Ben wasn’t like many combat veterans who centered the war as the defining element of their lives and traded on their record at every turn. His innate modesty wouldn’t allow that. But Ben was justifiably proud of his war record and the fame he had achieved. In his quiet way, he occasionally let people know he had done his part and had been more than just another faceless grunt.
One of those moments came in 1966 when he walked into the office of the top editor at the Ventura Star. Owners of the venerable New York Herald Tribune had announced that paper was shutting down, and the news had brought back a flood of memories for Ben. He quietly knocked out a piece about his return from the Pacific in October 1945—about being whisked from San Francisco to New York City aboard an army transport plane and then finding himself on a stage at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel alongside some of America’s most celebrated generals. Ben walked into his editor’s office at the Ventura Star on his day off, with the finished piece in hand. “He dropped a sheaf of copy on my desk and said softly, ‘Maybe there’s something here that you can use,’” recalled the editor, a World War II navy veteran named Julius Gius.1
Gius was stunned by what he read. He recapped Ben’s remarkable story for readers, noting Ben had been at the paper a year and neither Gius nor any other of Ben’s coworkers had a clue about his spectacular war record or his fame.
A year later, in 1967, Ben was assigned to cover the dedication of a plaque marking one of the incidents that contributed to the roundup and incarceration of Californians of Japanese descent: the shelling of the state’s central coast on the night of February 23, 1942, by a Japanese submarine. The plaque commemorating the incident was the project of the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, a vociferous roundup proponent.
Ben wrote a just-the-facts news story about the plaque dedication, but he also turned in a first-person piece about his wartime memories of the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. He was stationed in England in the fall of 1942 when he picked up a magazine in which the California group was calling for the isolation of all Japanese Americans in a swamp somewhere in a remote corner of America. “I was so mad I volunteered immediately for combat duty as an aerial gunner,” Ben wrote, hedging the truth a bit. He had been angling for a combat assignment months before he read about the racist Native Sons proposal.2
Only a few weeks after his 1967 brush with the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the hysteria-inducing submarine attack, four eighth-grade students from a Ventura junior high school came to the Ventura Star to interview Ben and Gius for a term paper they were writing on the incarceration of Japanese Americans. It was another moment that transported Ben back in time, something that happened with increasing frequency in the ensuing years.
Ben never spoke about his war service to his girls when they were growing up, but there were hints of the traumas he had endured and the scars he carried. “We had to be super careful about walking around him when he was sleeping,” his youngest daughter, Julie, recalled. “If you actually touched him when he was sleeping, he would lash out, reflex-type stuff, thinking that somebody was going to hurt him. But he really didn’t talk about it much at all.”3
As a college student in the late 1970s, Julie became more curious about this hidden chapter of her father’s life. She asked him about his war, and it was as if a door had been unlocked. Ben produced a trunk stuffed with photo albums, letters, official documents, and other war memorabilia. It was a treasure trove that revealed an extraordinary part of her father’s life that she knew virtually nothing about. Ben allowed Julie to use part of his uniform to fashion the cover of a book she created as an art student. “After that was when he started talking to me about things,” Julie said. “As he pulled stuff out of the trunk, he personalized events.”4
Six years into his retirement, Ben had settled into a life that revolved around family and golf when something prompted him to take his copy of an old wartime book off the shelf. The book was Air Gunner, and it told the story of the precarious lives of Eighth Air Force B-17 and B-24 gunners. Ben’s combat exploits were among those included by the journalist authors, a pair of army sergeants named Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney. In recent decades, Rooney had achieved fame and celebrity as a curmudgeonly commentator on the popular CBS News show 60 Minutes. Something prompted Ben to mail his copy of Air Gunner to Rooney at CBS News in New York City and to ask the author if he would mind signing the book. When Ben got the book back, Rooney had inscribed it: “To BK, who I’m sure is as great an American in 1988 as he was when I first knew him in 1942—AR 3/25/88.”
Around the same time, a national news event moved Ben to write a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. The trigger was the US government finally agreeing to make amends to Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II. After years of lobbying by prominent Japanese Americans, Congress had finally passed legislation for an apology and reparations and President Ronald Reagan had signed it. The Los Angeles Times published a letter from Ben in which he recalled being sent on a War Department recruiting mission to the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in 1944. “I vividly remember what a shock it was,” Ben wrote. “At the entrance were armed guards wearing the same uniform I was wearing. Inside, behind barbed wire, were ‘my own people.’”5
What Ben’s letter didn’t mention was the fact that his visit had stirred controversy within the Heart Mountain community and, in more recent decades, within certain Japanese American circles. The War Department had ordered Ben to visit the camps, and he had complied. Did that make him complicit in the incarceration regime? A collaborator? Ben certainly didn’t think so, and neither did many of the inmates who welcomed his visit. But a vocal group of Nisei thought otherwise at the time, and their voices had begun to shape revisionist books and films on the incarceration. Increasingly, the revisionists turned a critical spotlight on Ben.
