Richard Bong, America's Ace of Aces, and the August Sixth Morning That History Forgot to Tell

August 6, 1945 is remembered as the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. It is also the day America’s greatest fighter pilot died in an aircraft accident a world away from any front line. Major Richard Ira Bong - 24 years old, a farm kid from Poplar, Wisconsin who had shot down 40 Japanese aircraft over the Pacific - was killed when a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star flamed out on takeoff from Burbank, California. Both stories ran in the papers that day. One consumed every front page. The other ran smaller, quieter, diminished by proximity to catastrophe.

Who Was Richard Bong?

Richard Ira Bong was born in 1920 to a Swedish immigrant farming family and grew up in the small town of Poplar on Lake Superior’s western shore. His teachers described him as methodical rather than brilliant - the kind of student who worked a problem until he understood it completely. He found flying in high school, paying for lessons at a nearby grass strip through farm work.

When the Army Air Corps launched the Civilian Pilot Training Program in 1939, Bong enrolled without hesitation. He earned his wings at Strother Field in Kansas in January 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor. Advanced fighter training at Luke Field, Arizona drew consistent notes from his instructors: smooth, patient, no wasted control inputs.

The Golden Gate Bridge Incident

Before Bong shipped overseas, he came very close to ending his career before it started.

Flying out of Hamilton Field, north of San Francisco, Bong took his P-38 Lightning extremely low over the city. Accounts include flying loops around the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, buzzing Market Street close enough to rattle the cable cars, and flying at rooftop level through residential neighborhoods. A housewife in Oakland filed a formal written complaint that his propwash had blown her laundry off the clothesline.

The complaint reached General George Kenney - a First World War veteran who understood airpower as a strategic asset, not a supporting arm. Kenney ordered Bong to write a personal apology letter to the woman. Then, reportedly, he told his staff he wanted that pilot in his command. When Kenney received orders for the Southwest Pacific, he took Bong with him.

The P-38 Lightning and the Pacific Air War

Bong was assigned to the Ninth Fighter Squadron, Forty-Ninth Fighter Group in New Guinea in 1942. The theater was brutal: mountains rising to 14,000 feet, covered in cloud and jungle so dense that downed aircraft simply ceased to exist. Malaria, dengue fever, fungal infections, and parasites killed men as efficiently as the enemy.

His aircraft was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning - the “Fork-Tailed Devil,” as both German and Japanese pilots called it. Designed by Hall Hibbard and a young engineer named Kelly Johnson (who would later build some of the most famous aircraft in history at the Skunk Works), the Lightning’s twin-boom configuration housed twin Allison 12-cylinder engines, achieved a top speed of approximately 445 mph, and had a service ceiling above 44,000 feet. Over the Pacific, its most critical feature was simple: two engines. One engine over open ocean meant death. Two meant another chance.

Bong flew every mission with a photograph of Marge Vattendahl - a girl he’d known growing up in Poplar - taped inside his cockpit. His letters home were not the letters of someone romanticizing combat. They were the letters of a young man who wanted to come home.

Building a Record: 40 Kills

Bong’s first confirmed kills came within weeks of arriving in theater. His style was not aggressive or flamboyant. He positioned carefully, closed to effective range before firing, and was a precise marksman who wasted few rounds. Other aces built reputations on audacity or individual cunning. Bong built his on precision and patience - qualities that accumulate, kill by kill, until the total becomes something extraordinary.

At five kills, he was an ace. At twenty-six, he surpassed the American record set by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker during World War I - a mark that had stood for more than 25 years. He kept going. Thirty-one. Thirty-five.

General Kenney grew concerned. A pilot of this stature was a national symbol. If Bong went down over the jungle or in a dogfight above Leyte Gulf, the loss would reverberate far beyond the Forty-Ninth Fighter Group. Kenney ordered him to fly observation missions only - lead formations, but do not engage.

On December 17, 1944, flying one of those observation missions over the Philippines, Bong spotted a Japanese aircraft and engaged. Forty kills.

The following day, December 18, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur assembled the troops on the island of Leyte, named Bong the greatest American flier of the war, and pinned the Medal of Honor on his chest.

Coming Home

The Army Air Forces sent Bong home immediately. Combat was over for him.

