I found Ben Kuroki’s story to be extremely interesting because it was similar to but different from that of other Nisei men who fought during World War II. First, he grew up in Nebraska, and his family didn’t suffer the injustice of losing their land, forced relocation, and incarceration experienced by so many other people of Japanese descent. Second, he started his military career in January 1942 prior to the signing of Executive Order 9066. The similarity was the racism and hatred he had to endure following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As one of the few Japanese Americans in the Air Force, his ethnicity and questions regarding his loyalty to the United States were constantly highlighted. The majority of Nisei men who enlisted from the camps were assigned to the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Both were segregated units comprising Japanese Americans who shared a common mission and bond. These men also suffered racism and hatred but found strength with their fellow Nisei soldiers.
A common theme among all Nisei soldiers was their Issei parents telling them to honor family by demonstrating their loyalty to the United States. This became their focus throughout their military careers. Most Japanese Americans can speak to the impact parental influence and family obligation had on their lives. The concept “honor your family” is truly the core of our existence.
Ben Kuroki and many others shared the belief that military service was the only way to prove that Japanese Americans were loyal to this country. As stated in this book, Kuroki truly believed that his “debt to the United States is greater than that of most of these other fellows.”
I truly respect Ben Kuroki’s actions as a member of the 93rd Bomb Group in Europe. This book tells the horrors of combat through his amazing bravery and dogged determination to prove his loyalty to the United States. It also describes the constant and pervasive racism Kuroki had to endure from other airmen. To complete thirty bombing missions in Europe is truly extraordinary. However, his decision to volunteer for bombing missions over Japan took his determination to a different level. I recognize that this decision was driven by his intense desire to demonstrate his loyalty. However, even the Issei who told their sons to enlist in the armed services had trouble with Ben Kuroki’s participation in the bombing raids over Japan. The firebombing of cities throughout Japan targeted more than just military targets. The damage to nonmilitary entities and the injury of and death toll on civilians were devastating. The firebombing and subsequent use of the atomic bombs are very difficult for me to accept. I understand the premise that both hastened the end of the war, but the excessiveness and devastation were extremely tragic.
My father and one uncle were in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and one uncle was in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Each one of them was a decorated veteran. To this day, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team remains the most highly decorated combat unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US military.
I asked my father and uncles why they fought for a country that took so much from our family and community. For context, my grandfather was one of the most prominent members of the Japanese American community. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was arrested and charged—but never tried—as a war criminal. The US government took everything from our family. My father and uncles told me that they fought for their families’ honor and to prove that they were loyal Americans. At the same time, they shared their anger at what was done to their families and community.
Another uncle was a proud dissident who refused to sign the infamous loyalty oath and became a “no-no boy.” He refused to enlist in the military and protested because he strongly believed that what happened to the Japanese American community was unjust and a violation of every community member’s civil rights. My family and uncle who stood up against the injustice were incarcerated at the Heart Mountain concentration camp located in a desolate area of Wyoming. This book has a segment that describes the hostility Ben Kuroki experienced when he visited Heart Mountain on a recruitment visit. It’s possible that the dissidents who confronted him included my uncle and other family members. Prior to the war, my uncle was pursuing a degree at the University of Southern California. Due to his actions during the war, he wasn’t allowed to finish his degree at USC.
There are thousands of stories of immense courage and bravery from the Japanese American community during World War II. This includes the many who were incarcerated in the concentration camps, the military veterans, and the dissenters. Each one proudly demonstrated the strength, resilience, and honor of our community.
Like many Sansei (third-generation) and Yonsei (fourth-generation) children, I owe my life and career to the strength of the Issei and the bravery of the Nisei—both those who fought in the armed forces and those who stood against the injustice to our community. The opportunities and successes that I’ve enjoyed in my life would not have been possible without the actions and sacrifices of those who came before me.
