A wingtip from a Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter jet, once flown by World War II ace pilot Richard Bong, has been transported from Papua New Guinea to his home state of Wisconsin. The plane, nicknamed "Marge" after Bong's girlfriend Marge Vattendahl, crashed in 1944 over what is now Papua New Guinea after an engine failure forced the pilot, Thomas Malone, to bail out.

Richard Bong, a native of Poplar, Wisconsin, is credited with shooting down 40 Japanese aircraft during the war, the highest number for any US military pilot. He personally shot down three enemy planes while flying the P-38 Lightning "Marge," which featured a portrait of Vattendahl on its nose.

The recovered wingtip underwent a complex journey by air, land, and sea before arriving at the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin. The center had announced in March 2024 a collaboration with the historical preservation group Pacific Wrecks to search for the plane.

According to a 24 July news release from Wisconsin’s National Guard, some of its members traveled to Papua New Guinea to collect the recovered section. Pacific Wrecks founder and director Justin Taylan explained that Papua New Guinea’s government needed to issue an export permit for the relic because the US government had relinquished ownership of World War II artifacts.

The wingtip is considered a permanent loan to the Bong center. In exchange, the recovery mission secured another section of the plane for Papua New Guinea’s national museum, which also honors Richard Bong.

Bong died in August 1945 in a test flight crash, coinciding with the day the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, shortly before the end of the war.

Sources