With Nisei casualties expected to spike during the summer fighting season, the War Department was hard-pressed to enlist—or draft—more Nisei recruits. The army needed Ben to deliver their recruits.
Arriving at his Colorado base on Wednesday, May 17, Ben was handed his orders: He was to travel to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Delta, Utah. There, he would urge another pool of draft-age Nisei men to join the climactic fight against Nazi Germany.
AT TOPAZ, BEN RECEIVED HIS MOST exuberant welcome yet. The camp newspaper, the Topaz Times, published a special edition that celebrated every aspect of Ben’s life. “He’s Human Too; He Keeps a Charm, Likes Steak, Played Center Field,” announced the headline of a gushing story that described Ben as “our finest example of Nisei manhood” and “an excellent sport with a contagious grin.”7
The paper reprinted an excerpt from Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech as well as the February Time magazine profile. “Foremost an American,” declared the headline over a Topaz Times editorial that pronounced Ben “the living example of what a Nisei should be—an American first, a Nisei second.” Continuing in this vein, the editors rhapsodized: “He belongs to all America. After many struggles he attained his deserved and rightful role. This is the stuff which heroes are made from.”8
The paper urged camp residents to “learn a lot from Ben Kuroki. We Nisei of the relocation centers are too prone to tag ourselves as Nisei first and only secondly as Americans. Undoubtedly our trials and circumstances have magnified our Nisei status. But it is up to us to emerge from our shells of self-pity into full-fledged Americans. Sergeant Kuroki is the kind of citizen we in the relocation centers can prepare to become in the world outside.”9
For five days, Ben was feted and celebrated. He delivered speeches, attended banquets, picnics, and cookouts, met with students of all ages, comforted patients in the camp hospital, attended a USO luncheon with the parents of Nisei soldiers, and dined with the local Lion’s Club. “Everywhere he visited admiring crowds congregated around him, and autograph hounds trailed him,” the Topaz Times reported.10
When it was time for Ben to leave, some eight hundred residents gathered at the main gate for what the Topaz Times described as a “rousing sendoff.” His car was swarmed by last-minute autograph seekers as the camp’s Boy Scout drum and bugle corps set pulses racing.11
For Ben, the Topaz sendoff was a high note on which to end his unsettling assignment.
BEN RETURNED TO CHICAGO AGAIN IN early June to speak to War Relocation Authority employees and representatives of the various camps and resettled Nisei. The growing sense across America that 1944 might be the year of victory was intensified by the events of June 6, when Allied forces stormed ashore the beaches of Normandy, France, to begin the liberation of Europe. Some of the young men inspired by Ben to enlist would be in combat before the summer was out, and some would die. As for Ben, he was weary of his work as an army recruiter and pitch man. Rather than live on past glory and suffer the brickbats of his fellow Nisei, he was ready to get back to fighting the war.
As Ben headed home to Nebraska to resume his aborted furlough, the war in the Pacific entered a decisive phase. US forces were poised to launch a series of attacks on Japanese-held islands, from Biak off the coast of New Guinea to the Northern Mariana Islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. General Hap Arnold was keeping a close eye on the Northern Marianas as the launching pad for his climactic air campaign against Japan, utilizing his state-of-the-art long-range bomber, the B-29 Superfortress, which had made its combat debut on June 5 by taking off from bases in British India to bomb Japanese railroad facilities in Bangkok, Thailand. The B-29s were poised to bomb the Japanese homeland from China, but Arnold viewed the Northern Marianas as the preferred launching pad for operations against Japan.
On June 15, 1944, US soldiers splashed ashore on Saipan to begin a twenty-four-day battle. Arnold’s chessboard was set: As soon as the Marianas were secured, Seabees would set to work on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, building airfields capable of handling America’s biggest bomber. Once that was accomplished, Arnold would begin his decisive campaign on the Japanese homeland from the Northern Marianas.
