August 1945, across the Pacific, from the airirst strips of the Philippines to the coral runways of Okinawa, from New Guinea to the Marianas, hundreds of Lockheed P38 Lightnings, sit in gleaming rows beneath the tropical sun. These distinctive twin boom fighters, one of the most effective American fighters in the Pacific, the mount of top aces like Richard Bong and Thomas Maguire, now face an uncertain future.

 The war they were built to fight has suddenly ended. Within months, the question confronting American commanders becomes unexpectedly urgent. What precisely does one do with thousands of the most recognizable fighters ever built when victory renders them obsolete overnight? The P38 represented one of the most innovative designs in aviation history with its twin booms, central nel and counterrotating propellers.

 It looked like nothing else in the sky. The Germans called it the forktailed devil. The Japanese reportedly described it as two planes, one pilot. By the time production ended in August 1945, Lockheed and its subcontractors had delivered 10,037 Lightnings to the Army Air Forces. It was the only American fighter in continuous production from Pearl Harbor to victory over Japan day.

 Yet within weeks of Japan’s surrender, the vast majority of these machines faced a grim reckoning. The jet age had dawned. The Lockheed P80 shooting star was already in testing. The era of propeller-driven air superiority fighters was drawing to a close. For the Lightning, a design that once represented the cutting edge of aerial combat, obsolescence arrived with brutal speed.

The disposal of America’s P38 fleet began almost immediately in the continental United States. The process followed established channels. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation designated storage and sales depots across the country with Kingman Army Airfield in Arizona becoming one of the primary collection points.

 Here, amid the desert heat, rows of lightnings joined thousands of other surplus aircraft awaiting their fate. The government offered these wartime machines at prices that would have seemed absurd just months earlier. At surplus depots, many wartime fighters were sold for pocket change. P38s commonly fetched roughly $1,200 to $1,250.

At Kingman alone, 37 Lightnings were sold to civilian buyers in early 1946. Some found new purpose. Most did not. For the aircraft scattered across the Pacific and other distant theaters, the situation proved far grimmer. Shipping costs made returning these fighters to the United States economically impractical.

The solution was brutal in its simplicity. Bulldozers pushed lightnings into piles. Airframes that had flown combat missions over Rabal and the Solomons were crushed, stripped for valuable aluminium, or simply abandoned to the jungle. On remote air strips from New Guinea to the Philippines, P38s were left where they sat.

 Tropical vegetation slowly consumed them. Salt air corroded their aluminium skins. Within years, aircraft that had once stred through Pacific skies at 400 mph became rusting monuments to a conflict already fading from memory. In 1948, representatives of the newly formed Republic of South Korea approached American authorities with an intriguing proposal.

 Approximately 100 brand new P38 L Lightnings sat in storage in the Philippines, never flown in combat. Their engines still factory fresh. The South Koreans wanted to purchase them to build an air force around these proven fighters. The request was denied. American officials harbored concerns that providing high-performance fighters might embolden South Korea to launch its own invasion of the North, a scenario Washington wished to prevent.

 Beyond political considerations, the P38’s complex twin engine design demanded maintenance expertise that a fledgling Air Force simply did not possess. The simpler single engine P-51 Mustang, though worn from wartime service, proved far more practical for inexperienced ground crews. South Korea accepted worn out Mustangs and modified AT6 trainers instead.

 The brand new Lightnings in the Philippines were systematically destroyed. By June 1948, the remaining P38s in American service received a new designation. The letters ZF replaced the familiar P for pursuit. The F now stood for fighter under the new naming convention, while the Z prefix specifically indicated an obsolete aircraft restricted from frontline combat duty.

 The last lightnings in United States Air Force service were retired by 1949, just four years after they had helped win the Pacific War. Foreign operators and reserve units would keep some flying for years longer. The Bundeler Contracting Company received an 18-month contract worth approximately $2.8 million to reduce the aircraft at Kingman to aluminium ingots.

Workers operated massive smelters around the clock, melting down airframes that had crossed oceans and fought across continents. The process reportedly generated tens of millions of pounds of aluminium and steel along with over a million gallons of fuel, all sold for industrial reuse.

 Aircraft that had cost billions to design and manufacture disappeared into blast furnaces for a fraction of their original value. Yet not every lightning met the smelter. Some found new lives in unexpected places. The postwar air racing circuit offered one avenue of survival. From 1946 through 1949, brightly painted P38s competed at the Cleveland National Air Races, their distinctive silhouettes screaming around pylons before crowds hungry for peacetime spectacle.

Lockheed test pilot Tony Levier purchased a P38J, painting it red to stand out as an air racer and stunt flyer. Other pilots modified their Lightnings for maximum lowaltitude performance, reworking turbo systems and intercoolers, installing streamlined air intakes. Charles Walling flew his Lightning to second place in the 1947 Ohio Trophy race at 351 mph.

These racing Lightnings represented the fastest propeller-driven aircraft most Americans had ever seen up close. But racing proved a temporary reprieve. After a fatal crash at the 1949 Cleveland races, though not involving a P38, the events went on hiatus. The racing Lightnings scattered to private owners, some eventually finding their way to museums.

 The photo reconnaissance variants designated F5 discovered a more practical niche. During the war, approximately 1,200 Lightnings had been converted or built as unarmed camera platforms, their nose armament replaced by up to five aerial cameras. The F5 served as the primary long range photo reconnaissance platform in Europe with some veterans claiming it provided the vast majority of American aerial intelligence photography in that theater.

 After the war, civilian survey companies recognized their potential. Cargle Aerial Surveys of Midland, Texas purchased surplus F5s from the War Assets Administration for $1,250 a piece. Aero Exploration Company of Tulsa, Hikon Aerial Surveys of California, Mark Herd Aerial Mapping, and Spartan Air Services of Canada all operated lightning reconnaissance variants through the 1950s.

These aircraft mapped remote territories across North and South America. Their long range and high alitude capability perfectly suited to aerial survey work. A H Highon F5 visited Ecuador in 1956 to photograph snowcapped volcanoes for the United States Department of the Interior, measuring glacier recession over the previous decade.

 Witnesses recalled the pilot performing barrel rolls and arerobatics over Keito airport after completing his survey mission. For many observers, it was their first glimpse of the legendary forktailed fighter. One F5 sold in 1946 for $1,250 worked continuously for cargle aerial surveys until 1952, then for Mark Herd aerial mapping until 1963.

By then, the complicated twin engine fighters had become exotic oddities, their economic prime long passed. More capable platforms had emerged. The surviving photo mapping lightnings were parked, some eventually restored, others left to deteriorate. Foreign air forces provided another path to survival, though often a troubled one.

 The transfer of surplus American aircraft to Allied nations became a significant element of early Cold War diplomacy. For countries rebuilding their air forces after years of occupation or conflict, American surplus represented an affordable path to modern capability. The P38, despite its complexity, attracted interest from several nations seeking proven fighters at bargain prices.

 Italy received 100 P38 L fighters and F5 reconnaissance variants through an agreement dated April 1946. Delivered after refurbishment at the rate of approximately one per month. The aircraft equipped the fourth Stormmo and third Stormmo flying reconnaissance missions over the Balkans, ground attack sorties, naval cooperation duties and air superiority patrols.

 The Italian experience proved costly. These were heavy, complex fighters, entirely different from anything Italian pilots had previously flown. The engines were old, worn from wartime service. Maintenance knowledge was limited. Pilot errors multiplied. At least 30 P38s crashed in Italian service, many of the accidents fatal.

 Despite this, many Italian pilots appreciated the aircraft’s excellent ground visibility and stability during takeoff. The Italian Lightnings served until 1956 when they were finally phased out. No intact Italian P38 airframes survived the scrapyard. The high value of their light alloys ensured rapid recycling. Today, the Italian Air Force Museum preserves only a single cockpit and nose section as a relic of the country’s brief lightning era.

 Honduras acquired five to six P38s beginning in September 1948, making them the country’s first high-performance fighters alongside Bellp63 King Cobras. The Honduran Lightnings would see something no other P38s experienced after the war. Actual combat. In 1957, during a border dispute with Nicaragua over territory in the Gratzas, a Dios department, five Honduran P38s bombed and strafed a village occupied by Nicaraguan forces.

 It marked the last combat use of the Lightning anywhere in the world. The Honduran Air Force continued operating its Lightnings until the early 1960s, eventually exchanging them for F4U Corsair’s. One Honduran P38, serial number 4453 232, was imported back to the United States in 1960 and eventually entered the collection of the Air Force Museum.

 Cuba received six P38s in August 1948 under the Rio Treaty. The Dominican Republic operated six F5s and two unarmed two-seater Lightnings from 1947. China retained 15 aircraft. Each of these small fleets eventually disappeared through attrition, accidents, and scrapping, leaving few traces.

 Perhaps the most unusual postwar lightning mission occurred in Guatemala in 1954. An unmarked P38M Knight fighter working with the CIA’s so-called Liberation Air Force attacked the British cargo ship SS Springfield in Puerto San Jose Harbor on June 27th. A controversial covert action later documented in declassified CIA files. The ship had been loading Guatemalan cotton and coffee.

 It was a strange finale for a design conceived as a high alitude interceptor. By the 1960s, finding an intact P38 had become genuinely difficult. The combination of mass scrapping, foreign service losses, and simple neglect had reduced the once mighty fleet to scattered survivors. Museums acquired what they could. The National Air and Space Museum obtained examples.

 The Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson preserved aircraft with significant histories. Private collectors began scouring the world for forgotten airframes. From the jungles of New Guinea, where dozens of Lightnings had crashlanded or been abandoned, recovery teams extracted corroded but potentially restorable wrecks from Alaskan wilderness, aircraft lost during ferry flights emerged from decades of isolation.

 Each recovery became an expedition. each restoration a multi-year project requiring fabrication of components no longer commercially available. The most remarkable recovery began in 1981 when Pat EPS eps and Richard Taylor purchased salvage rights to search for a squadron of aircraft lost over Greenland in 1942. On July 15th of that year, six P38s and two B17 bombers had been forced down by weather during a ferry flight to Britain.

 All crew members were rescued, but the aircraft were abandoned on the ice cap. EPS and Taylor assumed the planes would be slightly covered by snow, their tails perhaps sticking out of the surface. They were wrong. The aircraft had been carried 2 miles from their original location and buried beneath 268 ft of solid ice. Finding them required years of searching and new radar technology.

 Kentucky businessman Roy Schoffner financed the eventual recovery expedition. Workers created a device called the Super Gopher, which circulated heated water through a copper tubed cone to melt shafts through the ice. Each descent to the buried aircraft took 25 minutes. Men equipped with steam hoses carved out a cavern around the fighter while constantly pumping out melt water. The work took 3 months.

 On August 1st, 1992, the last piece of the P38 emerged from the ice. The center section, 17 ft long and weighing three tons, came up through a shaft workers had spent weeks widening. The aircraft, christened Glacier Girl, was transported to Middlesborough, Kentucky, where a 10-year restoration began.

 Approximately 80% of the original parts were used in the reconstruction. On October 26th, 2002, an estimated 20,000 people watched Glacier Girl taxi down the runway for her first flight in 60 years. More than one veteran fought back tears as the factory condition fighter lifted into the Kentucky sky. Its mission resumed after six decades frozen in Arctic ice.

Glacier Girl now owns the only complete set of working P38 machine guns in existence. Many consider it the finest Warbird restoration ever completed. The aircraft continues to fly at air shows, a tangible connection to an era when twin boom fighters dominated Pacific skies. Other lightnings have emerged from equally improbable circumstances.

In 2007, shifting sands on a Welsh beach revealed the remains of the maid of Harle, a P38F that had made an emergency landing in 1942. Second Lieutenant Robert Elliot escaped unhe hurt, but American airmen were unable to fly the fighter off the beach. They salvaged the nose guns and abandoned the aircraft, which disappeared beneath naturally shifting sand for 65 years.

 Elliot himself was shot down over Tunisia less than three months later. His body and aircraft were never found. From Papua New Guinea, multiple Lightnings have been recovered from jungle sites where they crashed or were abandoned during the war. The Historical Aircraft Restoration Society extracted White 33 from dense terrain near Finch Hoffen, where it had sat since suffering a nose gear collapse in early 1944.

Such recoveries require helicopters, local labor, and years of planning, but they continue to yield aircraft thought lost forever. Today, roughly two dozen P38s survive worldwide with approximately 10 remaining airworthy. These small totals shift as restorations complete and accidents occur. The survivors include examples at the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of the United States Air Force, the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California, and various private collections. Each flying Lightning

represents an extraordinary investment. Maintaining these complex twin engine fighters requires specialized knowledge that has nearly disappeared. Engines must be rebuilt using techniques developed 80 years ago. Parts must be fabricated from scratch or sourced from crashed aircraft scattered across the globe.

 Insurance costs alone can reach six figures annually. Yet the surviving Lightnings fly on, their distinctive silhouettes appearing at air shows and heritage flights across America. Organizations like the Commemorative Air Force operate restored examples, keeping alive the memory of aircraft that once filled Pacific skies.

 Glacier Girl, the fighter pulled from Greenland ice, has crossed the Atlantic again, completing the ferry flight interrupted 60 years earlier. The story of the P38 after World War II is ultimately one of swift obsolescence and gradual redemption. Within four years of victory, the Lightning had vanished from American military service.

 Within a decade, the vast majority of 10,000 aircraft had been melted, crushed, or left to rot in tropical jungles. The jet age had arrived and propeller fighters, no matter how innovative, belonged to the past. The speed of this transformation remains striking. An aircraft program that had consumed billions in development and production, that had proven one of the most effective American fighters in the Pacific, that had carried America’s greatest aces to victory, became surplus within months of the war’s end.

 The lightnings that had made screaming dives on Japanese positions over Rabal were bulldozed into scrap piles before the ink dried on surrender documents. Yet something about the P38 refused to disappear entirely. Racers flew them around pylons. Survey companies mapped continents from their cockpits. Small air forces operated them into the 1960s.

and collectors recognizing their historical significance began the painstaking work of recovery and restoration. The roughly two dozen surviving Lightnings represent a tiny fraction of total production. They are scattered across museums from Washington to Berlin, from California to Serbia. A few still fly, their twin engines filling the air with the distinctive sound that once meant American air superiority over the Pacific.

 For the veterans who flew them, for the enthusiasts who restore them, for the crowds who watch them perform at air shows, these surviving aircraft are more than machines. They are tangible links to an era when young men climbed into forktailed devils and flew toward horizons their parents could barely imagine.

 The P38s that remain have earned their place in history. Survivors of both a world war and the systematic destruction that followed. If you found this video insightful, watch what happened to Germany’s yubot after World War II. Next, it explores how the Marines submarine fleet was captured, studied, and deliberately destroyed in the war’s aftermath.

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