The first time the farm kid pulled the trigger on his crazy trick, there were three Japanese fighters stacked in the sky like ducks over a cornfield.

They were zeroes—sleek, pale killers with red suns painted on their wings—coming in fast on a formation of lumbering American bombers over New Guinea. The air was thin, the tropic sun a white hammer overhead. The bombers droned along, heavy and stubborn, hauling explosives toward some nameless strip of jungle that the generals said mattered.

To the gunners in those bombers, the zeroes looked like death with a propeller.

To the man stalking them from above, they were just targets that hadn’t figured it out yet.

Major Richard Ira Bong—twenty-something, brown-haired, quiet, the sort of guy you’d expect to see operating a tractor instead of a twin-engine monster—was high above the whole mess in his P-38 Lightning, “Marge,” waiting.

He watched the zeroes through the curve of his canopy, eyes narrowed against the glare.

Patience, he told himself. Don’t rush the shot.

The zeroes slid in from the side like wolves, nosing toward the bomber formation. To any sane pilot, they were bad news. To Bong, they were numbers. Distance, angle, closing speed. He was already calculating where they’d be five seconds from now, ten, fifteen.

That was the trick.

Most men in the air war fired where the enemy was. Bong fired where the enemy was going to be.

He pushed the throttles forward. The twin Allison engines snarled, and Marge surged ahead, the twin booms vibrating with raw power. The altimeter unwound as he rolled into a dive. The Lightning’s nose dropped toward the zeroes, but Bong wasn’t looking at them anymore, not directly. He watched the space in front of them, the empty patch of blue they’d occupy in a heartbeat.

The P-38 screamed downward, compressibility nibbling at the controls. He felt the stick go heavy, the onset of that terrifying moment when the air turned to stone around the wings.

Not yet, he thought. Hold it. Just a little more.

He lined up the shot.

Three zeroes, flying like they owned the sky.

He put the invisible point in front of the lead plane, the place where all their lines would cross.

His thumb found the trigger.

For a fraction of a second he did nothing. The engines roared, the canopy vibrated, and his world shrank to a circle of glass and a thin white reticle.

Then he squeezed.

Four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon spat lead and fire in a single, perfectly timed burst. Not long, not wild—just a slice of death precisely where it needed to be.

The tracers stitched the air ahead of the zeroes.

The lead Japanese pilot never even saw it.

He flew right into the buzzing stream, into the farm kid’s crazy trick.

The Lightning shot past the formation, the impact a blur. One zero erupted, its wing shearing off in an explosion of smoke and fuel. Another flinched into the path of the bullets meant for the first and came apart, trailing black. The third banked hard in a panic, catching a few rounds in the fuselage, cartwheeling into the sky like a paper toy.

Three planes. One short burst.

By the time gravity finished what Bong had started, the P-38 was already pulling up, engines howling, climbing back toward the sanctuary of altitude.

He didn’t whoop. Didn’t pound the console, didn’t shout into the radio. He just checked his gauges, noted the ammo he’d used, and glanced back over his shoulder, making sure the bombers were still lumbering along safe and unbothered.

Then he keyed his mic, voice as mild as if he’d just adjusted a fence post.

“Blue Leader, this is Marge. Three bandits destroyed. Formation’s clear for now.”

On the other end of the radio, someone let out a disbelieving laugh.

“Hell of a trick shot, Bong.”

He didn’t answer. The farm kid from Wisconsin just settled in behind his guns again, already scanning the sky for the next problem to solve.

Long before he was a ghost in the Pacific sky, he was just a boy in Wisconsin with a .22 rifle and a patient father.

The Bong farm wasn’t much to look at—rolling fields, a weathered barn, a house that creaked in the winter wind. The kind of place where days were measured in chores and seasons, not clocks. Cows needed milking, fences needed mending, and the soil never cared who was president.

The boy’s name was Richard, though everyone called him Dick. He had the solid build of a kid who hauled hay bales and mucked stalls more than he sat in desks. He was quiet, even then, with the sort of calm that made adults trust him with sharp tools earlier than they should’ve.

His father taught him to shoot the way other dads taught catch.

They went out into the woods at dawn, breath fogging in the cold Wisconsin air, boots crunching on frost-hardened leaves. His father would set tin cans on fence posts, line up pine cones on fallen logs, and step back.

“All right,” he’d say, voice low, unhurried. “First thing you do is breathe.”

A lot of boys his age wanted to yank the trigger and hear the bang. Dick listened.

“You don’t chase the target,” his dad went on. “You let it come to you. You watch it. You think about where it’s gonna be, not where it is.”

He’d demonstrate, steady hands cradling the rifle. His father would track the sway of a can in the wind, lead it just a hair, and squeeze.

Ping.

The can would jump, and the boy would grin, a rare bright flash of excitement cracking his usual reserve.

When it was his turn, little Dick would line up his sights, tongue pressed against his teeth in concentration. The world would narrow to the tiny notch and the tin can at the far end. He knew better than to snatch at the trigger. He’d learned early—jerk, and you miss. Breathe, and you hit.

He learned to wait for the right moment, not the first moment.

