Richard Bong

A bong.

Richard Ira Bong.

Richard Ira Bong, who was the ace of aces, Brad, during World War II from Poplar, Wisconsin, buried in Poplar, Wisconsin.

And, of course, they do have a replica of the plane that he used to shoot down those Japanese aircraft, Brad, and that's available to view at the Bong Memorial Center in Superior.

Okay.

By early 1943, P-38 squadrons in the Pacific were dominating their engagement records.

A pilot from Poplar, Wisconsin named Richard Bong was flying with the 5th Air Force and adding to his score nearly every time he went up.

Bong would finish the war with 40 confirmed aerial victories, all of them in P-38s, making him the highest-scoring American fighter pilot in the history of United States military aviation.

But the most famous mission any P-38 ever flew was not about an individual pilot's score.

24 years old.

Richard Bong was born in 1920 in Poplar, Wisconsin, farm country.

The northwest corner of the state, close to Superior, close to the cold expanse of Lake Superior.

The Bong family ran a dairy farm, and he was the oldest of nine children.

It does not weigh your service or measure your skill against the odds.

It just is what it is, and sometimes the variables don't break your way.

Richard Bong's 40 kills have never been approached.

Not in Korea, not in Vietnam, not in any subsequent conflict.

You push the throttles forward, and you go to work.

That was a Tuesday for Richard Bong.

I'm Taildragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

Pull up a chair because today we are talking about the airplane that changed the Pacific air war, the man who flew it better than anyone alive, and why the Lockheed P-38 Lightning is still one of the most remarkable machines ever built by American hands.

What is not debated is that the mission worked.

The man who planned Pearl Harbor was dead, and the instrument was the P-38 Lightning.

But let's get back to the ace, because Richard Bong is the story that tells you what the airplane could do in the hands of someone extraordinary.

Dick Bong grew up in Poplar, Wisconsin, which is about as far from a Pacific island as you can get.

What he left behind is harder to put in a sentence than most aviation legacies.

Richard Bong has a kill count.

Lindbergh has the Atlantic.

Jaeger has Mach 1.

40 confirmed kills, all of them scored in the Southwest Pacific Theater, most of them over the jungles and reefs of New Guinea and the Philippines.

Richard Bong was 24 years old when he died, and most people who've never taken a military history class couldn't tell you his name.

That ought to bother us.

Pull up a chair.

over a piece of Pacific jungle that most Americans couldn't have found on a map.

The press found out, a war bond tour followed.

America needed heroes, and Richard Bong was handed that role whether he wanted it or not.

He toured stateside, shook hands, gave speeches, smiled for photographs.

Some of the finest American pilots in the Pacific had 20, 30 confirmed kills.

Richard Bong, America's highest scoring ace, had 40 victories.

We put his name on airports.

Eric Hartmann had 352.

In others, there was only sniggering, those strata where thought is subjugated to form and ritual niceties, proprieties.

But down below, ah, down below, where the people always needed their saints and sinners, their bread and circuses, their heroes and villains, he was considered a Bolivar, a Napoleon, a Robin Hood, a Dick Bong, Ace of Aces, a Jesus, a Jomo Kenyatta.

And at the top, where like socially attuned shipwrecked kellys, every tremor and vibration threatens to dislodge the wealthy, powerful, and titled from their flagpoles, he was considered a menace, a heretic, a rebel, a disgrace, a peril.

He was known down the line to the very heartmeat core, but the important reactions were high above and far below, at the very top, at the very bottom.

The rest of the squadron turned back as the Admiral's plane was descending to land.

Richard Bong, B-O-N-G, is like two.

Bong? Hit that Bong.

There you go.

Um, he was over there.

He got put on some crap details, burying dead bodies, and buried dead Japs just like dead Americans, and trench grazed with a dozer.

He said they were, they had an air raid alert, and everybody was running, ducking for cover, and he said Richard Bong, that P-38 pilot, that ace, and he never did, he earned ace, He didn't do anything other than sit there and who knows, may have wished a bomb would hit him.

On a stack of 55-gallon barrels of gasoline for the airplanes.

In the right conditions, with pilots who understood her, the lightning was genuinely fearsome.

Richard Bong flew a P-38 to 40 aerial victories, the highest total of any American pilot in the war.

Tommy McGuire had 38 kills in one before he died at 38 years old, trying to help a wingman who'd gotten into trouble over the Philippines.

The Lightning's distinctive silhouette, twin booms and a central gondola nacelle, made it instantly recognizable, and the Japanese gave it a name of their own, the Fork-Tailed Devil.