On 15 July, 1942 six P-38 Lightning fighters and two B-17 bombers took off from Maine on a flight across Greenland and Iceland to England, where they would join the growing American military presence in the fight against Nazi Germany. They only made it to Greenland, where they got lost in fog and crashland on the vast glacier. All crew members were rescued, but the planes were left behind. This would have been a bit of good news to the Germans had they known. German fighter piots had nicknamed the P-38 the fork-tailed devil due to its twin-tail construction and heavy armament. Four .50 caliber machine guns and one 20mm cannon gave the Lightning a byte that was certainly worse than its bark, much to the dismay of many German and Japanese airmen2, including Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor3.
Forty years later, the planes were located in the ice and one of the P-38s was literally melted out (it was some 260 feet below the surface). Unlike most World War II-era planes that have been recovered in remote jungles or in shallow waters, this particular plane was not in skeletal condition. Eighty percent of the plane was brought back to te U.S. and restored into flying condtion (the sound of the twin Allison engines at takeoff was indeed music to the ears of the restorers).
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