Over time, the tin cans got smaller, the distance longer. Cans turned to squirrels, squirrels turned to deer. He stalked through the woods with the same quiet focus he’d later bring to the sky. To him, the forest wasn’t just trees; it was angles and lines of sight, places where prey would step, where a shot would count.

The farm didn’t have much in the way of luxuries, but the sky was free. Dick watched it constantly. He’d lean on a fence post at sunset, straw in his hair, and stare up at the contrails of distant airplanes, thin white scratches across the blue.

He didn’t say much about it. But something in his chest stretched toward those tiny silver birds like a compass needle.

When he got the chance to ride in a barnstormer’s airplane at a county fair, it lit a fuse. The pilot was a sunburned guy with oil-stained hands and a grin too big for his face. The plane was rattling fabric and humming wires, smelling of gasoline and dust.

They strapped Dick into the front seat, his heart hammering, fingers digging into the metal frame.

The plane took off in a short, rough roar, wheels leaving the ground like they’d just remembered how. The Bong farm shrank below them—barn, fields, roads—until it looked like a child’s model, a toy world.

The feeling of leaving the earth hooked into him so deep he could never pull it out.

From that point on, every dollar he could scrape together went toward aviation magazines, flight books, anything with wings on the cover. He read about a world on fire—Europe collapsing under the Nazi blitz, the rising sun of Japan stretching its reach across the Pacific—and about the men who climbed into cockpits to meet the storm.

America, for the moment, stayed still.

But the boy in Wisconsin was already moving.

When the country finally woke up—December 7th, 1941, a date that would be echoed in every newspaper and on every front porch radio—the Bong farm didn’t change overnight, but Dick did.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t some abstract headline to him. The reports of burning ships and lost American sailors, of rising plumes of smoke over a place he’d never see, snapped everything into focus.

He’d spent his childhood learning to hit what he aimed at.

Now someone was aiming at his country.

He signed up for the Army Air Forces Aviation Cadet Program with the same quiet determination he used to fix a broken fence. No drama, no big speeches in the kitchen. Just a decision, simple and unshakable.

His mother worried. His father studied him with the same thoughtful stare he’d used on those tin cans years before.

“You’ll have to be better than good,” his father said.

Dick nodded once. “Then I’ll be better than good.”

The Aviation Cadet Program turned farm kids and city slickers into pilots, or broke them trying. The days were packed: ground school, navigation, instrument flying, formation work. The instructors were hard men who had seen enough young faces to know most of them wouldn’t make it past training, let alone combat.

They saw something different in Bong.

He didn’t just follow checklists; he absorbed them. He didn’t just bank and climb and descend on command; he made the airplane move as if it were tied to him with invisible strings.

Instructors took notice when he nailed landings in crosswinds that threw other cadets across the runway. They raised eyebrows when he performed perfect chandelles and lazy eights with a calm expression, engine and horizon blending into one smooth, practiced ballet.

But it wasn’t just skill that set him apart.

It was that edge.

Sometimes, when the flight was over and the formal lesson done, he stretched a little. A tighter turn here, a steeper climb there. Just enough to see where the airplane stopped being cooperative and started complaining.

He didn’t treat the aircraft like a fragile thing to be coddled. He treated it like a tool, and he wanted to know every inch of its handle and blade.

When he was introduced to the P-38 Lightning at Hamilton Field in California, it was like a farm boy walking into a garage and finding a hot rod built by angels.

The Lightning looked wrong, in the best way—twin booms joined by a central pod, two engines, tricycle landing gear. It was big, powerful, and unapologetically different.

The first time he opened the throttles, the plane leapt forward, his spine pressed into the seat. It wasn’t just flying; it was being fired from a gun.

He came back from that first flight with his hair plastered to his forehead from sweat and a look in his eyes his instructors recognized.

Love.

Dangerous love.

San Francisco lay spread out under him like a postcard.

The way it later went into the official record, it was all dull words: “unauthorized low-level aerial maneuvering,” “reckless disregard for regulations,” “endangering civilian property.”

The reality was that a young man with too much talent and too much airplane looked down at one of America’s prettiest cities and thought: I want to see how close I can get.

He took the Lightning down low over the bay, engines beating the air into submission. The Golden Gate Bridge loomed ahead, red and proud, straddling the water like a steel god.

He should have maintained altitude and distance. He should have flown his assigned pattern. He should have done a lot of things.

Instead, he looped it.

He pulled back on the stick, the P-38 arcing up and over, tracing a huge circle against the sky. For a moment, he hung light over the bridge, gravity forgotten, the world inverted. Below—above—he saw cars creeping along the roadway, tiny and oblivious to the twin-tailed shape spinning over them.

Then the loop completed, and he roared back to level flight.

He wasn’t done.

He dropped lower over the city, skimming along Market Street. Buildings rose on either side, a canyon of glass and stone. He flew low enough that pedestrians could look up and count the rivets on his wings. Restaurant windows rattled in his wake. Hats flew. People swore, pointed, laughed, ducked.

It was insanity. Gorgeous, stupid insanity.

Word got back to command faster than his Lightning.

When they finally hauled him in front of General George Kenney, Dick expected the show to be over.

Kenney was not a man anyone wanted to disappoint. He wasn’t one of those rear-echelon officers who kissed babies and polished his medals in Washington. He was the man in charge of the Fifth Air Force, the one responsible for making sure American planes in the Pacific did their brutal work and came back alive.