Ben Kuroki’s life was both meaningful and impactful not only for the Japanese American community but for all Americans. His story deserves our profound admiration and respect. He truly was an exceptional person who addressed racism and hate with exceptional feats of bravery and honor. Thank you, Ben Kuroki.
William Fujioka is the chair of the Japanese American National Museum’s board of trustees. He spent forty-four years in public service and was the first person of color to be appointed both as the city administrative officer of the City of Los Angeles and as the chief executive officer of the County of Los Angeles.
PROLOGUE
After a long and restless night, the Nebraska farm boy nervously made his way to the San Francisco hotel ballroom for his latest test of courage. In the twenty-six months since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, twenty-six-year-old Ben Kuroki had faced death on countless occasions. He had survived thirty B-24 bombing missions in Europe and North Africa, including America’s first attack on Rome and the suicidal smokestack-level raid on Adolf Hitler’s Romanian oil fields at Ploiesti. He had survived an encounter with Moorish brigands, three months of Spanish captivity, and a failed escape attempt that ended with bullets whizzing around him. On his final raid in Europe, a German shell shattered his Plexiglas gun turret and barely missed his head. He had returned to America the first Japanese American war hero, and now he hoped to top that feat by becoming the first Japanese American airman to bomb Japan.
For all his good fortune to date, Ben’s time in the army had been steeped in struggle and despair—the result of bigotry and racial discrimination that had confronted him from his first days in uniform. One of ten children born to Japanese immigrants, Ben was a high school graduate who seemed destined to spend the rest of his life growing potatoes and sugar beets with his father and brothers and trucking fresh produce back and forth to Omaha and the Rio Grande Valley. But the events of December 7, 1941, changed everything.
Nothing in his life had prepared Ben for the vitriol and suspicion that awaited him in the post–Pearl Harbor world beyond his remote corner of western Nebraska. Life was hard for the Kuroki children, but it was largely free of the prejudice and racial hatred that Shosuke and Naka Kuroki had encountered as Asian immigrants more than thirty-five years earlier. At tiny Hershey High School, Ben had been the popular vice president of his graduating class of fourteen students.1 But after joining the Army Air Forces, he quietly cried himself to sleep some nights because of the racial epithets and ostracism that were staples of his daily life. When peers were given a crack at a bomber crew assignment, Ben was given weeks of kitchen duty and other menial tasks.
He endured it all. Even after he was assigned to a newly formed B-24 group that was being rushed through training to join the air campaign ramping up in Europe, he seemed destined to spend the rest of the war as a clerk. Twice before overseas deployment, a pair of bigoted sergeants plotted to leave Ben behind. Twice fair-minded white officers granted him a reprieve.
From the moment he set foot in Britain in early September 1942, Ben felt a new sense of acceptance. Within weeks, he had talked his way into gunnery training, and then onto a B-24 crew. Given the chance to fight, he distinguished himself as an aerial gunner. On his first combat mission, a crewmate suffered a near-fatal head wound only a few feet from him. Later that night, Ben accepted that he probably wasn’t going to survive his tour.
Day after day, he conquered his fears to fly missions. He witnessed the death of good men and the disintegration of comrades shattered by combat stress. In December 1943, he returned home a decorated hero, celebrated in newspaper stories and radio interviews. Surely, he had done enough to silence the bigots who questioned his loyalty to America, or so he thought.
Ben spent the first weeks of 1944 at an Army Air Forces rest center in Southern California, awaiting his next assignment. In late January, he was scheduled to be interviewed by movie star Ginny Simms on her national NBC Radio show in Hollywood, only to be told at the last minute that he couldn’t do it. It was too controversial to highlight the war record of a Japanese American, especially in California, War Department and NBC officials said.
Two days later, things took an even worse turn for Ben when stories about the Japanese maltreatment of American and Filipino prisoners of war appeared in newspapers across the country. Opportunistic politicians demanded that more than one hundred thousand West Coast residents of Japanese descent currently confined in interior camps be held for the duration of the war.