In early 1990, another ghost from Ben’s past came calling. The phone rang one day and on the other end was Charles Brannan, the 409th Squadron adjutant who had helped block an attempt by a couple of bigoted 93rd sergeants who were trying to get Ben out of the group before their deployment to England in the late summer of 1942. Ben’s tearful pleas to remain with the group and his subsequent combat heroics had never left Brannan’s memory. Now retired in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Brannan tracked Ben down to discuss those events. Afterward, Brannan wrote a letter to the president of the Air Force Association to make sure they were aware of Ben as the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of World War II kicked off. Ben was “one of the Air Force’s brave,” Brannan wrote. Indeed, in Brannan’s estimation Ben “did more for America than people would ever believe unless they were aware of his deeds.”6
By 1991, museums and historical societies across America were preparing for four years of commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of World War II. The Nebraska Historical Society had timed the opening of its World War II exhibition to the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During discussions about which Nebraska World War II veteran should deliver the opening night remarks, at the ceremony formally opening the exhibit, the group’s leaders decided to invite the Nebraska native son who had been the nation’s first Nisei war hero. Ben Kuroki accepted the invitation and flew to Lincoln in early December 1991 to help commemorate the event that changed the course of his life.
ON THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 6, 1991, the largest crowd to ever attend a single event at the Museum of Nebraska History filed into the Nebraska Historical Society’s showcase venue in downtown Lincoln to witness the formal opening of one of the society’s most ambitious projects ever: “What Did You Do in the War? Nebraskans in World War II,” a four-year exhibition marking the epochal events of World War II as seen and experienced by Nebraskans.
Before the festivities got underway, Ben and more than 600 invited guests dined on a buffet of war-era food, including Spam. At the appointed hour, more than 125 VIPs and other select guests were ushered into the museum’s auditorium while other invitees gathered around closed-circuit monitors positioned inside the building. More than twenty members of Ben’s extended family from five states were among the guests. Also, there were two friends who had vouched for Ben at pivotal moments in his life: 93rd Bomb Group veteran Cal Stewart and retired congressman—and, later, US senator—Carl Curtis, who had secured War Department approval for Ben’s Pacific deployment in November 1944.
The director of the Nebraska Historical Society, James Hanson, introduced Ben as one of 110,000 Nebraska men and women who served in the various US military branches in World War II, and Ben—now seventy-four years of age—moved to the podium to deliver his first speech before such a large crowd since 1947.
Ben drew on the themes from his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour speech as he recounted his wartime service. But he also went out of his way to express pride in his Nebraska heritage. “Nebraska was the American dream for my parents,” he said. “During the war, nobody waved the flag as hard as Dad Kuroki.”
He was touched by the invitation and went on at length about how much it meant to him. He spoke about how the society might have taken a safer path choosing a Nebraska veteran from the state’s white majority to open the exhibition. His leading role in the ceremony was “an honor I considered the very best of my military experience,” Ben said. “I somehow feel vindicated. My dogged determination to prove my loyalty to America has been accomplished.”
Ben concluded his remarks by remembering his boyhood friend from Hershey, Gordy Jorgenson, one of 3,626 Nebraska natives who had paid the ultimate price during World War II. Ben declared the exhibition open “on behalf of all veterans of Nebraska and especially for my friend, Gordy.”7
The following morning, December 7, 1991, Ben was still savoring the thrill of his triumphal homecoming when someone alerted him to pick up a copy of the morning’s New York Times. In an editorial headlined “The Hidden Heroes,” Ben’s wartime service was celebrated by America’s most influential newspaper.
“When the orations are over today, most Americans who fought and died because of Pearl Harbor will have been well and fully remembered,” the editorial began. “What happened fifty years ago will have been generously commemorated on television and in print, in speeches and sermons. What remains very much in order is a special tribute to largely unremembered Americans like Ben, an Army Air Force[s] sergeant from Hershey, Neb.”8
The editorial summarized Ben’s record: thirty B-24 missions in Europe, his internment by Spanish forces, and his twenty-eight missions in the Pacific. “Ben was an authentic hero. General George Marshall asked to meet him; so did Generals Bradley, Spaatz, Wainwright and Jimmy Doolittle. He was feted on his return and pressed to make speeches. Yet this, his fifty-ninth mission, needed valor of a different kind. For Ben, as one historian notes, ‘couldn’t walk into a barber shop in California; he couldn’t be sure of getting a hotel room in New York.’ His ancestry was Japanese.
