Love and Lethality in 1943

The story of an army Airforce Bombardier and his family through letters home to his wife to be Shirley.  This story has a dog story within one of the letters.

Transcript

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Second Lieutenant Ray Conan sat on a train rolling out of Toma, Wisconsin in the bitterly cold February of 1943, staring down at a pair of numb fingers that had just spent hours trying to master the complex circuitry of an Army military radio. The temperature had plunged below zero, the kind of deep, biting Midwestern cold that freezes the moisture in a man's breath before it even leaves his face. Ray was stationed at the Army Air Force's Technical School in Toma, a young bombardeer and radio trainee grappling with the intricacies of the control net system, or CNS. The world was on fire, locked in a brutal global conflict, but in Toma, the war was a series of schematics, radio waves, and Morse code transmissions. Men in heavy woolen coats huddled over workbenches, their hands shaking as they tried to connect wires and tune frequencies. Ray was one of them, a young man from Michigan writing letters to a girl back in Chicago named Shirley Rutledge. His letters, written on thin, fragile paper with those freezing, stiff fingers, offer a profound, microscopic lens into the daily reality of a stateside trainee preparing for the deadliest aerial theater in human history. Ray's correspondence, meticulously preserved and eventually transcribed by his and Shirley's granddaughter decades later, forms a paper trail of ordinary humanity suspended on the edge of the abyss. The letters are not filled with grand declarations of geopolitical strategy or profound meditations on the nature of evil. Instead, they are grounded in the visceral, immediate realities of his life. He writes about scoring a ninety one on a difficult circuits test, begging Shirley not to be mad about a corny Valentine's Day card he sent, and dreaming of eating hot dogs at the Empire Room in Chicago. But lurking just beneath the surface of these mundane details is a terrifying undercurrent. The training at Toma was not a mere academic exercise. The Army Air Forces were rapidly building a massive armada of heavy bombers, B seventeen flying fortresses and B twenty four liberators destined for the freezing flak filled skies over Europe, and they needed men like Ray to operate the radios, drop the bombs, and navigate the hostile airspace. The physical reality of Toma, with its endless snow drifts and rigorous technical exams, was merely the vestible to a slaughterhouse. To understand what Ray and his fellow soldiers were facing, one must look at the mechanical and bureaucratic machinery they were caught within. In early nineteen forty three, the United States military was undergoing a massive structural shift in how it handled its technology. For decades, the Army Signal Corps had been the undisputed master of all things electronic and communicable. They had pioneered the use of aviation for reconnaissance in World War I, and they maintained an iron grip on radio equipment. But the Air Forces, ballooning to over two million men, required specialized, dedicated control over their own avionics. There was constant friction between the agencies. The Air Forces complained that Signal Corps equipment was inadequate for the specialized demands of high altitude strategic bombing. Ray captures this exact bureaucratic tectonic shift in a letter dated february twelfth, nineteen forty three. He writes to Shirley, noting with palpable relief that the Signal Corps had just relinquished control over their equipment. From that day forward, it was strictly Air Force jurisdiction. This meant that the CNS trainees at Toma were no longer dealing with a convoluted chain of command for their radios and radar sets. The mechanics of their daily lives changed. They were tuning specific Air Force frequencies, operating specialized transceivers designed to communicate between bombers flying in tight, defensive combat boxes at thirty thousand feet. But mastering the mechanics of the radio or the Nordon bombsite was only half the battle. The Norden bombsite itself was a marvel of analog computation, a device that looked more like a heavy sewing machine than a lethal weapon. Bombardier students spent hours on a groundbound simulator, resembling a house painter's scaffold, steering the apparatus slowly across a hangar floor. They aimed at a cardboard target mounted on a motorized box, a solenoid driven pen marking their hits. In the air, the bombageier would take over flying the massive thirty ton aircraft during the final bomb run, inputting variables into the site to calculate the exact trajectory required to drop a bomb from miles in the air and hit a target on the ground. It required immense concentration, absolute precision, and an unshakable nerve. And they were expected to do this while anti-aircraft shells exploded all around them, tearing jagged holes in the thin aluminum skin of their planes. This brings us to the controversy and the crushing mathematics of the strategic bombing campaign in nineteen forty three. The military brass operating out of Washington and London had committed to the doctrine of daylight precision bombing. They believed that heavily armed bomber formations could fight their way deep into Germany unescorted, drop their payloads on industrial targets, and fight their way back. The reality was a bloodbath. In the fall of nineteen forty three, the Eighth Air Force would experience loss rates that defied comprehension. Men were dying at a staggering pace. Out of every one hundred airmen who joined the bomber command, statistically only a fraction would survive a full twenty five mission tour unharmed. In some months, the fatality and capture rate meant that fewer than one in four Eighth Air Force crew members could expect to finish their tour. They were facing a twelve percent fatality rate overall, a number topped only by the submarine service. The bombers were falling from the sky in burning pieces. When Ray mentions in his letters that the statistics came through on the average life of a CNS man, he's looking directly at this grim reaper's ledger. He writes to Shirley that the statistics are pretty bad, but then he quickly pivots, noting that there isn't a single fellow in his unit who would want to get out of it. They were a great bunch of guys, he