Dick Bong, America's Ace of Aces, Forty Kills, and the Day He Died That Nobody Noticed

Major Richard Ira Bong died on August 6, 1945 - the same morning the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He was 24 years old, held the Medal of Honor, and had 40 confirmed aerial victories over the Pacific - more than any American fighter pilot in history, before him or since. The news of his death barely registered. The world was looking somewhere else.

Who Was Dick Bong?

Bong was born September 24, 1920, in Poplar, Wisconsin, a small farming community in Douglas County along the southern shore of Lake Superior. His father Carl ran a dairy farm. His mother Dora raised nine children. Dick was the second oldest.

There was no money for extras in rural Wisconsin during the 1920s and 1930s. What there was, stretching in every direction without interruption, was sky.

He encountered an airplane for the first time as a young teenager - a barnstormer who had put down in a field outside of town. By every account, the effect was immediate and permanent. He would figure out a way to fly, without yet knowing how a dairy farmer’s son from Poplar was going to make that happen.

How Dick Bong Learned to Fly

By seventeen, Bong had saved enough for lessons at a local grass strip. He soloed in the spring of 1939 in a 65-horsepower Piper J-3 Cub on a grass field outside of town.

He enrolled at Superior State Teachers College and entered the Civilian Pilot Training Program - the government’s quiet prewar hedge against a conflict nobody was officially planning for. He worked through it faster than most.

His instructors noticed something that was difficult to put into an evaluation report: a spatial instinct in the air that most pilots spend entire careers developing. He arrived with it already.

He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in May 1941 and earned his wings in January 1942. The country had been at war for 37 days.

Before he shipped out, he buzzed his girlfriend’s house in San Francisco at low altitude and flew under the Golden Gate Bridge - by most accounts, more than once. A general called him in. He was given extra duty and washed windows on the base as assigned. Then he shipped out to the Pacific.

Dick Bong’s Combat Record in the Pacific

Bong flew with the 49th Fighter Group out of Australia beginning in September 1942, in the Lockheed P-38 Lightning - the twin-boom, twin-engine fighter the Japanese nicknamed “two airplanes, one pilot” and American pilots called the fork-tailed devil. Armed with four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon, the P-38 carried its firepower on the nose rather than in the wings.

The P-38 was built for exactly the kind of war the Pacific turned out to be. Its combat radius measured in hundreds of miles. Over open ocean, hundreds of miles from a friendly field, the number of engines under your wings is not an abstraction - it is the margin between going home and not going home.

Bong scored his first kill in December 1942, reached ace status - five kills - by spring 1943, then kept going. Ten. Fifteen. He came home briefly in early 1944 for a rest rotation and war bond appearances, then returned to the Pacific.

A Technique That Broke the Rules

Standard Air Forces doctrine called for deflection shooting: calculate the angle, lead the target, put rounds where the aircraft will be by the time they arrive. It requires mathematics running in your head at 300 miles per hour while someone is trying to kill you.

Bong ignored it. He got close - uncomfortably close - maneuvering the P-38 until the deflection angle nearly collapsed to nothing. Not the textbook shot from four hundred yards. Close enough that if you misjudged the geometry, you would meet the other aircraft rather than shoot it.

He trusted his spatial instinct over the formula. His contemporaries described it consistently: calm as a man driving to church, while the world was on fire around him.

He named his P-38 Marge, after Marjorie Vattendahl of Superior, Wisconsin. Her portrait was painted on the nose. It flew over Rabaul, the Bismarck Sea, and the Philippine Islands.

The Medal of Honor and the 40th Kill

General George Kenney, who commanded Fifth Air Force and did not distribute praise easily, said publicly that Dick Bong was the finest combat pilot he had encountered in any theater of the war - any air force, any country.

On December 12, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur assembled his command at Dulag airstrip on the island of Leyte in the Philippines and pinned the Medal of Honor on Bong’s chest. MacArthur said he had never awarded the decoration to a man who deserved it more.

Five days later, on December 17, 1944, Bong shot down his 40th Japanese aircraft.

MacArthur grounded him permanently. The logic was direct: a pilot with forty kills and the Medal of Honor is no longer simply a combat asset. He is a symbol. If Bong went down over the Celebes Sea, Japan gained a propaganda victory the American public could not afford to absorb. MacArthur understood symbols at a level most generals never reached. He was not going to hand the enemy that story.