He looked at the report with an expression that could curdle milk.

“Lieutenant Bong,” he began, voice sharp enough to shave with, “do you have any idea how many regulations you shattered over San Francisco?”

Dick stood at attention, shoulders squared, eyes fixed ahead. His heart thudded, but his face was calm. He was a farm kid facing a storm. He knew how to do that.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“How many people you figure you scared half to death flying down Market Street?”

“Too many, sir.”

“And looping the Golden Gate Bridge? Were you out of your mind?”

“Yes, sir,” Bong said again, because what else could he say?

Kenney chewed him up one side and down the other, the words landing like artillery. Reckless. Hotshot. Hazard. If the general had stopped there, Bong’s flying career might’ve ended before it began.

But Kenney wasn’t just angry.

He was intrigued.

Somewhere in the middle of his tirade, he’d looked up from the paper and studied the young man standing in front of him. Kenney had watched the Lightning’s reports roll in. He knew how many pilots the P-38 had already killed in training, how many promising kids had been overwhelmed by its speed, its quirks, its temperamental turbo-superchargers.

The boy in front of him had not only survived, he’d made the aircraft dance.

Beneath the screwup was something rarer than gold.

When the general’s voice finally lost some of its edge, he leaned back in his chair.

“You know what your flight instructors say about you, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir.”

“They say you’re part airplane.” Kenney paused. “They also say if you don’t get your head on straight, you’re gonna kill yourself and someone else in the process.”

“Yes, sir,” Bong said quietly.

Kenney watched him, weighing possibilities. He could make an example of this kid, ground him, toss him into the dustbin of aviation history. Or he could take the roughest diamond he’d seen in a long time and put it in the harshest cutting wheel on the planet: combat.

“I don’t like hotshots,” Kenney said. “I don’t like stunts. But I like losing pilots even less. I’m not gonna ruin you, Lieutenant. I’m going to use you.”

He slid a folder across the desk.

“You’re going to New Guinea.”

New Guinea wasn’t the glamorous, clean war the posters promised.

It was mud and rot and heat and the smell of fuel soaked into everything. The jungle crawled right up to the edges of airstrips carved out of the green, like nature wanted to swallow the war whole and digest it.

The enemy didn’t oblige.

Japanese forces had been fighting there for years by the time Bong arrived in 1942. Their pilots were veterans, hardened in the crucible of China and the early Pacific campaigns. They flew the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a machine that moved like thought—a light, agile fighter that could out-turn anything the Americans put into the air.

On paper, it wasn’t a fair fight.

On paper, the farm kid didn’t stand a chance.

His first missions weren’t the stuff of legend. He flew escort for bombers, patrols along the jungled coastline, reconnaissance. He watched. He listened in the briefing rooms to the stories of pilots who’d tangled with the Zero and not come back, or come back with holes in their wings and haunted looks in their eyes.

He learned the rule written in blood: don’t try to turn with it.

The Zero could whirl on its own shadow, cut inside any curve the Americans threw at it. Pilots who forgot that—or never got the chance to learn—ended up stories traded in the mess tent late at night, voices low, coffee cooling untouched.

Bong didn’t forget.

He spent his off hours with maps and mechanical schematics, not at card tables. He studied the P-38’s manual the way some people studied scripture. He traced its strengths and weaknesses with a mechanic’s fingers and a hunter’s mind.

Two engines. High speed. Incredible rate of climb. Heavy armament, all in the nose.

And that one ugly secret: in a high-speed dive, the control surfaces stiffened. Compressibility. The word sounded academic on paper, but in the air it meant the stick turned to iron and the ground rushed up in a hurry.

He filed it all away.

On early missions, he held back just enough, watching other pilots engage, noting patterns. The zeroes liked to lure Americans lower, into the horizontal, into the dogfight. They wanted a close-in knife brawl in the sky.

Bong decided he’d bring a rifle instead.

He started staying higher. Not recklessly, not disobeying formation, but always looking for a way to slip just a little more altitude under his wings. Altitude was energy, and energy was life. He’d listened when his father talked about “letting the shot come to you.” Now he applied it at 20,000 feet.

His first kill over Buna was almost anticlimactic.

An enemy fighter clawed its way toward a bomber group, intent on carving into the formation. Bong watched from above, saw its path, saw where it had to be in a few seconds if it wanted to line up on the bombers’ fat tails.

He rolled the P-38 into a shallow dive, not too steep, eyes never leaving that future point. He put the reticle not on the plane, but ahead of it, where his math—intuitive, bone-deep math—said the Zero would cross.

He fired a short burst.

The Japanese pilot, concentrating on his own attack run, flew into the stream. His engine exploded in a burst of smoke, and the plane snapped into a spin, trailing a dark ribbon toward the jungle.

“Bandit down,” Bong reported, voice quiet.

That was it. No cheering, no theatrics. Just a notch in the log and a confirmation from the gun camera later.

It happened again. And again.

The pattern emerged in the intelligence offices before it did in the press. Gun camera footage came in on canisters of film, developed in darkrooms that smelled of chemicals and tension. Analysts watched, cigarettes burning low, as planes danced on screens in shades of gray.

