Each day’s mail brought reminders of the important work that awaited him on the East Coast. Among the requests he fielded was one from the University of Pittsburgh, asking to use his Herald Tribune Forum speech for teaching tolerance to high school students. Another request came from the mass circulation Reader’s Digest magazine, which wanted to reprint his speech in its January 1946 issue. There were countless letters from ordinary people he had inspired.
On his return to New York City, Ben and other Japanese American veterans were feted by the Japanese American Citizens League with a banquet at the celebrated Delmonico’s restaurant. The following evening—November 22, Thanksgiving—Ben appeared on the national America’s Town Meeting radio show. During the broadcast, he continued to passionately make the case for an America that lived up to its highest ideals. “The enemy is Fascism, whether it’s in Germany or a congressman from Mississippi,” Ben declared.8
Ben’s plainspoken convictions once again impressed listeners. “Magnificent in its exposition of true Americanism and eloquent in its denunciation of racial and religious discrimination was the speech of Sergeant Ben Kuroki, the American war hero of Japanese strain, during the Town Hall meeting, last night,” commented the New York Daily News.9
In early December, Ben was invited to offer comments at a daylong conference on managing the civilian transition of more than a million Army Air Forces personnel. The event was held at Mitchel Field, Long Island. Among the senior military leaders who shook Ben’s hand were Army General Omar Bradley, now serving as President Truman’s veterans administrator, and four-star general Carl Spaatz and three-star Jimmy Doolittle. Millard Lampell’s Boy from Nebraska radio drama was played for the audience and Ben was called to the stage. He was given a standing ovation, with the legendary generals leading the applause.
For the rest of the year and into January, the Army Air Forces kept Ben busy speaking to civic groups and clubs across the country. Ben had taken up residence in a YMCA in Lower Manhattan, and he returned from his travels to stacks of laudatory mail.
In mid-February 1946, Ben reported to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to receive his discharge. He had given four years and one month to the Army Air Forces, and Uncle Sam had gotten his money’s worth. As Ben signed his name on the discharge form and collected his final paycheck, he felt an overwhelming sense that the work he had started on the stage of the Herald Tribune Forum wasn’t finished. He had a stack of invitations to speak to civic clubs, schools, and other religious and community groups around the country. He couldn’t turn away from this opportunity to help shape a better America. He would have to do it on his own dime, but he felt just as passionate about this new mission as he had felt about serving as a combat gunner.
Ben loved America, but these past four years had illuminated the imperfections of the American experiment. His parents had come to this country as immigrants more than forty years earlier. They had worked and paid taxes, and yet federal law prevented them from becoming US citizens. State law in Nebraska prevented them from owning land. Why? Why were Black Americans and Japanese Americans forced to fight in segregated units during the war? Why couldn’t they eat in certain restaurants or stay in certain hotels? These questions haunted Ben, and he believed they should haunt other Americans.
He had fought to prove his loyalty to America. Now he would fight for a cause that was bigger than he was, and far more important than his personal quest for respect and acceptance—a cause that went to the heart of what America was, and what America would be.
Chapter 51
FIFTY-NINTH MISSION
Two weeks after Ben was honorably discharged from the Army Air Forces, the Sunday magazine of the Omaha Morning World-Herald newspaper ran a full-page article on Nebraska’s celebrated war hero. “Ben Kuroki’s 59th Mission,” the main headline read. And then, in smaller type: “Nebraska Nisei Hero Turns on Race Hatred.” The piece marked the rejuvenation of one of Ben’s most important wartime friendships, as the author was none other than Cal Stewart, the 93rd Bomb Group public relations officer who had done so much to highlight Ben’s combat exploits throughout his time with Ted’s Travelling Circus. Stewart had returned to Nebraska in the fall to resume his newspaper career, and he had pitched a piece on the highflying Nisei war hero to the state’s largest newspaper.
Stewart had caught up with Ben in New York City to flesh out his story about the war hero’s transition to crusading activist. Ben was living in a small room in the massive YMCA on West 23rd Street in Lower Manhattan. It was known as the McBurney YMCA, and it was one of New York City’s largest residence clubs, with 279 rooms on ten floors, a gymnasium, swimming pool, handball courts, and meeting rooms for various social, civic, and artistic activities.1 Stewart cast Ben’s place of residence as further evidence of his humble grounding. “He has many admirers who would willingly install him in a more elaborate set-up in a fashionable downtown hotel,” Stewart wrote. “But he prefers the congenial cosmopolitan and friendly atmosphere of the YMCA. Because, he’s the boy from Nebraska.”2
No longer a soldier, Ben had taken to wearing business suits at his appearances. But he counted his Army Air Forces uniform as one of his most cherished possessions. It hung in the closet of his room, still adorned with his medals and ribbons.
