BEN HAD BEEN WARNED EARLY IN HIS B-29 training that the War Department had an ironclad ban on Japanese Americans flying combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Undeterred, he requested an exemption based on his combat record and was confident it would be granted, but on September 27, he had received a letter from Colonel Warren Williams, deputy chief of staff of the Second Air Force, responsible for bomber crew training west of the Mississippi River. “I hate to give you the bad news, but I have done everything humanly possible to get you overseas in the Pacific Theater, but the War Department absolutely refuses to grant permission,” Williams wrote. At the bottom of the page, Williams scribbled a postscript. “We went right to the top and they would do nothing,” he wrote. “Sorry.”5
Two years earlier, when faced with the prospect of being left behind by the 93rd Bomb Group, Ben’s only option had been to beg for reconsideration. Now, with a national profile and friends in high places, Ben unleashed his allies on the White House and the War Department. On October 17, one of Ben’s Commonwealth Club friends, Monroe Deutsch, vice president and provost at the University of California, Berkeley, sent a telegram to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging a dispensation for the decorated Japanese American airman. Stimson refused to budge. Ben dashed off another flurry of letters to powerful friends he had made over the past year, but the War Department still refused to rescind its policy.
In early November, with deployment only a few weeks away, Ben played his last card. Accompanied by pilot Jim Jenkins and other officers on his crew, Ben tracked down Congressman Carl Curtis, a New Deal Democrat, at a meeting in a town fifty miles from their base. Ben explained his predicament: His crew was scheduled to depart for the Pacific in a matter of days, but the War Department refused to let him go. Could the congressman help?
Ben and the congressman talked for a while. Curtis asked Ben about his life before the war, and Ben shared his family story. Curtis was impressed with Ben and the obvious bond he had forged with his crew. The congressman brought the conversation back to Ben’s wish to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. “Is this really what you want to do?” Curtis asked. “Yes, I do,” Ben replied. “I am an American.”6
Curtis had heard enough. He drafted a telegram to the army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, and urged that Ben be allowed to fly and fight in the Pacific. He also fired off telegrams to Secretary of War Stimson and General Arnold.
On Thursday, November 16, Secretary of War Stimson sent letters to Monroe Deutsch, Congressman Curtis, and other influential advocates who had written appeals on Ben’s behalf. “I am now happy to inform you that, by reason of his splendid record, it has been decided to exempt Sgt. Kuroki from the provision of the policy to which I earlier referred,” Stimson wrote.7
Ben would be allowed to serve in the Pacific after all.
AROUND DECEMBER 15, BEN AND THE other members of the Jenkins crew loaded their gear aboard their B-29. They were poised to depart Harvard Army Airfield for the final time when men who identified themselves as army intelligence officers accosted Ben and asked him to prove he had permission to deploy to the Pacific. Ben frantically dug into the pile of gear stowed inside their B-29 in search of his B4 military garment bag. He pulled a copy of Secretary of War Stimson’s letter from the bag and showed it to the men. While the purported intelligence officers contemplated their next move, Jim Jenkins gunned the engines and took off with Ben aboard.
A similar scene played out during a stop at Mather Field, outside Sacramento, California. Once again, Jenkins settled the issue by getting his crew aboard and taking off before the shadowy inquisitors could take Ben away for questioning.8
During a layover in Hawaii, the 505th crews performed the ritual of naming their aircraft and having a base artist paint their preferred mascot on the nose. Most of the crews opted for a sexually suggestive name and a nude woman as their talisman. The Jenkins crew decided to pay tribute to their courageous tail gunner. They had previously nicknamed Ben “The Honorable Sad Saki,” a mashup of the popular Sad Sack comic book character popular with army readers and the beverage saki, the fermented rice wine that many Americans associated with Japanese culture. Henceforth, their glistening silver B-29 would be known as Honorable Sad Saki.
In the final week of December 1944, with Ben’s steadfast advocate Jim Jenkins in the command pilot’s seat, Honorable Sad Saki climbed into the skies over Hawaii. The shimmering waters of Pearl Harbor and the sunken hulk of the battleship USS Arizona flashed beneath them as Honorable Sad Saki banked to the west and an unknown destination in the Northern Mariana Islands. Since December 7, 1941, the ghosts of Pearl Harbor had haunted Ben, as if he somehow shared personal responsibility for the deeds of the Japanese armed forces. In his anguish and his shame, Ben had convinced himself that only by confronting Japan in combat could he prove his patriotism and atone for the deaths of more than ninety thousand Americans in three years of Pacific combat.
