What P-38 aircraft did the Dominican Air Force have in 1947?

After World War II, surplus P-38s passed to several foreign air forces. Honduras received 12, and China kept 15. Italy also used them, until retiring them in 1956, and none of the Italian aircraft survived scrapping. In the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Air Force operated six F-5s and two unarmed two-seat P-38s, painted black, from San Isidro Air Base in 1947.

The F-5s were the unarmed photo-reconnaissance versions of the Lightning. Lockheed, for example, modified 200 P-38J airframes on the production line to convert them into unarmed F-5Bs. In the Pacific, the improved aircraft had been deployed as F-5A reconnaissance planes or as P-38G fighters.

The Dominican Republic was one of the last users of the P-38: it kept its Lightnings until the end of 1950, when the remaining aircraft were cut up and scrapped. By then, most of the Lightnings in the United States had been sold as surplus for 1,200 dollars each or had been scrapped. In Central America, the aircraft still saw combat episodes: in 1957, five Honduran P-38s bombed and strafed a village occupied by Nicaraguan forces during a border dispute between the two countries.

Other operators gave the aircraft even more turbulent uses: the CIA's "Liberation Air Force" flew a P-38M in support of the 1954 coup d'état in Guatemala, and on June 27 of that year that aircraft dropped napalm bombs that destroyed the British cargo ship SS Springfjord at Puerto San José. The P-38 had been the only American fighter manufactured on a large scale throughout the country's participation in World War II.