Ben had arrived in San Francisco the previous October with only a vague notion of returning home to Hershey and resuming his life on the farm. But the reaction to his speeches and public appearances had caused him to rethink his plan for the future—or at least his immediate future. He even had a catchy title for what he planned to do.
“My hands still shake a little, but I’ve got one more mission to go,” Ben had said during his Thanksgiving evening broadcast interview. “There is still the fight against prejudice and race hatred. I call it my fifty-ninth mission, and I have a hunch that’s one mission I won’t be fighting alone.”3 It was a clever reference that likely originated with Millard Lampell, but Ben liked it, and now Cal Stewart—creator of the 93rd’s catchy “Ted’s Travelling Circus” moniker back in England—fixed a name for Ben’s crusade in the public mind.
Ben shared his rough plan for the rest of the year: He would knock out as many speaking engagements and interviews as he could through the spring and summer, and then head home to resume his life. He had shown little interest in college before the war, in part because of his tight finances, but now, with the GI Bill of Rights signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, Ben didn’t have to worry about paying for his higher education. He had begun to imagine himself as a college boy. Come fall, Ben told Stewart, he hoped to enter the University of Nebraska’s College of Agriculture. “I figure it this way: Farming is what I know best,” Ben said. “There have been lots of changes in farming methods since I went away, and if I’m going to be a good farmer, I’ve got a lot to learn.”
Stewart had his own thoughts on what Ben should do with his life, and, if he didn’t share them with Ben during this visit, he did at some point in the months ahead. For now, Ben had a plan for the rest of 1946. But his life since Pearl Harbor had rarely gone according to script, and neither would his journey back to civilian life.
AMONG THE PERQUISITES THAT HAD suddenly fallen his way over the past four months, Ben had become the most prominent Japanese American in the public eye by early 1946. He had been just an unremarkable Nisei farm boy when he attended the speech of Japanese American Citizens League leader Mike Masaoka in the North Platte church basement on December 7, 1941. Now Ben was being given access to bigger platforms than Masaoka.
Masaoka had emerged from the war with painful political baggage stemming from the JACL’s decision to encourage cooperation with the West Coast roundup of people of Japanese descent. Masaoka would later contend that he and other JACL leaders had been assured by Roosevelt administration officials that the removal of people from their West Coast homes would only be temporary and there had been no talk of mass incarceration. 4 Whatever the reality, Masaoka would be forever tainted by the incarceration.
During the war, Masaoka served in the army as publicity officer for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. One of his brothers lay buried in a European grave and two others carried the scars of combat wounds. In early 1946, Masaoka resumed his role as JACL’s national leader, and he set to work organizing the group’s ninth biennial convention in Denver. When the gathering got underway on February 28, one of the speakers was Ben Kuroki, billed as “a Nisei war hero of World War II.”
The convention highlighted the postwar issues of importance to people of Japanese descent, including a timely and just peace treaty with Japan and repeal of the federal law that barred Ben’s parents and tens of thousands of other Japanese immigrants from obtaining American citizenship. Another priority was government compensation of individuals who had suffered financial losses in the roundup.
Ben’s crusade against bigotry was of particular interest, because so many Asian Americans and other Americans of color faced discrimination and race hatred in their daily lives. The return of Nisei and Black troops from overseas had highlighted examples of these festering issues, including acts of violence committed against Black veterans as they returned to their homes in the South.
The lead story in the JACL newspaper, Pacific Citizen, on March 23 highlighted the appalling treatment of wounded Nisei veterans returning from combat in Europe. Forty-four wounded Nisei veterans of the 442nd RCT, including nine amputees, had endured shoddy treatment during their weeks-long stay in a California military hospital. As if that weren’t bad enough, the Nisei veterans had been forced to travel in the hold of the navy transport President Hayes on their passage from San Francisco to Honolulu.5
That same March 23 issue of the Pacific Citizen reflected Ben’s soaring profile in the Japanese American community. An article about a Nisei veterans appreciation gala in Salt Lake City scheduled for the following week noted two main speakers: Mike Masaoka and Ben Kuroki.6 Another article reported that Ben had been invited to join the provisional committee for a new veterans group devoted to minority veterans. Overnight, Ben’s war record had given him a seat at the table.
THE LEGACY OF THE DRAFT RESISTANCE movement that Ben encountered at Heart Mountain in April 1944 was another issue that hung over the Japanese American community in the war’s aftermath. The movement had quickly spread to eight of the ten camps in the continental US. Eventually, some three hundred incarcerated men refused to undergo their pre-induction physical or otherwise defied their summons to serve.
