Tibbetts had been in the command pilot’s seat when the Enola Gay had taken off from North Field at 2:45 a.m. the morning of the 6th with a single 9,700-pound bomb in its bay. They had flown a northwest course, passing over Iwo Jima, then proceeded to Japan’s Honshu island. At 9:15 a.m. Tinian time—8:15 a.m. in Japan—the Enola Gay’s bombardier, a North Carolina boy named Thomas Ferebee, unleashed his solitary bomb over Hiroshima, a city the Americans had purposely spared from the firebombing raids. Tibbetts put Enola Gay into a banking dive, and about fifty seconds later the bomb christened Little Boy exploded in a blinding flash some nineteen hundred feet above Hiroshima’s two-story Shima Hospital.
In a cataclysmic instant, at least sixty thousand lives were extinguished by an atomic bomb.
At 2:58 p.m. Tinian time, after an uneventful return flight, Tibbetts eased Enola Gay onto a North Field runway and taxied to a stop. He and his crew emerged from their aircraft to a rousing welcome by a hundred or so Army Air Forces officers, news reporters, and photographers. At an impromptu tarmac ceremony, General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz, Hap Arnold’s new commander of US Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, awarded Tibbetts the Distinguished Service Cross. General Curtis LeMay offered his praise and congratulations.
On the other side of the world, President Harry S. Truman revealed the first atomic bomb strike in a low-key radio announcement to the nation that began in remarkably understated fashion: “A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.”5
A second atomic bomb mission—this one flown by the 509th B-29 Bockscar against the city of Nagasaki—took off from Tinian’s North Field three days later. On August 14, as rumors of Japan’s imminent surrender swirled, LeMay unleashed a final punishing flurry of B-29 raids on Japan. An Associated Press dispatch from Guam, where LeMay was now assigned as a deputy to Spaatz, raised further hopes that the end was at hand: “Superfortresses have struck Japan with a five-thousand-ton demolition attack. Headquarters indicated that the B-29s will continue their crushing blows until a final official surrender notice is received.”
That notice of surrender was delivered in extraordinary fashion hours later in a radio broadcast to the Japanese people by Emperor Hirohito himself. World War II was over.
BEN WAS STILL RECOVERING FROM HIS injuries when Japan’s surrender was announced. The news set off a mad scramble among the B-29 crews on Tinian, and orders were cut for Jim Jenkins to fly his crew back to the States. Ben was heartsick when the Honorable Sad Saki took off from Tinian’s North Field for the final time without him.
In September, Ben was finally cleared to return to the States, but all available B-29s were long gone. It took him weeks to get out of the Marianas, but in early October, Ben finally boarded a humble Liberty ship for the Pacific crossing to San Francisco. After twenty-one days at sea, Ben was exuberant to see the Golden Gate Bridge. The “boy from Nebraska,” as the AAF play had christened him in the spring, was now twenty-eight years old, a veteran of fifty-eight combat missions, and recipient of three Distinguished Flying Crosses. With no thoughts of future plans beyond getting off the Liberty ship and getting out of the Army Air Forces, Ben stepped ashore along the same waterfront where his father had entered America as a young immigrant forty-two years earlier.
Chapter 50
A GREATER CAUSE
The scene as Ben came ashore in San Francisco was far different than what he had experienced on his return from Europe in December 1943. A Women’s Army Corps band was dockside playing “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here,” and on the ferry transporting troops across the bay to a transit camp, a USO troupe provided live entertainment. At the camp, a colonel welcomed the returning GIs with a rousing speech. As soon as that was out of the way, the men dashed off to indulge in all the deferred pleasures suddenly at their fingertips, including hot showers, sheets, and all the steak and ice cream they could eat.
Ben had just reached his bunk when he was summoned to the orderly room. “Sergeant Kuroki, you’re flying to New York immediately to meet General Marshall,” a solicitous captain informed him. The captain didn’t have further details. Still clad in the sweat-stained khakis he had been wearing since leaving the Marianas, Ben hustled to the nearest air base and boarded a waiting B-24. Shortly after they were airborne, he fell asleep.1
Arriving in Newark, New Jersey, that evening, Ben was accosted by an eager lieutenant as he stepped onto the tarmac. The lieutenant directed Ben to a waiting army sedan, and the car threaded its way through traffic and crossed the Hudson River into Manhattan.
