I liked flying the P38 the most, out of all the airplanes I flew, mainly because it had two engines.  There were many missions, when our guys would fly back to base on one engine.  I remember one time, flying back from Rabaul, I saw two P-38;s .  One was the C.O.’s and he had one engine out.  I trotted back to stay with him, but he waved me on home.  Later when he got back over base, he turned on the other engine, and landed on two.  The guys would often do that.  If the engine got damaged, shut it off, and save the fluids, then they could try and restart it when the got back.  In New Guinea, especially, that was very important because you didn’t want to bail out!

The P-38 was fast – our cruising speed was up around 180, 190mph.  Ofcourse, that’s as fast as those Nascar drives go today!,  But, it was fast, and then we could go as fast as 280 300 at full power.  We would take off from Port Moresby, fly high over the mountains and to the target, then to get home, just point the nose down! I scored all my victories in the P-38.  It had all the armament up there in the nose in about a two foot diameter circle., It had all that firepower straight ahead of you, in the nose in small area, of only a couple feet.  Usually, you would use your machine guns first to sight the plane, and when you saw that you were on target, pour on that 20mm. On the controls, you just pressed one button for machine guns, and the other button for cannon.  In a P-47 for instance, you had those four guns on each wing, but they did not converge until 300 feet ahead of you, or whatever it was.  So, I liked that about the P-38 best, naturally.

We had gun cameras in the nose, but the pictures they took were not that good, because they worked when the guns fired, and the camera would shake.  One fellow in the squadron got the idea to mount the cameras in the wing nacelle and they then they took much clearer pictures, because the camera was away from the guns.  After the mission, they would take out the film, develop it, and review it.  I don’t have any copies of my film in particular, it doesn’t really interest me really to have it today.

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