Richard Bong, the P-38 Lightning, and the Forty Kills No American Fighter Pilot Has Ever Matched

Richard Bong shot down 40 Japanese aircraft between 1942 and 1944, making him America’s ace of aces - a record that has stood for more than eighty years and, given the nature of modern air combat, is almost certainly permanent. He was killed on August 6, 1945, testing a jet fighter in California, the same morning the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Who Was Richard Bong?

Richard Ira Bong was born on September 24, 1920, in Poplar, Wisconsin, the second of nine children. His father farmed and ran a small store. Nothing in that background predicted what he would become.

Bong was consumed by aviation from adolescence - building models, reading aviation magazines, tracking every development in flight he could find. When the Army Air Forces opened cadet training in 1941, he applied immediately. He earned his wings in January 1942 at age 21.

Before he saw combat, he was already drawing attention. During operational training at Hamilton Field near San Francisco, he flew a residential street at rooftop level, low enough that a housewife wrote a formal complaint to the base commander saying she could have handed him her laundry. The Army officially disapproved. The precision required to thread a fighter down a city street at speed without touching anything spoke for itself.

They assigned him to the P-38 Lightning.

The P-38 Lightning: Why It Suited Bong

Standing next to a P-38 clarifies why this airplane dominated the Pacific. The wingspan is 52 feet. Twin booms extend from the engines back to the tail assembly. Twin Allison V-12 liquid-cooled engines turn their propellers in opposite directions, canceling each other’s torque. That counter-rotation made the P-38 an exceptionally stable gun platform - when you pulled the trigger, the nose didn’t yaw. What you aimed at, you hit.

The armament was concentrated in the center nacelle: four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon, all converging roughly 1,000 feet in front of the aircraft. An enemy inside that cone had no good options.

The P-38 also had extraordinary range for a fighter of that era - combat missions of over 1,000 miles. In the Pacific, where the distances between bases were measured in hours of flight over open water, that range wasn’t a luxury. It was the reason American fighters could escort bombers into Japanese-held territory at all.

Combat Over New Guinea

Bong arrived in the Southwest Pacific in late 1942 and was assigned to the Fifth Air Force, flying from primitive bases in New Guinea. Australia was the rear area. New Guinea was the front.

The conditions were brutal in ways the European theater rarely matched. Convective buildups reached 60,000 feet. Thunderstorms formed in minutes. The Owen Stanley Range pushed peaks above 13,000 feet, higher than a fully loaded fighter could safely climb. Heat and humidity rotted equipment, grew mold inside oxygen masks, and turned the laterite-mud airstrips into soup during the wet season.

The Japanese were defending Rabaul, their major base on the northeastern tip of New Britain. The aerial battles over New Guinea and the Bismarck Sea were constant and costly. Japanese pilots in 1942 and early 1943 were experienced, aggressive, and flying capable aircraft.

Fighting the Zero: Energy Tactics Over Dogfighting

The Mitsubishi Zero is sometimes dismissed in postwar accounts as easy prey. It was not. Yes, it lacked armor and self-sealing fuel tanks - weaknesses that compounded as the war went on. But at low and medium altitudes it was extraordinarily maneuverable, able to turn inside almost any American fighter in a horizontal fight if you gave it the chance.

American pilots learned this early: you did not dogfight a Zero on its terms. The correct tactic was energy management - boom and zoom. Come in with altitude and speed advantage, make a single firing pass, roll away hard, climb back out, extend, reset. Never let the Zero bleed your energy in a slow turning engagement at low altitude where it held every advantage.

Bong understood this instinctively, and it shaped every engagement he flew.

How Bong Flew: Close, Calm, Lethal

By most accounts, Bong was not a flashy pilot. He didn’t impress in the pattern or perform aerobatics casually. What he had was patience and an almost eerie calm in the cockpit.

He got close. Uncomfortably close. He would fly up behind a target at firing ranges most pilots would consider too short to set up and too tight to safely pull out of - and then he would fire, and the enemy aircraft would stop flying.

His wingmen operated on a standing arrangement: keep the Zeros off Bong while he worked the target. He could fixate completely on the geometry of a shot, and he needed his element to clear his six o’clock. Teammates described watching him as something between impressive and unsettling. He never seemed to rush. He was simply there, behind the target, and then it was over.

His first kills came in December 1942. By mid-1943 he was the leading American ace in the Pacific.

Breaking Rickenbacker’s Record

Eddie Rickenbacker had held America’s ace-of-aces title since World War I - 26 confirmed kills over France flying the SPAD 13. His record had stood for more than two decades and carried the full weight of national legend.

By early 1944, everyone in the Army Air Forces knew that record was coming down.

On October 27, 1944, over the Philippines, Richard Bong shot down his 27th Japanese aircraft and passed Rickenbacker’s record. Word reached home before he did. Rickenbacker responded by sending Bong a case of Scotch whisky. Bong didn’t drink. He was a quiet, clean-living Wisconsin farm kid who happened to be the most lethal fighter pilot in the American military. He accepted the gesture graciously and gave the Scotch to his squadronmates.

