Ben hinted at the lack of resistance the B-29s now faced. “Japan airpower is becoming weaker every day,” he told the reporter. “Iwo Jima has made possible all our recent air actions. Those Marines did a wonderful job. They’re responsible for saving hundreds of lives of B-29 men who made emergency landings there.” As he always did, Ben shared the spotlight with his crewmates and asked the reporter to include their names in his story. The reporter obliged.1
Since leaving the US in December on his latest overseas deployment, Ben had remained in the public eye. Millard Lampell, a young writer and radio producer of national renown now serving as an Army Air Forces sergeant, had fictionalized Ben’s story in a radio play that recently aired across the country. Weaving Ben’s story into a recurring radio series called First in the Air, Lampell had titled his drama “The Boy from Nebraska.” The play noted that Ben hadn’t been wounded by enemy combatants, but he had suffered injuries from domestic bigots. The story culminated with Ben encountering a racist barbershop owner in Arizona who had a sign in his shop window: “JAP KEEP OUT YOU RATS.” The narrator gravely intoned, “He means the boy from Nebraska.”
The publicists at the War Relocation Authority helped keep the spotlight on Ben by issuing a press release that noted his exploits in the Pacific and described him as “recuperating from these raids in a Honolulu hospital.” The United Press news agency in Washington had written a dispatch based on the release that highlighted the fact that Ben was “the first Japanese American to help bomb Tokyo.” In fact, the UP dispatch noted, he was the only Japanese American flying combat missions in the Pacific.
Although he hadn’t actually interviewed Ben, the United Press correspondent assured the American public that the heroic Japanese American airman was “eager to get back to combat.” The piece ended with a grandiloquent kicker, proclaiming that as soon as Ben Kuroki wrapped up his Honolulu holiday he would be “dropping more Tokyo roses on Tokyo Rose.”2
Aside from his newspaper interview, Ben spent his days in Honolulu relaxing. He met up with a few friends and played tourist with LeRoy Kirkpatrick. They took photographs of palm trees and manicured gardens, and Ben posed for a tourist snapshot on the grounds of the Hawaiian royal family’s Iolani Palace.
Ben was still in Honolulu in late April when the stunning news from Europe broke: Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in Berlin rather than witness the fall of his capital to the Russian hordes. Shortly afterward, Ben boarded his return flight for the Marianas with his crewmates. They were back on Tinian when another thunderclap broke on May 8: Nazi Germany had surrendered, concluding the war in Europe.
All eyes were on the Pacific and the final showdown with Japan.
AS BEN RETURNED TO COMBAT IN EARLY May 1945, the end of the war was coming into focus. The guns had fallen silent in Europe, and the ground forces of Japan were in retreat in the Pacific.
B-29 crews were now pouring into the Marianas. There had been four hundred B-29s based on the islands in March. By August there would be one thousand.3 As new crews arrived from US training bases, the 313th Wing headquarters arranged for the transfer of battle-tested crews into inexperienced outfits. Among the veterans tapped to provide guidance to the new arrivals were Jim Jenkins and his Honorable Sad Saki crew. Bidding farewell to their comrades in the 484th Squadron, Jenkins and his men now became one of the lead crews of the 680th Squadron of the 504th Bomb Group.
A new unit wasn’t the only change that greeted Ben on his return to Tinian. The military population on the island was soaring from a few thousand men when Ben arrived to 26,500 by the summer.4 With each passing day, battle-scarred Tinian seemed to lose some of the aura of danger that had caused such stress for Ben and his comrades when they had arrived.
Along with the waning risk of an encounter with a Japanese army holdout (or a jittery American sentry), creature comforts increased for the B-29 crews. Gone were the crude lean-tos and tents that had been the only shelter available to Ben and his comrades when they first arrived. Now they slept and lounged between missions in all-weather Quonset huts that shielded them from the sun and the monsoon rains. Touring USO troupes and military ensembles performed in theaters and on open-air stages. Ben could check out a book from the group lending library, or join an athletic league to compete on baseball, basketball, or volleyball teams.
