THE DAY AFTER THE KING’S VISIT, THE 93RD was back in action. At 10:30 a.m., Major Baker, the 328th Squadron commander, led a force of thirteen bombers into the skies over England. Six of the aircraft were from Ben’s 409th Squadron. Their target was La Pallice, the deep-water port of La Rochelle, France, and home base of the German Navy’s 3rd U-Boat Flotilla. When the Liberators reached the target area, 320 miles southeast of England’s Cornwall coast, La Pallice and its submarine pens lay concealed beneath a blanket of clouds. The Liberators banked to the north and flew thirty minutes back up the coast to Saint-Nazaire. Under heavy enemy antiaircraft fire, the B-24s released their bombs and headed for Cornwall. They passed at treetop level over Land’s End at the far southwest tip of England, before landing safely at RAF Exeter.5
Six 93rd B-24s took off the following morning, November 15, to fly a diversionary sweep over the North Sea to draw enemy fighters away from a B-17 strike on German submarine pens on the Bay of Biscay. It was a quick and easy mission for Timberlake’s boys. On November 17, twelve 93rd Liberators joined with thirty-one Flying Fortresses to strike the Saint-Nazaire submarine pens and a nearby power plant; the flak was heavy, but there were no fighters. Three B-17s were shot down over the target and twenty-two Flying Fortresses were damaged, but Timberlake’s men escaped without casualties or the loss of an aircraft.
There was one close call involving some of Ben’s friends from the 409th Squadron. The aircraft was named Red Ass, and only a few minutes from landing at Alconbury a mechanical problem caused all four engines to die. The pilot, a diminutive Tupelo, Mississippi, native named Jake Epting, took immediate action to revive the engines. In the process, he inadvertently rang the alarm used to signal the crew to abandon the aircraft. A few seconds later, Epting got his engines restarted and the crisis passed. When the pilot tried to raise his navigator over the intercom, the tail gunner informed Epting that the navigator and bombardier had parachuted from the plane. The men landed on an English farm not far from Alconbury, and the next day they sheepishly rejoined their comrades.6
On November 18, the 93rd put thirteen planes in the air to bomb the submarine pens at Lorient. Ben’s friend and spiritual advisor, Chaplain James Burris, was allowed to accompany the crew of a 328th Squadron B-24 named Bomerang, a moniker derived from a mashup of bomber and boomerang. Burris wanted to understand what the stressed men he was counseling were experiencing, and so he stretched out on the flight deck and peered through the open bomb bay doors to watch the raid unfold. Shrapnel from bursting flak shells pierced the bomber’s aluminum skin, and one chunk punched through the fuselage and whizzed by the chaplain’s head.7
Nearby in the 93rd formation, the 328th Squadron crew of Katy Bug had an even worse time. The pilot, Lieutenant Al Asch of Beaverton, Michigan, had just been promoted from the copilot’s seat. In the target area, a piece of flak ruptured the fuel tanks in the right wing and a stream of gas trailed from Katy Bug as Asch coaxed the bomber back across the English Channel. The enemy flak had damaged various controls, and Asch discovered that the nosewheel remained lodged in its well. The flight engineer and the bombardier lowered the wheel manually while Asch circled the field. Asch was only seconds from landing when the Alconbury control tower suddenly ordered him to abort to avoid a collision with a Liberator landing on the opposite runway. Asch applied full power, but the lowered flaps and landing gear made it impossible for him to generate enough speed to climb. He was perhaps one hundred feet above the field when his airspeed dropped to a hundred miles per hour and two starboard engines quit. On Asch’s command, the wheels were retracted and he skidded the aircraft into a farmer’s field. As the bomber careened across the uneven terrain, the bottom of the fuselage ripped away and the top turret collapsed into the interior, crushing his bombardier. Two gunners and the flight engineer also died in the wreckage of Katy Bug, but Asch and five others survived.8
On November 21, five days before Thanksgiving, Chaplain Burris conducted an open-air memorial service for the four dead men of Katy Bug. The next day, the men of the 93rd returned to action, this time bombing the submarine pens at Lorient. Leaving the target, the 328th Squadron crew of Ball of Fire was attacked by three Luftwaffe Junkers Ju-88 fighter-bombers. In the running battle that ensued, one of the gunners took a round in the stomach. Another round nearly severed the pilot’s right arm before ripping into the copilot’s right leg.