He returned to Poplar. The town turned out. On February 10, 1945, he married Marge. The ceremony was quiet - the way both of them seemed to want it. She had waited. He had come back.

He was 24 years old. His record at the time of his return: 40 confirmed aerial victories, 500 combat hours over the Pacific, the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross with six oak leaf clusters. He was the most decorated American combat pilot of the Second World War.

The P-80 Shooting Star and a Dangerous Fuel System

Lockheed and the Army offered Bong a test pilot assignment in Burbank, California, working on the P-80 Shooting Star - America’s first operational jet fighter, and widely considered the future of aviation.

The P-80 was a fundamentally different machine. No propeller torque. No reciprocating vibration. Just a rising turbine whine and then clean, immediate thrust. The cockpit was unfamiliar. Power delivery was unfamiliar. Aircraft behavior at speed was unfamiliar.

And there was the fuel system.

The P-80’s design required the pilot to manually switch from the auxiliary fuel pump to the main pump during the takeoff roll and early climb. Miss that switch - or catch it late - and fuel flow would interrupt. The engine would flame out. At altitude with speed and options, a flame-out might be survivable. At low altitude, immediately after rotation, with no speed and nowhere to go, it was not.

This was documented. The procedures covered it. The test pilots knew it. But the habits that had carried Bong alive through 500 combat hours over the Pacific had all been built around a different aircraft, in different circumstances, over different ground.

August 6, 1945: Burbank, California

The morning of August 6, 1945 was clear. California sunshine. The kind of day you take off into and expect to land into.

Bong took off from the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank. The engine quit. He was low. He was slow. He was out of options.

He was 24 years old. He had been married five months and twenty-seven days.

Far across the Pacific, the Enola Gay - a Boeing B-29 out of Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands - had already reached Japan. “Little Boy” detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. local Japanese time. The war that Richard Bong had fought from three miles up over New Guinea - the war he had given 500 hours of his life to, the war he had wanted simply to survive and come home from - was effectively over by the time he did not come home from Burbank.

Why This Matters for Pilots

The manner of Bong’s death carries a specific lesson for anyone who flies. He survived 500 combat hours in the most intense aerial warfare in history. He died on a routine test flight because a new aircraft required a fuel pump switch during the takeoff roll, and the muscle memory built across years in a different cockpit didn’t make that switch in time.

Type transitions kill experienced pilots. New aircraft carry unfamiliar procedures, and unfamiliar procedures demand conscious attention at precisely the moments - low altitude, high workload - when instinct competes with checklists. Bong’s accident prefigured a pattern that accident investigators would document across the entire jet age: proficiency in one aircraft does not transfer automatically to another, no matter how many hours precede it.

Legacy: America’s Ace of Aces

General Kenney, upon hearing the news, reportedly could not speak for some time. He said afterward: “He was the greatest fighter pilot that ever lived.” Not the greatest in the Pacific. Not the greatest American. The greatest that ever lived. Kenney had seen them all, and he knew what he was saying.

Marge Bong did not remarry. She spent decades keeping his memory alive - speaking at schools, talking to veterans groups, making certain the quiet kid from Poplar did not get permanently swallowed by bigger stories.

The Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center stands today in Superior, Wisconsin and houses a Lockheed P-38 Lightning on display. Not one of his specific combat aircraft - none of those survived the war - but the right airplane. The Fork-Tailed Devil. The twin-boom machine that carried America’s Ace of Aces through five hundred hours of the most intense air combat in history.

Key Takeaways

Richard Ira Bong (1920–1945) was America’s leading ace of World War II with 40 confirmed aerial victories, all achieved in the Pacific Theater in a P-38 Lightning.
He surpassed Eddie Rickenbacker’s WWI record of 26 kills in 1944, and received the Medal of Honor from General MacArthur on Leyte on December 18, 1944.
He died on August 6, 1945 - the same day the Hiroshima bomb was dropped - in a P-80 Shooting Star fuel system failure on takeoff from Burbank, California. He was 24 years old.
His death resulted from a required manual fuel pump switch during the takeoff roll - a procedure unfamiliar to a pilot whose habits had been built entirely in a different aircraft, illustrating the specific danger type transitions pose to even the most skilled aviators.
General George Kenney, who commanded him throughout the Pacific campaign, called him “the greatest fighter pilot that ever lived” - a judgment made by a man who had observed the full field he was measuring against.