Declassified. 1944. High above the sweltering jungles of the Pacific, a lone predator scans the skies. Below him, Japanese fighters claw for altitude, desperate to intercept American bombers. They have no idea they are being stalked by a ghost. This ghost wasn’t a hardened killer. He was a quiet farm boy from Wisconsin. And by the war’s end, he would achieve 40 confirmed victories, a record of aerial lethality that has never been broken. How did the most unassuming pilot in the US Army Air Forces become its deadliest instrument of war?

This is the story of the man they couldn’t kill, the record they can’t break, and the brutal truth of what it took to become America’s ace of aces. While Bong was honing his marksmanship, the world was catching fire. In Europe, the Nazi war machine was crushing nations. In the Pacific, the Empire of Japan was executing a campaign of brutal conquest. By 1941, America was still a sleeping giant, but the winds of war were blowing across the ocean.

Bong, like so many of his generation, felt the call. He enlisted in the Army Airore Aviation Cadet Program. Driven not by a thirst for glory, but by a simple, profound love of flight. His instructors saw it immediately. The boy was a natural. He didn’t just fly an airplane. He became part of it. The controls were an extension of his own body. But with this raw talent came a dangerous edge, a restlessness. Stationed at Hamilton Field in California, Second Lieutenant Bong was introduced to the most advanced and perhaps the most lethal fighter in the American arsenal, the P38 Lightning.

He fell in love, and that love nearly destroyed his career before it ever began. Official reports sanitized and filed away document a series of unauthorized arabatic displays. But the reality was far more reckless. Bong treated the skies over San Francisco as his personal playground. He flew his P38 down Market Street so low that pedestrians could see the rivets on its wings. He looped the Golden Gate Bridge, a flagrant, breathtaking violation of every rule in the book. He was showing off, yes, but he was also testing the limits, his own and the aircrafts.

His commanding officer, General George Kenny, was a man who had no time for hot shots. He was a stern, brilliant tactician responsible for the entire fifth air force. When Bong was brought before him, expecting to be grounded for good, he faced a storm. The reprimand was severe, a dressing down that would have shattered a lesser man. But Kenny saw something else in the young pilot’s eyes. It wasn’t arrogance. It was confidence. An absolute unshakable mastery of his machine.

He saw what the flight instructor saw. A prodigy. Kenny, one of the most perceptive commanders of the war, made a decision that would change the course of the air war in the Pacific. Instead of ruining the boy’s career, he would forge him into a weapon. He kept Bong under his direct command, assigned him more training, and then he unleashed him. By September 1942, Bong was deployed to New Guinea. This was the bleeding edge of the war, a brutal, unforgiving battlefield where American forces were desperately trying to halt the Japanese advance.

The Japanese pilots he would face were not rookies. They were battleh hardened veterans, masters of their craft, who had been fighting since 1937. They flew the Mitsubishi A6M0, a fighter so agile, so legendary it could outmaneuver almost anything the allies put in the sky. On paper, a farm boy from Wisconsin with a handful of flight hours stood no chance. But Bong wasn’t flying just any plane. He was flying the P38 herate lightning designed by the legendary Clarence Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.

The P38 was a monster, a revolutionary aircraft that looked like nothing else in the sky. Its twin boom design powered by two roaring Allison engines gave it incredible speed and an astonishing rate of climb. Most importantly, all its weapons, four 50 caliber machine guns and a 20 mm cannon, were clustered in the nose. This was a critical design choice. Wing-mounted guns had to be angled to converge at a specific point. Fire too early or too late, and you’d miss.

The P-38’s firepower, however, shot straight forward in a concentrated buzzsaw of lead and high explosives. If a pilot could get a target in his sights for even a fraction of a second, the result was utter annihilation. But the Lightning had a dark side. It was a killer. The plane was notoriously difficult to master. Its advanced turbo superchargers were temperamental. In a high-speed dive, it suffered from a terrifying phenomenon called compressibility, where shock waves would form on the wings, freezing the controls and sending the pilot into an unreoverable terminal plunge.

Dozens of American pilots had already died, just learning to tame the beast. The Japanese masters of the dog fight knew the Allied playbook. They would lure American fighters into a low-speed turning battle where the zero was king. An American pilot who tried to turn with a zero often died in a matter of seconds. Richard Bong didn’t try to turn. In his first combat missions over Buna, New Guinea, he watched, he learned, and he calculated. He saw the Zeros dance through the sky, and he understood.

