John Conry

Flying over Nagasaki Japan, John Conry was held captive by the sheer devastation that he witnessed. “You can’t imagine the destruction the second atomic bomb did. It was completely destroyed…everything was gone.” Although he wasn’t in Japan at the time the bombs were dropped, John spent two hundred hours in flight in his tour after the war transporting hand ammunition and assisting the return of the Japanese back to Japan. During this time the consequences of war were made very clear to him. He saw the poverty experienced by the Chinese; drove over roads riddled with sixty-foot craters made by bomb blasts and saw the courage and steadfastness of the Marines that he labored alongside in his position as Ariel Navigator.

John enlisted in 1944 at the age of eighteen; his dream to become a pilot. Coming from a family line of other Marines, his father serving in WWI and a grandfather serving in the British Marines, he believed that the Marines was where he needed to be. “There was supposed to be a lot of opportunity there but when I went to boot camp pilot training was shut down.” Boot camp was no surprise for John. Since his Dad was in the marine corps in WW1 he sat him down and lectured him for four hours about how boot camp was going to be. John ended up being sent to Radio/Radar repair school for four months before being shipped out to Camp Marimar in California. He didn't even have time to settle down because six days later he was shipped back out to Eagle Mountain Lake, Texas. It was there that he was finally able to pursue his interest in flying when he applied for navigation school and was accepted. He was almost finished with his schooling when the war was over.

The navigators who were the co-pilots for B25 Bombers were sent to China to help escort the Japanese back to Japan. John was one of the chosen one for the mission. "It took a crew of six; pilot, navigator, co-pilot, crew chief, mechanic, radio operator." John remembers flying two weeks almost non-stop transporting hand ammunition to the troops left on the ground. All in all, he ended up with about two hundred hours flying time. His memories of China are still very vivid. " The Chinese were extremely poor they didn't have anything" Although times were hard John said that because he held the rank of Tech Sergeant he received fairly good treatment.

John completed his tour after seven months and was transported home via ship. Unfortunately the way home ended up being pretty rough. Two days out they broke down and had to stop in Japan. They then left on bigger ship when a typhoon came in. The ship was stuck there off shore for two days unable to move anywhere. The anchor chain had gotten tangled into a buoy and it wouldn’t budge. Besides the unsettling delay he remembers that there wasn’t enough food to feed the 3,000 extra troops. "I remember going a couple of days with only a candy bar to eat." Fortunately they made it back to dock in San Diego without further incident.

When John was discharged he went to work for a furnace company. He traveled all over the country putting in furnaces for steel mills; finally settling in Vandergrift. Now John plays an active roll in the local Marine Corp League. I asked John what the one thing that he'll never forget about his Marine experiences and this was his response. "The Marines were good. They supported one another; they stepped up what they needed to do."

To watch the video, go to http://www.allekiskitoday.com/webcasts/1235