decisions on head-spacing and poor quality control because their size qualified them as "artillery" rather than "machine guns".  Not sure how that explains the single cannon in the P-38, though--imported from Canada, maybe?

3

The P-38's cannon was 37 mm and I believe it was specifically designed for that plane. It wasn't a Hispano, which was the one they had all the production problems with.

If, indeed, production problems on the American version of the Hispano forced them to use the M2 instead, then it may be a stroke of luck. The M2 was a superb weapon for fighter planes, at least for that time and place.

Wikipedia says the 37 mm gun was made by Oldsmobile. I don't totally trust Wikipedia on this; they also say 2 .50's and 2 .30's. I think that may have been the design configuration but I know that's not how they were equipped in real combat.  So I just dug up my copy of "Fire in the Sky". Bergerud describes the weapons loadout as four .50's and one 20 mm cannon, which I find much more believable.

Given that 4 M2's is still a lot of punch, especially when center-mounted and firing parallel, they might be more willing to risk having a Hispano lock up for the P-38.

4 I think you're right about those wings. The viewing angle is so oblique it's easy to miss, but I do think those are ovals.

5 I'd have to dig around, but that sounds right.  I believe that the *original* model had 4x.50+1x37mm, but the 37mm had such a low rate of fire and so many problems that they threw it out and replaced it with a Hispano.  What I don't know is where they got the Hispanos (domestic or Brit/Canadian), and if the former, whether they had frequent trouble with them.

I have heard, anecdotally, that fighters with all nose-mounted weapons had a fairly big advantage in the hands of a good gunner.  I don't know any sources of hard data for that, but it seems to be fairly accepted.

I've often wondered if any A-26s (or the B-25 mod that led to it) ever got a shot at another plane... I suppose it wouldn't have been much better for anyone targeted by the night fighter variant of the Mosquito (400mph, 4x20mm).

6

When guns are mounted in the wings, they have to aim them to converge at a single point, some distance ahead of the plane. The only time a plane can hit an enemy with all its guns is if the enemy is within a certain range bracket around that convergence point -- and a lot of the time, they were nearer or further, which meant that the best you could do was to hit with half your guns.

One of the big advantages of the P-38 was that its weapons were mounted center. All of them, and they fired parallel. That meant that at any range if any gun was hitting the enemy, all of them were, in concentrated pattern.

The only way that could have been done with a single-engine fighter was to center-mount the guns, and slave them to the engine to fire between the prop blades, but that forced a lower fire rate, which wasn't desirable, and it also put significant limits on how variable the engine speed could be, which was really a problem.

So in WWII center-mounting the guns was only really possible in a two-engine fighter, at least when you're talking about props.

There were a lot of two-engine fighters, but the P-38 was the only one that was able to compete with single-engine fighters successfully during the day.

Night fighters were an entirely different matter. And of course none of that discussion applies to jets.

7 I don't know that it's fair to say that the P-38 "competed successfully" - it was still a two-engine fighter, and still wasn't able to outmaneuver single-engine fighters.

But for the Pacific theater, it had an even better attribute - long range. There are plenty of examples of air-to-air combats where one side held a tremendous advantage because the other side was operating near the edge of their range envelope (the Battle of Britain and the Falklands War, for example.) Japanese fighters could out-dogfight a P-38... but if you did, and the P-38 disengages and you're 50 miles of fuel short of making it back to your home island, you died anyway.

Not that they did badly in actual combat - like you've said, that punch is nasty, so the P-38 didn't have to hit much to score. But I don't think they would have done as well in the European theater (i.e. against German fighters over their bases).

8

I don't know that it's fair to say that the P-38 "competed successfully" - it was still a two-engine fighter, and still wasn't able to outmaneuver single-engine fighters.

It depends. At high altitude it could turn faster than the Zero. In combat it had a favorable kill/loss ratio against the Zero.

But you had to use it right. There's more to success in combat than maneuver.

If you tried to fight with it as if you were flying a Zero, you'd get waxed. The P-38 did some things well and some things not-so-well (which, of course, is true of every fighter) and you had to adopt tactics which maximized your advantages and minimized your disadvantages. And its advantages were considerable, and not just the gunnery advantage.

Once the pilots in the Pacific learned how to use the plane, they did very well against the Japanese. The P-38 was the USAAF's primary fighter in the Pacific through the end of the war.

9 Hit-and-run tactics were the P-38's combat technique.  You dove on the Zero, zapped them, then zoom-climbed to regain your height advantage.

Of course, in a perfect situation, any plane would do that, but the Lightning was the first fighter that could create that perfect situation against a Zero, just by being able to outperform it.

To oversimplify it, the Zero fought horizontally, but the Lightning fought vertically.

10 Yep, many early fighters were designed for the turning dogfight, much like in WWI.  The Spitfire was one of these, BTW.  The Zero just took the idea and optimized the heck out of it.  They made up for a fairly small engine by eliminating weight wherever possible (most famously, by adding no armor).  It could out-turn just about anything ever built during the war by anyboy.

However, faster planes with more powerful engines could decide to an extent when and where to engage or disengage; while they would (and did) fail if they took on the turning fighters' strengths, they could win handily by taking on their weaknesses.

We tend to take Boyd and ACM energy theory for granted; but back then, all they had to go on really was what they had learned from WWI, and what the survivors were learning slowly, the hard way, as they went along.  Which ties neatly into the differences in treatment of combat veterans between nations, and the differences they made in their respective roles towards the end of the war.

11

As I understand it, the P-38 could outclimb the Zero, and could also outdive it. So slashing attacks were feasible and effective.

Early on, P-38 pilots tried to mix it up with Zeros at medium or low altitude, and definitely came up second best doing that. It wasn't until they changed tactics that they began to do well.

12 Everyone who's interested in more theory should read Shaw's monography "Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering".