Some 80 years ago this month, May 1944, we see a great period Kodachrome of Lockheed P-38J-20-LO SN 44-23296, carrying a special vermillion red paint scheme and the moniker “Yippee” as she was the 5,000th P-38 produced.
She even made the cover of the August 1944 edition of Flying Magazine, for good reason.
While the P-51 and P-47 get lots of love when it comes to USAAF fighters in WWII, and I think the P-40 is tragically unloved, people forget the twin-engine P-38 and how much of a bruiser it was in all the theatres it flew in.
Among the pages of aces that it produced were Col. Charles MacDonald (27 kills), Maj. Tom McGuire (38) and Maj. Dick Bong, who holds the title of the most proflic American ace of the war with 40 kills. It was the P-38 that was given the task of splashing Yamamoto, after all.
Sadly, Yippee was a working girl and, with her red and white scheme covered under standard military markings, shipped out to the Pacific in late 1944 to join the 475th Fighter Group’s 431st FS and was lost in a ground accident in the Philippines on 20 January 1945.