A wingtip of a downed fighter plane once flown by second world war ace pilot Richard Bong has been taken to his home state of Wisconsin from Papua New Guinea, where it crashed more than 80 years earlier.
The piece of the plane named after the pilot’s girlfriend, Marge Vattendahl, underwent a remarkable journey by air, land and sea before its procurement by the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior, Wisconsin.
Bong is credited with shooting down 40 Japanese aircraft during the second world war, more than any other US military pilot. The native of Poplar, Wisconsin, shot down three of those enemy aircraft while in a Lockheed P-38 Lightning plane that he nicknamed Marge – and which had a portrait of Vattendahl plastered on its nose.
Marge was being flown by fellow US military pilot Thomas Malone in March 1944 over what is now Papua New Guinea when an engine failure caused the aviator to bale out and the plane to crash, with its wreckage not being recovered for decades.
Bong, meanwhile, earned the Medal of Honor, the highest American military commendation, in 1944 – as well as the sobriquet “ace of aces”. He later married Vattendahl, who became a fashion model and magazine publisher. But in August 1945, on the same day the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima shortly before the end of the war, Bong was killed in a test flight crash.
The Bong museum announced in March 2024 it was collaborating with the historical preservation group Pacific Wrecks to mount a joint search for Marge. Two months later, the organizations said explorers hiking in the jungles of Papua New Guinea’s Madang province discovered what remained of Marge, whose wingtips still had the paint Bong applied on them.
A 24 July news release from Wisconsin’s national guard said some of its members had gone to Papua New Guinea to collect a recovered section of Marge. They came back with it onboard a military refueling tanker during the week before the publication of the news release, the Wisconsin national guard said.
The US defense department said the artifact was a recovered Margue wingtip. And an article published on Monday by Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) said officials with the Bong Center joined family members of the late ace in flying to Papua New Guinea to retrieve the artifact, too. The group’s travels included a boat ride on the way to the Marge crash site.
WPR reported that Pacific Wrecks had spent two years negotiating with Madang’s government, local landowners and Papua New Guinea’s national museum – which owns Marge’s wreckage – to recover a piece of the downed plane.
Papua New Guinea’s defense force flew the 6ft-long, aluminum wingtip to the country’s capital, Port Moresby, according to WPR. From there, Wisconsin national guard members – who have a partnership with Papua New Guinea for purposes such as disaster response and medical readiness – flew the artifact to Milwaukee.
The wingtip was displayed at an airshow and brought to Poplar, before being taken about 20 miles (32km) away on Sunday to the collection of artifacts at his namesake historical center.
Pacific Wrecks’ founder and director, Justin Taylan, told WPR that the government of Papua New Guinea needed to issue an export permit for the recovered Marge section because the US government had relinquished ownership of second world war relics. The Marge piece at the Bong center is in effect a permanent loan – and in return, the recovery mission involving Pacific Wrecks secured another section of the plane for Papua New Guinea’s national museum, which has its own display honoring the ace, Taylan said to the outlet.
Whatever the case, those at the heart of the effort said it was worth it.
Brig Gen Adria Zuccaro of Wisconsin national guard said her troops were “honored to bring a piece of Richard Bong’s legacy home”.
Bong’s nephew, Jim, told the outlet that it was priceless for visitors to the museum in Superior to be able “to actually have something tangible right in front of you that is a part of what he flew in combat”.
And the Bong Center’s director of collections and exhibits, Briana Fiandt, told Wisconsin news channel WDIO that she hoped the facility’s Marge wingtip would “help inspire future generations to be interested in history”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
• The headline and text of this article were amended on 4 August 2026. The Lockheed P-38 Lightning is a fighter plane, not a fighter jet as an earlier version said.