The lieutenant’s orders were to deliver Ben to the posh Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Unshaven, his shoes scuffed and moldy, his uniform a rumpled mess, Ben asked the driver to drop him at a back entrance. When the registration clerk finally figured out that the scruffy airman was legitimately connected to a big event about to get underway at the hotel, he directed a bellhop to lead Ben to his room.
Ben was sprawled on the bed when his phone rang. It was the secretary of a New York Herald Tribune executive, Helen Rogers Reid, who also happened to be the wife of the newspaper’s owner and a prominent patron of liberal causes. Could he please come to Mrs. Reid’s room right away? Reid, it turned out, was the founding chair of the annual Herald Tribune Forum, a prestigious gathering in its fourteenth year. She had read about Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech the previous year and thought he would be a perfect speaker for the current events forum. She had reserved a spot for him on the opening night two days from now. Could she count on him?
Everything was settled the following morning. Ben had twenty-four hours to clean up and pull together the speech of his life. With $100 wired from his brother George and a money order from Reid, Ben got a haircut, shave, polished shoes, and a crisp new uniform to showcase his medals and ribbons. Tapping her liberal circle, Reid had arranged for Millard Lampell, the journalist and playwright who had penned the AAF drama about Ben’s life earlier in the year, to help write Ben’s remarks.
During a frenetic day’s work, Lampell and Ben crafted a powerful speech. On Monday evening, October 29, Ben slipped a copy into his pocket and made his way into the crowded Waldorf Astoria ballroom for the night of his life.
AS BEN MOUNTED THE STAGE, AN USHER introduced him to an instantly recognizable figure: a tall, emaciated man with four stars on his shoulders and the Medal of Honor around his neck. It was Jonathan Wainwright, commander of the American and Filipino defenders of Corregidor Island in the Philippines until their surrender on May 6, 1942. Wainwright had endured three years of brutal Japanese captivity and had recently returned to a hero’s welcome. President Harry Truman hosted Wainwright at the White House on September 10 and surprised him by awarding him the Medal of Honor. Three days later, Wainwright was showered by cheers and ticker tape as he rode through the streets of Manhattan in an open limousine. Now this living, breathing symbol of Japan’s wartime brutality offered Ben a nod of greeting. In his nervous state, Ben reached out to shake the general’s hand rather than salute him.
Glancing around the stage, Ben felt intimidated. Along with Wainwright and army chief of staff General George C. Marshall was the celebrated air general, Claire Chennault, who had commanded the US Fourteenth Air Force in China during the war. Representing America’s allies were President Sergio Osmeña of the Philippines and Australia’s foreign minister, Dr. Herbert Evatt. The other speaker was Navy Captain Harold Stassen, former Minnesota governor and recent Pacific naval combat veteran, now poised to resume his political career.
Just as he had been unnerved by the news coverage of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines on the eve of his Commonwealth Club speech, Ben now felt the eyes of the audience bore into him as he sat next to the brutalized hero of Bataan and Corregidor. After sitting anxiously through Marshall’s keynote address, Wainwright’s remarks, and other speeches, Ben finally stepped to the podium. He was so nervous that he initially forgot to make eye contact with the audience and rushed through his written pages.
Gaining control of his churning emotions, Ben slowed his pace and began to connect with the people in the room. Ben’s epic journey had never lacked for poignancy, but Millard Lampell’s pen had elevated his oft-told tale to an American allegory. It was still the inspiring story of a humble Japanese American farm boy who had risked everything to prove his love of country. But now it also became a summons to the nation to redirect the commitment mounted against foreign fascism into a fight at home to forge a more perfect union for all Americans.
“Not only did I go to war to fight the Fascist ideas of Germany and Japan, but also to fight against a very few Americans who fail to understand the principles of freedom and equality upon which this country was founded,” Ben declared.
I’ve had fifty-eight bombing missions now, and I’m still tired enough so my hands shake, and plenty of nights I don’t sleep so good. I’d like to go home to Nebraska and forget the war, and just lie under a tree somewhere and take it easy. It’s hard to realize that the war is not over for me. Not for a lot of us Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, Negro Americans, Japanese Americans. While there is still hatred and prejudice, our fight goes on. Back in Nebraska on our farm, when I planted a seed, I knew that after a while I’d get a crop. That’s the way it was with a lot of us in this war; we went to plant the seeds to bring in a crop of decency and peace for our families and our children.
