A Bombardier’s Christmas Secret

Close to graduation midwar, Ray plans a Christmas trip home for a visit.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Second Lieutenant Raymond J. Conan is sitting in a drafty barracks on the edge of a dusty airfield, his heart hammering against his ribs at 3,000 points of pressure. It is November 1944, and the air in Oklahoma is turning sharp, but Ray is sweating through his officer's uniform. He is twenty three days away from graduation, one final test away from the silver wings of a bombardier, and exactly twenty five days away from a Christmas miracle at Dearborn Station in Chicago. Ray leans over a small wooden desk, the scratching of his fountain pen the only sound against the low hum of distant aircraft engines. He is writing to Shirley Rutledge, a bank teller back home, with a look he calls elegant and a smile that makes him feel like he might blow up from the sheer weight of waiting. He tells her to take this letter into her room and close the door, because what he's about to say is secret. He has been holding out on her for three months, terrified to speak the dream aloud until it was within his grasp. He's finished his bombing runs, and for two weeks he's been doing fancy navigating, preparing for a world where he might be the one in the nose of a B-25 Mitchell, juggling the crosshairs and the charts simultaneously. Ray's journey to this desk began long before the war, on the streets of Chicago and the winding roads of Lansing, Michigan. He started young, driving a beer delivery truck for his father when he was only fourteen years old. His family life was a revolving door of fathers. His mother was married four times, and her fourth husband, Miles, is the one Ray thinks of now as he considers the news of his impending commission. There's a ghost of a different life in Ray's past, one involving a missed opportunity when his father turned down the sole Midwest distribution rights for Pabs Blue Ribbon Beer. Instead of a beer empire, Ray and his brother Johnny once dreamed of a hot dog stand. They spent a Memorial Day weekend stocking up on supplies, envisioning a booming business under the Michigan sun, only for the clouds to break and the rain to wash their investment away. They lost their shirts that weekend, a bitter lesson in the unpredictability of fate that Ray carries with him into the cockpit. Now the stakes aren't hot dogs or beer, they are five hundred pounders dropping on Nazi marshalling yards and the life of his brother, who is already over there somewhere in the frozen mud of Germany. On December fourth, a letter arrives that halts Ray's excitement for his own graduation. It's a V mail from Johnny. The thin, microfilmed sheet of paper feels light, but the request inside is heavy. Johnny, who has never complained, who has never asked for a single thing from the front lines, asks if Ray might be able to send him a small fruit cake. They don't get much cake in Germany, Johnny writes. Ray feels like a heel. He's been so busy thinking about his pink and green officer's pants and his new gray gabardine topcoat that he forgot his own blood is shivering in a foxhole. He immediately writes to Shirley, his honey, his sweetheart. He can't leave camp. He's restricted until graduation, so he begs her to go to the post office and check the regulations. The postal authorities are strict about size and weight, a damn silly rule in Ray's mind, but he tells Shirley to send as much as she can. He encloses Johnny's letter as proof of the request, a necessary bureaucratic ritual to get a piece of home across the Atlantic. He promises to buy her a banana split when he gets home, a small bribe for a monumental task, but the urgency is real. Johnny is asking for cake, and in the language of the war, that means he's hungry for more than just sugar. As the days towards december twenty third tick down, the tension in the barracks reaches a fever pitch. Ray is a nervous wreck. He's drinking black coffee every night just to stay awake and think about Shirley, afraid that if he closes his eyes, the dream of Christmas will vanish. He and a fellow cadet named Leyton have mapped it out with the precision of a bombing run. They will clear the field by five o'clock on graduation day and drive nonstop to Tulsa. It's a thirty four and a half hour sprint through the heart of the country. From Tulsa, he'll catch the Santa Fe Streamliner at eight forty on Christmas morning. If the rails hold and the steam stays up, he'll pull into Chicago by nine hundred thirty that night. He tells Shirley not to say a word to his mother. He wants to walk in on them, a surprise in wool and brass, a second lieutenant home from the clouds. He wants to set Shirley under the Christmas tree and just look at her, a reward for the year and a half he sweated out in training fields. But the war is never far, even in his letters home. He learns he's being sent to a light bombardment group, which means the fast stuff, A twenties or B twenty six marauders. He'd rather have the heavies, the B seventeens and B twenty fours that feel like flying fortresses, but the army needs men who can work like madmen on the smaller, quicker ships. He knows the danger. He's seen the training films of target saturation, the thermite mixtures burning at four thousand degrees, and the jagged craters left in places like San Lo. He's navigating by the stars and the dead reckoning of a Norden bombsite, but his true North is always Shirley. He tells her she'd better stay chipper and not get sick, because he does enough worrying for both of them. He's already planning their first night back, a party at the L with grandma, a romantic cab driver to take them through the Chicago city limits, and the sky is the limit because an ocean voyage is looming in his very near future. He is a man suspended between a beer truck past and a bombardier future, holding on to a fountain pen and a prayer that he won't fall apart before the train pulls into the station. He spent months looking at her picture, and he's certain that when he finally sees her in the flesh, his heart is going to explode like one of the demos he's been practiced in dropping. The letters of Ray Conan remind us that history isn't just a map of true movements, but a series of quiet, desperate hopes sent through the mail. If you found this story compelling, please share this episode with a friend.