BEN’S DETRACTORS IN THE INCARCERATION camps had scorned him as a collaborator and race traitor, but his Commonwealth Club speech had galvanized a national conversation about restoring the rights of incarcerated Japanese Americans. A crusade to close the camps and release the incarcerees was being led by a group of prominent California progressives calling themselves the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play. The group’s leaders included University of California Berkeley president Robert Gordon Sproul, UC provost Monroe Deutsch, and Stanford University president Ray Lyman Wilbur. All three had attended Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech and had been moved by his words. Their efforts were being supported by an influential friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, photographer Dorothea Lange, who had written Ben’s family a lovely letter praising his speech.12
But dark forces continued to oppose the lifting of wartime restrictions on those people of Japanese descent who had been forcibly removed from the West Coast exclusion zone. A few days after Ben concluded his visit to Topaz, a speaker stood at the same Commonwealth Club podium where Ben had spoken three months earlier and vehemently argued against closing the incarceration camps. “We’re not against the Japs for what they are, but for what they do,” thundered former California state legislator Seth Millington, who was now a leader of the fiercely pro-incarceration Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West.
Drawing a distinction between loyal and disloyal Japanese, Millington singled out the club’s February speaker as a role model. “As to Sergeant Ben Kuroki, he flew for his regular twenty-five missions against the Germans and volunteered for five more,” Millington said. “And so far as the Native Sons and American Legion are concerned, he has demonstrated his loyalty, and he and any other man like him can live next door to us for the rest of his life.” But, Millington added, America’s “disloyal” Japanese should be exiled to Japan “on the first boat.”
Pressure on Franklin Roosevelt to close the camps mounted through the summer of 1944, but the political cost was always foremost in the mind of the American president. Facing reelection in November, Roosevelt knew that opinion polls showed a majority of Americans favored confining people of Japanese descent for the remainder of the war. Ninety percent of Los Angelenos polled earlier in the year favored continued army control of people of Japanese descent. Sixty-one percent favored the permanent exclusion of all Japanese from the Pacific Coast. Sixty-five percent favored a postwar constitutional amendment that would result in the deportation of all Japanese immigrants.13 With those sentiments in mind, Roosevelt ducked the issue as Election Day approached.
Forty days after winning election to a fourth term, Roosevelt finally acted. On December 17, 1944, US Army major general Henry C. Platt issued Public Proclamation No. 21, ordering an end to the “internment” of Japanese Americans, effective the second day of 1945. Unwilling to accept responsibility for the shameful incarceration order he had personally approved in 1942, Roosevelt had delegated the announcement to a subordinate.
Civic leaders and activists who had spent more than two years trying to convince Roosevelt to undo his incarceration of Japanese Americans would later describe Ben Kuroki’s Commonwealth Club speech as a turning point. As activist Ruth Kingman described it, Ben’s speech “was the beginning of [the] change of the whole attitude in California.”14
Chapter 42
HONORABLE SAD SAKI
July 1944 found Ben back in Colorado training B-24 crews how to survive in combat, while stewing over his own unrequited goal to serve a tour in the Pacific. His view of military service had always been infused with the spiritual themes of atonement and redemption. But now he also harbored a taste for Old Testament retribution. In his mind, he would avenge the lives lost at Pearl Harbor and Bataan and he would avenge the death of Stanley Bates. In recent weeks, his thirst for vengeance had become almost insatiable after receiving devastating news from home: His friend Gordy Jorgenson had been killed fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific.1
At the same time, a recent incident had convinced Ben he still hadn’t done enough to earn the respect and trust of his fellow Americans. He was passing through Colorado during his recent travels and flagged down a taxi at the Denver train station. A passenger already in the taxi took one look at Ben in his bemedaled dress uniform and snarled, “I won’t ride with no lousy Jap!” The man slammed the taxi door in Ben’s face, unleashing a wave of shame and self-doubt.2
Ben concluded he still hadn’t done enough to prove himself to his fellow Americans, or at least to some of them. He resolved to bomb Tokyo to prove beyond any doubt where his loyalties lay. He wouldn’t rest until he landed a Pacific combat assignment.
IN AUGUST 1944, BEN RECEIVED ORDERS to report to the 505th Bomb Group in Harvard, Nebraska. On his arrival, Ben was assigned as the tail gunner on a B-29 Superfortress crew.