“His full name was Ben Kuroki. Like other Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, he was at first deemed unfit to serve because of his origin.”
The editorial went on to recount the heroics of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe and the stalwart service of six thousand Nisei soldiers who aided military intelligence efforts in the Pacific. “Prejudice, secrecy, and negligence have denied these brave Americans their full measure of respect and recognition,” the Times wrote. “All Japanese Americans—those who fought, and the 120,000 who were interned in camps—have earned the apology that President [George Herbert Walker] Bush intends to offer at Pearl Harbor today.”
The editorial ended with a Franklin Roosevelt quote that Ben had incorporated into his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour speech: “The principle on which the country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.”
A few days after returning from Lincoln, Ben received a letter from the Nebraska Historical Society director that he would cherish. “You have won the hearts of Nebraskans,” James A. Hanson wrote. “Never so many complimentary remarks. It was a special thrill to read the editorials in Nebraska papers, and the New York Times editorial made me fairly burst with pride and admiration.”9
Ben could hardly have imagined a more thrilling finale to his life’s story. Yet even now, at the age of seventy-four, greater honors lay ahead.
Chapter 55
RECKONING, REMEMBRANCE, AND REWARD
Throughout the 1990s, historians and journalists churned out thousands of books on nearly every imaginable aspect of World War II. There were wide-lens looks at the war, close-focus examinations of specific battles or incidents, and biographies by the score. And yet, Ben’s story was somehow overlooked in the publishing frenzy.
But he wasn’t entirely forgotten.
In 1994, Ben was living in Ojai, a charming spa town in the Ventura County mountains. He spent much of his time on the golf course. As World War II fiftieth anniversary celebrations took place across America, Ben was content to bask in the glow of what he called his “last hurrah”—his 1991 appearance opening the Nebraska Historical Society’s World War II exhibition in Lincoln.
When he received an interview request in 1994 from a history professor at California State University, Fullerton, Ben politely declined. The professor’s name was Arthur Hansen, and he was an accomplished scholar of the Japanese American experience in America. He had immersed himself in the World War II incarceration tragedy and the resistance to the incarceration. In his research, Hansen had become familiar with Ben Kuroki’s story. Hansen was determined to talk to Ben, and so he enlisted his wife to approach Shige through a mutual friend. In that roundabout way, Hansen arranged to sit down with Ben at his Ojai home on October 17, 1994.
Hansen was a masterful researcher and storyteller, and he had developed a philosophy of oral history interviewing. His approach was the antithesis of what he disdainfully referred to as “strip-mining”—the superficial interviews conducted by many journalists and less accomplished historians. Hansen viewed an oral history interview as a mutually enlightening encounter for the interviewer and the interviewee. He structured his interviews to draw out his subject and allow them to relive their life during the course of the conversation. It was a highly effective method.1
Rigorous preparation was a hallmark of Hansen’s method. He had pored over Ralph Martin’s book, flagging the holes, inconsistencies, and questionable facts and carefully preparing his long list of questions. Hansen had requested two days for the interview, but Ben would agree to only one. As it turned out, one day was enough. Over the course of several hours, Hansen covered Ben’s story in rich detail. Hansen elicited from Ben a number of revelations, like the fact that Ben’s mother, Naka, came to America as a “picture bride,” and that professional writers on the army payroll had written Ben’s signature speeches before the Commonwealth Club and Herald Tribune Forum.
Hansen felt uneasy as he zeroed in on Ben’s controversial visits to the three incarceration camps in the spring of 1944. He felt guilty about confronting Ben with questions that he no doubt would find uncomfortable, but his sense of integrity and his commitment to an accurate rendering of history didn’t allow him to avoid these uncomfortable moments in Ben’s life. Gently, skillfully, Hansen forged ahead .2
In Ben’s memory, his most intense encounters during his recruiting mission had come at Heart Mountain, the first of his stops. But Hansen had studied the notes of James Sakoda, the Minidoka inmate who was also conducting field research on the camps for the University of California, Berkeley. Sakoda’s journals depicted Ben’s tour of Minidoka as contentious. When Hansen gently laid out some of Sakoda’s notes that suggested Ben’s reception at Minidoka was more hostile than commonly portrayed, Ben became defensive.
“That’s BS!” Ben exclaimed at one point.3
Hansen concluded that the camp visits came in such quick succession for Ben that some of his memories were jumbled. In any event, Hansen had covered the necessary ground to illuminate Ben’s collision with the resisters and their conflicting definitions of patriotism. The interview ended in cordial fashion, and they said their goodbyes. Hansen went away thinking that Ben was a good person and a gentleman.