The navigator tied a tourniquet to the pilot’s mangled arm to prevent him from bleeding out. The radio operator managed to remove the pilot from his seat while the copilot, blood spurting from his leg, kept Ball of Fire flying. Faint from loss of blood, the copilot asked the bombardier to help him fly the plane. The bombardier had completed only two months of pilot’s training before failing the course, but he knew the rudiments of flying. With their radio shot out, the wounded copilot and plucky bombardier kept Ball of Fire in the air. They crossed the English Channel and safely landed Ball of Fire on an RAF field.9
By Thanksgiving Day, the 93rd had nine missions to its credit. Timberlake had lost only one plane in combat and another on a training flight. The 93rd’s operational losses were the lowest of any of Ira Eaker’s bomber groups, but casualties were mounting and the 93rd’s reserve of spare gunners was nearly exhausted. Ben’s pleas to join a crew as a gunner suddenly found a sympathetic audience.
Chapter 11
“ARE YOU SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING?”
Within weeks of arriving at Alconbury, Ben had sought the advice of a 93rd comrade whose path he hoped to follow. The comrade had arrived in England as a squadron first sergeant, with responsibilities that would have kept him on the ground and out of harm’s way for the duration of the war. But the first sergeant wanted to fight. He requested reassignment to a combat crew as a gunner, and his request was granted. Ben approached the former first sergeant for advice on how he might do the same.
The newly minted gunner counseled Ben to talk to the head of the Armaments Section, a college-educated lieutenant from Iowa named Merlin D. Larson. “I want to prove my loyalty, sir,” Ben told Larson. “I can’t do it on the ground.” Larson replied, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Kuroki?” Ben said he did.1
The transfer was arranged, and Ben joined the Armaments Section. It was only the first step, but the new assignment allowed Ben to spend nearly every waking minute on the flight line. He helped load bombs into aircraft before missions, learned to clean and repair .50-caliber machine guns, and even got in some target practice with the fifties. He helped ground crews any way he could. He also chatted up combat gunners and their command pilots. But without formal gunnery training, Ben remained stuck on the ground.
For weeks, Ben cajoled Lieutenant Larson to send him to gunnery school, and for weeks Larson put off Ben’s requests. In November, with the 409th Squadron facing an imminent need for replacement gunners, Larson relented. Ben was among a group of men assigned to the 93rd in various ground positions who were given physical examinations to test their flying fitness. The twelve men who passed, Ben included, were dispatched to a gunnery school near London.
The course lasted only five days and largely consisted of looking at pictures and models to sharpen aircraft recognition skills, learning to sight with the .50-caliber machine gun, then firing ten rounds—without ever leaving the ground. Some of the men fumed about the training, but Ben remained silent. If a sham gunnery course got him a spot on a combat crew, he wasn’t going to complain.2
BACK AT ALCONBURY, BEN REDOUBLED HIS efforts to find a 409th Squadron pilot who would take him on. Openings were starting to occur more frequently now as gunners became combat casualties or succumbed to stress. Flying duty was entirely voluntary in the Army Air Forces, and a bomber crew member could opt out at anytime. The first 93rd man to do so was Jack Stover, the tail gunner on the 328th Squadron crew commanded by Charles Murphy. Stover decided after one mission that aerial combat wasn’t for him.3 “In training in the States and everything, it was all glamor,” recalled Art Ferwerda, a 93rd ground crew chief at Alconbury. “Once [men] started to get in the fighting part of it, the glamor stops.”4
Another factor working in Ben’s favor was the diversion of air combat forces to North Africa. Replacement crews that were supposed to fill the 93rd’s combat losses were no longer arriving, and so it became clear to the group’s senior officers that they would have to replace their casualties with men currently assigned to ground duties.
Ben had made a few close friends in the 409th Squadron and he was a familiar face to men throughout the 93rd, but the undercurrent of distrust because of his Japanese ancestry remained a concern for command pilots. The damp and dreary month of November 1942 drew to a close with Ben still in search of a crew.
