P-38 Lightning

Choose an answer from the three choices and True or False offered after each question and then "Check Your Answers" at the end of the quiz.

1. What was the date of the P-38’s maiden flight?

• January 27, 1939
• February 6, 1940
• March 6, 1941

2. What was the first air force unit to get the new P-38s?

• 1st Fighter Group
• 3rd Fighter Group.
• 6th Fighter Group

3. On 14 August, a P-38F and a P-40 operating out of Iceland shot down a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor over the Atlantic. This was the first Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed by the USAAF.

• True or False?

4. The P-38 was used most extensively and successfully in the European theater, where it proved ideally suited, combining excellent performance with very long range.

• True or False?

5. The 339th Fighter Squadron flight of P-38s flew Operation Vengeance to kill a Japanese admiral on April 18, 1943, during the Solomon Islands campaign in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Who was the admiral?

• Togo Heihachiro
• Hiroyasu Fushimi
• Isoroku Yamamoto

6. Flying a P-38, who was the World War II “Ace of Aces”?

• Chuck Yeager
• Barry Goldwater
• Richard Bong

7. Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire Jr. was the second highest scoring American ace during World War II, whose memory was preserved by the naming of McGuire Air Force Base in Burlington County, New Jersey. How many aircraft was he credited in shooting down?

• 40
• 38
• 36

8. Who was the civilian that shot down, on July 28, 1944, a Mitsubishi Ki-51 Sonia.

• Moses Richardson
• Charles Lindbergh
• Mark Reynolds

9. The noted aviation pioneer and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery vanished in an F-5 (recon P-38) while on a flight over the Mediterranean, from Corsica to mainland France, on July 31, 1944.

• True or False?

10. Who was the seventh-ranking American ace also flew a Lightning against the Japanese, scoring 27 kills in his famous aircraft, the "Putt Putt Maru"?

• Charles H. MacDonald
• Dick McDonald
• Barry Montgomery

Check Your Answers

• 1. January 27, 1939
• 2. 1st Fighter Group.
• 3. True
• 4. False. It was the Pacific theater.
• 5. Isoroku Yamamoto
• 6. Richard Bong
• 7. 38
• 8. Charles Lindbergh
• 9. True
• 10. Charles H. MacDonald

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