The line chief awakened me before daylight and told me to go out and preflight a P-38 with the squadron identifier LMT. He said I would now be crewing for John Eiland. My pilot had been transferred out to another outfit when we left England. LMT was a new P-38 ferried over the southern Atlantic route from the Lockheed factory and had arrived at Tafarouri the previous day. I can remember the following as if it happened yesterday. I finally located LMT with my flashlight. I tried to start the engines for the preflight but the battery was dead. My first thoughts were not pleasant nor was I confident, at that early hour, that my beginning as a crew chief for Big John, who was second in command, was getting off to a good start. I knew Big John would be out to take off at the break of dawn, and I needed to get moving although I was all by myself. I sat down in the cockpit and primed the left engine with fuel, set the throttles, set the mixture controls, set the parking brakes and put wheel chocks in front of the wheels. The plane still had the belly tanks on from its last flight, I thought if I was successful in getting the engine inertia starter up to speed by hand cranking the starter by myself, I would be able to get the left engine started. I could jump on the belly tank, make one leap onto the wing, another leap into the cockpit and hit the starter switch before the inertia starter lost speed to turn the engine over. I believe the adrenaline jolt I was having, would enable me to make the first vault onto the belly tank and the rest would be a race against time. I hand cranked the inertia starter until I knew, from the high pitch whine, it wasn't going to go any faster so I dropped the crank and made my first leap. Every thing went as planned and the engine started at the first rotation of the propeller. I then started the right engine by using the generator on the left engine and continued on with the pre-flight. http://www.1stfighter.org/warstories/duncan.html

Phil. It's a while since I saw the film but I think you'll find the aircraft was a Fairchild C-82 Packet. http://afmuseum.com/aircraft/c82.html
I agree with what you say but this is a work of fiction. Where's your imagination?  
I believe the aircraft they flew was actually created from a C-82. It did fly but as was previously mentioned the pilot was unfortunately killed. That's why there was no foootage of the actual landing & the film ended abrubtly.

PS. I didn't get it quite right. Here's the full story with photos. http://stripe.colorado.edu/~steinerd/Phoenix.html

The ones with authentic footage are always interesting to see. However, having seen so many History Channel Doco's containing the same footage over and over, I don't think there's much around that's not been used in films or doco's that I haven't seen.
I know that to 99% of people a film is a means of entertainment and it's only we buffs that are picky about things, but if I see that shot of an F6F on a carrier hitting the island and breaking in half, revealing the bulkhead behind the cockpit one more time, I'll scream.
Christ, isn't the poor bugger embarrassed enough yet..............lol.
As I said in my post, they don't seem too particular about getting the sequences correct in terms of time and place etc. For instance, the shot I mention above was shown in the Battle of Midway movie. Of course there were no F6F's. There were also many other shots which were glaring errors. But as I said, for most the entertainment value is there.
I could go to a movie about something I don't know much about and not be concerned with similar oversights.

As for Ronald's character having difficulty recognising Zeros. The Dauntless was very similar in shape and at a distance, especially in poor light, many mistakes were made. I read that Joe Foss (pretty sure it was him) was flying and spotted a group of Dauntlesses and thought he'd give them an escort. He ended up in the middle of a flight of Zeros. So it happened to the best.  

how many Spits and Hurri's did they have available during the production in '68?