Lockheed P-38 Lightning P-38 Droop Snoot

The problem it solved. By mid-war the P-38 had become a formidable fighter-bomber: it could carry two 2,000 lb bombs, a 4,000 lb load equal to that of the early B-17s or of the de Havilland Mosquito B Mk XVI. There was one decisive difference, though. The bomber Mosquito had a clear nose from which to aim; the Lightning had a solid nose packed with its cannon and machine guns, and its lone pilot could not aim accurately in level bombing. The Droop Snoot was created to close that gap: a P-38 that acted as a lead ship, with a bombardier aboard, so that a whole formation of Lightnings could release its bombs together.

Where the idea came from. The proposal came from two officers at Eighth Air Force headquarters, Colonels Cass S. Hough and Don Ostrander. Their plan was to trade the firepower in the nose for a bombardier's station with a Norden bombsight, still secret equipment at the time, plus extra armour. According to the P-38 National Association, Ostrander himself flew as bombardier on the first Droop Snoot test missions over Europe.

Development at Langford Lodge. The work was done at Lockheed's modification centre at Langford Lodge in Northern Ireland. First a P-38H had its guns removed and a wooden mock-up of the planned bombardier's position fitted; that aircraft was used for flight testing. The key element was the new nose: in place of the guns, a bombardier-navigator position under a transparent Plexiglas bubble, similar in profile to the Mosquito's, holding the Norden sight, the bomb-release controls and navigation equipment.

How many were made. The number is not clear. Twenty-three P-38Js were converted to the new role at Langford Lodge, and a hundred conversion kits were also produced, though it is not known how many were used. The sources agree that these were not factory builds but field-modified P-38Js and P-38Ls. The German encyclopedia captions a P-38L Droopsnoot as a "Leitflugzeug" (lead aircraft), so the conversion also reached the last production series.

The other half of the modification. Less well known is the second part of the system. A Droop Snoot was useless on its own: the other aircraft in the group received a matching modification that let the bombardier in the lead ship drop the bombs for the entire formation. Each P-38 in the formation carried two 2,000 lb bombs, and all of them released when the leader did. By October 1944 all three P-38 groups of the Ninth Air Force were equipped to fly Droop Snoot missions.

Service. The Droop Snoot entered active service on 10 April 1944, when one led forty-two P-38Js of the 20th Fighter Group against the Luftwaffe base at Gütersloh in Germany. From then on Droop Snoots served from bases in Britain and Italy until the end of the war. The original colour scheme was olive drab over grey, and the type is mostly associated with the Eighth Air Force in Europe; the P-38 National Association adds that they were flown in the China-Burma-India theatre as well. The English-language encyclopedia also notes that P-38 lead ships guided not only formations of other Lightnings but also streams of medium and heavy bombers.

The H2X radar version. Alongside the glass-nosed version there was a radar one. In Europe several P-38s were fitted with H2X radar in the nose, the ground-mapping set the Allies used to bomb through cloud, with an operator-navigator in a cramped compartment behind the dish, small side windows and an access and escape hatch in the floor: the same layout as the Droop Snoot, but with a radome instead of the glazed nose. Its job was to produce radar maps of German targets. Plans to build this version in quantity never materialised, and the sources consulted give neither numbers nor specific operations.

What remains open. The total number of conversions, the split between P-38Js and P-38Ls and the full list of groups that used the system have no reliable figure in the available sources.