The extracurricular activities helped the men fill their idle hours, but the nature of their work was changing, too. The original vision of conquering Japan with high-altitude “precision-bombing” raids was a distant memory, as was the high-minded talk about waging an air campaign that spared unnecessary civilian casualties. Now incinerating Japan’s most important industrial cities, killing factory workers, and breaking the morale of the Japanese people had become American objectives. The air campaign had been conceived as preparation for a ground invasion of the home islands, starting with Kyushu in November. But, as Pacific War air historian James Boyle wrote, with some hyperbole, by May “many American commanders, mostly air officers,” had come to believe that the B-29 bombing campaign “would make an invasion unnecessary.”5
The stakes were enormous. The epic battle for Okinawa was underway fourteen hundred miles northwest of Tinian just as Ben returned to combat. For the American high command as well as the soldiers and Marines on the ground, the fight for Okinawa was a nightmarish glimpse of what was likely to come—unless the air campaign could bring Japan to its knees without an invasion.
WITH THIRTEEN MISSIONS UNDER HIS belt by early May, Ben’s Pacific combat tour so far hadn’t been nearly as harrowing as the worst raids he flew in Europe and North Africa. Casualty rates for the B-29 crews were a fraction of those incurred by the B-17 and B-24 groups of the Eighth Air Force in Ben’s final weeks in Europe in the fall of 1943.6
Still, Ben had been around long enough to know that survival in aerial combat came down to luck. It would only take a dime-size piece of flak to kill him or disable Honorable Sad Saki. But luck had been a constant companion for Ben throughout the war, and he returned to action in May 1945 with the conviction that his luck was going to hold.
On May 11, 1945—three days after Germany’s unconditional surrender in Europe—the B-29s flew their last strike against Japanese kamikaze airfields on Kyushu. That same day, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, released the Marianas-based B-29s from support of the Okinawa campaign. With an eye toward destroying Japan’s industries, LeMay ordered his B-29 group commanders to prepare for more firebombing raids on Japan’s principle urban areas.7
On May 14, LeMay’s B-29 incendiary raids resumed in spectacular fashion with a joint daytime strike by all four Marianas-based air wings. The target was the north urban area of the Japanese city of Nagoya. It was the largest B-29 force mustered against Japan to date, with 529 aircraft taking off for the target. The area included LeMay’s top precision target, the Mitsubishi Aircraft Engine Works, and other high-value industrial targets, including the Mitsubishi Electric Company and a branch of the Nagoya Arsenal.8 The raid was the lead story in the New York Times later that day: “500 ‘Superforts’ Blast Nagoya.” Within forty-eight hours, the B-29s hit Nagoya again, this time focusing on the city’s southern area. The two raids effectively destroyed the city’s most important manufacturing concerns and prompted another 170,000 people to flee Nagoya.9 LeMay crossed Nagoya off his list, but he had other targets in his sights.
On May 23 and 25, the B-29s completed the destruction of Tokyo. Yokohama was gutted on May 29 and Osaka on June 1. In each case, the Superfortresses faced almost no enemy fighter resistance. Only twenty of the 1,433 B-29s dispatched to bomb Japan between March 24 and May 19 were lost to any cause—numbers that underscored the extent of Japan’s military decline.10
For Ben, the growing sense that Japan was on the verge of defeat was a personal triumph. He had proven his loyalty to America by taking the war to the land of his ancestors, and he had refused an early ticket out of harm’s way. He had weathered that crisis and, as victory loomed, was fulfilling his responsibilities as Honorable Sad Saki’s tail gunner. But if Ben had learned anything from his months of aerial combat, he knew that disaster was never far away for a bomber crew, even against a wounded enemy.
Chapter 47
A WAR WITHOUT MERCY
The early hours of June 5, 1945, found Ben in the tail compartment of Honorable Sad Saki, cruising northward across the Pacific Ocean through overcast skies and sporadic showers. Jim Jenkins and his men had been among 531 B-29 crews that climbed into their aircraft after a late evening briefing and began taking off from Marianas runways before midnight.
General Curtis LeMay had committed all four of his XXI Bombardment Command wings in a “maximum effort attack” on Kobe, Japan’s sixth largest city. Before the war, Kobe was Japan’s most Westernized and cosmopolitan city—an international enclave with a taste for Hollywood films and American baseball and a curiosity about foreign cultures that was rare in much of Japan. Kobe also began the war as one of Japan’s most important industrial cities. Factories produced fighter planes, tanks, diesel and marine engines, ship turbines, and locomotives. The city’s shipyards turned out battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and submarines. Its international port was Japan’s busiest.1 Now Curtis LeMay aimed to wipe Kobe off the map, or at least burn it to the ground so that its factories and workers would no longer be able to contribute to Japan’s war machine.
