Major Richard Bong, the P-38 Lightning, and the Forty Aerial Victories That Made America's Ace of Aces

Major Richard Ira Bong holds the record that defines American military aviation: 40 confirmed aerial victories in World War II. A dairy farmer’s son from northern Wisconsin, he flew the P-38 Lightning over the Pacific and became the deadliest aerial combatant in U.S. history. No American pilot has come close to that number since.

From Superior, Wisconsin to the Army Air Forces

Bong was born in September 1920 in Superior, Wisconsin - timber and dairy country on the south shore of Lake Superior. The eldest son in a family of nine children, he was drawn to aviation from an early age, during an era when barnstormers still worked county fairs and a two-dollar biplane ride was worth talking about for the rest of the summer.

By high school he had talked a local crop duster into taking him up. That was enough. He enrolled at Superior State Teachers College primarily because it gave him access to the Army Air Corps Civilian Pilot Training Program, launched in 1939, which offered subsidized flight instruction to college students. He earned his private certificate and kept going.

He enlisted in the Army Air Forces in May 1941, at age twenty. After advanced flying school in California and transition training at Luke Field, Arizona, his instructors were writing the kind of evaluation notes reserved for pilots who are genuinely different. Bong possessed a built-in spatial awareness - an instinct for where his aircraft sat in three dimensions relative to everything around him - that no syllabus can produce.

The Incident That Sent Him to the Pacific

In September 1942, stationed at Hamilton Field in northern California and flying P-38s, Bong was reported for buzzing downtown San Francisco. Not the outskirts - Market Street. He allegedly flew low enough that a woman hanging laundry on a rooftop had her sheets scattered by his propwash.

The report landed on the desk of General George Kenney, commander of the Fifth Air Force. Rather than impose a conventional punishment, Kenney reportedly ordered Bong to fly slow rolls over a local street as a form of documented apology - the kind of consequence only a general with a sense of humor would devise. Then he arranged for Bong to be transferred to his theater. Kenney became one of the most influential advocates of Bong’s career over the next two years.

The P-38 Lightning: The Airplane That Made It Possible

Bong was assigned to the 431st Fighter Squadron, 475th Fighter Group, and flew the Lockheed P-38 Lightning - an aircraft unlike anything else the Allies put in the air.

The P-38 was a twin-boom, twin-engine design with the pilot sitting in a central nacelle between the two tail assemblies. At maximum takeoff weight it reached 17,000 pounds, with a 52-foot wingspan. Two Allison V-12 engines, each producing around 1,400 horsepower, drove counter-rotating propellers that largely eliminated the torque effects that made single-engine fighters demanding on takeoff.

At altitude in a clean configuration, it could reach 400 miles per hour or better. Its armament - four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon, all mounted forward in the nose - fired straight ahead with no convergence point to calculate. What you aimed at, you hit.

The Japanese called it the two-tailed demon. German pilots in Europe independently called it the fork-tailed devil. When two separate theaters of the same war give your aircraft the same category of name, the manufacturer did something right.

How Bong Fought: Altitude, Speed, and Deflection

Bong’s tactical approach was disciplined and repeatable. He preferred altitude. He would position above a target, read the geometry of the engagement, then dive, close fast, and fire. Then extend, climb, reset. He avoided slow turning fights at low speed whenever possible - those were where the Japanese Zero excelled - and instead used the P-38’s speed and climbing ability to control the terms of every engagement on his own.

He also had an exceptional gift for deflection shooting: leading a moving target through its turn and placing rounds where the aircraft was going to be, not where it was at the moment of firing. In actual combat, with your own aircraft maneuvering and a target cutting across your field of view, this is extraordinarily difficult to execute consistently. Bong made it look natural.

His first confirmed kill came in December 1942 - a Japanese Zero. By the spring of 1943 he was in double digits. By December 1943, he had 21 confirmed victories.

Breaking Rickenbacker’s Record

The benchmark in American military aviation was Eddie Rickenbacker’s 26 kills from World War I. Every ace in every theater knew that number. By early 1944, it was apparent that Bong was closing in on it fast.

In April 1944, he passed it - 27 confirmed kills. General Douglas MacArthur personally pinned the Medal of Honor on him at a ceremony in the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur - not known for offering praise he didn’t mean - acknowledged both the record and the character behind it in the citation.

Then MacArthur sent him home for a war bond tour.

Bong returned to Superior, proposed to Marjorie Vattendahl, a young woman he had been writing letters to throughout the war, and she accepted. The coverage was genuine rather than manufactured - America’s Ace of Aces and the woman waiting at home - which is probably why it resonated as broadly as it did.

The Final Forty

General Kenney allowed Bong to return to the Pacific in the fall of 1944, nominally as an aerial gunnery instructor in an observer capacity. He was not officially cleared for combat. Combat found him anyway. By December 1944, the total stood at 40 confirmed aerial victories.

MacArthur called him in personally. The message was not a reprimand - it was closer to an order framed as a gift. You have given everything that can be asked of any man. Go home. Marry the girl. Live.

The Morning of August 6, 1945

Bong came home. He and Marjorie married in February 1945. He was assigned stateside as a test pilot evaluating new jet aircraft, including the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star - America’s first operational jet fighter.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Bong took off in a P-80 from Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, California. Shortly after liftoff, the fuel boost pump failed. The engine flamed out. He was too low to recover. He was 24 years old. He and Marjorie had been married six months.

That same morning, the Enola Gay had taken off from Tinian Island in the Pacific. By the time Bong’s P-80 went down in the San Fernando Valley, the atomic bomb had already fallen on Hiroshima. The news services were consumed with what may have been the most consequential single event of the twentieth century. In that flood of coverage, it was easy to miss that America’s Ace of Aces had died on the same morning the war he had spent three years fighting was effectively over.

A Record That Has Never Been Challenged

40 aerial victories. In a war where five kills earned you the title of ace, Bong recorded eight times that total. No American combat pilot in any conflict since has come within sight of the number. The reasons are part technological, part doctrinal, and part the particular character of a specific kind of warfare that no longer exists in the same form. Whatever the explanation, the record stands as a fixed point in aviation history.

The Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center in Poplar, Wisconsin - near where he grew up - holds his story and the aircraft that defined it. A P-38 Lightning is on display there. If you’re traveling through northern Wisconsin, it is worth the drive.

Key Takeaways

Major Richard Ira Bong holds the all-time American aerial combat record: 40 confirmed victories during World War II in the Pacific theater
He flew the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, using altitude advantage, high-speed diving attacks, and exceptional deflection shooting to control every engagement on his own terms
He broke Eddie Rickenbacker’s WWI record of 26 kills in April 1944 and received the Medal of Honor from General Douglas MacArthur
Despite being kept in a nominal non-combat role on his final Pacific deployment, he reached 40 victories before MacArthur ordered him home for good
Bong died on August 6, 1945 - the same day as the Hiroshima bombing - when a P-80 fuel boost pump failed on takeoff in Burbank, California; he was 24 years old and had been married six months