ONE 409TH SQUADRON PILOT—A REDHEADED, freckle-faced twenty-five-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri—seemed sympathetic to Ben’s plight. Richard L. Wilkinson—Wilkie to his B-24 comrades—had grown up under the roof of a man who was ahead of his time in many ways. Wilkie’s father, J. L. Wilkinson, had been a gifted baseball player growing up in Iowa and became a star pitcher for Highland Park College while playing for professional and semiprofessional teams. Then an arm injury ended his career.5
At the age of thirty-five, a few years before the First World War, J. L. Wilkinson found his calling in the game he loved. He put together a women’s professional baseball team that traveled around the Midwest by train, playing for two thousand fans in a collapsible covered grandstand. J.L. followed this feat in 1912 by cofounding a multiracial baseball team known as the All Nations. After the war, Wilkinson’s All Nations team became the all-Black Kansas City Monarchs, a charter member of the Negro National League.6
J. L. Wilkinson had already distinguished himself with his barrier-breaking feats in professional baseball when the Great Depression arrived. Hard times threatened to cripple Black professional baseball, but J.L. hit on a solution to accommodate working fans who couldn’t afford to catch a game during daylight hours: He bankrolled a portable lighting system that could be transported from town to town, allowing the Monarchs to travel the country playing night baseball. Wilkinson became a beloved figure among Black professional baseball players, sometimes bunking with coaches and players during road trips. His Monarchs would win ten league titles and two Negro League World Series crowns. One of those championships came in the fall of 1942 behind the power pitching of Monarch star Satchel Paige.7
Born in Des Moines in 1917, J.L.’s only son, Richard, was steeped in his father’s values. When the family moved to Kansas City, young Dick Wilkinson’s summers revolved around the Kansas City Monarchs and its Black players. In the late 1930s, after two years of college, Dick moved to Southern California. In July 1941, Dick was working as a bookkeeper for a multinational industrial company, the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation in Los Angeles, when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. The following spring, Dick joined the newly formed 93rd Bomb Group at Barksdale Field, Louisiana.8
Wilkie, as he was quickly christened by his comrades, made his combat debut with the 93rd in the October 9 raid on the Lille locomotive works, and he burnished his résumé in the group’s sporadic raids through the fall. Around the end of November, Wilkie found himself one gunner short for a mission. He was familiar with Ben Kuroki and the combat aspirations of the Japanese American gunner, and so Wilkie asked Ben if he was interested in filling a temporary vacancy on his crew. Ben jumped at the chance.9
Twice in the first days of December 1942, Ben took off with Wilkie’s crew on missions, but both times the 93rd bombers were recalled over the English Channel because of bad weather. After the two aborted missions, Wilkie’s regular gunner returned, and Ben resumed his search for a crew. But the landscape had shifted. Ben hadn’t gotten credit for the aborted missions, but he had been initiated into the rituals of aerial combat. For the first time, he had donned his leather flight suit, attended a classified mission briefing, and climbed aboard a B-24 bomber cradling a .50-caliber machine gun.10
More importantly, a respected 409th Squadron pilot had broken the taboo that had made pilots reluctant to take the Japanese American gunner into combat.
Chapter 12
A BIG CHANCE
In the first week of December, Ben heard from a friend that the 409th Squadron pilot of Red Ass, Jake Epting, needed to replace a gunner who had taken himself off combat duty. Ben tracked down Epting to plead his case. Epting polled his men before giving Ben an answer. There were no objections.1
On Monday, December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, Ben’s breakthrough was featured on the front page of the weekly 93rd Bomb Group newspaper, the Liberator. “Jap Gunner Gets ‘Chance,’” announced the frontpage headline. “Born of full-blooded Japanese parentage near [Cozad], Neb., where his folks were farming, sturdy Ben looks like most Japanese; but inside he’s different,” the story declared.
The article was written by the Liberator editor, Cal Stewart, the Nebraskan who had introduced himself to Ben on the Queen Elizabeth. In his interview with Stewart, Ben described the discrimination he had endured during his military service. He also spoke of his hope to exact payback for the Pearl Harbor attack. “I’ve gone through a lot of hell because of that Pearl Harbor incident, and I’ve got a personal score to settle with them as well as their Axis partners,” Ben said. “I’d just as soon be in the Far East pourin’ it on them!”
Ben spoke passionately of his 409th comrades.
“About the dearest thing to Ben’s heart is his squadron,” Stewart wrote. He quoted Ben as saying, “You can tell them I wouldn’t leave my outfit to fly for the King of England, and that’s saying a lot!”
The article ended with a dramatic flourish by describing a resolute Ben “fastening his helmet as he strode away toward ‘his’ B-24 [for] his big chance.”
BEN’S “BIG CHANCE” COINCIDED WITH news that electrified the 93rd. Because of inclement weather, the group had last completed a mission on November 23, and by early December the mood among the enlisted men and officers matched the foul weather. With one eye on the fighting in North Africa and one eye on Ted Timberlake’s idle crews in England, US military commanders decided to temporarily reassign the 93rd to the tactical air campaign against German lines of supply in North Africa.
Three of the 93rd’s four squadrons—the 328th, 330th, and 409th—received hasty orders to pack for a temporary assignment to some undisclosed location. Ben’s name appeared on the orders, along with a promotion from private first class to sergeant—the rank bestowed on aerial gunners. His invitation to join the Epting crew seemed real.
As the 93rd crews climbed into the skies over Alconbury the day before the Pearl Harbor anniversary, Ben and most of the men could only speculate about their destination. The first leg of the journey took them across England to the country’s far southwest peninsula. In addition to the combat crews, some of the planes carried a skeleton force of maintenance and administrative specialists. They landed at RAF bases in Por-treath and Exeter to refuel and spend the night.
Shortly after daybreak on the morning of December 7, 1942, Ben gazed from one of the waist windows as Red Ass climbed into the morning sky and turned to the south. The crews were in a jubilant mood. They were leaving behind the damp chill of England and headed to North Africa’s balmy Mediterranean coast.2
