Your presence threatens no one. Especially not me.
It was YOU who began the pointless tirade about the P-38 being replaced by superior planes. So, yes, in fact it was you that turned the thread into a plane vs plane comparison. It was you that compared the P-38 to other planes, not someone else.
Don't blame me for your inadequacies, it was you who started the comparisons, go back and look at the thread.
The P-38 did stomp the Japanese. And other than in the 8th AF, it pretty well took care of the Luftwaffe as well, with a 4-6:1 kill to loss ratio outside the 8th AF. And a near 3:1 kill to loss ratio in the 8th AF.
The fact that there were too few P-38s is not the fault of the plane. Blame that on the War Production Board. It was the WPB that forced Lockheed to produce B-17s because Boeing could not meet the demands (had they had more P-38s instead, they'd have needed less B-17s).
Compressibility was not so serious an issue. It only prevented the P-38 from following Luftwaffe planes down in a dive. Big deal.
The Luftwaffe didn't have advantages over the P-38, it had advantages over the 8th AF. Plain and simple. If the Luftwaffa had advantages over the P-38, it would not have done well everywhere but in the 8th, but it did.
This is real simple.
The fact that there were too few P-38s is not an indicator of inferiority of the P-38, but an indicator of fundemental inadequacies in the supply system. The WPB forced Lockheed to build B-17s, and failed to second source the P-38. That has nothing at all to do with the P-38, and everything to do with the WPB.
The fact that there were not enough trained pilots for P-38s does not indicate an inadequacy in the P-38, it shows a basic fatal flaw in the pilot training system.
By the way, regarding McGuire, the first failure in your analysis is that you neglect to grasp the concept that there were in fact two enemy planes involved, they entered the fight at different times and from different directions, and that the P-38s were fully laden with nearly full drop tanks and full internal loads of fuel. Further, you also did not take into account that McGuire was flying an unfamiliar plane, not his regular plane, and that it required an all night maintenance thrash just to be ready to fly that day.
I really do not care who the data on the FW came from (in your post you listed the RAF).
Oh, and one more note. Beware of test data from military sources. In case you are not familiar with how the military actually acquires equipment, you should get intimate with the propcedure. Because if you think the best equipment for the job is always what is accepted, you are terribly mistaken. You should really study the way equipment was acquired and produced in World War II, look carefully at the War Production Board and the USAAC. The data is often skewed to allow acquisition of a certain piece of equipment. This greed and corruption goes on to this day.
