P-38 Lightning vs F4U Corsair: Which WWII Fighter Was Better?

The P-38 Lightning and the F4U Corsair were designed for different jobs. The Army wanted a high-altitude interceptor, and the Navy wanted a fast carrier fighter.

That split explains almost every difference below. The P-38 went for range and altitude with two engines, and the Corsair went for speed and toughness with one.

Speed: the Corsair is faster, with a catch

On paper the Corsair wins. Our database lists the P-38 at 414 mph and the Corsair at 447 mph, and the Corsair figure belongs to the late F4U-4.

Published sources put the F4U-4 anywhere from 446 to 448 mph, so treat the last digit as soft. The earlier F4U-1 was slower, and only 13 mph (21 km/h) behind the P-47 Thunderbolt.

Both aircraft had a first to their name. The P-38 was the first military aircraft to fly faster than 400 mph in level flight. The XF4U-1 became the first single-engined US fighter to top 400 mph, on 1 October 1940.

Range and altitude: where the P-38 wins

Our database lists the Lightning’s range at 1,300 miles (2,100 km), against 1,000 miles (1,600 km) for the Corsair. It also had the higher service ceiling, 44,000 feet against 41,500 feet, and the better climb rate, 4,750 feet per minute against 4,360. Range figures depend on how they are measured, and Wikipedia’s F4U-4 data lists a combat range of just 328 miles (528 km).

Range was the P-38’s real weapon in the Pacific. On 18 April 1943, 16 P-38G Lightnings flew 435 miles (700 km) from Guadalcanal at 10 to 50 feet above the ocean to intercept Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s transport over Bougainville. Two Mitsubishi bombers fell, and the Americans lost one P-38.

In the second half of 1944, P-38L pilots from Dutch New Guinea flew 950 miles (1,530 km), fought for 15 minutes and returned. Those long legs were invaluable until the P-47N and P-51D entered service.

Guns and bombs: one cluster against six wing guns

The P-38 put all its guns in the nose: one 20 mm cannon and four .50 caliber machine guns. Wing guns have to be aimed to converge at one distance, while the nose battery let a good pilot hit targets out to about 1,000 yards (900 m).

The Corsair carried six .50 caliber guns in its wings, with the F4U-1C variant swapping them for four 20 mm cannon. Our database lists the same maximum payload for both, 4,000 pounds, so the old claim that the Corsair carried twice the load does not hold up.

Where the Corsair pulled ahead was how it was used. Corsairs delivered 15,621 short tons (14,171 metric tons) of bombs in the war, about 70% of all bombs dropped by US fighters.

One engine or two

Two engines were a real advantage over open ocean. Wikipedia notes the P-38 was considered safer for long over-water flights, and that was a reason it did so well in the Pacific.

The layout had a trap. The Lightning’s propellers turned outward at the top of the arc, so a pilot who followed normal twin-engine drill and pushed the good engine to full power after an engine failure on takeoff could flip the aircraft. Pilots were taught to reduce power, feather the dead propeller and then bring the other engine up gradually.

The Corsair’s single Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp made 2,100 hp on the F4U-4, a huge engine for its day. That power was also its handling problem, because the torque punished a pilot who had to go around on a carrier deck.

Why both were hard to fly

The P-38 had a high-speed dive problem that nobody had met before. Near Mach 0.68 in a dive, the tail shook, the nose tucked under and the controls could lock, a condition now called compressibility. It was not true flutter, because engineers stiffened the tail and the shaking did not change.

The fix was dive recovery flaps under the wings. They reached the production line in June 1944 on the last 210 P-38J-25-LO aircraft, after a 14-month delay, and a shipment of about 200 retrofit kits was lost when an RAF fighter shot down the C-54 carrying them.

The Corsair had different faults. At low speed its left wing stalled before the right, and the long nose hid the runway on approach. Early Navy pilots called it the hog, the hose nose and the bent-wing widow maker.

Carriers: the Corsair’s hard road to the deck

The Navy first picked the easier-to-land Grumman F6F Hellcat as its carrier fighter and passed the Corsair to the Marine Corps. Marines flew it from land bases, starting at Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field in February 1943.

The Royal Navy cleared the Corsair for carrier operations well before the US Navy did. Its fixes included raising the pilot’s seat and clipping each wingtip by 8 inches (20 cm), and the US Navy finally accepted the type for carriers in April 1944 after a longer landing-gear strut cured its bounce.

In the end only 15% of Corsair sorties flew from carrier decks. The rest came from land, where the aircraft was at its best.

The P-38 never had that fight. The Navy was not interested in a proposed carrier version with folding wings and an arresting hook.

Combat record: be careful with the kill ratios

In the Pacific, P-38s shot down more than 1,800 Japanese aircraft, and more than 100 of its pilots became aces. The top two American aces of the war, Richard Bong with 40 victories and Thomas McGuire with 38, both flew Lightnings.

US figures show Corsair pilots claiming 2,140 victories against 189 losses in the air, an overall ratio of more than 11:1. Wikipedia points out that this flatters the Corsair, because it mostly met air opposition in the Solomons, Rabaul and Leyte before its work shifted to ground attack.

Two nicknames are worth treating with caution. “Whistling Death” for the Corsair is not supported by Japanese sources, and “Fork-tailed Devil” for the P-38 has no German source from before a 1943 magazine article.

After the war

The P-38 faded quickly. The last Lightnings in the US Air Force retired in 1949, and Italy flew 100 late-model aircraft until 1956, losing many in accidents.

The Corsair kept fighting. It served in Korea, in the French wars in Indochina and Algeria, and in the 1956 Suez operation. Its last combat came in 1969 in the Football War between Honduras and El Salvador.

Production tells the same story. More than 10,000 Lightnings were built, while 12,571 Corsairs were built across 16 models from 1942 to 1953, the longest run of any US piston-engined fighter.

Verdict: P-38 or Corsair?

For a fighter that had to launch from a ship and hit hard on the way back, the Corsair was the better aircraft. It was faster, tougher and built in larger numbers, and it fought for more than 25 years.

For long overwater missions and high altitude, the Lightning was the better tool, and it carried the war’s two top American aces. For the wider field, see our guide to the best American fighters of World War II.