May 5, 1942
San Francisco, California
The St. Francis Hotel towered in legendary elegance over one flank of Union Square, the one must-see spot in the city after a visit to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the Plaza of the West Coast, dominated by ornate columns and high ceilings designed to accentuate its grandeur. The Otis Elevator Company added custom outdoor glass elevators that dazzled riders with thirty-story rides above the city.
Its rooms catered to the finest of the interwar “in” crowd, from Cary Grant to President Roosevelt and boxer Jack Dempsey. In 1939, Salvador Dalí let reporters take his photo in one of the hotel’s bathtubs—wearing a lobster on his head, green goggles, and holding a cabbage in one hand.
There were times the in crowd took it too far. Fatty Arbuckle saw his career destroyed there when a young actress died at one of his wild parties.
If the St. Francis was the play place of the elite, the war transformed it into the last hurrah for a generation facing an uncertain fate. Gone were the high-end shops off the first-floor lobby, replaced by temporary rooms for military officers in transit to the Far East. Men from all walks of life and every state came to the St. Francis for a cultural experience they would never forget. They blew their remaining cash to say they had stayed at the hotel fit for world leaders and Hollywood icons. They dined on dollar-fifty brook trout and danced close in the packed confines of the Mural Room, where Harry Owens and his orchestra filled the venue with sensual Hawaiian tunes like “Sweet Leilani” and “Cocoanut Grove.” It was their brush with something great, which the hotel’s photographers memorialized for a few extra dollars.
In front of the hippest hotel with the hottest entertainment in the most beloved and liberated city in America, five-foot-seven, 150-pound 2nd Lt. Richard Ira Bong, late of Poplar, Wisconsin—population three hundred—stood with barely a penny to his name. The St. Francis was wild and glamorous, Bong the exact opposite. A little stocky, average looking with a decent smile and a quiet demeanor, he appeared entirely ordinary. In the greatest party place on the West Coast, he drank Coke. Though he would never stand out in a crowd, he was a fighter pilot. In wartime America, nothing was more romantic than that.
He watched as his buddy, Danny Robertson, shared a reunion with his girlfriend in epic Hollywood fashion. The young lovers arranged the rendezvous just after Dick and Danny received orders transferring them from Luke Field, Arizona, to the 49th Fighter Squadron at Hamilton Field. Now Dick Bong felt like a third wheel.
Trouble was, he was a third wheel everywhere in this city. A year before, he’d been living on the family farm in his childhood room, a tiny misshapen box at the top of the stairs, defined by a sloping roof so steep that when he slept in his narrow bed, his nose had been inches from the ceiling. Before May 29, 1941, he’d been out of Wisconsin just once in his life, when his family took a road trip to Yellowstone National Park.
He was not worldly, and the glitter of the St. Francis must have made him feel out of place. In the moral ambiguity of a city whose bar scene included a half-naked woman swimming in a goldfish bowl at Bimbo’s 365, Bong probably felt out of place everywhere. He was a straight arrow, a young man raised on simple farm principles of hard work and loyalty to God and country. His father imbued him with a rigid sense of right and wrong. In his world, there were no gray areas, though his sense of black and white had never been tested.
San Francisco that spring was a whirlwind of emotions, stoked by wartime romances, tragic partings, and terrible grief. Thanks to the many nocturnal air raid alarms, the city lived with a sword of Damocles over its head, and the people embraced a live for the day spirit. The military added to the drama. Throughout the morning, the huge sixteen-inch guns defending the area thundered as the crews trained to hit targets out at sea. Each shot resounded through the city, shaking windows and floors. Overhead, combat aircraft flew back and forth to gunnery ranges off the coast at Big Sur and Point Reyes, adding to the sounds of wartime San Francisco. They lent intensity to the moment.
Richard Bong was even-keeled. He knew how to keep his emotions on lockdown. Depression-era farm kids learned this as a matter of survival, as most faced despairing loss at young ages. You either learned to control it or grief controlled you. The Bong family possessed self-control in even the worst moments. If everyone here was fueled with a higher emotional octane, that was fine with him. He was content to be the rock in the surf.
Union Square hummed around him. Women wore the latest fashions—dirndl skirts made with black rayon crepe, or jersey-print below-the-knee dresses and wide-brimmed hats. Farm women back home had few such luxuries. Dresses and gloves were saved for Sunday church services. Most of the girls he knew back home milked cows and baled hay. These West Coast women were foreigners to a young man whose life was spent hunting and fishing around the family homestead.
The men were different, too. They were dapper and well dressed, while he made do with his Army Air Force “pinks,” the khaki uniform pants that turned that color when washed a few times. He wore the olive-brown dress tunic of an aviator, silver wings pinned to his chest. His shoes were brown and worn after a year of use.
The men flowing through Union Square sported the latest in shoe styles: seven-dollar Burma tan and brown Freeman two-tone wing tips, Roblee monk-strap Defenders, or traditional black bluchers, shined and neatly tied. His Air Corps regulation russet oxfords looked tacky in comparison. This was a town that took fashion seriously, and shoes were the mark of a man. He made a mental note to buy a new pair as soon as he got paid.