He could not win their game, so he invented his own. His doctrine was brutally simple. One, use the P38’s powerful engines to climb above the enemy. Always hold the altitude advantage. Two, convert that altitude into speed, diving on your target in a high-speed pass. Three, unleash the devastating firepower of the nose-mounted guns in a single, precise, controlled burst. Four, use your momentum to climb back to the safety of high altitude. Never stick around, never turn, hit and run.

His combat reports were a reflection of his personality, understated, clinical, and brutally efficient. He noted altitude, engagement conditions, and the outcome. What the reports didn’t capture was the genius at work. Other pilots would spray long, hopeful bursts of ammunition. Bong was different. His gun camera footage, later studied by intelligence officers, showed a chilling pattern, patient stalking, careful positioning, a brief, violent firing pass and immediate disengagement. His squadron mates were in awe. Major Thomas Lynch, another decorated ace, described Bong’s technique as that of a surgeon.

He was patient, precise, and wasted nothing. His ammunition efficiency was off the charts. The key was his innate understanding of deflection shooting. The art of firing not where the target is, but where it is going to be. Most pilots spent their entire careers struggling with it. For Bong, it was as natural as breathing. His victory count began to climb. One kill, then two on a single mission. A bomber here, a zero there. He was a quiet phantom-like presence in the sky, appearing from nowhere, striking with lethal precision and vanishing back into the sun.

The Japanese, analyzing their losses, started noting a pattern. Vicious, high-speed attacks from above by a twintailed devil. They gave the P38 a chilling nickname, the forktailed devil. And Richard Bong was its most terrifying practitioner. On his own P38, he painted the name of his sweetheart back home, Marge. It became a legendary sight in the Pacific skies, a symbol of death for his enemies and a symbol of hope for the bomber crews he escorted. By early 1943, he was an ace.

By the end of the year, his tally was growing at a staggering rate, and the quiet farm boy was becoming a living legend. July 1943, above the port of Lei, New Guinea, the air was thick with smoke and fear. A massive formation of Japanese bombers escorted by a swarm of zero fighters thundered towards Allied positions on the ground. For the soldiers huddled in their foxholes, it looked like an unstoppable wave of destruction. But high above, in the blinding sun, Bong and his squadron were climbing, positioning themselves for the slaughter.

This engagement would become a textbook example of Bong’s evolving genius. He was no longer just a lone wolf. He was a conductor of aerial violence. Instead of diving in head first, he held his flight group at a superior altitude, forcing the Japanese to look up into the glare. He waited with chilling patience for the enemy formation to commit to its bombing run. He watched for the exact moment a bomber would expose its belly or a zero would break formation.

Then he gave the order to attack. The P38s fell from the sky like silver sharks. Bong led the charge, his plane a blur of speed and purpose. He didn’t engage the agile zeros. He went straight for the bombers, the heart of the enemy formation. A single precise burst from his nose cannon, and a Mitsubishi bomber simply disintegrated in a blossom of fire and black smoke. He didn’t linger to watch it fall. He was already climbing, converting his speed back into precious altitude, scanning for his next victim.

His squadron followed his lead, striking and vanishing, sewing chaos and confusion among the Japanese pilots who couldn’t track the faster, more powerful American fighters. The results were devastating. Multiple enemy aircraft were destroyed for minimal Allied losses. Japanese combat reports from this period are filled with a sense of dread, describing encounters with American fighters who attacked with a speed and precision they simply could not counter. They knew they were being hunted by experts. By November 1943, Richard Bong had 21 confirmed victories.

This wasn’t just an impressive number, it was historic. He was now one of America’s top aces, a celebrity in a war that desperately needed heroes. General Kenny, ever the shrewd commander, knew the value of a symbol. He personally decorated Bong with the Distinguished Service Cross. And then he did something Bong hated. He sent him home. Bong was ordered back to the United States for a war bond tour. Suddenly, the quiet pilot who let his flying do the talking was thrust into the spotlight.

He was paraded before cheering crowds. His face plastered on newspapers from New York to California. The American public embraced him. He was the humble farm boy who had become a dragon slayer, the personification of American ingenuity and courage. But Bong was miserable. He despised the ceremonies, the speeches, the endless handshakes. In letters to Marge, he confessed that his heart was still in the Pacific. With the pilots, who were still fighting and dying, he felt like a fraud, a show pony, while his brothers in arms were in the thick of it.

He relentlessly petitioned General Kenny, practically begging to be sent back to combat. Finally, Kenny relented. By March 1944, Bong was back in New Guinea, and a surprise was waiting for him. A new upgraded P38J Lightning. This was a refined killing machine. It boasted improved engines, a more effective cockpit heating system for high altitude flight, and most importantly, hydraulically boosted ailerons. This innovation gave the P38 far better maneuverability at high speeds, mitigating one of its most significant weaknesses.

