In addition to an agonizingly slow roll rate, the P-38s I flew in combat had two other very limiting features- restricted dive and cockpit temperature. It was suicide to put the P-38 into a near vertical dive at high altitude; all we P-38 pilots knew it, and I believe all the Luftwaffe pilots knew it, for they usually used the vertical dive to escape from us. You could “split-S” and do other vertical-type maneuvers at high altitude; and as long as you continued to pull the nose through the vertical, you always held your airspeed within limits. But let the nose stay in the vertical position for more than a few seconds and you reached what was termed “compressibility” in those days. The nose would actually “tuck under” beyond the vertical position, and it would impossible to recover the plane from its dive. The only salvation was to pop the canopy, release your seat belt, and hope you would clear the plane as you were sucked from the cockpit. The 20th Group lost two P-38s in vertical dives over England before we went operational, but both pilots bailed out successfully (although one of them almost killed himself when he popped his chute too soon).
According to a Lockheed tech rep who once visited us, theoretically the air was sufficiently dense at 1,500 feet below sea level for the P-38 to begin pulling out of a high-speed vertical dive. Such a statement did little to bolster my confidence. Later Lightnings had dive brakes under the wings to correct this problem, but they were too late to be of value to me.
The other limited feature, cockpit temperature, would be more correctly identified as “paralyzing.” Cockpit heat from the engine manifolds was nonexistent. When you were at 30,000 feet on bomber escort and the air temperature was –55 F outside the cockpit, it was –55 F inside the cockpit. After 30 minutes or so at such a temperature, a pilot became so numb that he was too miserable to be of any real value; to make matters worse, he did not particularly care. Only his head and neck exposed to the direct ray s of the sun retained any warmth.
Not only did the numbness seriously decrease a pilot’s efficiency, but the bulky clothing he wore further restricted his efforts. For example, I wore double-thickness silk gloves, then heavy chamois gloves, and topped these with heavy leather gauntlets (all British issue). Inside all these layers were fingers almost frozen stiff and completely without feeling. Flipping a single electrical switch required deep concentration, skill, and luck, and the P-38 cockpit was loaded with electrical switches. How we envied the P-47 and P-51 pilots with a heat-producing engine in front of them to maintain a decent cockpit temperature.
The greatest problem of all with the P-38 over Europe in 1943-44 was its engines, or rather its engine installation. When the AAF decided to add more internal fuel to the P-38 and thereby increase its range, the only place more tankage could be placed was in the leading edges of the wings where the intercoolers were located. So leading edge tanks for about one hour’s additional endurance were installed and the intercooler radiators wre moved to the lower noses of the booms under the prop spinners.
The intercoolers worked fine in this position, but the adjacent oil coolers were now much too efficient. We would put up a Group strength of 48 planes and if 30 got to the target, we considered ourselves fortunate. On every mission plane after plane would turn back for England once had reached high altitude, primarily because of an engine that had blown up or a turbosupercharger that had “run away” –i.e., uncontrollable overspeeding.
A couple of months after my left engine had blown up while I was flying deep inside Germany (an event that led to my capture), Colonel Mark Hubbard, 20th Group CO, arrived at Stalag Luft I, my POW camp on the Baltic Sea north of Berlin. In a conversation one day he remarked that during the first three months the 20th Group was on operations, it had the equivalent of a complete turnover in pilots- 70 percent of which could be attributed either directly or indirectly to engine trouble. What a needless waste of highly trained men to the enemy!
A Lockheed tech rep explained that at the tremendously low air temperatures in which we were flying, the oil in the radiators cooled to such an extent that its viscosity resembled that of molasses. It simply refused to flow sufficiently, and the engines would eventually explode or the oil-type turboregulators would malfunction.
