Letters From Last Leave

Ray tries to get a visit together with Shirley but the war has other plans.

Transcript

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2nd Lieutenant Ray Conan leans over a sheet of borrowed stationery on March 15, 1945. The mechanical roar of aircraft engines from the nearby Florida airfield vibrating through the thin walls of his barracks. He is a bombardier, a man trained to look through the crosshairs of a secret Norden bomb site and calculate the mathematics of destruction from 20,000 feet, but tonight his mind is 700 miles north in Chicago. He addresses the letter to Shirley Rutledge, a bank teller he calls Tangerine, and the very first thing he does is make a joke about the impossibility of her virtue. He tells her there are only two ways she could stay a virgin until they marry. Either they wed within ten minutes of her arrival in Florida, or some major explosion decapitates him in a major locale. It is a raw, jagged kind of humor, the sort that only makes sense when you are twenty four years old and your immediate future is being dictated by the sprawling, impersonal machinery of the United States Army Air Forces. Ray is an officer now, but he's still caught in a bureaucratic maze of shifting schedules and cancelled leaves, trying to bridge the gap between a military cot and the vibrant neon-lit streets of home. The war is in its final brutal stages, and the air over the Atlantic is thick with the logistics of victory. Ray writes about a complete shakeup in his orders. He thinks he'll be finished with his current training block by the end of April, and after that, the horizon goes dark. He mentions the possibility of dropping her a postcard from Iwo Jima, a name that in March 1945 carried the weight of a thousand headlines about black sand and mounting casualties. The promised last leave feels distant, a mirage shimmering, just out of reach. But he's still pushing Shirley to find out about train schedules. He tells her May is the end of the season down there, meaning there should be room on the trains and choices for where to stay. He is trying to build a plan on shifting sand, a week of normalcy before the world claims him for good. He describes a fantasy of them living at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, a massive pink stucco resort on the shore of Michigan. He imagines them as strangers on a vacation, dancing in the marine dining room or on the open-air marble floor of the beachwalk, wandering through gardens that look good in the moonlight. It's a dream of a world where nobody knows where they are. A week of being completely relaxed in a city that for a soldier has become a constant, aching memory. To understand the world Ray's navigating, you have to look at the specialized nature of his role. By 1945, the Army Air Forces had turned out tens of thousands of bombardiers, each one a vital component of the Daylight Precision Bombing Doctrine developed at Maxwell Field in Alabama. This doctrine relied on the Norden Bomb Site, an analog computer bristling with gyroscopes that was so secret bombardiers were required to take an oath to protect it with their lives. Ray's letters often mask the technical pressure of this work with self-deprecating humor. He describes a Sunday afternoon spent trying to save fifty cents by washing and ironing his own suntan uniforms. With no lights in the barracks, he worked for two hours in the dimness, only to end up with a pair of scorched trousers. As an ironer, he writes, I am a miserable flop. He jokes about selling them as shoe rags. It's a small human failure in a life otherwise defined by the need for absolute cold precision. When he's not scorching his laundry, he's navigating across the Gulf of Mexico, flying search missions that cover 1,500 miles in eight hours. He tells Shirley he can fly for eight hours now without getting lost, most of the time. It is a high-stakes education conducted in the humid air between northern Alabama and Cuba. On March 23rd, Ray returns to his barracks, dirty, greasy, smelly, rumpled, and dog tired. He had spent the day on a sea search mission after a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, a massive four-engine transport, crashed into the ocean. The C-54 was the workhorse of the Air Transport Command, the plane that moved presidents and priority cargo across the globe, but on this day it was just a collection of debris scattered across the waves. Ray and his crew flew for eight hours, scanning the water for the bright yellow of a life raft or the inflatable vests they called May Wests. They found pieces of the plane, but no signs of life. I guess it's TS for another crew, he writes, using the grim military shorthand for tough luck. There is a chilling detachment in the way he reports the loss. He is oxygen happy and exhausted, his hair uncombed, a stark contrast to the flyers Shirley sees in the movies who land with their pants smartly pressed. The reality of the air war is a grind of grease and failure, of looking for men who have already been swallowed by the Atlantic. This detachment is part of the psychological armor Ray wears. He mentions a simulated bomb run he performed over Nassau in the Bahamas. He jokes that he could shock Wallace if he had had a real bomb. He's referring to Wallace Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, who was living in Nassau, where her husband, the former King Edward VIII, served as the governor of the Bahamas. The Windsors were a source of constant simmering controversy. The FBI and British intelligence were keeping a close eye on them, fueled by reports of their sympathies for the Nazi regime. For Ray, though, they're just another target on a practice run, a bit of juicy gossip to be discussed later. He's more concerned with his own internal drama, specifically a sailor who has been seeing Shirley back in Chicago. He tells her to call her cards right, calling it a jackpot hand. He needs to know the answer, needs to know if she is his before he goes overseas. It's a demand for certainty in a life where everything else is amusing but confusing. A world where he can watch a movie like None But the Lonely Heart and find himself nearly in tears, then walk down to the lake and sit on a bench alone under a full moon. By March 28th, the brief window of hope for a May vacation in Florida slams shut. Ray writes to Shirley with the news of another big upset. The rapid movement of the war in Europe has triggered a massive shift in schedules. The promised 20-day leave has been cut to seven, and he fears it might be cut even more. The whole field is being changed around, and he tells her to hold off on any plans that involve him. I was hoping against hope that it would work out, he writes, but I had a feeling that it wouldn't. There is a profound sadness in the brevity of this final March letter. The dream of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, the dancing in the marine dining room, the sunshine of Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. It all collapses under the weight of the European setup. He's a soldier again, a piece on a board moved by hands he can't see. He apologizes to her, a simple, devastating, I'm sorry, honey, before signing off. He had spent months trying to find a way to stay, trying to slug the general if he had to, but in the end, the war moved faster than his plans. He is left waiting for the straight dope, wondering if he'll even get a couple of days at home before the sky finally claims him. These letters, which Ray kept hidden from Shirley for nearly fifty years, are a testament to the quiet, stubborn endurance of a heart trying to remain human while being trained for the machinery of death. If you found this glimpse into their story moving, consider sharing this episode with a friend.