Since returning from Hawaii, Ben had settled back into his routine with the Jenkins crew. No pilot would ever measure up to Jake Epting in Ben’s estimation, but Jim Jenkins had proven himself a steady hand in combat. His command qualities had not gone unnoticed. Jenkins would be pinning a captain’s bars on his khaki blouse in a few days. But combat was all about surviving the moment, and Jenkins had his hands full in this morning’s soupy Pacific skies.
The force would eschew the single-file attack mode used during night raids in favor of a conventional four-plane defensive formation. As one of the most experienced pilots in the 680th Squadron, Jenkins faced the tricky task of herding his flight into formation amid these unexpectedly precarious weather conditions. He accomplished this, and dawn found the 680th Squadron Superfortresses approaching Japan’s southern islands in clearing skies.
Without warning, shore batteries opened a heavy barrage of fire. No sooner had Jenkins and his trailing crews survived this threat than scores of enemy fighters attacked with startling aggressiveness. For the first time in five months of Pacific combat, Ben and his comrades found themselves fighting for their lives against resolute enemy fighters. Of the more than 500 Superfortresses that had taken off from the Marianas seven or so hours earlier, 473 now approached the city at a ground speed averaging 325 miles per hour.2
Driving ahead through the onrushing enemy fighters, Jenkins was poised to pass control of Honorable Sad Saki to bombardier Ken Neill when they discovered their aiming point was obscured by a wall of smoke. Rather than bomb blindly, Jenkins pushed through the blacked-out area. On the other side of the veil, Neill unleashed his load of incendiaries.3
Jim Jenkins had delivered his deadly ordnance as briefed, but more flak and fighters awaited the crew. In their desperate southward dash out of the target area, Honorable Sad Saki faced another “withering barrage” of antiaircraft fire. They were hit repeatedly, but Honorable Sad Saki’s engines and other vital systems remained in working order. Jenkins emerged from the ring of flak to encounter more enemy fighters. In a running battle, Ben and his comrades made their escape.4
The mission had been a near-tragedy for the Jenkins crew, but once again, Ben’s luck had prevailed. Such luck eluded eleven of the 473 B-29s that reached Kobe: Nine were lost to flak or fighters, or a combination of both, and two disappeared due to mechanical failures.
From the results-oriented perspective of Curtis LeMay, the raid on Kobe was another mission accomplished. The B-29s had blanketed Kobe with 3,006 tons of incendiaries and 71 tons of high explosives, killing more than 3,600 people and injuring another 10,000. The resulting fires incinerated 4.35 square miles of the city.5 Nearly 180,000 people were rendered homeless by the raid.
Kobe was eliminated from LeMay’s priority list of urban targets.
LIKE MOST BOMBER CREWMEN DURING World War II, Ben didn’t agonize over the morality of his work. He had asked for this assignment, and he was determined to do his duty. That meant dropping bombs on targets determined by higher-ups, and most of those targets were in congested urban areas where civilians lived. During the war, and even decades later, Ben never publicly questioned America’s policy of incinerating Japanese civilians in the final months of the Pacific War. But evidence suggests the topic was on his mind.
In his 1946 book about Ben’s wartime exploits, journalist Ralph Martin shared Ben’s inner reflections about the Japanese people dying beneath the American bombs and incendiaries—people who looked like him and maybe even thought like him. People who perhaps shared “his hate of Fascism, his love of democracy. All of them, the good and the bad and the innocent—under the bombs.”6
Interviewed by documentary filmmaker Bill Kubota in the late 1990s, Ben seemed shocked to learn how many Japanese civilians had died in the firebombing raids. “The thing that surprised me the most was I didn’t realize the tremendous toll that we’d taken [on Japanese civilians],” he told Kubota. And then, Ben flashed back to his thoughts as he peered down at the columns of smoke billowing from Japan’s burning cities. “Sometimes I felt sorry for all the women and children in those situations,” Ben said. “There was no way they could escape. We just dropped tons and tons of incendiaries on them.”7
That’s as close as Ben ever came to expressing regret about the firebombing in his public comments.
AMERICAN MILITARY PERSONNEL—prisoners of war captured at places like Wake Island, Guam, Bataan, and Corregidor—were also on the ground in Kobe on June 5, 1945, and they, too, were trapped in the inferno. They were the largest group of American prisoners remaining in Kobe: the doctors, staff, and patients at a facility officially designated Hospital Number 30, but commonly known as the Kobe POW Hospital.8