Against the backdrop of resurgent anti-Japanese hatred in America, Ben headed north to San Francisco. Before the atrocity stories broke, he had agreed to address the prestigious Commonwealth Club, one of San Francisco’s most venerable institutions. Ben had planned to use the speech as a platform to speak out against continued anti-Japanese bigotry on the home front, but now he wasn’t sure if he should raise this issue or even cancel the speech.
After a restless night, Ben slipped into his bemedaled dress uniform on the morning of February 4, 1944, and made his way to the ornate Gold Ballroom for the midday meeting of the Commonwealth Club. The hall was packed with more than seven hundred leading citizens. In the front row sat the bespectacled steel tycoon Henry Kaiser, Sr., whose seven huge shipyards on the West Coast had played a pivotal role in the previous year’s military turnaround for Allied forces. Scattered throughout the audience were some of the country’s most prominent politicians, entrepreneurs, educators, writers, artists, and journalists. Only one invited guest was a woman: the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange, who had documented the despair of Californians of Japanese descent as they were rounded up and herded into camps two years earlier.
After introductions were made, Ben stepped uncertainly to the microphone. Gazing out at the sea of strangers, he was sure he saw hate and hostility in their eyes. Panic welled in his gut. What do they see? The face of the Bataan atrocities? His voice shaking, he began to speak. “I’m a farm boy from Nebraska and I can’t speak for all GIs, but I can speak for myself,” he said.
There were no boos or catcalls, as he had feared. The audience hung on his every word. Faces he’d imagined as masks of hate now exuded warmth and empathy. Gaining command of the crowd and confidence with every word, Ben Kuroki began to tell his remarkable story—a saga of patriotism, courage, teamwork, and tolerance. A saga that was far from finished.
Chapter 1
FIT FOR SERVICE
Ben Kuroki gripped the wheel of the old truck as it rolled along the gravel road that connected the family’s farm to the busy Lincoln Highway a mile-and-a-quarter to the south. It was Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, and he was headed into the town of North Platte for the sort of meeting he didn’t usually attend. Twenty-four years of age, Ben had spent most of his life on the farm the family leased from a white landowner in the nearby village of Hershey. A federal law prevented Ben’s parents, both immigrants from Japan, from becoming US citizens; a state law prevented them from owning land in Nebraska. That was the case in most farming states in the West, which had adopted “alien land laws” to prevent people who looked like Shosuke Kuroki from owning land.
As onerous as Nebraska’s 1921 Alien Land Law could be, life in the Cornhusker state was better than what Sam—as a Swedish neighbor had begun calling Shosuke—had experienced in some of his previous stops, in California and Wyoming. Farming was hard work, but he loved it. It had gotten him away from the gambling habit he had developed in Wyoming, where he mined coal for the Union Pacific Railroad for a few years and maintained the company’s rail lines in Wyoming and Nebraska, in all sorts of weather.1
Ben didn’t share his father’s love of farm life. In fact, Ben found a way to escape it. After graduating from Hershey High School in 1936, he saved some money from odd jobs and selling the pelts of skunks and raccoons he trapped. Ben and a partner bought a tractor-trailer rig for hauling produce. For about three years, they had been driving over to Omaha and down to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, delivering Sam’s potatoes and vegetables or the produce of other local farmers and returning with fruits or vegetables in season at their delivery point.
The meeting that Ben was headed to this morning wasn’t about farming. A fellow from an organization that Ben didn’t know much about—the Japanese American Citizens League—was in North Platte trying to organize the several dozen residents of Japanese ancestry to form their own chapter. Ben wasn’t sure why, but he had agreed to listen to the fellow who had traveled from California by train. Ben didn’t have deep feelings about his Japanese ancestry, but he would get to see old friends and learn more about the conflict between America and Japan that newspapers and radio newscasts were screaming about these days.