He kept flying.

The Medal of Honor and MacArthur’s Order

On December 12, 1944, at an airstrip on Leyte in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur awarded Bong the Medal of Honor. Not at a ceremony in Washington with dress uniforms and a reviewing stand - right there on the flight line, in the noise and heat of a combat airfield, in front of Bong’s squadron. Bong’s total at that point stood at 40 aerial victories.

MacArthur told him he was going home. That was not a suggestion. It was a direct order from the theater commander. MacArthur was not going to let America’s greatest living air hero get shot down over the Philippines by a last-ditch intercept.

Bong went home.

Marge Vattendahl

He had met Marge Vattendahl briefly before the war, in the compressed social calendar of a country moving toward a conflict everyone could feel coming. Somewhere over the Pacific at altitude, he had decided she was the one - the way certain things become simply decided when you have a lot of time to think and not much certainty about the future.

He named every P-38 he flew after her. One word on the nose: Marge. He wrote her hundreds of letters from New Guinea and the Philippines. She wrote back.

On February 10, 1945, Richard Bong and Marge Vattendahl were married in Superior, Wisconsin. He was 24 years old.

The P-80 Shooting Star and the Test Pilot Years

He could have taken a desk job - war bond tours, speeches, the full machinery of wartime public relations. Nobody would have faulted him. He had done everything anyone could have asked.

Instead, Lockheed called.

The Army Air Forces were fielding the P-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter. The shift from propeller aircraft to jet propulsion was the largest change in fighter aviation since powered flight began, and the program needed pilots who understood combat at its deepest level. Bong volunteered.

The P-80 was genuinely impressive. The Allison J33 turbojet produced 3,300 pounds of thrust - remarkable for a production aircraft in 1945. Top speed exceeded 500 miles per hour. It was clean, fast, and modern.

But it was a different world from the P-38. No propellers. No torque. Completely different emergency procedures. Jets of that era were sensitive to throttle inputs - advance the power lever too quickly and the engine could flame out. Ground operations, high-altitude fuel management, approach sight picture - everything Bong had built into his hands and reflexes over three years and 40 kills was, in important ways, the wrong set of reflexes for this airplane.

He accumulated roughly a dozen hours in the P-80.

August 6, 1945: Two Events, One Morning

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Bong was scheduled for a functional check flight at Lockheed’s facility in Burbank, California. Clear summer morning. He preflighted, taxied, and advanced the throttle.

The engine flamed out.

Investigators believed afterward that the auxiliary fuel boost pump had not been switched to the on position, starving the engine under the high-demand conditions of the takeoff roll. Some accounts indicate the aircraft got briefly airborne before losing power. What is certain is that Bong was too low and too slow when the engine quit. He attempted to exit the aircraft. He was not high enough for it to matter.

He was killed on impact. He was 24 years old. Marge had been his wife for less than six months.

That same morning, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The news cycles of August 6, 1945, were consumed entirely by that event. The death of Richard Bong was carried along in the current of the largest story of the century. The men who flew with him knew. The people of northern Wisconsin knew.

The Record That Will Never Be Broken

Bong is buried in Poplar, Wisconsin. The Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center stands in Superior, a few miles from where he grew up. Outside the post office in Poplar, a P-38 sits on a pedestal - a real aircraft, weathering Wisconsin winters - with one word on the nose in the same lettering it wore on every combat airplane he ever flew over the Pacific.

Marge.

She outlived him by decades. She never remarried.

Forty aerial victories. That record has stood for more than 80 years. In the era of beyond-visual-range missiles and radar-guided engagements measured in dozens of miles, no American fighter pilot will accumulate kills the way World War II made possible. That era is closed. The number is permanent.

Some records exist in categories that close behind them.

Primary sources: John Stanaway’s biography of Bong; Air Force Historical Research Agency records of Fifth Air Force operations in the Southwest Pacific. The Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin, is worth visiting if you’re ever near Lake Superior.

Key Takeaways

• Richard Bong shot down 40 Japanese aircraft flying the P-38 Lightning with the Fifth Air Force in the Southwest Pacific between 1942 and 1944 - the highest aerial victory total of any American fighter pilot in history.
• Bong broke Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record of 26 kills on October 27, 1944, over the Philippines; General MacArthur awarded him the Medal of Honor on December 12, 1944, and ordered him home.
• His success relied on energy tactics - never slow-turning with the maneuverable Zero - combined with extreme patience and unusually close firing ranges.
• He died on August 6, 1945, in a P-80 Shooting Star test flight accident at Burbank, California - the same morning the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima - just six months after marrying Marge Vattendahl.
• The record of 40 aerial victories will almost certainly stand forever; modern air combat doctrine and beyond-visual-range missile technology have made the conditions that produced it unrepeatable.