insisted. This is the ultimate paradox of the bomber poise. They were highly trained, intelligent young men, operating the most sophisticated technology of their era, fully aware that they were being fed into a meat grinder, yet they marched forward into the freezing sky anyway. Amidst the looming specter of death, the soldiers clung to whatever fragments of normalcy and compassion they could find. The harsh landscape of Toma provided one of the most vivid and touching moments in Ray's correspondence. On a freezing, desolate road about five miles from the school, Ray and his unit were out on a two hour hike. The Wisconsin wind was howling, biting through their uniforms. Suddenly a dog, a scrappy little mutt they called stinky, was struck by a passing car. The animal was left shattered on the side of the road, blind in one eye, with four broken ribs, a broken hind leg, and a severe head contusion. In an environment where these men were being trained to drop high explosives on distant cities, their reaction to this single broken animal is intensely revealing. Ray and another student did not leave the dog to die in the snow. They picked Stinky up and took turns carrying him through the bitter cold for an hour until they managed to flag down a car. The scene at the base hospital borders on the Surreal. They rushed the stray dog through the doors and started yelling for doctors. According to Ray, the dog received better medical treatment than he ever had. Eight government issue doctors, ranging from the major on down, along with two local veterinarians from the town of Toma, went to work on the mutt. They x rayed Stinky, they shaved the bruised parts of his body, they bandaged him tightly and put him to bed in the military hospital. The soldiers even stole food from the mess hall, sneaking it into the ward to feed the dog like a baby. When Ray visited Stinky after school, the dog wagged his tail and looked at the young bombardier with a single good eye. Ray wrote to Shirley, marveling at the profound, irrational kindness of his fellow soldiers. He asked, How can anyone lick a bunch of guys that will do so much for just a dog? It was a defiant act of preservation in a world dedicated to destruction. This desperate holding on to life permeates every word Ray sent to Chicago. His letters are an anchor, a lifeline thrown across the miles to Shirley. He focuses obsessively on the details of their future together. He asks about her new coat, betting she will look super in a silver fox fur. He plans every hour of a rare three day pass, outlining a schedule that includes roast duck, two hamburgers, ice skating, and a trip to the field museum. He jokes about his numbed fingers and begs her to eat a light breakfast so they can have an early dinner when he arrives. He even talks about listening to the shortwave radio at night, catching a Stroze Beer program broadcast from Lansing, Michigan, and imagining his own father standing in the auditorium within shouting range. These are the thoughts of a man constructing a protective fortress of domesticity and love against the encroaching dread of the casualty lists. When he reads the newspaper headlines in the depot about eight hundred and fifty men lost in a transport sinking, he remarks how rotten it is that they did not even have a fighting chance. The juxtaposition is stark. One moment he is talking about the museum, and the next, the mass graves of the Atlantic. The sheer volume of this correspondence, two hundred letters crisscrossing the American Midwest, builds a monument to the fragility of this generation. Ray Conan was not a famous general, he was not a politician. He was a second lieutenant bombardier who likened his love for a woman to a photoelectric cell, a piece of technology he was studying, stating that the moment he saw her, the machinery inside him started moving. He promised to tickle her if she didn't laugh, and he signed off with double love and kisses. And miraculously, Ray survived the war. The statistics did not claim him. The freezing skies over Europe and the deadly flak fields did not extinguish the life he had so carefully planned in those letters from Toma. He returned home to Chicago. He and Shirley got that small apartment they had dreamed about. Nine months later, the machinery of their life together produced a son, Thomas. The legacy of those letters and of the survival they represent is not a simple, triumphant Hollywood ending. It is messy, human, and complicated, echoing down through the decades. Thomas grew up in the post-war boom, poised to take over his grandfather's company, American Steelbox. But the great wheel of history turned again. The military drafted Thomas, not for a global crusade against fascism, but for the murky, divisive conflict in Vietnam. The son of the bombardier found himself in basic training, where a severe injury derailed his deployment. He returned home to the sprawling suburbs of Chicago, married, divorced, and raised three daughters on his own. He spent his career not as the heir to a steelbox empire, but as the head of purchasing for a Malibu light assembly factory in the far northern reaches of the city. Ray, the man who had faced the terror of the Eighth Air Force statistics, retired at fifty, living to see his son graduate college, carrying the immense pride of a father who had survived the unimaginable to witness the ordinary. Thomas passed away just four years ago. The generations turn over, the factories close, the military bases in Wisconsin transition into new eras, and the grand, terrible events of the twentieth century fade into history books. But the physical artifacts remain. The letters sit in a box, transcribed by an artist's granddaughter who recognizes the profound weight of those flimsy, yellowed pages. They hold the cold wind of Toma, the smell of stolen mess hall food for a broken dog, the anxiety of a circuits test, and the desperate burning hope of a twenty one-year-old man staring into the void and deciding to write about hot dogs at the Empire Room. They remind us that the massive sweeping movements of armies and air forces are entirely composed of individual beating hearts, each one terrified, each one hoping to make it to Monday, each one leaving a small, indelible mark on the people they love. If you found yourself moved by Ray and Shirley's story, send this episode to a friend who appreciates the hidden histories found in old family letters.