Of the half-dozen or so aircraft bearing nose art inspired by the WWII-era comic book “Bunnies At War,” few have a history as confusing as the P-38 Lightning named “Double Trouble.” In part, this is due to the fact that a succession of P-38s carried the name, with the mascot being passed along as older planes were superseded, shot to pieces or otherwise written off the inventory; and in part because of the remarkable events involving the plane's pilot, as told by himself—no two stories of which seem to fit within the same realm of possibility, although in some cases corroborated by old squadron mates.

“Double Trouble’s” pilot, 2nd Lt. Larry Szelznik, does not seem to have been a remarkable man in other respects, though he does seem to have been a pilot to whom remarkable things happened … or perhaps he was just one of the greatest BS artists who ever flew.

After the lapse of many years, and with the fading memories of the participants and fragmentary squadron records, it is often hard to determine the veracity of an event through the "fog of war." Still it is a truism, particularly in times of crisis, that some of the most unlikely and unbelievable of wartime events can turn out to be actual fact...

The first “Double Trouble” was a P-38H, tail number 267079, and the last was an L model, tail number unknown at present. The first in the series is the only one known to be represented by a photograph.

The winsome bunny cowgirl mascot of the “Double Trouble” is obviously one of the characters in the “Bunnies At War” comic, apparently from an issue of the series that I have not seen myself. The name “Double Trouble” is obviously a play on the Lightning’s twin Allison engines, the bunny-girl’s twin six-guns, and other obvious twin attributes—the reader need hardly be reminded of a bit of Lightning nose-art in the Pacific theater, depicting a bathing beauty doing a swan-dive with those attributes thrust stiffly ahead, like the propeller spinners of the P-38 on which it was painted. The idle time and enforced celibacy of war tended to inspire the artistic imagination.

Even discounting Lt. Szelznik’s personal testimony, the “Double Trouble” accumulated a creditable war record. Flying out of Kings Cliffe Army Air Force Base, England, with the 343rd Fighter Squadron, 55th Fighter Group, Szelznik was in fact officially credited with five and a half air victories, and various targets destroyed on the ground—officially. Unofficially, he claimed at least two dozen air victories, ranging from the twin-jet Messerschmidt 262—an impossibly fast target, even if the 262 and the Lightning had shared the European sky at the same time—to the vast, lumbering ME 321 “Gigant” troop transport.

The various incarnations of “Double Trouble” were, by Szelznik’s testimony, lost in various dramatic ways—a pitched battle against five (or nine) ME 109s, or ramming a V-1 “Buzz Bomb” that was headed for Windsor Castle (the heroic pilot, who bailed out at the last possible instant, was unaccountably passed over for the appropriate military honors for this exploit), and so on.

In fact, the first “Double Trouble,” 7097, was written off under rather mysterious circumstances. Returning home moderately damaged following a low-level strafing mission, in which Lt. Szelznik seems to have become separated from his squadron mates over Belgium, he claimed to have shot up a moving ammo train, which exploded, blowing or throwing something through his plane's left wing. Later aerial photographs in the area failed to show any evidence of a destroyed train, but there was a definite hole in the P-38's wing, where closer inspection revealed pieces of fabric that may have come from an engineer's cap. In any case, the plane was written off after “Double Trouble’s” nose wheel collapsed during the rough landing—a fairly common occurrence in Lightnings—and the plane was thoroughly “pranged” and scrapped.

The last of the line, the L model, supposedly had the most dramatic demise. As Szelznik told it, he was flying cover for the epic battle for the bridge at Remargen during the closing days of the war, beating off waves of desperate German fighters attempting to strafe the Allied troops, while the Nazis lobbed every weapon at their disposal at the bridge in a frantic effort to halt the Allied advance.

Among those weapons was the infamous V-2 rocket, which had great range but was fairly inaccurate against any target smaller than a major city.

As Szelznik told it, he saw the “frozen lightning” of the climbing V-2’s exhaust far in the distance, and would have flown over to shoot it down, but couldn’t leave the defensive duty to which he was assigned; and minutes later, the rocket came plummeting out of the stratosphere at supersonic speed, struck the “Double Trouble” in midair, and disintegrated it in a titanic explosion.

Observers on the ground only reported a massive aerial detonation, but witnesses are few since at that very moment the center section of the old railway bridge, weakened and overtaxed, collapsed. The men scrambling for either end of the bridge had little time or interest for events taking place far overhead. Lt. Szelznik was later fished out of the Rhine, far downstream, along with several other survivors of the Remargen bridge's final collapse. While the scattered remains of "Double Trouble" are presumably still somewhere on the bottom of the river, no wreckage was ever reported found.

Szelznik himself told me this story in the lobby of his veteran’s hospital in Chicago—along with many others— but unfortunately there is no room to recount more here. At any rate, verification is spotty at best for many events in the "Double Trouble's" history, as Szelznik tells it.

What cannot be denied, notwithstanding all this, is that the P-38 Lightning was a remarkable plane, the “Double Trouble” was certainly not inferior to the majority of the breed, and the pistol-packing bunny girl was a charming and doubly appropriate mascot.