In Bong’s hands, the P38J was not just a fighter. It was a scalpel. He returned to a different war. The years of brutal attrition had taken their toll on the Japanese air forces. Many of their veteran pilots were gone, replaced by young men with limited training and flight time. The experience gap between the two sides had become a chasm. For an American ace like Bong, with hundreds of hours of combat experience, facing these new pilots was often, tragically like a hawk facing a sparrow.

His tactical approach continued to evolve. He perfected the head-on attack, a maneuver that required unimaginable nerve. Most pilots would break off early, terrified of a mid-air collision. Bong held his course, his eyes locked on the enemy, firing until the last possible second. The closing speed was over 800 mph. The window for a kill was less than a second. Bong’s gun camera footage shows him repeatedly flying directly through the debris of his victims. By June 1944, the inevitable happened.

During a mission over New Guinea, Bong shot down his 27th and 28th enemy aircraft. In doing so, he surpassed the legendary Eddie Rickenbacher’s World War I record of 26 kills. Richard Ira Bong was now officially America’s greatest living fighter ace. General Kenny was both proud and terrified. He immediately prohibited Bong from flying routine combat missions, declaring him too valuable to risk. Bong, he argued, was a national treasure. His loss would be a catastrophic blow to morale. Bong was furious.

Grounded and frustrated, he argued that his place was in the sky, leading his men. A compromise was reached. Kenny allowed him to fly, but only on high priority missions and only as a flight leader where he could direct the battle, not just fight it. He was a general in the sky. The restrictions did nothing to slow him down. In fact, flying priority missions often meant he was sent exactly where the fighting was thickest. October 1944, Balik Papan, Borneo.

A critical mission to escort B-24 bombers striking Japanese oil refineries. The Japanese threw everything they had at the American formation in a desperate attempt to protect their fuel supply. The sky erupted into a swirling chaos of dog fights. Bong leading his P38s, positioned his formation with the sun at their backs. a classic tactic to blind the enemy. He led the initial attack, diving from above and blasting an enemy fighter out of the sky. But as he pulled up, his own aircraft was rocked by a violent explosion.

An enemy fighter had gotten on his tail. Cannon shells ripped through his right engine. Warning lights flashed across his console. The engine sputtered, caught fire, and died. Most pilots would have disengaged immediately, diving for home on a single engine. That was the smart thing to do. That was the sane thing to do. But Richard Bong was neither smart nor sane in that moment. He was a predator. He feathered the dead propeller to reduce drag, hit the fire extinguisher, and calmly assessed the situation.

He was still flying. His guns still worked, and there were still enemies in the sky. With his P38 crippled and trailing smoke, he banked the heavy fighter back into the dog fight. On a single engine, with his performance severely degraded, he hunted down another Japanese fighter and shot it down. Only then did he turn for home, nursing his battered plane across hundreds of miles of open ocean. When he landed, the ground crews were horrified. His P38 was riddled with bullet holes.

An entire engine was destroyed. They declared the aircraft combat ineffective, destined for the scrap heap. But they underestimated the bond between the pilot and his machine. Bong oversaw the repairs himself. And within weeks, he was flying Marge once again. This single incident cemented his legend. He wasn’t just skilled, he was fearless. He wasn’t just an ace, he was unbreakable. After that day, his victory tally climbed relentlessly toward a number no one had ever thought possible. 35, 36, 38.

By December 1944, he had 40 confirmed aerial victories. The number was staggering. It was an achievement so far beyond the norm that it barely seemed real. Back in the United States, at the highest levels of command, a decision was made. General Douglas MacArthur himself issued the order to General Kenny. It was no longer a request. Richard Bong was to be permanently grounded. His war was over. He was simply too valuable a symbol to lose. America’s ace of aces was being sent home for good.

Whether he liked it or not. His final combat mission was on December 17th, 1944. It was an uneventful patrol with no enemy contact. Unceremoniously, the combat career of the most successful fighter pilot in American history had come to an end. He returned to the United States not to the quiet farm he dreamed of, but to a whirlwind of national adoration, to a nation weary of war. Richard Bong was more than a pilot. He was an icon of hope, a symbol of the quiet, determined strength that would ultimately win the war.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor. In the hallowed halls of the Pentagon, Secretary of War Henry Stimson placed the medal around his neck. The official citation was read aloud, a dry military summary of deeds that bordered on the unbelievable. It spoke of his conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. It mentioned his unflinching courage and brilliant leadership and his relentless pursuit of the enemy, even when outnumbered and facing intense opposition.