Plenty of pilots sprayed bullets in wild, hopeful arcs, trading fire like drunk brawlers in a bar.

Bong was different.

On film, his attacks looked almost boring. Long periods of cruising, of calm positioning. Then, at the last moment, a fast, controlled dive, a short, brutal burst of gunfire, and immediate disengagement.

No waste. No emotion.

A surgeon, some called him.

His squadron called him something simpler: lucky, crazy, scary good.

The enemy called him nothing at all. They didn’t know his name. But they knew the shape of his airplane.

The Japanese started calling the P-38 the “fork-tailed devil.”

They had no idea that one of those devils was flown by a quiet kid who’d once shot tin cans off fence posts in Wisconsin.

The day he started painting his sweetheart’s face onto the war, the whole squadron noticed.

Her name was Marge Vattendall, a girl back home with a kind smile and the patience to love a man who spent more time in the sky than under a roof. Bong wrote her letters between missions—short, spare things, more about weather and duty than about kills.

He didn’t brag to her.

He didn’t brag to anyone.

But he wanted her with him.

So he had the crew chief paint her name—MARGE—in looping letters on the nose of his P-38. A pin-up picture of her went just behind, a hint of a smile tucked under those roaring engines.

It became a ritual. Before each mission, he’d circle the plane, hand brushing the metal lightly as if he were checking a mare before a ride. He’d pause under the nose art, looking at the name, drawing something steadying from it.

Then he’d climb in and go to work.

By early 1943, the scoreboard on Marge’s nose was filling up. One tiny flag for each enemy aircraft destroyed. One tally after another, accumulating so steadily that men started counting not if he’d get another, but how many he’d end up with.

He did not play the lone wolf by choice, but the way he flew made him feel like a ghost to the enemy. He’d appear from the sun, strike, and vanish, while other pilots were still turning circles, chasing contrails and curses.

The more he fought, the more his “crazy trick” solidified into doctrine.

Energy first. Always.

Never go where the enemy wants you to go.

Never turn with a Zero.

Hit. Climb. Hit again.

He treated the entire sky as a three-dimensional chessboard, each move designed to preserve his advantage while stripping the enemy of theirs.

On the ground, in post-flight debriefs, he was as understated as his reports.

“Engaged two bandits. Destroyed one, probably destroyed another.”

“Enemy aircraft burst into flames.”

“Minimal return fire.”

He never wrote, “I scared the hell out of them.” But he did.

By the summer of 1943, he wasn’t just a good pilot—he was an ace many times over.

The mission over Lae, New Guinea, crystallized what he’d become.

The day started like a hundred others, wet air clinging to the skin, engines coughing awake in the gray light. But the briefing room hummed with extra tension. Intelligence said a big Japanese strike was coming—bombers escorted by plenty of fighters, heading for Allied positions that were already hanging on by their fingernails.

If those bombers got through, it would be ugly on the ground.

Bong sat at the briefing table, flight cap tilted back, arms crossed loosely. He listened to the target coordinates, the expected altitudes, the estimated numbers. The commanding officer tapped a board with a pointer, outlining tactics.

“Hit the bombers,” the man said. “Don’t get drawn off chasing fighters.”

Simple.

Deadly.

Up in the air, as they climbed into the morning, the world narrowed down to humming engines, radio chatter, and the green-blue sprawl of New Guinea below. The coast glistened like a knife edge. Clouds piled up on the horizon like mountains.

Then they saw them.

A formation of Japanese bombers, big, dark shapes plowing forward, surrounded by a buzzing cloud of zeroes. To the troops on the ground, they’d look like doom. To Bong, they looked like math.

“Hold altitude,” he ordered his flight, voice easy but firm. “Make them come to us.”

He kept his P-38s higher than the enemy—just a few thousand feet, but it might as well have been a kingdom. The Japanese fighters twitched below, searching upwards, squinting into the glare of the sun.

He waited.

“Blue Flight, this is Lead,” someone said over the radio, tension creeping in. “We’ve got a clean shot if we go now.”

“Negative,” Bong said. “Wait ‘til they commit.”

He watched the bombers steady up, watched their formation tighten as they entered whatever run their crews had rehearsed a thousand times. Once a bomber formation committed to a run, it became predictable. They had to stay straight and level long enough to open bay doors and drop.

Predictable things were easy to kill.

“Now,” he said simply.

The P-38s peeled over in unison, predators dropping out of the sun.

Bong led them straight at the heart of the bomber formation, ignoring the temptation to swat at the zeroes swirling nearby. Zeroes were deadly, but it was the bombers that burned cities and shattered runways.

He picked a bomber, calculated its path under him, and squeezed the trigger once.

Marge’s nose guns lit up, pouring fire into the enemy aircraft. The bomber disintegrated in a flash of smoke, pieces shearing off into the slipstream.

He didn’t watch it fall. He was already climbing, preserving the precious energy from his dive.

“Hit and up,” he called. “Don’t linger. Hit and up.”

His squadron followed suit, each attack shredding another bomber, then the P-38s disappearing back toward the sun like silver sharks. The zeroes below whirled in confusion, trying to climb into the fight but losing speed, angle, and initiative with every second.

