This post-Thanksgivng note will be more down to earth than the previous one.

The WWII twin engine P-38 fighter was a potent weapon in the war. The Japanese called it “the twin-tailed devil.”

The top ace in the Pacific War was Richard Bong, who shot down 40 Japanese planes while flying the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft. I knew a WWII veteran, Ed Glover, who helped service planes in New Guinea. He said Bong was a wild man. Bong became a test pilot for the Air Corps near the end the war and died while test flying a Shooting Star jet plane. He died on the same day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. 

Several of the P-38s still survive and are flyable. Perhaps the most famous is known as the “Glacier Girl. It was dug out of the ice in Greenland. On July 15, 1942, there was a flight of six P-38s and two B-17 bombers on the way to England, when they encountered adverse weather and turned back.

They found themselves over Greenland and running of fuel. One landed with its landing gear extended and flipped over. The other five landed on the ice fields without extending their landing gear and had very little damage. All the crew members were rescued. In 1992, after much searching, they found this P-38 under 268 feet of ice and brought it to the surface. It was taken to Middleboro, Tennessee, where, over 10 years, it was restored to flying condition. Today, it is mainly shown at air shows across the country. 

In the book titled, “The Aviators” by Winston Groom, I learned a lot about Lindbergh and his war effort.

There has been very little written about Charles Lindbergh and his war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that he visited Germany and called on Adolph Hitler and did not condemn him. He was on the president’s blacklist and when Lindbergh tried to regain his commission after Pearl Harbor, he was turned down by direct orders from the president. He went to Henry Ford and hired on to evaluate the B-24 Liberator bombers they manufactured at the rate of one plane every hour. He became disenchanted by the quality of workmanship at Ford, although he did fly the B-24 a great deal to iron out the problems.

Lindbergh thought the workers were lazy. They were used to assembling cars, which was a lot less critical than working on aircraft. The Army Air Corps was concerned about the B-24 since they found that the B-17 bomber was more rugged and more of them returned from raids than the B-24s. I have known men who flew in the B-24 and it always smelled of gasoline and was known as a flying coffin.

There is lot more about Lindbergh’s war effort contribution and, if I don’t forget, I’ll tell you more about his exploits next week. He did a lot of research on aviation and the effect of oxygen deprivation at the Mayo Clinic. He also flew combat missions as a civilian.

Don Lee, a pilot flying out of Lawrence County Airport since 1970, has been in charge of equipment and grounds maintenance for the last several years. He can be reached at eelnod22@gmail.com