Bong stood there characteristically quiet and humble, looking almost uncomfortable in his decorated uniform. This was a man who communicated through action, not words, who felt more at home in the cramped cockpit of a P38 at 20,000 ft than he did in a room full of generals and politicians. After the ceremonies, he finally found a moment of peace. On February 10th, 1945, he married his sweetheart, Marge Vatendall, in a church in Superior, Wisconsin. For a brief moment, the deadliest ace in American history was just a husband.

A young man hoping to build a life far away from the scream of diving aircraft and the flash of cannon fire. The war in Europe was in its final bloody throws. And the end of the global conflict finally seemed within reach. But what was the real secret to his phenomenal success? How did one man in one specific aircraft achieve a record that seems statistically impossible? The answer lies in a combination of the man, the machine, and a tactical doctrine that was years ahead of its time.

Postwar analysis by Army Air Force’s experts. Studying his gun camera footage revealed a level of precision that was simply breathtaking. Bong’s hit percentage. The ratio of bullets fired to targets destroyed was extraordinarily high, far exceeding the average pilot’s performance. He didn’t waste ammunition. He didn’t rely on luck. He relied on a cold calculus of speed, angle, and timing that was ingrained in his very being. His early life as a hunter, stalking prey in the woods, had trained his mind to see the world in terms of lead, deflection, and a single perfect shot.

His tactical philosophy, refined over 200 combat missions became the gold standard for American fighter pilots in the Pacific. It was a doctrine built on discipline, not aggression. While other pilots were drawn into swirling close-range dog fights, the kind of romantic duels seen in movies, Bong understood this was suicide against the nimble Japanese zero. His system was a brutal science. First, energy. Always maintain an energy advantage through superior altitude and speed. The P38 was a superb highaltitude fighter.

Bong used this to dictate the terms of every single engagement. Second, positioning. Use the sun, clouds, and the enemy’s own formation to achieve a position of advantage before ever firing a shot. He was a master of the patient stalk, sometimes maneuvering for long periods to get the perfect attack angle. Third, firepower. Exploit the P38’s concentrated nose-mounted weapons. He knew that if he could bring his guns to bear for even a split second, the fight was over. Fourth, discipline.

Never ever try to turn with a zero. After an attack pass, he would use his superior speed to disengage, climbing back to altitude to set up the next strike. He fought a vertical war, a battle of energy and physics, while his opponents were still fighting a horizontal one. And then there was the aircraft itself. The P38 Lightning was the perfect instrument for his style of warfare. Its twin engine configuration offered a crucial layer of redundancy. It could absorb incredible amounts of damage and still bring its pilot home, as Bong proved over Borneo.

The tricycle landing gear made it stable on the rough makeshift runways of the Pacific Islands, and its turbo superchargers gave it the high altitude performance that many Japanese fighters simply couldn’t match. In the hands of an average pilot, the P38 was a capable fighter. In the hands of Richard Bong, it was a weapon of historical significance. Letters to Marge revealed the man behind the legend. He rarely spoke of his victories. Instead, he wrote about his duty, about his focus on doing the job effectively, on protecting the bomber formations and supporting the troops on the ground.

He saw his role not as a glory-seeking ace, but as a protector, a guardian for the men who were counting on him. There was no ego, no bravado. There was only the quiet, lethal efficiency of a master craftsman. As 1945 dawned, Bong’s life was supposed to be one of safety and prestige. He was a hero, a husband, and a symbol of American victory. But the warrior in him couldn’t stay away from the cockpit. The military, wanting to leverage his unparalleled expertise, gave him a new assignment.

He was to become a test pilot. The world of aviation was on the cusp of a revolution. Piston engines which had dominated the skies for 40 years were becoming obsolete. A new terrifyingly powerful technology was emerging. The jet engine at Lockheed’s secretive skunk works facility in Burbank California. Kelly Johnson, the same man who had designed the P38, had created America’s first operational jet fighter, the P80 Shooting Star. The P80 was the future. A sleek, futuristic machine with a single jet engine that produced 4,000 lb of thrust, pushing it to speeds over 500 mph.

It was an entirely new flight regime, a quantum leap in performance and technology. And the army needed its best and most experienced pilots to tame this new beast, to write the rule book for a new era of aerial combat. Richard Bong, the master of the piston engine fighter, was assigned to help usher in the age of the jet. He was transitioning from the pinnacle of one generation of technology to the very beginning of the next. He was once again on the cutting edge, but this time the enemy wasn’t a zero in his gun site.

