People carried Richard Bong’s wingtip home one careful step at a time.
The six-foot piece of aluminum came from Marge, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning flown by Bong, a Wisconsin pilot credited with shooting down 40 Japanese aircraft during the second world war. Marge crashed in March 1944 over what is now Papua New Guinea after fellow US military pilot Thomas Malone bailed out when an engine failed.
The wreck stayed in the jungle for decades. Bringing one piece of it to Wisconsin took two years of work.
Explorers with Pacific Wrecks located what remained of Marge in Madang province. The wreckage still carried sections of the wingtip, including paint Bong had applied to the plane. Finding it was only the beginning. The recovery required negotiations with Papua New Guinea’s government, local landowners and the country’s national museum.
The national museum owns the wreckage. That fact matters. The wingtip did not belong to whoever found it, and Wisconsin did not have a claim simply because Bong came from there. The people who searched for the plane had to work through the government and the local custodians of the land. The country’s national museum had to authorize the arrangement.
Papua New Guinea’s defense force carried the artifact to Port Moresby. Wisconsin National Guard members then flew it to Milwaukee aboard a military refueling tanker. From there, the wingtip went to Poplar, Bong’s hometown, before traveling about 20 miles to the Richard I Bong Veterans Historical Center in Superior.
That is a long trip for a small piece of metal. It crossed jungle, roads, airports and an ocean because a chain of people agreed that the wreckage should be protected and seen. Local landowners helped make the recovery possible. Papua New Guinean officials and museum custodians kept control of their national history. Explorers did the searching. Military personnel did the carrying and transport. Wisconsin residents and museum staff took responsibility for what came next.
The Superior museum received the wingtip as a permanent loan. Another section of the plane was secured for Papua New Guinea’s national museum. That arrangement gives both communities a piece of the wreckage and a claim on the work of caring for it.
A permanent loan is not the same thing as a transfer of ownership. The artifact can be displayed in Wisconsin while remaining part of Papua New Guinea’s national collection. The loan also leaves room for the two museums to share the story instead of dividing it into competing national trophies.
Bong was born in Poplar, earned the Medal of Honor in 1944 and became known as the “ace of aces.” He later married Marge Vattendahl, the woman after whom the plane was named. In August 1945, on the same day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Bong died in a test-flight crash.
Those facts belong on the museum’s labels. So do the facts about the aircraft’s wreck, the search, the negotiations and the people who moved it. A visitor in Superior should know that the wingtip came from a machine used in combat, but also that it came out of Papua New Guinea through permission and cooperation, not simple possession.
The object will need more than a display case. It will need staff to protect it, residents to support the museum, records to explain its origin and custodians in both countries willing to keep the agreement honest. That is how a community preserves something fragile. One group searches. Another grants access. Another carries. Another pays attention to the story after the excitement of arrival has passed.
The wingtip is modest. The labor around it is not.
At the Bong Center, visitors will be able to stand in front of something Bong flew in combat. That physical connection can make the war less distant. It can also keep the artifact from becoming only a heroic souvenir. The aluminum came from a plane, and the plane came from a war that killed and wounded people across the Pacific.
The work now is straightforward, though not easy: care for the metal, tell the truth about where it came from, name the people who made its recovery possible, and remember that Papua New Guinea kept part of Marge because the history belongs there too.
A piece of Marge is in Wisconsin. The responsibility for it remains shared.