Richard Bong shot down 40 Japanese aircraft, more than any other American pilot in history, survived it all, and then was killed testing one of the new jet fighters, on the very same day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. His story bridges the two ages of flight, the propeller ace who died at the dawn of the jet.
Bong was a farm boy from Wisconsin, and he flew the twin-engine, twin-boomed P-38 Lightning in the Pacific. Over the jungles and seas of New Guinea and the Philippines, in mission after mission, he ran up a score no American had ever matched, 40 confirmed victories, the ace of aces of the entire United States. He was a modest, boyish figure, not a swaggering hotshot, and he was so valuable and so famous that the command kept trying to pull him out of combat and send him home to safety, and he kept finding ways back to the front.
General MacArthur personally presented him with the Medal of Honor in December 1944, awarded not for a single action but for his sustained, extraordinary record of aggressiveness and skill, flying combat missions even when, as a gunnery instructor, he did not have to.
Eventually they did get him home, the war nearly won, his tally unmatched, a national hero married to his sweetheart, seemingly with his whole life ahead of him. And here is the cruel end. Bong was assigned as a test pilot for the P-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational jet fighter, the machine that represented the future that had first flown on this date in 1939. On August 6, 1945, taking off on a routine test flight, his jet suffered an engine failure. Bong was too low to bail out successfully, and the aircraft crashed and he was killed. He was 24.
He died the same day as the Hiroshima bomb, so his death was buried in the newspapers beneath the news that would end the war. America's greatest ace, who had survived 40 dogfights and every danger the Japanese could throw at him, killed by an engine failure in a jet, at the very hinge between the propeller age he had mastered and the jet age that was just beginning.