The "Thunder Over the Valley" air show in Santa Maria, CA, will have a P-38 flying this weekend in their "Heritage Flight." If you're in that part of the country, you can find details on the show here.

WEBSITE FOCUS

Visit us on the web. Here's a sample of one of our current website sections:

	This section of the website is one of the most visited on our website.  We try to keep it as current as possible, so if you hear any news about the whereabouts or status of any P-38s, please let us know so we can keep it accurate.  I'd like to thank Pat & Linda Carry for their invaluable help in keeping us updated on these surviving 38s.  VISIT THIS SECTION

One of the things that conventional WWII aviation wisdom holds is that the P-51 Mustang was the hands down winner in every category of European war history.  Now, I don’t want any misunderstanding: the Mustang was a corker in European and Mediterranean combat, and even the most ardent P-38 advocate will give the North American fighter its due as a cracker jack in aerial combat.  However, the record in the Mediterranean gives the P-38 top honors with subordination only to Britain’s immortal Spitfire in any significant degree.

The P-38 had its first large scale deployment anywhere during the Operation Torch Morocco landings in November, 1942.  With its exceptional ferrying range, the P-38 was flown directly across the Bay of Biscay to North Africa with three squadrons of the 1st Fighter Group and two others of the 14th Fighter Group.  Those green Yankees were thrown into the fight against savvy veterans of the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica, and took some lumps while learning the ropes, but offered enough quality to have American theater leaders try to have every P-38 they could lay their hands on diverted to the area, and to declare that the invasion could not have progressed without the fighter.

Later, when the 82nd Fighter Group entered combat with its P-38s, the crack American Fighter unit of the Mediterranean began its record.  With finely honed discipline and almost fanatical pride of arms in their Lockheed fighter the three squadrons of the group became the highest scoring American unit with more than five hundred confirmed claims.  Only the 31st Fighter Group claimed more enemy aircraft shot down by the end of the war, but did not surpass the 82nd’s score until March 1945.

Final count of enemy aircraft claimed gives the P-38 about 1400 against 1100 for the P-51 (depending on which count you accept).  Only the Spitfire seems to have claimed more aircraft in the theater in much wider service over longer periods.  The heritage of the P-38 is lost amid the furor of P-51 deployment in the ETO around the D-Day monopoly of public relations.  The relative value of individual types of aircraft was fixed on what the correspondents believed at the time of the Normandy invasion, and the fighter type of the moment was the P-51.  The North American fighter was a great one, but it fought its war largely on the ground won by other types, notably our beloved Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

Here is a great screensaver for your computer.  (Sorry, this only works with a PC and not a Mac).  Loaded with beautiful pictures of the P-38, it's simple to download and install.

Setting up your "screensaver" on a PC

1. You must have an unzip program on your computer, such as Winzip. (Download here, if needed.)
2. Clicking on this link to download the zipped P-38 Screensaver file.  (I recommend saving it to your desktop, as it will be easy to find after it's finished downloading.)
3. After the screensaver has downloaded, double click on the icon that looks like this:
   
   or this:
   
4. That will open the Winzip program and display a file called:
   
   
5. Double click on that file and it will automatically open the screensaver and guide you through the installation.
6. Make sure you have this screensaver "chosen" in your control panel:
   Open Display in Control Panel.  (To open Display, click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.) On the Screensaver tab, click the dropdown menu and choose P-38 Lightning Screen Saver if it hasn't automatically been chosen for you, and then click on the "OK" button.

That's all there is to it!  Now, every time your computer sits idle for awhile, these beautiful images will begin to appear.

I won't be able to answer any questions about this process if it doesn't work for you as I am not a computer technician.  It has worked well for lots of us, so hopefully you won't have any problem getting it to load.