How many victories did Richard Bong, the greatest American ace of World War II, achieve, and in which aircraft?

Richard Bong was the American fighter pilot with the most confirmed victories of the entire Second World War: 40 in total, every single one of them scored while flying a P-38. The Lightning was, in fact, the aircraft flown by the United States' greatest aces across both the Asia-Pacific and the China-Burma-India theatres of operations, and Bong spent much of the war contesting the top spot with Thomas McGuire, who ultimately totalled 38 victories in that very same type of aircraft.

Bong had a habit of flying straight at his targets to make absolutely certain he hit them, and on more than one occasion this meant flying directly through the debris of an enemy aircraft he had just shot down. On one particular occasion he even collided with an enemy fighter outright, an incident that was officially credited to him as a "probable" victory. This aggressive style of attack suited the P-38's armament especially well, since all of its guns were concentrated in the nose: four Browning M2 machine guns together with a single 20 mm cannon, neither of which depended on a fixed convergence point, and both of which could hit a target reliably out to a range of 1,000 yards (roughly 900 m). Among the men who helped train him was Hoyt "Curley" Eason, a five-victory veteran of the 39th Fighter Squadron who had personally instructed hundreds of fellow pilots over the course of the war.

After reaching his final total of 40 victories, Bong was sent back home to the United States as the country's leading ace, and from then on worked instead as a test pilot. McGuire, for his part, was killed in aerial combat in January 1945 over the Philippines, having reached 38 confirmed victories, which left him ranked as the second-highest-scoring American ace of the war. Both men were ultimately awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their service. Across the Pacific theatre as a whole, the P-38 is credited with shooting down more than 1,800 Japanese aircraft during the war, and more than a hundred of the pilots who flew it went on to become aces in their own right.