Marge

Major Richard Ira "Dick" Bong was America's highest-scoring ace, with forty confirmed aerial victories in the Pacific Theater. He flew P-38 Lightnings, and every one of them carried the same image on its nose: a realistic colorized photograph of a young woman named Marjorie Ann Vattendahl.

Bong met Vattendahl in late 1943 while home on leave in Superior, Wisconsin. He carried a wallet-sized photo of her everywhere. A buddy helped him apply the portrait as a decal to his P-38, and the image of "Marge" flew into combat over New Guinea, the Philippines, and Borneo.

It was not a pin-up illustration. It was not a cartoon mascot. It was the actual face of the woman he loved, blown up from a wallet photo and pasted onto the nose of a fighter aircraft that killed forty enemy pilots. The intimacy of the image made it unique among nose art: this was not fantasy or bravado. This was a specific person, looking back at anyone who stood in front of the aircraft.

Bong received the Medal of Honor from General Douglas MacArthur in December 1944. He married Marjorie on February 10, 1945, in a ceremony at Concordia Lutheran Church in Superior.

On August 6, 1945, the same day the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Major Richard Bong was killed testing a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter at Burbank, California. The engine flamed out on takeoff. Bong ejected but was too low for his parachute to open. He was twenty-four years old. He and Marjorie had been married less than six months.

In 2024, a Pacific Wrecks expedition located the wreckage of one of Bong's P-38s, the one that had crashed in March 1944 due to engine failure. The pilot had bailed out safely. Marge's face had been in the jungle for eighty years.