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America’s Ace of Aces. Wisconsin’s hometown hero.
Richard Ira Bong, 1920 to 1945. Forty enemy aircraft, more than any American pilot before or since, flown from a farm in Poplar to the Southwest Pacific and home again.
The all-American farm boy
Born in Superior in 1920 and raised on farmland in the neighboring hometown of Poplar, Richard (Dick) Bong was the first of nine children of a Swedish immigrant father and an American-born mother. Loyalty to his family and a deep sense of patriotism started young.
Like all farm children he had chores and was expected to drive farm machinery at an early age. He hunted and fished the surrounding woods and streams, played on his school athletic teams, and sang in the church choir. For his 4-H project he planted an extensive evergreen windbreak on the family farm to help his father.
He became enamored of flying as a small boy, watching airplanes over the farm that were said to be carrying mail for President Calvin Coolidge’s summer White House in Superior.
Ace of Aces
As a college student at the State Teachers College in Superior, now the University of Wisconsin-Superior, he learned to fly in the Civilian Pilot Training program. At twenty he became a flying cadet in the US Army Air Corps, in time for the entry of the United States into World War II.
Flying P-38 Lightnings in the Pacific theater, Dick became America’s all-time Ace of Aces, downing 40 enemy planes. His decorations for outstanding skill and extraordinary courage included the Medal of Honor and every other medal besides the Purple Heart. Ordered home for his own safety as America’s top pilot, he married his sweetheart Marge at a cathedral in Superior.
“The most shot-at girl in the Pacific.”Bong, on the P-38 he named for Marge and painted with her photograph
Banner headlines on the day the war changed
Only six months after his wedding, Bong was killed test-piloting the first Lockheed jet fighter in California. It was said he bailed out too late after steering the aircraft away from civilian homes. He was 24. His death came the same day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and he still received banner headlines in the national newspapers.
Thousands attended the funeral services in Superior, and many more lined the funeral route to the Poplar cemetery, where he was buried in the family plot.
In 1955, ten years after his death, a memorial was dedicated in Poplar with a P-38 Lightning on a pylon. It stood for more than fifty years, until funds raised by his family and by Marge led to this museum in Superior, opened in 2002.
Dick Bong, in photographs.