Marriage and the Return Home

Bong was sent back to the United States in January 1945. Two years of letters crossing the Pacific had built something between him and Marjorie Vattendahl that survived the distance.

They married on February 10, 1945. He was 24. She was 20.

He gave speeches in factory cafeterias and school auditoriums. He did war bond tours. He did it all without complaint and understood the purpose. But he was a pilot who wasn’t flying, and anyone who has been grounded for any reason, even a good one, knows exactly what that does over time. There is a particular restlessness - always half listening for engine noise.

The P-80 Shooting Star and the Final Flight

Bong volunteered for test work at Lockheed in Burbank, California, flying the P-80 Shooting Star - America’s first operational jet fighter. After years of Allison piston engines, the jet was something from a different world. The sound was different. The throttle response was different: move the power lever, wait a beat, then feel the aircraft accelerate in a way that was sustained and relentless in a way no piston engine could match.

He loved it immediately and said so in his reports. The engineers valued him. He was not a man who embellished, and not a man who minimized.

The Allison J-33 engine had problems common to early jet development - compressor surge, sensitivity to abrupt throttle movement, fuel system behavior that wasn’t yet fully understood. Lockheed was working through it flight by flight. That was the job.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Bong arrived at the Burbank plant, completed his preflight, suited up, ran through his checks, climbed into the P-80, and taxied to the runway. During the takeoff roll or in the first seconds after becoming airborne, the fuel boost pump failed. The engine starved and flamed out. Witnesses estimated the aircraft was below 100 feet when the problem began. There was no altitude to restart the engine and no runway remaining to put the aircraft back down.

The canopy separated from the aircraft. Whether Bong attempted to bail out or was thrown clear could not be established by the subsequent investigation. The report was rapid and sparse.

The aircraft hit the ground.

The Morning Nobody Was Watching

At 11:15 AM Hiroshima time - eight hours ahead of California - a B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay, flying from Tinian Island in the Northern Marianas, released a single bomb over the center of Hiroshima, Japan. Seventy thousand people were dead by noon, with tens of thousands more to follow in the days and weeks ahead. The world had changed in a moment.

The wire services ran both stories. Some newspapers carried both - a brief notice about a test pilot killed in California, alongside the enormous headline. Most readers saw only the enormous headline.

Nine days later, Japan surrendered.

There were street celebrations in every American city. Strangers crying in each other’s arms. The relief of years of terrible news, finally lifting.

In Poplar, Wisconsin, a 20-year-old woman named Marjorie Bong had been a widow for nine days.

Marjorie Bong

She kept his letters. She kept the photograph that had traveled in the cockpit with him across the entire Pacific - over every target, through all forty engagements, across all that ocean. She never remarried. She wore his name for the rest of her life.

Marjorie Bong died in 2002, fifty-seven years after that August morning.

Why This Matters to Pilots

Bong’s story captures something aviation culture tends not to celebrate loudly enough: the pilot who cannot be reduced to a formula. His technique was wrong by the book and unmatched in practice. He was precise in the air in a way instructors could see but not fully explain, and that gap between what the manuals prescribed and what he could actually do decided forty aerial engagements in his favor.

His death also represents the hidden ledger of the early jet era. The P-80 was obviously where aviation was going - jet propulsion, speeds and altitudes the piston engine could never reach. The engineers who designed it and the pilots who flew it were pushing against the edge of known territory, flight by flight, on engines that were not yet fully understood. Some of those pilots did not come back. Bong was not the last.

The Richard Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin, houses a restored P-38 bearing his name and his record. If you are ever in that part of the country, make the drive.

Key Takeaways

Major Richard Ira Bong holds the all-time American record with 40 confirmed aerial victories in the Pacific - a record that still stands today.
He flew the Lockheed P-38 Lightning with the 49th Fighter Group, using a close-in attack technique that defied standard doctrine but was devastatingly effective.
General MacArthur awarded him the Medal of Honor on December 12, 1944 and grounded him permanently five days later, after his 40th kill on December 17, 1944 - too valuable as a symbol to risk in further combat.
Bong died in a P-80 Shooting Star test flight accident at Burbank on August 6, 1945, when a fuel boost pump failure caused engine flameout at less than 100 feet of altitude - the same morning Hiroshima was bombed.
His wife Marjorie Bong never remarried, kept his letters and photograph from the cockpit, and carried his name until her death in 2002.