It was the unknown. The assignment to test the P80 shooting star placed Richard Bong at the epicenter of a technological earthquake. He, who had mastered the most complex piston fighter ever built, was now a student again. The P80 was a different breed of animal entirely. It had no propeller, no torque, just the raw, screaming thrust of a jet engine. It responded differently. It landed at terrifyingly high speeds. It climbed as if pulled by an invisible hand. Every pilot transitioning to jets was, in a very real sense, a pioneer exploring a dangerous and unknown frontier.

Bong, with his innate feel for machinery, adapted quickly. He respected the new aircraft, studying its systems with the same quiet intensity he had applied to combat tactics. He was no longer a hunter of men, but an explorer of the machine, pushing the boundaries of what was possible and reporting his findings back to the engineers who were literally inventing the future of aviation. For several months, this was his new life. A life of flight logs, technical debriefings, and the constant high-pitched wine of a jet turbine.

Then came August 6th, 1945. It was a hot, clear summer day at the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank, California. For Major Richard Bong, it was a routine day at the office. He was scheduled to perform a standard acceptance flight on a new P80 that had just rolled off the production line. He went through his pre-flight checks, suited up, and climbed into the cockpit of the futuristic machine. The canopy slid shut, sealing him inside. The P80s engine spooled up with its characteristic shriek.

Bong taxied onto the runway, received his clearance, and pushed the throttle forward. The jet accelerated rapidly, pinning him to his seat and lifted gracefully into the California sky. But just moments after takeoff, something went catastrophically wrong. A primary fuel pump failed. The engine starved of fuel flamed out. Below him, the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles stretched to the horizon. He was at a critically low altitude with no power in a machine that flew like a brick without its engine.

For the man who had survived 200 combat missions, who had faced down swarms of enemy fighters who had flown a crippled P38 home on a single engine, this was his final, most desperate battle. It was a battle against gravity and time. He fought for control. His training kicked in. He attempted the emergency restart procedures, but there wasn’t enough altitude. He tried to glide the powerless aircraft back towards the runway, but he couldn’t make it. In the final fleeting seconds of his life, with the ground rushing up to meet him, he made one last decision.

He tried to bail out, but it was too late. He was too low. The P80 crashed into a field and exploded in a ball of fire. Major Richard Ira Bong, the ace of aces, the farm boy from Wisconsin, the deadliest American fighter pilot in history, was killed instantly. He was 24 years old. On the exact same day, half a world away, an American B29 bomber named the Anola Gay flew high over the clear skies of Japan. It opened its bomb bay doors and released a single strangelook weapon.

That weapon fell towards the city of Hiroshima. And in a blinding flash of light, it erased a city and unleashed the terrifying power of the atom. The world had changed forever. The news of Richard Bong’s death, the death of America’s greatest war hero was a minor story buried beneath the colossal worlds headlines announcing the dawn of the atomic age. In a profound and tragic irony, the master of conventional aerial warfare died on the very day that his type of war was rendered obsolete.

80 years later, Richard Bong’s record of 40 confirmed victories remains unbroken, and it is a record that will almost certainly stand for all time. Modern air combat, a sterile affair of radar screens and beyond visual range missiles, will never again produce the close quarters, visual range dog fights that defined the Second World War. The era of the gunslinging ace is over. The true measure of Bong’s impact was not just in the 40 enemy aircraft he destroyed. It was in the bomber crews he shephered to safety, in the ground troops who looked to the skies for his protection, and in the tactical doctrine he pioneered that saved the lives of countless other pilots.

His methods became the foundation of American fighter tactics for years to come. General George Kenny, the man who saw the prodigy behind the rule breaker, later wrote that Bong was the greatest fighter pilot he had ever witnessed. Kenny noted that Bong’s incredible success came not from aggression, but from its polar opposite, a calm, calculated precision. He made killing look effortless because he was a master of sound, repeatable, tactical principles. Today, at the Richard the Furbong Veterans Historical Center in his home state of Wisconsin, his medal of honor rests in a quiet display.

A restored P38 bearing the name Marge on its nose stands as a silent tribute to the man and his legendary machine. It is a reminder of a time when a quiet young man from the Midwest could climb into the cockpit of a fighter plane and through sheer talent and discipline change history. The battlefields where he fought are now quiet. The skies where he duled are empty, but the record remains etched into the annals of military history. 40 victories, 200 missions, one unbreakable legend. The farm boy who became America’s deadliest and most untouchable ace.