In the 1990s, Ben gave three lengthy interviews. In 1994, he was interviewed by California State University, Fullerton, historian Arthur Hansen. In 1998, he was interviewed separately by documentary filmmakers Frank Abe and Bill Kubota. These interviews proved invaluable in my work on this project.
Ben was also the subject of a 1946 biography. Boy from Nebraska, by the war correspondent Ralph G. Martin, is a quick read but flawed. There are no source notes, so the reader is left to assume that Martin’s quotes and other facts were obtained directly from Ben. But Ben later indicated that he hadn’t read the book, or at least not carefully. Martin’s account is contradicted in several instances by available facts. In other instances, I found myself wondering whether Martin took literary license to fill gaps in his narrative. For these reasons, I’ve limited my use of his work to material I confirmed elsewhere or concluded was highly plausible under the circumstances.
Other primary source material I drew on included my 1990s interviews with more than one hundred veterans of the 93rd Bomb Group. My knowledge of Ben’s European tour was deepened by 93rd Bomb Group sortie reports and unit histories at the National Archives and Records Administration and the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Through Freedom of Information Act requests I filed with the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, I obtained personnel files for Ben and a number of his crewmates and comrades.
The Ben Kuroki collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was an untapped trove that contained correspondence, photographs, and other memorabilia accumulated by Ben. Also useful were diaries kept by 93rd Bomb Group flight surgeon Wilmer Paine and 93rd intelligence officer Brutus Hamilton, and an unpublished narrative written by 93rd pilot Edwin Baker.
My knowledge of the Japanese American incarceration and Ben’s 1944 recruiting visits to three incarceration camps was informed by textual records and photographs at the NARA II facility in College Park, Maryland. Another invaluable source on these subjects was the Densho Encyclopedia, the extraordinary online website maintained by Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, Washington. Densho’s repository of oral histories, photos, documents, and other primary sources and artifacts also deepened my understanding of the roundup and incarceration of people of Japanese descent in 1942.
My grasp of these topics was also greatly assisted by the groundbreaking scholarship of Arthur Hansen, Susan Kamei, Eric L. Muller, Doug Nelson, and Stephanie Hinnershitz, and by firsthand accounts written by Yoshito (Yosh) Kuromiya and Michiko (Michi) Nishiura Weglyn. Finally, the powerful documentary films of Frank Abe and Bill Kubota greatly informed my work.
ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES
Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton, California
Dallas Public Library, Dallas, Texas
Eugene McDermott Library, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Texas
Heart Mountain National Historic Landmark, Powell, Wyoming
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
KDN Films Archives, Detroit, Michigan
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Lincoln County Historical Museum, North Platte, Nebraska
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri
Plano Public Library, Plano, Texas
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
ENDNOTES
PROLOGUE
1
“The Hershey Senior Class, 1936,” Hershey (Nebraska) Times, May 7, 1936, p. 1.
CHAPTER 1: FIT FOR SERVICE
1
Ben recounted the immigration of his parents, their early lives in America, and how they came to move to Nebraska in an extraordinary oral history interview with the imminent Cal State, Fullerton, history professor (and now professor emeritus) Art Hansen. See Arthur A. Hansen, Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton, Japanese American Oral History Project, October 17, 1944. Shosuke Kuroki’s fondness for gambling during his Wyoming days is drawn from the author’s interview with Reed Kuroki, the son of Ben’s oldest brother, George. Reed Kuroki, author interview, November 5, 2022.
2
“Taking a Sight with John Bentley,” Nebraska State Journal, April 22, 1928, p. 6.
3
The neighbor who looked after Ben was Margaret (Maggie) Harkness Geiken, an Irish immigrant from Belfast who had married a Nebraska farmer named Albert Geiken. “Obituary: Margaret Harkness Geiken,” Cozad (Nebraska) Local, August 29, 1950; also Ralph G. Martin, Boy from Nebraska (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1946), pp. 34–36.
4
Martin, Boy from Nebraska, pp. 16–17.
5
At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, Hawaii was fixed as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) minus ten hours and thirty minutes. As a result, 7:55 a.m. in Honolulu—the moment of the Japanese attack by most accounts—was 1:25 p.m. in Washington, DC, and 12:25 p.m. in Nebraska. On June 8, 1947, Hawaii time was adjusted forward by thirty minutes to conform with the rest of the United States.
CHAPTER 2: “THIS IS URGENT”
1
Mike Masaoka with Bill Hosokawa, They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), pp. 69–70.
2