Chapter 43
TINIAN
In the final week of 1944, after a journey of 3,700 miles west across the Pacific Ocean from Honolulu, Ben Kuroki and the crew of Honorable Sad Saki reached their destination: Tinian, a thirty-nine-square-mile chunk of coral-encrusted limestone in the Northern Marianas chain. The island’s most important feature was its proximity to Tokyo—a distance of fifteen hundred miles, or a fourteen-hour roundtrip flight for a bomb-laden B-29 Superfortress. Deployed to England for the early days of the Eighth Air Force bombing of Nazi Germany, Ben now found himself in the vanguard of the climactic air campaign against Japan.
Ben and his comrades emerged from Honorable Sad Saki for an introduction to their new home. In their first hours on the ground, they formed several impressions, none of them good. The island was hot, humid, and dangerous. The crew had no place to sleep, and no shelter from the tropical sun. Had anyone been expecting them? There was no evidence of it.
American soldiers had captured Tinian on August 1, 1944, after eight days of fighting that claimed the lives of 328 US soldiers and nearly 9,000 Japanese. Many of the Japanese soldiers had committed suicide rather than surrender. As soon as the island was secure, Navy Seabees came ashore and began clearing the island’s sugarcane fields to transform Tinian into a massive B-29 base. The entire northern end of the island was now covered by nearly eleven miles of runways, taxiways, and hardstands—enough to accommodate the four groups of the 313th Bombardment Wing, which included Ben’s 505th Bomb Group.
With the Seabees still focused on accommodations for the B-29s rather than their crews, Ben and his comrades set to work building a bivouac. For the enlisted personnel like Ben, canvas shelter halves would have to suffice until pyramid tents could be secured. Exercising the privilege of rank as always, the officers appropriated the sole Quonset hut near the airfield.
As the men worked, air-raid sirens periodically sent them scurrying for cover. The attackers were Japanese fighters and Bettys, twin-engine bombers that roared overhead to hit targets on the larger island of Saipan, whose southern tip lay only three miles off Tinian’s northern shore.
Tinian, Saipan, and the smaller island of Rota had been important sugar-producing islands under Japanese administration before the war, and lush fields of seven-foot-tall cane surrounded the 505th bivouac. Rumors swept the group that some of Tinian’s Japanese defenders had survived the fighting and were hiding in caves and cane fields, waiting to strike the American airmen and their B-29s. Nervous sentries reacted to random sounds and imagined threats by firing wildly into the fields, especially after nightfall.
Jim Jenkins and the Honorable Sad Saki crew feared their Japanese American gunner would be mistaken for an enemy soldier and shot on sight by a trigger-happy sentry. They pleaded with Ben to wear his US Army helmet at all times and they accompanied him to the mess tent and latrine. Ben stopped going to the latrine after dark. “I deserve a Purple Heart for bladder damage,” he joked with Jenkins and their squadron commander after a few days.1
Ben managed to make light of his predicament, but the danger was real. He had prepared himself for all imaginable challenges in the Pacific, but being mistaken for an enemy soldier and shot by his own comrades wasn’t one of them. With that grim possibility hanging over him every waking minute, Ben began to steel himself for actual combat against Japanese forces.
TEN WEEKS BEFORE BEN AND HIS crewmates landed on Tinian, Brigadier General Haywood “Possum” Hansell arrived on neighboring Saipan to head the bombing campaign designed to seal Japan’s defeat. Hansell went to work getting his inexperienced Superfortress pilots and gunners prepared for action. He first directed bombing raids on Truk atoll, providing an opportunity to practice formation flying and overwater flight while going up against light enemy defenses. After two raids on Truk he sent his crews to bomb airfields on the fortified Japanese island of Iwo Jima, a more formidable target that tested the daylight visual bombing skills of his men and their first night return. Hansell’s crews exhibited wildly inaccurate bombing in six training missions against Truk and Iwo Jima, but those problems would have to be worked out on the job.2
Hansell’s primary objective was the destruction of Japanese aircraft engine and assembly plants. His force had just over one hundred bombers on hand when Hansell issued his Twentieth Air Force crews their first strategic assignment: a strike on the Nakajima Aircraft Company’s engine plant in the crowded Tokyo suburb of Musashino, ten miles northwest of the Emperor’s Palace.
