The Bombardier’s Burden

Ray encourages Shirley to wait for him.

Transcript

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On September 1st, 1943, Second Lieutenant Ray Conan presses his pen into a sheet of paper with enough force to nearly tear it, demanding to know if a Chicago bank teller named Shirley Rutledge is going to wait for him. The ink spills out in a frantic, unpolished cursive, capturing the spiraling anxiety of a young man trapped in the relentless machinery of the United States Army Air Forces. Ray is a bombardier cadet, and on this late summer evening, he writes his seventh letter in a single sitting, deciding to send it no matter how angry or raw the words appear. He warns Shirley that he is familiar with how miserable a person can feel, that he's an old hand ad, and that if she turns him down, his life will be no concern of hers or anyone else's. He threatens, with a mix of desperate bravado and genuine terror, that if she claims he doesn't understand her, he will go AWOL and pin her ears back. He ends the barrage with a final, exasperated confession. I love you, damn it. Ray Conan's outpouring of frustration is not an isolated emotional breakdown. It is the psychological byproduct of a military training program designed to break men down and forge them into precise instruments of destruction. By 1943, the American military realized that the Second World War would not be won solely by the charismatic fighter pilots of the First World War, but by coordinated air crews executing highly technical missions. The military needed bombarders by the tens of thousands, and they needed them to perform complex mathematical calculations while suspended thousands of feet in the air, enduring freezing temperatures and flying straight into anti-aircraft fire. To become a bombardier, Ray has to navigate a grueling 12 to 18-week course that tests his reflexes, his mental endurance, and his sanity. The elimination rate hovers at a severe 12%. Ray knows this statistic intimately. In his letter to Shirley, he insists that if he washes out of the cadet program, it will be for physical reasons and no other. A promise to her that he isn't a quitter. The pressure to succeed is immense. The Army Air Force's classification films from the era explicitly tell young men that their aptitude tests reveal they were born to be bombarders, promising them a chance to drop bombs directly on Tokyo or Berlin. It is an overwhelming burden for a young man from the Midwest, suddenly told that the fate of the free world rests on his ability to master a device that looks more like a complex sewing machine than a weapon of war. This device is the Norden Bombsite, a highly classified mechanical computer composed of gears, gyroscopes, and optics. The military reveres the Norden bombsite to such a degree that cadets are required to take a solemn oath to protect the instrument with their lives. Before a mission, the site is carried to the aircraft under armed guard. If a plane is forced down in enemy territory, the bombardier's absolute primary duty is to destroy the device, often carrying thermite grenades, specifically designed to melt the complex mechanical calculator into useless slag. The training to master this revered machine begins on the ground, in vast, echoing hangars. Ray and his fellow cadets learn their trade on a bizarre simulator that resembles a house painter's scaffold. This motorized contraption moves slowly across the hangar floor. The cadet sits perched atop the scaffold, peering through the rubber eyepiece of the bombsite, turning knobs to steer the entire structure. His goal is to track a small mechanical bug moving across the floor. As the scaffold passes over the target, a solenoid-driven pin marks a dot on a piece of cardboard, recording the accuracy of the simulated strike. It is a surreal slow-motion ballet of war, young men in pristine hangers practicing the geometry of devastation. Once they master the scaffold, the cadets take to the air in the Beach AT-11 Canson, a twin-engine transport plane modified with a plexiglass nose and a bombay. Up in the air, the true isolation of the bombardier takes hold. They fly over the desolate landscapes of the American Southwest, vast stretches of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. During these flights, the bombardier effectively takes control of the aircraft. Through the bomb site, signals are sent directly to the flight controls, or the bombardier gives verbal corrections to the pilot, guiding the massive machine on its final, agonizingly straight bomb run. Over the course of their training, each student drops approximately 160 practice bombs. These bomb dummy units are filled with sand, or sometimes in rival training flights, sacks of flour. They plummet toward the desert floor, kicking up harmless plumes of white dust, a sterile rehearsal for the firestorms to come. The philosophy underpinning this intense training is deeply paradoxical. The creator of the bomb site, a Swiss engineer named Carl Norden, fundamentally believed that his invention was a tool of mercy. He designed the device with the conviction that its pinpoint accuracy would drastically lower the death toll of the war by avoiding civilian casualties. Norden envisioned a war of precision, where only factories, rail yards, and military installations would be destroyed. The military adopts this narrative, feeding it to the cadets. The bombardier is taught to view his role as a defensive measure, a necessary calculated violence that acts as a shield for the innocent people back home. When Ray Conan looks through the crosshairs, he is conditioned to see a mathematical equation that equals safety rather than a physical act that equals destruction. It is this psychological armor that allows men like Ray to endure the relentless drills and the creeping dread of deployment. But the armor is thin, and the dread bleeds through into the letters Ray sends back to Chicago. Shirley Rutledge, the recipient of this endless stream of affection and anxiety, lives in a world