Bong grew up on a farm in Poplar, Wisconsin, the eldest of nine children of a Swedish immigrant father. As a boy he watched mail planes drone overhead toward President Coolidge's summer retreat in nearby Superior, and he built models obsessively. He played clarinet in the marching band and skated hockey through the long northern winters. He enrolled at the local teachers college, signed up for civilian flying lessons, and in May 1941 joined the Army Air Corps. One of his flight instructors, as it happened, was a young Arizonan named Barry Goldwater, who would later run for president. Bong earned his wings in January 1942, a quiet, almost shy young man who turned out to have an extraordinary gift in the cockpit.

That gift first showed itself as mischief. Training over California in his new twin-boomed P-38 Lightning, Bong flew low down Market Street in San Francisco, looped around bridges, and reportedly blew the washing off an Oakland woman's clothesline. He was hauled before General George Kenney and reprimanded; he was also, the story goes, ordered to go do the woman's laundry. Kenney's words were stern, but his private verdict was warmer: "We needed kids like this lad." Bong was still grounded when the rest of his group shipped out to England, which is how he ended up bound instead for the South-West Pacific, the theatre where his name would be made.

He reached his first victories at the end of 1942 over Buna in New Guinea, flying with a borrowed squadron while his own waited for its scarce Lightnings. The tally climbed through 1943 and 1944. In April 1944 he passed the American record of twenty-six kills set by Eddie Rickenbacker in the previous war. He named his P-38 "Marge" and painted on its nose the face of Marjorie Vattendahl, the college girl he had fallen for back home. In December 1944 General MacArthur pinned the Medal of Honor on him at Leyte, and days later, over the Philippines, he scored his fortieth and final victory. He married Marge in February 1945, the celebrated Ace of Aces and his sweetheart, the wedding splashed across newspapers. He had survived two years of the most dangerous flying in the world.

What combat could not do, a test flight did. Pulled from the front and assigned to Lockheed's plant in Burbank, Bong was flying the new P-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational jet fighter, still a temperamental and lethal machine. On 6 August 1945, on a routine acceptance flight, the primary fuel pump failed on takeoff. He did not switch to the backup pump in time, bailed out far too low, and was killed almost instantly when the jet exploded. He had logged barely four hours in the type. His death made front pages across America, sharing the day's news with the first reports of the atomic bomb falling on Hiroshima. He is buried in the small cemetery at Poplar, near the farm where he learned to watch the sky. Half a world away, a Townsville bridge still carries his name.