By the time the engagement was over, several Japanese bombers and fighters had been destroyed for minimal Allied losses. The soldiers on the ground looked up at a sky that wasn’t raining death after all.

In Tokyo, somewhere, a report would be filed about a disastrous mission. In New Guinea, pilots slapped Bong on the shoulder in the mess, their relief too big to fit into words.

He just shrugged.

“Right place, right time,” he murmured.

But in the quiet, when the noise of the day was gone, he’d take out paper and pencil and sketch little diagrams of the encounter—angles, altitudes, attack vectors. He wasn’t just fighting a war; he was refining a system.

By November 1943, his total stood at twenty-one confirmed aerial victories.

The number was staggering. To the American public, still reeling from casualty lists and rationing, it sounded like something out of pulp magazines. To his fellow pilots, it was both awe-inspiring and slightly unnerving.

General Kenney knew exactly what it meant.

This was not just another ace. This was a symbol.

He flew out personally to decorate Bong with the Distinguished Service Cross. On a sun-blasted airstrip, with sweat running down the backs of neatly pressed uniforms, Kenney pinned the medal to the young man’s chest.

A small crowd of pilots and ground crew gathered, clapping and whistling. Cameras clicked. Somewhere, an Army photographer captured the moment.

“Proud of you, son,” Kenney said under his breath, so only Bong could hear it.

“Thank you, sir,” Bong replied, eyes lowered.

Then the general did something that made Bong feel more helpless than he ever had in a dogfight.

He pulled him out of it.

Orders came down: Major Richard Ira Bong was going home.

Not to a farm. Not to quiet days and early nights. To stages, podiums, and factory floors. To parades and speeches and long, exhausting days in a different kind of battlefield—the home front.

They wanted him to sell war bonds.

America loved him.

They loved the story: the humble farm boy from Wisconsin who had climbed into the cockpit of a weird-looking plane and carved his name across the Pacific sky. Newspapers ran his photograph, headlines crowing about “Ace of Aces” and “Jap-Killing Farm Kid.” Reporters bragged about his 21 victories as if they belonged to the country’s collective record.

He rode in open convertibles through city streets, crowds pressing in on both sides, people tossing confetti and waving flags. Women blew kisses. Men shouted congratulations. Kids pointed and shouted, “There he is!”

On factory tours, he stood on makeshift stages next to giant posters of himself, urging workers to keep turning out bombers and fighters, to buy bonds, to “do their part.”

He did his duty. He shook hands until his fingers ached, smiled until his face felt like it might crack, answered the same questions again and again.

“What’s it like up there?”

“Are you scared?”

“How many planes have you shot down now?”

He gave careful answers.

“It’s a team effort.”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Twenty-one confirmed.”

He didn’t tell them about the faces he never saw, the enemy pilots who had been young men like him, with families who’d never get a welcome-home parade. He didn’t tell them about the soldiers who’d cheered at the sound of P-38 engines overhead.

He saved that for his letters to Marge, and even there, he pulled his punches.

“I feel like a show pony,” he wrote once, pen scratching across the paper. “I should be in New Guinea.”

He petitioned Kenney again and again.

“Send me back,” he asked. “I’m no good here.”

Kenney, halfway around the world, read the letters and scowled. He had a war to fight and a home front to feed. The farm kid’s ability to shoot down planes was matched only by his ability to inspire Americans to dig a little deeper into their pockets.

But Kenney also understood something else: you couldn’t put a thoroughbred into a pasture and expect it to be happy.

Eventually, he relented.

Bong went back.

When he returned to the Pacific in March 1944, the war had changed.

So had his airplane.

Waiting for him was a P-38J Lightning, a refined version of the beast he already knew. The engines were stronger. The cockpit was better heated for high-altitude work. Hydraulically boosted ailerons made roll response sharper, mitigating some of the stiffness that had killed so many men in high-speed dives.

He walked around the new aircraft with the same quiet reverence as he had the first time, fingers brushing along the panel seams, eyes catching every rivet.

He climbed in, took it up, and within minutes he’d adapted. The new Lightning did what the old one had done, only more so. In his hands, it was less a machine than an extension of his intent.

The Japanese air force he faced now was not the same predator it had been in ’42.

Years of brutal combat had stripped them of their best pilots. The men he fought now were often younger, less experienced, thrown into cockpits with fewer hours of training. The Zero was still agile, still deadly, but the hands on its stick were different.

The mismatch wasn’t fair.

War rarely is.

Bong’s tally climbed: twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.

In June 1944, he shot down two more aircraft in a single mission.

That put him at twenty-eight.

He had just surpassed Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record of twenty-six.

America had a new Ace of Aces.

The news raced across cables and wires, splashing into newspapers and radio bulletins. The farm boy’s face went back into print, back into the public eye, even as he stayed in the hot, humid world of airstrips and combat.

General Kenney, hearing the news, felt something like pride and fear twist together in his chest.

“We’re gonna lose him,” he muttered to an aide. “If we keep him up there, they’re gonna get lucky sooner or later.”

He had already proven the farm kid could survive rules, stunts, and an unforgiving aircraft. Now he had to protect him from statistics.

Kenney issued a new order: Bong was not to fly routine combat missions anymore.

