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P38
Lightning
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On April 12, 1944 over Hollandia,
New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean, Major Richard Bong, flying his P-38 “Marge”
with the 80th Fighter Squadron, provided fighter cover for B-24s of the
Fifth Air Force.
The two confirmed victories that
day were Major Bong’s twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, which surpassed
Captain Eddie Richenbacker’s record of twenty-six in WWI. Several
weeks after Allied forces captured Hollandia, Navy divers, using Major
Bong’s pinpoint directions, found the wreckage of a reported probable
kill, officially confirming Bong’s number twenty-eight.
By war’s end, Major Richard Bong led all American
aces with forty victories. Returning stateside, after having been pulled
from combat as a war hero, Major Bong was tragically killed on August 6,
1945, in a crash of a P-80 jet fighter in Burbank, California. |
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