Whatever he felt or believed, he couldn’t act without his father’s permission.
Sam Kuroki had been in America for thirty-seven years, and yet he had never risen above second-class status because of his ancestry. Sam and Naka were painfully aware that America hadn’t fully embraced them. And yet, they had embraced America without reservation, and that included teaching their children to celebrate the flag and their American citizenship.
When Ben asked his father what he should do, Sam didn’t hesitate. “This is your country,” Sam said. “Go ahead and fight for it.”1
ONLY MINUTES AFTER THE FIRST Japanese bombs and torpedoes smashed into their targets at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, Americans of Japanese descent found themselves in the crosshairs of an ugly backlash. The FBI had spent months preparing a list of potentially “dangerous” or “disloyal” Japanese and Japanese Americans, and the agency’s all-powerful director, J. Edgar Hoover, ordered his agents to start the roundup. Nationwide, more than seven hundred people of Japanese ancestry were arrested in the twenty-four hours following the Pearl Harbor attack.2
Fears of sabotage and spying by Japanese in America prompted authorities to post armed guards at defense plants, utilities, and bridges. The initial surge of fear intensified after false alarms of Japanese aircraft flying over West Coast cities, and saboteurs and spies on the ground. There were breathless stories about Japanese farm workers in Hawaii who supposedly had cut giant arrows in sugarcane fields to direct the strike force to Pearl Harbor and dockworkers and vegetable vendors who provided information on the location of American warships. Unconfirmed reports of Japanese spies and saboteurs photographing defense plants, utilities, and other key installations led the Justice Department to issue an order requiring all people of Japanese descent in America to turn in their radios and cameras to local police. Another Justice Department order froze the bank accounts of all people of Japanese descent.
In Nebraska, Ben had witnessed the opening moments of the government crackdown when Mike Masaoka was taken into custody and led from the North Platte church basement.
An even more shocking development occurred at the church later that Sunday. The beloved Reverend Hiram Hisanori Kano, who had helped arrange Masaoka’s meeting in North Platte, emerged from the Church of Our Savior following an afternoon service and was arrested. Because his father was a prominent political figure in Japan, Kano was on a secret FBI list of potentially dangerous Japanese immigrants marked for arrest and confinement. On Monday morning, December 8, he was driven to Omaha and placed in FBI custody, and from there he was shipped to an internment camp in Louisiana. Kano would spend the next two years in government camps under armed guard.
The Kuroki family had experienced only sporadic incidents of bigotry in their decades in Nebraska, but a foul mood now swept the state. There were about 500 people of Japanese ancestry in Nebraska at the time, 400 of whom resided in the Platte River Valley. Among those 500, some 157 were immigrants and thus barred from citizenship, while 323, including Ben and his siblings, held birthright citizenship.3
In an incident illustrative of the vengeful mood of those days, several Nebraska newspapers published on their front page an Associated Press dispatch about an Omaha businessman who had offered a bounty to the first American aviator to bomb Tokyo—one of scores of such offers around the country. The article quoted the businessman, Rex J. Olson, as saying he would gladly reward that pioneering aviator with a $100 defense savings bond “provided he gets at least one dirty back-stabbing Jap.”4
In the months ahead, the anti-Japanese backlash would result in the expulsion of tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry from the entirety of California and parts of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. In Nebraska, the Kuroki family and other residents of Japanese ancestry would be allowed to remain in their homes, but only after being treated like the enemy spies and saboteurs that many believed them to be. They were fingerprinted and documented by agents of the Alien Registration Division. Their radios, cameras, and guns were seized, and travel was limited to a fifty-mile radius. Some Japanese residents buried or burned family heirlooms or Japanese-language letters they had received from loved ones in Japan for fear of raising suspicions if they were discovered by law enforcement authorities.5
In his quest to serve his country, Ben wouldn’t be shielded from the prejudice and bigotry directed at American civilians of Japanese descent.
AT THE MARINE CORPS RECRUITING Station in North Platte, Ben and Fred presented themselves to the noncommissioned officer in charge. His name was Sergeant Williams, and he didn’t know what to do with the two young Japanese American men. Williams told them to come back in a few days when the situation regarding the service of Japanese Americans was clearer, and sent them on their way. “All our friends in Hershey were all going in right and left, into the service, and we knew we were getting the runaround,” Ben later recalled.6
When a day passed without word from the Marine recruiter, Ben forced the issue. He heard something on the radio about the Army Air Forces accepting recruits in the town of Grand Island, on the Platte River about 150 miles downstream. Ben got the recruiter on the phone and asked if his nationality would be a problem.