He was “too valuable.”

They called him a national treasure.

Bong called it something else: infuriating.

He understood the logic. On some level, he even appreciated the concern. But he also knew there were still men going up—men who didn’t have his hours, his experience, his strange feel for the sky—into battles that would decide who lived or died on the beaches and in the jungles below.

He argued.

He called in favors.

He made his case in quiet, stubborn tones.

“I fly smarter than I used to,” he told Kenney. “I’ve got more to teach now. Let me lead.”

Kenney, caught between the needs of the war and the need for heroes, compromised.

Bong could fly.

But only on specially approved missions.

Only as a leader.

It didn’t slow him down.

If anything, it sent him straight into the hottest parts of the war.

One of those fires burned over Balikpapan, Borneo, in October 1944.

The mission was as bad as they came: escort B-24 bombers on a strike against Japanese oil refineries. Oil was blood in this war. Whoever controlled it controlled movement, power, life.

The Japanese threw everything they had into the air to stop the Americans.

The sky over Borneo became a three-dimensional knife fight.

Bong led his P-38s in, keeping them above the bomber formation, between the enemy fighters and the vulnerable big ships. They went in with the sun behind them, blinding the enemy with bright white glare. It was an old trick, but an effective one.

He picked off an enemy fighter on the first pass, his guns speaking once, the target disintegrating, the lessons of New Guinea now muscle memory.

Then the world erupted behind him.

A Japanese pilot had slid in on his tail, unseen in the chaos. Cannon shells slammed into his right engine. The cockpit shuddered. Warning lights flared across his panel like angry red eyes.

The engine coughed, sputtered, and then fire blossomed along its length.

He smelled burning fuel.

Most pilots, in that moment, would have broken hard for home. One engine gone, performance cut, drag increasing—it was a death sentence if you stayed in the fight too long.

Bong feathered the dead prop, hitting the switch that turned the windmilling blades to a smooth, narrow edge to cut drag. He hit the fire extinguisher, watched the flames stutter and die. He tested his controls.

Marge was hurt.

But she could still fly.

His guns still worked.

So did his mind.

He looked at the sky, at the bombers, at the zeroes still swarming, and made a decision that would become part of his legend and lessen the odds he’d ever survive long enough to grow old.

He stayed.

On one engine, nursing his wounded Lightning through turns it hated to make, he went back into the fight. He stalked another Japanese fighter, lined up a shot, and killed it.

Only then did he turn for home.

The flight back was long and careful. The airplane listed, the remaining engine laboring, the gauges all reminding him how far from safe ground he still was. The ocean below was empty, blue, and unforgiving.

He made it.

When he landed and rolled to a stop, he shut down the last engine and climbed out into a sea of wide-eyed ground crew. They swarmed over the plane, fingers tracing bullet holes, peering into the wrecked engine.

“This thing shouldn’t’ve flown,” one of them muttered.

“We’ll scrap her,” another said. “Write her off.”

Bong shook his head.

“We’ll fix her,” he said simply.

And they did.

He oversaw the repairs, jaw set, eyes focused, as if he were helping a wounded friend back on their feet.

A few weeks later, Marge was back in the air.

And the farm kid’s legend solidified into something harder, more enduring.

He wasn’t just a man with a crazy trick shot and a knack for flying.

He was, in the eyes of those who served with him, unbreakable.

The victories kept coming.

Thirty-five.

Thirty-six.

Thirty-eight.

Each one was a plane that wouldn’t drop bombs or strafe soldiers. Each one was a fleeting, violent instant in a sky full of noise and fear, distilled down to a single, precise burst of fire from the nose of a P-38.

By December 1944, he had forty confirmed aerial victories.

Forty.

The number didn’t seem real. To the desk officers tallying up results, it was a figure in a column. To the pilots who flinched when they heard about yet another friend not returning from a mission, it was something closer to magic.

To Bong, it was a ledger of what he’d done, not who he was.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it.

Higher up the chain of command, others did.

General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander in the Southwest Pacific, heard the news. He’d already allowed Kenney to risk their “national treasure” longer than many thought wise. Forty kills was beyond all expectations, beyond any statistic anyone had seriously considered when the war began.

It was enough.

MacArthur gave the order: Bong was to be grounded. Permanently.

His last combat mission took place on December 17th, 1944.

It was almost insultingly quiet.

No zeroes, no bombers, no dogfights. Just a patrol over a sky that, for once, stayed empty of enemies. The radio crackled with mundane check-ins and navigation calls. The sun slid across the canopy. The world below turned slowly, indifferent.

He landed, taxied in, shut down the engines, and knew—without anyone saying it—that he had fought his last aerial battle.

They’d won’t let him go back.

He’d shot down forty planes.

He’d flown roughly two hundred missions.

He’d survived.

That, the generals decided, would have to be enough.

They gave him medals.

Big ones.

In Washington, DC, in halls lined with polished wood and portraits of dead men, he stood in a crisp uniform while Secretary of War Henry Stimson placed the Medal of Honor around his neck.

The citation was read aloud, a careful blend of legal phrasing and awe. It spoke of “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” and actions “above and beyond the call of duty.” It described, in clipped sentences, moments when he’d flown alone into formations of enemy aircraft, when he’d pressed attacks in the face of “intense opposition.”