The Heart Mountain dissidents seized the national spotlight in two high-profile trials. The young artist Yosh Kuromiya was one of sixty-three men from Heart Mountain who went on trial on federal draft evasion charges at the US District Court in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on June 12, 1944. The men waived their right to a jury trial, placing their fate in the hands of Judge T. Blake Kennedy. On June 26, Judge Kennedy found all sixty-three defendants guilty and sentenced them to three years in federal prison.
The second trial involving the Heart Mountain dissidents got underway in Cheyenne on October 23, 1944, with seven leaders of the camp’s Fair Play Committee and the sympathetic Nisei journalist James Omura accused of conspiring to encourage draft evasion. On November 1, a jury found the seven Fair Play Committee leaders guilty and acquitted Omura. The following day, the seven committee leaders were sentenced to federal prison terms ranging from two to four years.
Both groups of Heart Mountain defendants appealed. When the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver affirmed the convictions of Kuromiya and his codefendants, they were serving their sentences at the federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington. On December 26, 1945, that same court of appeals reversed the conviction of the seven Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee leaders, concluding the court erred in not allowing the jury to consider the civil disobedience argument offered by the defendants. Federal prosecutors declined to retry the seven men and they were released from Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.
Yosh Kuromiya and most of his codefendants from the Heart Mountain resisters case remained behind bars at McNeil Island until July 14, 1946, when they were released with time off for good behavior.
Nisei draft resisters from other camps had faced trials in federal courts in Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, and all were convicted and given prison terms that ranged from six months to thirty-nine months. The resisters at a camp in Poston, Arizona, were convicted on the eve of the war’s end and were sentenced to one-penny fines by a lenient judge.
The only Nisei draft resisters to prevail in federal court were twenty-seven defendants from the Tule Lake Segregation Center. US District Judge Louis E. Goodman of the Northern District of California concluded after a brief trial that it was “shocking to the conscience” for the federal government to have jailed American citizens on suspicions of disloyalty and then prosecuted them for refusing to be forced into military service.7
On December 24, 1947, President Harry Truman pardoned all wartime draft resisters, expunging the conviction of Yosh Kuromiya and the other sixty-two men from Heart Mountain convicted of evading the draft. But not even a presidential pardon could erase the stigma the draft resisters and No-No Boys faced in their highly conformist and close-knit communities.
In a March 1946 letter to the editor published in the Pacific Citizen, Ben called on his Nisei peers to “stop bickering over the past.” But Ben had underestimated—or even completely dismissed—the depths of anguish and anger that many Nisei and Issei in America felt over the injustices committed against them by the US government during the war. Ben had faced bigotry during the war, but he and his family had not been forced from their land or incarcerated, and he seemed unable to make that distinction.
Back in the fall of 1944, as he was trying to win War Department approval for his deployment to the Pacific, Ben had been ordered to Cheyenne to testify as a prosecution witness in the conspiracy trial of the seven leaders of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and journalist James Omura. In the end, Ben wasn’t called to the stand, but he had condemned the draft resisters to a newspaper reporter outside the courthouse after the trial. The activities of the Japanese American draft resisters were “a stab in the back,” Ben declared. “These men are Fascists in my estimation and no good to any country. They have torn down all the rest of us have tried to do.”8
Since Pearl Harbor, Ben had been tormented by his fears of what other people, especially white Americans, thought of him. Did they see him as a loyal American or a “lousy Jap”? That fear had driven his actions for the past four years, and he continued to struggle with these insecurities in the war’s aftermath. He never wavered in his wartime belief that Nisei men should swallow the government injustices they had suffered and seek a combat assignment like he had to prove their loyalty to America.
Most of the young men, including Yosh Kuromiya, had defied the draft out of principle, not ideology, but Ben could never accept that. The draft resisters and the No-No Boys and their supporters would never forget nor forgive Ben. The day would come, far in the future, when their voices would be heard.
FROM HIS ROOM IN THE MCBURNEY YMCA, Ben arranged interviews and speaking appearances, read and responded to stacks of mail, and attended meetings in his new role as an activist for veterans’ affairs and racial justice. His war experiences continued to appeal to radio interviewers and producers. The radio station WMCA in New York City broadcast a dramatization of Ben’s battle experiences on the popular New World A-Coming program, which had a Black host and frequently featured stories on discrimination experienced by African American veterans. Ben’s story was also featured on the Treasury Salute radio program, which was sponsored by the US government as part of its drive to pay off war debts.