that is completely alien to the sterile hangers and freezing altitudes of Ray's reality. Chicago in 1943 is a city radically altered by the war effort, a bustling hub of production and rationing. As a bank teller, Shirley handles the localized economics of a nation pivoting entirely toward military supremacy. The sensory landscape of her city has changed. The streets of Chicago echo with a new, unfamiliar noise. Because rubber is strictly rationed for the military, delivery trucks have been stripped of their tires and fitted with wooden replacements. As these heavy trucks navigate the neighborhood alleys, the wooden wheels rumble and howl against the pavement, a constant, abrasive reminder of the overseas conflict. The materials of everyday life have vanished. Silk, once imported from Japan, is virtually impossible to find. The city undergoes constant collection drives. Citizens are urged to donate aluminum pots, pans, and tinfoil, told by the president that their cookware will be melted down to build the very bombers Ray is learning to fly. Even the city's waterways and docks are militarized. Navy Pier has been taken over for training, and makeshift aircraft carriers like the USS Wolverine and USS Sable cruise the waters of Lake Michigan, allowing naval aviators to practice dangerous deck landings just offshore. In the midst of this transformed city, Shirley receives Ray's letters, over 200 of them over the course of the war. His handwriting is the only tether connecting him to a civilian identity. In his September 1st letter, he chastises her for talking about being content with just living, asking her where her fight is. He demands she wait for him, arguing that waiting for a guy is tough, but it's plenty tough on the guy, too. He points out that he could have had a girl on Sunday, but he didn't, choosing instead to sit in his room and read, holding on to the belief that they belong together. As the war grinds on into 1945, the tone of Ray's letters shifts. The fiery anger of the cadet desperate to prove himself gives way to the exhausted melancholy of a man who spent too long in the military machine. By October of 1945, stationed in Kansas, the war is technically over, but the military bureaucracy keeps him trapped in uniform. He writes to Shirley with a deep, aching fatigue. He complains that he is getting ornery, unpleasant, lazy, irritable, neglectful, thoughtless, and less and less ambitious. He tells her that if he could get out of the army tomorrow, it would be the answer to several prayers. But he recognizes the psychological damage the experience has inflicted on him. He admits that he has to get used to being on his own again, that he has to discover himself anew. The threat of deployment still hangs over him. He mentions seeing a newspaper notice that five groups of B-29 bombers are scheduled to go to Europe, and he dreads the thought that his group might be one of them. The B-29 Superfortress is a massive, complex machine, the pinnacle of wartime aviation technology, but for Ray, it represents only further separation from the neon-lit streets of Chicago. He seeks refuge in the mundane details of their imagined future, detailing to Shirley how he wants to live, analyzing their relationship down to its core components. He writes that a relationship is like a jigsaw puzzle, taking a lot of different pieces to make a complete picture, and bluntly states that he would rather have her without sex than sex without her. He casts Shirley as a mythological figure, a savior who will rescue him from the drudgery of the barracks. In one letter, he jokingly refers to himself as Sleeping Beauty, claiming that all the time he has away from her is just a dream, and that he won't wake up and start living until he gets kissed by Princess Charming. It is a profound reversal of the traditional fairy tale, revealing the deep vulnerability of the wartime soldier. The man trained to drop high explosives from 20,000 feet views the bank teller back home as his only source of salvation. Ray tries to maintain a sense of humor, telling Shirley stories about the absurdities of military life. He writes about a fellow soldier named Bob who was driving him berserk with his romantic troubles, changing his mind about a girl named Kathy every 10 minutes. He recounts playing his harmonica for Bob, trying to get him to guess the tunes. When Ray plays the Star Spangled Banner, Bob looks puzzled and says he thinks he has heard it before. When Ray plays America, Bob confidently guesses it is coming around the mountain. Ray tells Shirley that this ignorance was the straw that tickled the lion's nose, causing him to die from laughter. These small, ridiculous moments are lifelines, attempts to normalize an existence defined by rigid schedules, medical exams, and the ever-present threat of violence. The legacy of this intense, long-distance relationship is captured entirely in ink. The 200 letters Ray sent to Shirley survived the war, preserving a microhistory of the American home front and the psychological reality of the Army Air Force's training program. These fragile sheets of paper document the evolution of a man, from an anxious, combative cadet terrified of washing out, to a weary veteran desperate to reclaim his freedom. They strip away the polished, heroic veneer often applied to the Second World War, revealing the raw, unvarnished human cost of turning a young man into a bombardier. The letters demonstrate how the massive globe-spanning machinery of war was ultimately sustained by the most intimate and fragile of connections. The Norden bombsite, the beach AT-11 Canson, the freezing altitudes, and the complex ballistics, all of it was endured because somewhere in Chicago, a woman was walking past the rumbling wooden tires of a delivery truck, heading to her job at a bank window, carrying a letter in her purse. Ray Conan survived the statistics, the elimination rates, and the terrifying responsibility of his training, held together by the stubborn, angry love he poured onto the page on September 1st, 1943.