Author: Rainbow Kursk
In the photo, a modern F-35 stealth jet fighter and an ancient twin-engine propeller fighter fly in unison, and the stealth aircraft even deliberately drags the rear half of the fuselage during the flight to let the propeller fly in front, and the latter's strange double-tailed brace fuselage structure is even more impressive.
The F-35 is a fifth-generation stealth fighter jointly developed by the United States Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, developed by Lockheed Martin. The aircraft has a peculiar nickname - "Lightning" II.! Why is there a "II." after the nickname? Because before the aircraft, there was also a piston propeller fighter called the P-38 "Lightning", which was also developed by the company's predecessor, Lockheed. As an important twin-engine fighter of the US Army Air Corps during World War II, the aircraft was put into the European battlefield and the Pacific theater and achieved brilliant results. This is the propeller fighter plane accompanied by the F-35 fighter in the photo, and it also has a nickname given by the Japanese pilots - "Double Demon"!
Lockheed was founded in 1912 and only merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to change its name to the now-familiar Lockheed Martin Company. In fact, Lockheed has a pivotal position in the history of the U.S. aviation industry, with its tireless exploration of aviation technology, the formation of a legendary skunk factory, the development of the first jet fighter P-80 for the U.S. Air Force, and has developed the SR-71 "Blackbird", F-117 "Nighthawk" and other advanced models that transcend the times, repeatedly breaking world records. The source of all this is the P-38 Lightning fighter, the first military aircraft developed by Lockheed.
P-38 by the legendary Kelly Johnson as the chief designer, the use of a very rare twin-engine double tail brace structure, the entire fuselage is very short, the airborne area is also correspondingly reduced, while the aircraft has a high speed, large rate of climb, heavy armor, strong fire characteristics, the nose concentrated 1 20 mm machine gun and 4 stop 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, under the wing can also carry bombs or rockets, and has a range of 1700 kilometers. After pearl harbor, the P-38 was the only land-based fighter that could compete with the Japanese Zero.
The highlight of the P-38 was the successful interception of Yamamoto Isoroku.
On April 13, 1943, the U.S. Military intercepted a telegram from the Japanese Combined Fleet Command to the forces headquarters of the Northern Solomon Islands. It took three days for U.S. code experts to decipher the telegram and learned that General Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy, was about to take a plane to the front line for an inspection. The information was reported until the case of Admiral Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, who soon made plans to completely eliminate Yamamoto, an old adversary. Since the assassination of senior enemy generals was related to the changes in the entire international situation, the final battle plan was telegraphed to President Roosevelt and personally approved by him.
On April 18, when Yamamoto and his staff appeared in the predetermined airspace escorted by 6 Type 1 land attack aircraft, 18 U.S. P-38 Lightning fighters came from a high altitude, of which 12 Lightning were responsible for moving the tiger away from the mountain and diverting the escortEd Zero fighter, and the other 6 Lightning launched aerial sniper attacks, quickly shooting down 2 type I land attack aircraft with weak firepower, and Yamamoto Fifty-Six was killed by lightning bullets in the cabin. The death of Isoroku Yamamoto was a dramatic event in the history of World War II, in which the Combined Fleet lost the guidance of the "God of War", and was succeeded by a major general and a series of generals of Koga Peak, who could not be compared with Yamamoto in terms of prestige or ability, and indirectly led to the rapid decline of the Japanese Navy.
Closely linked to the P-38's reputation was Richard Bon, the U.S. military's number one ace pilot. The young pilot, who entered the war on December 27, 1942, flew the P-38 down 5 Japanese planes in just 10 days, promoted to ace pilot, and two years later became the number one ace in the U.S. Military with the record of shooting down 40 Japanese aircraft, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bang loves his girlfriend Maggie so much that he enlarges her graduation headshot and sticks it on the side of the nose of the Lightning fighter jet and writes her girlfriend's name.
Next to this warmth, there are 40 small plaster flags painted densely, representing the number of falles of Bang, and This P-38 fighter of Bang has become a classic famous aircraft in the history of aviation warfare. Unfortunately, on August 6, 1945, Bang was martyred in a mechanical failure while testing Lockheed's newly developed P-80 jet fighter, at the age of 25, and he had just completed his marriage to Maggie shortly before the incident, and on the same day of the crash, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and 7 days later, Bang's comrades ushered in the unconditional surrender of Japan.
It is precisely because of the outstanding contribution of the P-38 in World War II that Lockheed Martin re-gave it the name of "Lightning" when developing the F-35 fighter, obviously to inherit the glory of the P-38, so it was called "Lightning" II.