People clapped. Cameras flashed.

Bong shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wishing, not for the first time, that he was somewhere else.

In his mind, he was back in a P-38 cockpit, checking instruments, listening to the crackle of the radio, scanning the sky.

After the ceremony, he shook hands with men whose names filled history books, men whose orders had sent him across oceans and into the thin, dangerous air over places most Americans couldn’t pronounce.

He respected them.

But he didn’t feel like them.

He felt like a farm kid who’d gotten very good at a very specific thing, and now that thing was done.

There was one bit of quiet, human business left.

On February 10th, 1945, in a church in Superior, Wisconsin, he married Marge.

There were flowers and flowers and the awkward stiffness of uniforms and borrowed suits. The sanctuary smelled of candles and winter coats. Outside, snow lay thick on the ground, the world hushed in white.

He stood at the front of the aisle in his dress uniform, ribbons and medals sharp against the dark fabric. She walked toward him in white, a lifetime away from the pin-up picture on the nose of his airplane.

For a moment, there was no war—no zeroes, no P-38s, no missions or kills or citations.

There was just a man and a woman, promising to walk through whatever came next together.

He slid the ring onto her finger with hands that had once guided a war machine through enemy fire.

She looked up at him with eyes that believed, stubbornly, in tomorrow.

They said “I do.”

Everyone clapped.

In some unseen ledger, the universe briefly balanced another kind of tally.

If the story had ended there, it would have been a clean, satisfying American tale: humble beginnings, war heroism, homecoming, wedding, fade to black.

But the world was changing too fast for tidy endings.

The war had shifted into a new gear. Europe was cracking under Allied pressure. In the Pacific, island by island, mile by bloody mile, American forces were closing in on Japan. The skies were filling with new shapes, new ideas.

Piston engines—the beating hearts of all the airplanes Bong had ever flown—were already on their way to becoming old news.

Jets were coming.

At Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works in Burbank, California, the same mind that had dreamed up the P-38—Clarence “Kelly” Johnson—had conjured something sleeker, faster, and stranger.

The P-80 Shooting Star.

It looked like a bullet with wings. A single jet engine in the rear, a rounded nose, swept tail. No propeller. No familiar blur of blades in front, nothing for the eye to latch onto and say, this is an airplane the way airplanes are supposed to look.

The Army Air Forces needed test pilots with nerves of steel and instincts sharpened by combat. Men who knew what it felt like to push an aircraft to the edge and then take one more step without falling off.

They thought of Richard Bong.

He accepted the assignment.

He might have had misgivings, but he was a man who did the jobs handed to him. He traded jungle heat for California sun, muddy airstrips for clean, paved runways. The war felt far away there, even though it wasn’t. B-17s and other warbirds still flew overhead, factories still turned out weapons of war, but there was a kind of forward-leaning excitement in the air, too.

The future smelled like jet fuel.

The P-80 was a different beast than any he’d flown.

There was no torque to fight on takeoff, no engine roar in the familiar sense. The jet engine whined, a high, insistent note that grew into a steady, powerful push. The aircraft maneuvers were different, too—acceleration, deceleration, climb rates. The margins for error were slimmer.

He approached it the way he’d approached everything else: carefully, methodically, with a hunter’s patience and a mechanic’s interest.

He studied the manuals. He listened to engineers. He ran his hands over the surfaces, learning the feel of a new machine.

In the air, he respected it. He didn’t treat it like a rodeo bull to be tamed in one dramatic ride. He did what he’d always done—he tested its limits slowly, pulling and pushing just enough to feel where the resistance started.

He flew acceptance tests, checking new P-80s as they came off the production line, making sure they were ready for service.

It was dangerous, unglamorous work.

There were no enemy pilots to outthink, just gravity, physics, and machinery. But in some ways, that was scarier. An enemy could be anticipated, perhaps out-maneuvered. Mechanical failure didn’t negotiate.

He kept flying.

The war ground on.

August 6th, 1945 dawned clear over Burbank.

It was the kind of bright, hot California summer day that made the air waver above asphalt and sent people searching for shade and cold drinks. At the Lockheed Air Terminal, the heat shimmered over rows of silver aircraft.

For Major Richard Bong, now a test pilot instead of a combat ace, it was another day at the office.

He had a routine acceptance flight scheduled on a P-80—a new Shooting Star that needed to be checked out before being turned over to operational units.

He went through the pre-flight with his usual quiet thoroughness. Walk around the aircraft. Check control surfaces. Inspect tires. Confirm fuel load. Verify that the men who’d worked on the plane had done their jobs, while knowing that sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, things still went wrong.

He climbed into the cockpit, strapped in. The interior felt both familiar and alien—throttle, stick, pedals, sure, but also new gauges, new systems. He put on his helmet, adjusted his oxygen mask, and went through the checklist with the ground crew.

Outside, the jet engine whined to life behind him, building from a faint whirring to a strong, steady roar.

He taxied out to the runway.

Cleared for takeoff.

Throttle forward.

The P-80 surged down the concrete strip, speed piling up rapidly. The nose lifted, wheels leaving the ground, earth dropping away.

He climbed.

