The P-38 prototype was a very different aircraft from the production aircraft. The earliest designs lacked the fillet between the wings and the fuselage/cockpit pod, and once those were installed the buffeting at high speeds was reduced somewhat, and as long as you followed the Do Not Exceed speeds at the designated altitudes, you were okay. Of course, at extreme altitudes the Lightning could exceed its DNE speed in level flight rather easily, which was the price you sometimes pay for being one of the first to get that high and that fast...
But all high performance aircraft of that era were subject to compression effects when they went past their critical Mach number--it's just that the P-38's number was a bit on the low side, due in part because the whole compression/critical Mach problem was not well understood when it was designed in the late 1930s.
In any case, if you could get the aircraft below 6200m or so before it broke, it would supposedly recover quite nicely in the thicker air.
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horseback
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