On either side of the gravel road lay fields where much of Ben’s life had played out—irrigated expanses that in recent months had yielded bountiful harvests of potatoes, sugar beets, cabbages, and tomatoes. The Kuroki family was well-known in these parts for the size and quality of their fresh produce. They lived in a ramshackle one-story farmhouse just off the road, on the land they leased.
Ben had grown up in poverty, the sixth of ten children born to Sam and Naka Kuroki. His parents had emigrated separately to America in the century’s first decade, and they had married in Wyoming in 1907, shortly after Naka’s arrival. Steady work with the Union Pacific Railroad took Sam from California to Wyoming, where he hoped to realize his American dream. The newlyweds made their first home in Cheyenne, where Sam was a coal mine laborer, according to the 1910 federal census. The couple had taken on a boarder to supplement Sam’s income. In Cheyenne, Naka gave birth to a son named Ichiro, who adopted the name of George, and a daughter named Fuji.
Around 1911, the family moved deeper into the Wyoming interior, to Hanna, where Union Pacific had its biggest coal mine. The work was no doubt a grueling adjustment for Sam, who had made a living selling silk sashes back in Japan, according to family lore. His coal-mining work was as dangerous as it was physically exhausting, with mine shafts subject to periodic explosions and cave-ins. Sam quit the mines around 1914 to act on his dream. As with the Wyoming move, the seeds had been planted by Sam’s work for the Union Pacific Railroad. He had first laid eyes on the Platte River Valley’s lush farmland during a stint with a railroad line crew, and it was there that Sam Kuroki hoped to raise his growing family in bucolic bliss.
FARMING WASN’T AS DANGEROUS as coal mining, but, as Sam discovered, it wasn’t without perils. Gyrating prices, fickle markets, financial upheaval, assorted natural disasters such as wind- and hailstorms and droughts—these all became perilous forces for the Kuroki family on that plot of leased land near the town of North Platte. Naka had given birth to another two daughters, Shizuye (Cecile) and Yoshie (Wilma), and another boy, Atsushi (Henry), by the time that Ben entered the world on May 16, 1917.
By then the family was living outside of Gothenburg, an old Pony Express stop on the Platte River, about thirty miles downstream from North Platte. Sam kept moving the family farther west, following the river upstream, until finally the Kurokis put down roots a mile south of the North Platte River outside the village of Hershey. After delivering Ben, Naka gave birth to another three children in quick succession: Shitoshi (Fred), in 1919; Fusae (Beatrice) in 1921; and Minoru (William) in 1923. In 1926, a frail and exhausted Naka gave birth to her tenth child in eighteen years, a daughter they named Rose Marie (sometimes recorded as Rosemary in documents). Ben had been the first Kuroki child to not have a Japanese name; Rosie, as she was known, was the second.
The same year of Rosie’s birth, the family marked another milestone when the oldest child, Ichiro—now known as George—graduated from tiny Hershey High School and entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. A fast runner, George held the South Platte Valley track record for the mile race for several years after his graduation, and he continued to compete for the Nebraska Cornhuskers track team. A sports columnist writing in the Sunday Nebraska State Journal newspaper in Lincoln once noted his admirable work ethic, but only after introducing him as “George Kuroki, a Jap from Hershey.” The columnist had used what was then common shorthand for the word “Japanese”; Ben would grow to hate the word long before it was deemed an ethnic slur and retired from common usage.2
By the waning months of 1929, Sam Kuroki had earned a reputation in Lincoln County as a skilled and industrious farmer. At the same time, the Kuroki children were doing well in school, their lives largely integrated with those of their white classmates. There were one or two other Japanese families with children in the Hershey school and a few Mexican families, whose men worked as laborers on the local farms. George was in his third year at the University of Nebraska and the other children were scattered through the classes of the two-story Hershey school. Ninth-grader Atsushi—who now went by Henry—had brought great honor to his parents in the summer just passed by winning a medal for his essay on “Americanism” and for earning a spot on the American Legion junior baseball team. There was much to celebrate for Sam and Naka.