Somewhere far away, over the Pacific, a B-29 named Enola Gay was also in the air that morning, carrying a bomb that would change the course of human history.

Bong couldn’t have known that.

All he knew was that his jet was climbing, instruments behaving the way they should, the sky ahead blue and empty.

Then something failed.

A primary fuel pump, the lifeline between the tanks and the hungry engine, quit. Starved of fuel, the jet engine flamed out.

Silence crashed into the cockpit.

No engine roar.

No steady push.

Just wind over the canopy and the sickening realization that he was now in a powered brick flying over the crowded sprawl of Los Angeles at low altitude.

He’d been here, in a way, before—dead engine, damaged plane, bad odds. Over Borneo, he’d feathered the prop, killed the fire, flown Marge home on one engine.

This was different.

A jet without power didn’t glide like a sleek bird. It fell with more enthusiasm than grace.

He ran through emergency procedures, muscle memory and training taking over even as adrenaline spiked. He tried to restart the engine. Not enough altitude, not enough time.

He angled the powerless aircraft away from houses, away from streets full of people driving to work, kids playing in yards, lives that had likely never heard of New Guinea or Balikpapan.

He fought gravity and physics and circumstance with everything he had.

When it became clear he couldn’t save the plane, he tried to save himself.

He tried to bail out.

But he was too low.

The ground rushed up.

The P-80 hit, exploding into flame and twisted metal in a field.

Major Richard Ira Bong, the farm kid who’d turned deflection shooting and disciplined tactics into an art form, the pilot who had shot down forty enemy airplanes and survived two hundred missions, died instantly.

He was twenty-four years old.

Half a world away, over Japan, the bomb from Enola Gay fell toward Hiroshima.

It detonated in a blinding flash, obliterating a city, inaugurating the age of atomic warfare.

Newspapers the next day were filled with the unimaginable: a single weapon capable of destroying more in an instant than entire bomber fleets could in weeks.

Somewhere, below the fold, in smaller type, there was another story.

America’s greatest ace had died in a testing accident in California.

History turned a page.

The age of piston-engine dogfights—the age that had given birth to men like Bong—ended that day in more ways than one.

No one knew it at the time, not clearly. Jets would duel, sure, but the nature of aerial combat was changing. Radar, missiles, beyond-visual-range engagements. The close-in, turning, slashing gunfights of World War II would become rarer and rarer, then effectively extinct.

There would be no new Ace of Aces.

No one would ever get the chance to match his forty kills in the same way.

His record became, not a stepping stone, but a monument.

Years later, in a quiet corner of his home state of Wisconsin, a building rose: the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center.

It wasn’t a marble palace with gold ceilings. It was something more fitting—a solid, understated place where people could walk in off the street and come face-to-face with reminders of what kind of man he’d been, and what kind of war he’d fought.

Inside, under careful lights and behind glass, his Medal of Honor sits on display.

There are photographs—black-and-white shots of a young man in uniform, leaning against his P-38, smiling shyly for the camera, eyes squinting a little in the sun. Images of him receiving medals, riding in parades, shaking hands with factory workers and generals.

There are letters. Notes to his family, to Marge. Reports written in that same understated tone he used for everything, describing actions that would make most people’s blood run cold.

And there is a P-38.

A restored Lightning, painted in the same scheme as the one he flew, with MARGE on the nose and the familiar curves of the twin-boom tail.

It stands on its landing gear, frozen in the moment between war and peace, between memory and myth.

Visitors walk around it, necks craned back, tracing its lines, marveling at how big it is, how odd it looks, how different it feels from the sleek jets they see on TV.

Somewhere between the tin cans on fence posts and that polished museum floor lies the arc of his life.

A farm kid who learned that the trick to hitting a moving target was not to chase it, but to understand where it would be. A pilot who took that lesson into the air and used it, again and again, until enemy airplanes started falling in numbers that seemed impossible.

He didn’t see himself as a killer.

He saw himself as a protector.

To the bomber crews who looked out their windows and saw a fork-tailed silhouette sliding into position above them, he was a guardian angel with a crazy trick and unshakable nerve.

To the engineers and tacticians who studied his gun camera footage and dissected his reports, he was proof that discipline, energy tactics, and deflection shooting could turn the sky from a crapshoot into something closer to a science.

To General Kenney, he was the best he’d ever seen—not because he was aggressive, but because he was smart. Calm. Calculated.

He made killing look easy because he followed rules that worked and never let his ego write checks his airplane couldn’t cash.

To Marge, he was a husband who never got the chance to grow old with her, whose name would always be paired with war, even though he’d dreamed, quietly, of fields and peace.

To the country, he was and remains a legend.

Forty victories.

Two hundred missions.

One life that burned fast and bright between a Wisconsin farm and a California field.

The engine noise is gone now. The jungle airstrips are reclaimed by vines and silence. The Zeroes and P-38s that once clawed at the sky are museum pieces and photographs.

But somewhere, in the deep memory of the nation, that farm kid still sits in a P-38 cockpit, eyes narrowed, fingers light on the trigger, watching not where the enemy is, but where they’re going to be.

He waits.

He sees the future point.

He squeezes the trigger once.

And three planes fall out of the sky.

THE END