The raid took place November 24. Leading the way was a B-29 named Dauntless Dotty, piloted by a pair of celebrated B-17 pilots. Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, who had been a B-17 squadron commander in the Philippines at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, was the lead command pilot. Seated next to him in the copilot’s seat was Major Robert K. Morgan, who had piloted the Memphis Belle during the first year of the Eighth Air Force campaign against Nazi Germany.
On the flight to Tokyo, seventeen of 111 B-29s that got airborne aborted for various reasons. Another six failed to bomb because of mechanical issues. The aircraft that reached Tokyo rocketed into their bomb run with a 120-knot tailwind that increased their ground speed to about 445 miles per hour. The wind coupled with clouds that obscured the Nakajima plant led most of the aircraft to head for alternate targets. Only twenty-four B-29s bombed the Nakajima plant, while sixty-four dropped their ordnance on docks and urban areas.3
Pacific combat tour, 1945
The first Tokyo raid by Hansell’s forces—and the desultory results—were harbingers for what was to come. The B-29s executed occasional strikes on Iwo Jima’s airfields and some experimental incendiary raids on urban areas, but the high-altitude, daylight precision raids on aircraft factories in Japan fell far short of expectations. Clouds and high winds repeatedly undermined bombing accuracy.
By early January 1945, Hansell’s boss, the chronically impatient four-star general Hap Arnold, had seen enough. He relieved Hansell and replaced him with General Curtis LeMay. Arnold dispatched his handpicked hatchet man, General Lauris Norstad, to deliver a blunt warning. “If you don’t succeed,” Norstad told LeMay, “you will be fired.”4
Ben and the vanguard of the 505th Bomb Group had arrived in the waning days of Hansell’s command. The 313th Wing commanders on the ground had quickly sized up the new arrivals as deficient in key areas. They devised a month-long training program to whip the raw crews into shape flying simulated practice missions. On January 21, 1945, Curtis LeMay’s first full day as chief of the XXI Bomber Command, Ben logged his first mission as a B-29 gunner, bombing a Japanese airfield on the island of Truk. Ben and his crew logged two more raids in the closing days of January, twice bombing Japanese airfields on Iwo Jima.
For veterans of the European air war like Ben, the contrast between Japanese and German air defenses was striking. German antiaircraft fire was usually heavy and disciplined, and the fighter pilots were equally skilled. Ben had seen nothing of that skill or intensity in his first three missions against the Japanese. But would that still be the case over Japan’s home islands? Ben and his comrades could only wonder what awaited them when they finally got a chance to attack the Honshu heartland.
Chapter 44
DÉJÀ VU
On February 4, 1945, Ben and the men of Honorable Sad Saki were among 129 crews that took off from the Marianas to attack Kobe, Japan’s sixth largest city and most important port. The city was a shipbuilding center, but its workers also manufactured steel, railway machinery, rubber, and munitions. Its rapid growth had occurred in more recent times, and thus much of the construction was less vulnerable to fire. But Kobe’s population density and proximity of industrial and residential areas made the city an intriguing test of Lauris Norstad’s conviction that saturating Japanese cities with incendiaries would be the best use of the B-29s.
As Honorable Sad Saki approached Kobe with Ben in his pressurized tail compartment, Japanese air defenses filled the skies with heavy and accurate flak and about two hundred fighters. The raid could have ended badly for Ben and his comrades, but the Japanese air defenses were surprisingly inept. Despite their favorable numbers, the Japanese managed to shoot down only one B-29, while damaging thirty-five. Sixty-nine B-29s reached the target, dropping 159.2 tons of incendiaries and 13.6 tons of fragmentation bombs.
The incendiary raid proved far more destructive than precision attacks by B-29s had been thus far. Fires ignited by the American incendiaries destroyed or seriously damaged 1,039 buildings in Kobe’s southwest industrial district. Civilian casualties were described by the air command as “only moderate,” but 4,350 people were rendered homeless. Five of Kobe’s major military factories sustained damage and one of its two major shipyards saw operations reduced by half. Among other industrial losses, Kobe’s production of fabric and synthetic rubber was wiped out.
For Ben and his comrades, the raid was a milestone: They had flown fifteen hundred miles across the open Pacific to rain fire and destruction on Japan’s Honshu heartland, and they had returned to their base on Tinian without a scratch.
