"redc1c4" wrote ...


tell us again about the Air Force flying P-38's in the 1950's.


I'd like to have seen them too.

Unfortunately, both of my print sources claim "Neba Hachee", with one of
them maintaining that P-38s, even a few scattered photo birds, were gone
from active service long before 1950 (1946 withdrawn from squadron service),
and were not assigned to Air Guard units. The reasons were twofold. 1.
The P-51s, line dup in vast quantities on ramps around the world had
equivalent range and performance (along with a lower accident rate). & 2.
Even more important, those two turning made the Lighting an expensive gas
hog, a real problem with post war cutbacks.

P-51s remained in Air Guard Service into the mid50s, but the only P-38s
around were a handful of privately owned Pylon racers and the dusty ones
parked in boneyards like Davis Monathan.

I guess I saw the last of the TB-25s used for navigator training at James
Connally AFB, Texas, plus what must have been one of the last operational
sorties by a P-47, Haitian AF, off Haiti's coast in 1963, plus later that
year, Spanish versions of the He111 and a real Ju52 operating out of Palma,
Majorca.

In early 1942, when I was a little over 2, I am told a P-38 crashed across
the street from our house on Pont Loma (overlooking the then empty flats of
Mission Bay). I remember the excitement, but wasn't up on P-38s back then.
My old friend and infrequent story teller, Paul Murphy of Clifton, TX,
passed last year, one of those pilots who survived combat tours in P-39s and
P-38s in the South Pacific.

We still have an "operational" B-26 (not the old Marauder) and a TBF flying
around here. On its rare flights, the B-26 takes off across the lake and
passing over my ridgetop at less than 1000'. Loud!

Prop-driven memories....The sound of a sortie of A1Hs flying off the deck of
CVA-38. Sort of an ear-splitting stream if you had forgotten to close the
hatch to the Port Wing and Vultures' Row.

TMO