Back in high school in Nebraska, one of the things they taught me was that America is a land where it isn’t race or religion that makes free men. That’s why I went to Tokyo. I went to fight for my country, where freedom isn’t color, but a way of life, and all men are created equal until they prove otherwise. That’s an old idea we have in Hershey, Nebraska, just down the highway from Cozad, which is near North Platte.
The room exploded with thunderous applause reminiscent of Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech nearly two years earlier. Embarrassed, Ben finally returned to his seat. The gaunt General Wainwright extended his hand with an approving smile. As the audience continued to convey its appreciation, Ben bowed awkwardly. With the reaction reverberating throughout the room, a smiling Helen Rogers Reid motioned for Ben to stand once again to acknowledge the crowd’s approbation.
OVERNIGHT, BEN’S SPEECH ELEVATED his profile in a way that none of his wartime interviews ever had. He had established himself in the vanguard of a postwar movement to create a more just and equitable America.
Ben was inundated with interview and speaking requests. He decided the time was right for a book about his exploits and so he asked Millard Lampell if he would write it. Lampell begged off, but he found a reporter friend who was interested.2 During the war, Ralph Martin Goldberg had written for the army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper and Yank weekly magazine under the pen name Ralph G. Martin. A Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Martin viewed Ben’s story as a saga that could speak to important American themes beyond the battlefield. He soon struck a deal with Harper & Brothers Publishers in New York and set to work interviewing Ben.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece of Ben.
At the Herald Tribune Forum, Ben had seemed to be handling the spotlight in stride. Privately, he was struggling. He felt terribly alone and wanted nothing more than to go home. That line in his speech about lying under a tree somewhere and taking it easy wasn’t just a rhetorical flourish. He felt like he was breaking down again. He was so tense and nervous that he found it a challenge to pick up the phone and order room service at the Waldorf Astoria.3
He received orders summoning him to Washington, DC, and it was all he could do to drag himself aboard his train at Penn Station.
At the Pentagon, Ben met with Colonel Howard Rusk, director of the Army Air Forces convalescent and rehabilitation services. Ben pleaded for a furlough that would allow him to go home for a few days. Rusk agreed to do what he could. Before leaving Washington, Ben was invited to dinner with Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, which was in the process of closing its network of incarceration camps and releasing the inmates. Ben arrived at Myer’s home, expecting a private dinner, only to encounter a host of other guests. Ben kept losing his focus. At one point he heard a bugler blowing taps somewhere in the distance and broke down, “crying and shivering, his cheeks twitching uncontrollably.”4
After his disastrous dinner, Ben caught a train to New York City with one final obligation before his furlough. Army Public Affairs had agreed to make Ben available for an interview on Report to the Nation, a national CBS radio show originating in New York City. At Penn Station, Ben asked the Travelers Aid USO desk for help in booking a hotel room. “Are you a Chinese or Japanese American?” the attendant asked. Ben was taken aback. “I’m just asking because I wanted to save you embarrassment,” the attendant explained. “There are some hotels here that won’t accept Japanese Americans.”5
Ben found a hotel that would have him and made his way to the Manhattan studio for his Saturday night appearance on Report to the Nation. He shared top billing with big-name British actor Boris Karloff, and held himself together.
As he prepared to leave New York on Sunday, November 4, Ben made news with the publication of an interview he had given to a United Press correspondent in Washington. In the interview, Ben had waded into a spiraling controversy involving the American Legion, the country’s biggest veterans’ group. Local Legion chapters were denying membership to Black veterans in the South and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Ben told the UP reporter that Nisei soldiers might have to form their own group to make sure their story was told.6
By taking on the powerful American Legion, Ben enhanced his standing even more with prominent liberals, civil rights activists, and advocacy groups. But Ben’s head was elsewhere. Boarding his train in New York City, he began the first leg of his journey home.
BACK HOME IN HERSHEY, BEN TOOK long walks around the farm and surrounding fields and then ventured into town. He stopped by his high school and gave a talk to students. He made a tearful visit to console Gordy Jorgenson’s mother.7