Those men not in uniform wore a mix of older suits—double-breasted chalk stripes in blues and grays, loosely tailored. The newer suits were less flashy since their designs were rigidly controlled by the federal government to save wool for military use. No pocket flaps on their coats, and pant cuffs were forbidden. Some of the men ignored the latter restriction by simply ordering longer slacks, then having them cuffed. Still, in the mélange of people around him, it was easy to see the extent of the government’s wartime reach.
People sat around the square on benches, enjoying the spring weather and reading about that very subject of government control in the local papers. The front page of one listed all the latest civilian items the government outlawed for the duration of the war. Production of purse frames was banned, and perfume atomizers, beer steins, roller coasters, and birdhouses made the list too. Butter knives, attic fans, and BB shot for Red Ryder spring rifles would also not be produced for civilian consumption for the duration of the war.
Bong took all that control in stride. Honoring the responsibilities of citizenship was the bedrock of his small-town education. His eighth-grade graduation ceremony included a speech by two classmates, entitled “I Am an American.” Four years later, when he received his high school diploma, the theme of the graduation ceremony was “Youth Faces the Ideals of Citizenship.”
Bong did not see the government’s restriction of fashion design to be an intrusion. There was a reason for it. He was a patriot and erred on the side of government. He trusted the country’s leaders, even if his folks hadn’t voted for FDR.
Bong explored the city that first night in town, taking it all in with his natural even keel. A few months before, he’d seen the Pacific Ocean for the first time and remarked in a letter home that it wasn’t all that impressive. It reminded him of Lake Superior. He contextualized the sweeping nature of an ocean with his own small corner of the planet. In a vast world, he existed in a farm-boy bubble, gazing out as an onlooker, not a participant.
So he avoided the prostitutes, and the dive bars, and the pool halls. He was twenty-one, a virgin who didn’t drink or gamble. In a city full of vice, he was viceless. His sense of propriety recoiled at the hookers plying their trade through the Tenderloin. He’d had a girlfriend in high school, but that was strictly proper. Bong came from a Christian family. Dating in Poplar meant holding hands.
At length, Bong retreated to his hotel room for the night. He and Danny could not afford the St. Francis, so they picked the Roosevelt on the other side of town. It was a once-majestic Gilded Age hotel that had slipped slowly into disrepair. Five bucks a night for a stained room with two beds, a chair, and a writing desk. This was all he could afford.
Just before nine thirty, the local radio stations went silent. The radar station on Mount Tamalpais detected an unidentified aircraft. Searchlights swept the sky until quarter to ten, seeking to illuminate the mystery craft, which turned out to be a wayward Navy plane. Sometime after midnight, another unidentified aircraft appeared over the bay. Once again, searchlights lanced the darkness over Mare Island and Oakland. Another false alarm, but it kept everyone on edge.
The next morning, Bong awoke early to pen a letter home. He was one of seven children—seven surviving children. Their tiny whitewashed two-story farmhouse managed to keep a roof over everyone’s head, but it was cramped and lacking in privacy. In such confines, one might expect the siblings to grow very close. They did, but for Bong, his deepest connection back home was to his mother. He wrote her at least several times a week to describe his experiences since joining the Army Air Force.
This morning, he wrote to his mom about the Bay Bridge. It was an engineering marvel, the longest in the world at that time. Completed six years before, it spanned almost a mile, connecting the East Bay to San Francisco’s China Basin district. It was an awesome sight, especially when the fabled California fog shrouded the spans at sunset, a highway into a cloud, standing hundreds of feet above the shimmering bay.
He loved these sorts of engineering achievements. In school, Dick was a hit-or-miss kind of student. He possessed a mechanical mind that took to all types of science, but he limped through art and earned a D in U.S. history, unaware that he would become a part of it someday. Chemistry class, where he kept meticulous notes written in the spiky print of an ordered and logical mind, was a different story. After years of working on aging farm machinery, he was a young man comfortable around metal things that moved. Had he not joined the military the previous fall, he might have made a talented mechanical engineer.
Letter written, it was time to report to duty. Danny and Bong drove across the Golden Gate into San Rafael and showed their military identification at the front gate to Hamilton Field. Around the airstrip’s perimeter, half-buried light tanks served as stopgap fortifications in case any Japanese troops made it over the Marin Headlands and into the North Bay. Elsewhere, men crewed antiaircraft guns with binoculars pointed to the sky, rifles nearby and pistols holstered on their hips.
Here, he would learn to be a warrior, not the trainer of warriors-to-be that he was in Arizona. Dick relished the opportunity; everyone, it seemed, wanted a shot at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. What he did not know was just how unyielding a gaze the media would shed on him when he would find himself at the center of the race to become the deadliest American fighter pilot.
Danny put the sedan in gear after getting their IDs back and drove onto the base to report to their new fighter squadrons, both pilots wondering what kind of pursuit planes they were destined to fly.