The crew was commanded by Lieutenant James Jenkins, a five-foot-ten, twenty-six-year-old Michigan native. Jenkins was born in the state’s rural interior but spent most of his life in and around Detroit. He graduated from Detroit’s northside Cooley High School in 1936, and, when his parents divorced, he moved to Flint, Michigan, with his mother and her new husband. In Flint, he found work as a parts manager at a local auto garage. When he registered for the Selective Service draft in October 1940, twenty-one-year-old Jim was back in Detroit, working in the General Motors Company’s Chevrolet Division retail store in the city’s bustling New Center area.
Jenkins entered the Army Air Forces after Pearl Harbor, earned his pilot’s wings, and got married. He learned to fly B-17s and became an instructor at the army’s advanced flying school at Pampa, Texas, as the American bombing campaign in Europe entered its darkest months. Now he was commander of B-29 Crew 84-10, as it was known in 384th Squadron records.
Jenkins was asked by his superiors whether he would be willing to take on a tail gunner of Asian descent. “I didn’t know he was a Japanese American when I first saw him,” Jenkins recalled of his introduction to Ben Kuroki. Once he became aware of Ben’s ancestry, Jenkins thought about the complications of taking on a Japanese American gunner. He finally decided it was the right thing to do. When he wrote his mother to tell her about his new tail gunner, Mabel Jenkins expressed her disapproval of “that man.”3
As Ben began to bond with members of his new crew, he found his comrades baffled by his decision to request another combat tour when it wasn’t required of him. “What’s the matter with you?” some of them asked. Why keep going?4
Ben tried to explain the obsession that burned inside—his compulsion to prove himself loyal, his desire to avenge compatriots and friends who had been cut down by Japanese bullets and bombs. He tried to explain why he was willing to put his life on the line by undertaking a combat tour in another theater when no one was asking him to do so. If he struck a blow against Japan and showed his willingness to shed the blood of his own ancestral kin, no one could ever again call him a “lousy Jap” or question his loyalty to his country.
WHEN BEN ARRIVED AT HARVARD Army Air Field, the 505th Bomb Group was still taking shape. The group was comprised of three squadrons: the 482nd, 483rd, and 484th. Ben’s squadron, the 484th, had been created in Florida with only a few men and officers before moving to Harvard the previous spring.
After nearly freezing to death in some of his B-24 missions over Europe, Ben could hardly believe the creature comforts and cutting-edge technology of the B-29. America’s new super-bomber was a truly revolutionary aircraft—bigger, heavier, and more spacious than the B-17 or the B-24, capable of flying farther, faster, and higher. The Superfortress was the first American aircraft with pressurized compartments and a centralized fire-control system that allowed gunners to remotely operate turrets from the comfort of the fuselage.
The B-29 had been conceived before America’s entry into World War II as a high-altitude strategic bomber. Hitler’s aggression in Europe led Hap Arnold to seek and receive permission to put the bomber into production, but the program was plagued by technical problems and never saw action in the campaign against Nazi Germany. Eventually, with the program’s cost dwarfing that of the Manhattan Project by more than $1 billion, the B-29 would be directed at Japan.
Despite the thirty combat missions Ben had under his belt, the B-29 presented a learning curve. On a B-24, each gunner was on his own. On the B-29, computers allowed gunners to synchronize their fire to best defend against an enemy threat. The isolation of the tail gunner’s position on a B-17 or a B-24 presented its own unique psychological challenges in combat. As Ben discovered, the B-29 promised similar isolation. The tail gunner occupied a pressurized compartment separate from the main fuselage. That required Ben to remain in his self-contained cocoon until the aircraft descended to an altitude that allowed unpressurized flight.
By the end of August, the crews were working through their training checklists. In October, they began to undertake three-thousand-mile cross-country flights. Maintenance problems disrupted the training schedule at times, and the loss of eleven men in a fatal accident at Ben’s old B-24 base at Barksdale Field, Louisiana, reminded the men of the perils of their work. By the beginning of November, the 505th Bomb Group crews had completed their training.
Finally, on November 6, 1944, the group’s ground echelon—maintenance crews, mechanics, armorers, and other support staff—departed Harvard Army Air Base for Seattle, where they were to board a transport ship bound for the Pacific.
The combat crews were to follow on a staggered basis after Thanksgiving—everyone except Ben Kuroki, that is. Ben had been informed that he wouldn’t be allowed to accompany his crew to the Pacific. Ominously, Ben was told the order came “from the top.”
