Letters From a B-17 Bombardier

Second Lt Bombardier Ray Konen writes his sweetheart Shirley from stateside training fields in the middle of WWII.  Note his brother was Kennard and the ai reading calls bill and Johnie his brothers.  Bill was either a close family friend or Shirley’s boss at the bank.  Two separate bills often come up in the letters.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Ray Conan sat alone in a quiet room on the evening of November 6, 1944, listening to a high wind scream around the corners of the barracks. It was a sound that reminded him of Withering Heights, not just a single moment from the book, but the haunting, restless spirit of the whole story. He felt isolated, but as he wrote to his sweetheart, Shirley Rutledge, he admitted he was getting used to the solitude. He described it as a prelude to the future, a time of vivid dreams and visions that his body and mind couldn't quite keep up with.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

He was a man out of sync with his own soul, restless and searching for answers he couldn't name, all triggered by the same wind that had fascinated him since he was a boy. He was 27 months into his service with the United States Army Air Forces, training to be a B-17 bombardier, and the world outside that room was becoming increasingly chaotic. The training field where Ray was stationed had turned into what he called a madhouse. The Army Air Force had literally run out of bombs, which made learning how to drop them a bit of a challenge. To make matters worse, all the experienced instructors had been shipped out to the front lines. Ray and his fellow cadets were left to read about bombing techniques and textbooks and then take to the skies to see if they could figure it out on their own. He believed in self-education, but even he realized there was a limit to how much a man could learn about aerial warfare without any guidance. There was a rumor that they would all graduate as flight officers, a rank that carried the same pay and uniform as a second lieutenant, but with a commission signed by Congress instead of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ray didn't care about the prestige. He just wanted to get out of school and get to work. He thought of his brothers and friends scattered across the globe. His brother Bill had earned his civilian pilot's license and was practicing cross country flights. Ray joked that if he had joined the paratroopers, Bill would probably be practicing jumping off the roof just to keep pace. Then there was Johnny, Ray's half brother, who was somewhere in France, likely in the thick of the fighting. The irony of their situation wasn't lost on him. Shirley lived just two miles from Ray's mother in their hometown, yet his mother would send a letter twenty five hundred miles across the country just to ask Ray how Shirley was doing. It was a strange, fragmented way of living, that Ray called a bit insane, even if it was the best they could manage during the war. The uncertainty of the military machine weighed on him. Two weeks later, on november twentieth, Ray sat down with an apple to celebrate his twenty seventh month in the army. The situation at the field had deteriorated further. The creeps in charge, as he called them, had shipped out almost all the planes, and he suspected his unit would be transferred to Carlsbad, New Mexico to finish the course. He told Shirley he could handle flying without bombs or instructors, but if they took away the ships themselves, he was ready to throw in the towel. He was struggling with the paperwork of navigation, making silly mistakes, miscopying figures and measuring distances incorrectly on the ground, even though he could navigate perfectly fine once he was actually in the air. He had an exam coming up on Monday, and he was terrified that if he flunked, his journey toward his wings would be over. In the face of that pressure, Shirley's letters were his lifeline. He told her he wanted to know every detail of her day, from the moment she woke up until she went to bed, and even what she dreamed about. He stared at her picture, noting that she was still as beautiful as ever. He daydreamed about a future furlough, imagining himself standing in the bank lobby where she worked, watching the people get off the elevators just to feel his heart flip-flop when she finally appeared. He missed the simple things: a hug, a kiss, a moment of normalcy in a world that felt like it was constantly shifting beneath his feet. The camaraderie of the service was a double-edged sword. Ray listed the friends he had made and lost to the relentless churn of shipping orders, men like Lyshka, Jimmy Sorver, Doc Udell, and Cliff Stout were all gone now, sent to different fields or different fronts. He had new chums, Buck Knowlton, a cowboy from South Dakota, Bob Leighton, a college boy from Oklahoma, and John Klingler, a coal miner from Pennsylvania. They were good Joes, but Ray knew that in a couple of months old devil shipping orders would reappear and tear them apart too. The radio in the background was playing no place like home, a cruel irony for a man restricted to his post for six weeks straight. As Thanksgiving approached, the army seemed indifferent to the holiday. Ray's schedule allowed only 20 minutes for noon mess, hardly enough time to appreciate a meal. He teased Shirley about what she wanted for Christmas, offering her everything from a year's subscription to Wild West Weekly to a genuine prospector, or even a bomb site. But then his tone shifted to the one thing he could actually offer, a diamond ring. He joked that the catch was that he came with the ring, but the underlying desire for a permanent commitment was clear. He was a B-17 boy, he told her, and he wasn't interested in the smaller, sleeker P thirty nine types. He wanted a life with her, one filled with roast duck dinners and three day turnarounds on letters. The letters from Ray Conan, who would eventually serve as a second lieutenant bombardier, offer a window into the mind of a young man caught between the mechanical demands of war and the emotional pull of home. He was a man who found meaning in the screaming wind and the quiet moments with an apple. A man who worried about navigation exams and the lack of airmail stamps while preparing to fly one of the most dangerous aircraft of the era. His words are a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, finding humor and hope in the middle of a global madhouse. He closed his letter to Shirley with three separate postscripts, adding two more ounces of love, then one more ounce, and finally ain't no more. It was a simple, heartfelt goodbye from a man who was ready to go hurtling through space again, searching for the answers the wind had promised him. If these letters from a young bombardier resonated with you, consider sharing this story with a friend who appreciates the personal side of history.