The P-38 had a horrible reputation when it came to a pilot bailing out. The horizontal empennage, which we dubbed “the cheese knife,” was considered a menace. In reality it was less of a threat than the stabilizers on the P-47 and P-51, simply because it was located farther to the rear from the P-38 cockpit, thereby providing more chance for a pilot to clear it on bailout. In addition the P-38 did not have a fin and rudder directly behind the cockpit which the pilot had to avoid. The only fighter pilot I knew in POW camp to strike the tail of his plane was a fellow who bailed out of a P-51D. When I was forced to bail out over Germany, I rolled my P-38 onto its back and dropped clear without any difficulty.
The experience that led to my capture in February 1944 sheds light on the performance of the P-38 in combat. Five Lightnings dove on four Me-410s and two Me-110s in a combat over Germany, and the Luftwaffe pilots scattered in all directions. I decided that if I were going to have to chase one of the German planes, I might as well be heading toward England, so I selected an Me-110 scooting westward on top of the cloud deck. Having had a right engine shot out by an Me-110 rear gunner over Frankfort two weeks previously, I had developed quite a healthy respect for any rear gunner. Therefore, I lined up behind the German plane and dropped into the cloud deck, holding a steady compass course. When I slowly pulled up from the cloud layer, the Me-110 was slightly above me at a range of less than 200 feet. I took careful aim at its belly through my gunsight and let it have all four .50 caliber guns and the 20 mm cannon. The Me-110 flamed so rapidly that the crew probably never had time to realize what had happened to them.
Quite elated, I pushed my prop pitches forward to 3,000 rpm and my throttles to 54 inches of manifold pressure, maximum allowable military power. Although the P-38 handbook allowed fifteen minutes of operation at military power, my left engine blew up after only three minutes. The Allison “time bomb” had once again held true to its reputation.
I feathered the left prop immediately and headed westward as before, hoping to reach England more than 300 miles away. However, the P-38J-10LO had a design feature none of us pilots could ever quite fathom: it had only one generator, and it was on the left engine. (Later series J airplanes were produced with a generator on each engine.) Normally this would not have been a problem, but the cross-feed on the P-38 was electrical, and a pilot had to have electrical power to transfer his fuel from the tanks on one side of the plane to the engine on the other side. Even though I had turned off all electrical equipment immediately upon losing the left engine, I realized my cross-feed would probably drain my battery before my right engine had time to burn all the fuel in my two left tanks. I determined to stay on cross-feed until the battery went dead and then switch to my right tanks. This would probably never get me across the North Sea to England, but it should get me to Holland, where I had a chance of being picked up by the underground.
After flying on instruments for almost an hour, I broke through the western edge of the cloud layer into clear air; suddenly I saw five bursts of light flak walking in on me from the right side, exactly at my altitude. Then, to my utter horror, I heard the sixth one somewhere from below my plane. My mind flashed back to the bars in London in those days before I began flying ops when the bomber boys used to quip, “If you ever hear it, it’s got you.”
Their words were prophetic, for within a few seconds my right engine began smoking. To get away from the flak battery as rapidly as possible, I dove for the deck and leveled off on the treetops. I sped across forests and open fields with the smoke rapidly getting more intense. Before long I began to smell it as it seeped through the wing into the cockpit. It did not take much debate for me to decide I should not attempt to belly-land a smoking plane. Besides, the Germans, to the best of my knowledge, had not yet received a J series P-38 in any respectable condition worthy of close technical examination.
As I approached another forest, I decided to use the remaining “excess” speed from my dive for a zoon to sufficient height for bailout. As I reached the other side of the forest, I pulled up into a climb, leveled off, cranked in full-down nose trim, rolled the plane on its back, pulled the canopy release, and unlatched my safety belt. With flames now coming into the cockpit from around the right window, all these motions were performed almost as one, and I next felt myself drop into the rushing airstream.
Admittedly the P-38 was outperformed by the P-47 and P-51 in the skies over Europe, but many of its difficulties were the result of unnecessary design deficiencies and the slow pace of both the AAF and Lockheed in correcting them. One can only ponder about how much more rapidly the troubles would have been remedied if the slide-rule types had been flying the plane in combat against the Luftwaffe. But I will always remember the P-38 with the greatest fondness. Even with all her idiosyncrasies, she was a real dream to fly.
