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You must be wearing a helmet and armor padding there, Phil. ; )
The existence of the name 'Apache' is not in doubt, but the application of the name to the A-36 is. The name actually predates the A-36 and was dropped before A-36 production even began. NAA referred to their original prototype NA-73 as the 'Apache' in October 1940 sales ads - it being the initial "house"/company name that the NAA sales department was pushing. The 'Apache' name was also unofficially applied to the XP-51's, and the original production P-51 (no letter designation, and designed/built prior to the A-36) may have also been referred to as the 'Apache' for a brief time, during the initial contract & early production time frame. In June 1942, the British name 'Mustang' became official with the US military, to be applied to NAA's fighter, at which point the A-36 had yet to even go into manufacture - that didn't get started until September 1942. The very first USAAF P-51's (no letter designation)/F-6A's entered combat service in North Africa in the spring of 1943, months after the name 'Mustang' had already officially been assigned to the type by the US Government. The A-36's entered service shortly thereafter. There has never been any evidence that the A-36 was officially named anything other than 'Mustang' - it must be remembered that the US military did not want to have different names assigned to different variants of the same plane, that otherwise would clue the enemy into these differences - for instance, all of the photo-recon F-6's were still called 'Mustang', just as the A-36 was (and this holds true for other types in the USAAF inventory). One of the things that kept the name 'Apache' around (besides the early NAA promotional ads) is because a few of the early newspaper reports that came out of the Mediterranean Theatre in '43, written by the US Defense press and then re-printed in a number of different papers, used the original NAA sales dept. name 'Apache' to describe these new fighters going into combat (these being the first P-51's (no letter designation)/F-6A's and A-36's), rather than the actual USAAF official name that had already been set in stone. Meanwhile, North American Aviation's own newspaper/reports at the same time ('43) referred to the A-36 as the 'Mustang'. Dutch Kindelberger himself liked the name 'Mustang' more than their initial idea of 'Apache'.
Despite all of this, the 'Apache' name/myth has grown so large in the post-WWII years that it has become very difficult for museums, books, model kits, etc., to refer to the A-36 as anything other than 'Apache', as they are likely to hear far fewer critics/complaints - if they were to use the proper name 'Mustang', as was originally official, they are likely to get a lot more feedback from those that don't know all of this about how they got it "wrong" (though it has been great to see this changing now). Even though the USAF Museum admitted a number of years ago that the name 'Apache' was never an official name used with the A-36, the signage at the museum for their own A-36 was only finally corrected from 'Apache' to 'Mustang' just this year.
A segment of MTO A-36 pilots wanted to have the aircraft officially renamed as the 'Invader', to separate/distinguish themselves as different than the Mustang fighter groups being reported about in Stars & Stripes - if the A-36 had been named 'Apache', there wouldn't have been a need for a name change as they would have already had that unique name separating them. The 'Invader' name is well documented and known to have been used unofficially by the pilots/ground crews that flew and worked on the A-36 in the MTO. The name 'Invader' has a whole lot more historical cred, applied to the A-36, than 'Apache'.
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