Maj, U.S. Army Air Forces — World War II
Richard Ira “Dick” Bong was born on September 24, 1920, in Superior, Wisconsin, the eldest of nine children of a Swedish immigrant father, and grew up on the family farm in Poplar, Wisconsin. As a boy he watched mail planes pass overhead on their way to President Calvin Coolidge’s Summer White House in Superior and knew he wanted to fly. He learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training Program while attending Superior State Teachers College and enlisted in the Army Air Corps aviation cadet program in May 1941, earning his wings in January 1942.
Bong was sent to the Southwest Pacific, where he flew the twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightning with the 49th Fighter Group. He scored his first victories over Buna, New Guinea, on December 27, 1942, and they came steadily after that. By his own admission his gunnery was not the best, so he compensated by closing to point-blank range before firing. In April 1944 he shot down his 26th and 27th Japanese aircraft, surpassing Eddie Rickenbacker’s American record from World War I. His P-38, named Marge for his sweetheart, Marjorie Vattendahl, carried her photograph on its nose.
By the fall of 1944 Bong was assigned to the V Fighter Command staff as an advanced gunnery instructor — a job that neither required nor expected combat flying. He volunteered for missions anyway, and between October 10 and November 15, 1944, flying from Leyte during the Philippines campaign, he shot down eight more enemy aircraft on hazardous sorties over Borneo and Leyte. For that voluntary combat, General Douglas MacArthur personally presented him the Medal of Honor in December 1944. By December 17 his score stood at 40 victories, every one of them in the P-38 — making him America’s top-scoring flying ace.
Sent home for good in January 1945, Bong married Marjorie on February 10 and became a test pilot for Lockheed in Burbank, California, flying the new P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter. On August 6, 1945 — the same day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima — his jet’s main fuel pump failed on takeoff and he was killed at age 24. He is buried in Poplar, Wisconsin, and his record of 40 aerial victories has never been surpassed by an American pilot.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society