“Heck, no!” the recruiter replied. “I get two bucks for everybody I sign up.”7
On Wednesday, December 10, Ben and Fred drove to the army’s Grand Island recruiting station. The first radio bulletins announcing the Pearl Harbor attack had within minutes inundated Sergeant John Cook with a flood of applicants. He had to turn some away, including several grizzled World War I veterans; most of the men were already registered with Selective Service, and so he couldn’t accept them without permission from their local board.
The two Japanese American brothers presented a thornier problem. Sergeant Cook had told Ben to come on down, but he backtracked when the brothers presented themselves. Now Sergeant Cook told the Japanese American men that he needed to ask his superiors if he could accept their applications. The brothers drove back home to wait.
The following afternoon, Sergeant Cook notified Ben that his superiors had given him permission to accept the brothers for enlistment in the US Army Air Forces if they were willing to make the drive again. On Monday, December 15, Ben and Fred presented themselves at the Grand Island recruiting station for the second time. This time Sergeant Cook arranged for a local news photographer to be on hand to document the enlistment of the Japanese American brothers. As Ben and Fred pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, the photographer snapped away. The image was published in several Nebraska newspapers.8
The Kuroki brothers had taken their army oath, but they again found themselves in limbo as they awaited orders for formal induction into the service. While they waited, anti-Japanese hysteria intensified across the country. Nearly every daily newspaper reported new arrests or allegations of Japanese spying or sabotage. On December 23, the North Platte Telegraph printed an Associated Press dispatch about a thirty-five-year-old Japanese man arrested in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, after he was unable to produce a passport when stopped by police. Under questioning, the man reportedly admitted that he had registered for Selective Service under a different name, compounding his problems.9
Far worse was the article that appeared in newspapers around the country in the final week of December. Written by correspondent Wallace Carroll of the United Press news service, the article opened with a sensational accusation: “A fifth column and espionage network, patiently organized over many years, paved the way for Japan’s surprise blow at Pearl Harbor.”10 The article levied one unsubstantiated allegation after another to rationalize the lack of preparedness by American forces in Hawaii. Carroll asserted that in a recent reporting trip to Hawaii he had learned that “big arrows, pointing to military objectives, were reported to have been cut in the sugar cane on plantations in the islands a few hours before the Japanese struck.” A local Japanese businessman had been arrested “for allegedly operating a short-wave transmitter during the Pearl Harbor attack,” he claimed, and “Japanese vegetable dealers had an uncanny knack of knowing about movements in and out of port of units of the American navy because they delivered their produce to the ships.”11
The article continued in that wildly speculative vein. Advertisements in local newspapers “may have contained coded messages to the fifth columnists.” Additionally, Japanese expatriates had infiltrated Hawaii utilities, the post office, and telephone service as “ideal posts for spies”; Japanese proprietors of “small stores, restaurants and cafes” in Hawaii were actually spies working under the direction of Japanese army intelligence; and “local fishermen and seamen who knew the Hawaiian seas and coasts, hotel proprietors and employees, servants in private families and fresh produce dealers” were actually part of an extensive spy network run by Japanese naval intelligence, Carroll claimed.12
None of the allegations would ever be confirmed, but the cumulative effect of such reports on President Roosevelt was profound. Military and political pressure mounted on Roosevelt to do something about the “Japanese problem” at home.13
Against that increasingly ugly backdrop, Ben and Fred received their induction orders in the final week of December. They were to report to Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In an outdoor ceremony there on January 6, 1942, the brothers officially began their army careers. They had barely learned to salute and stand at attention when they received orders to report to Sheppard Field, Texas, for basic military training.
On the long train ride to Texas, proudly wearing their uniforms, the Kuroki brothers were stunned by the racially tinged epithets, hostile comments, and suspicious looks directed their way by other soldiers. As dispiriting as the journey was, it was only the beginning of the ordeal that awaited Ben and Fred Kuroki.
Chapter 4
ALONE
Ben arrived in Texas in the vanguard of a chaotic effort to build the mightiest air force the world had ever seen. It was a bold quest by the ambitious air chief, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, to elevate American airpower to the pinnacle of the US defense pyramid. From the beginning, the quest was plagued by shortages of nearly every essential element: planes, high-octane aviation fuel, spare parts, recruits, qualified instructors, mechanics, facilities.
Far removed from Hap Arnold’s world, Ben confronted his own problems.
His experiences during his induction in Wyoming and the train journey to Texas had been a harbinger of the hostility that awaited the Kuroki brothers in the army. Growing up in rural Nebraska, the brothers had only rarely encountered the sort of prejudice and bigotry unleashed by the Pearl Harbor attack. Now gratuitous insults and epithets became constants in their lives.
Some of the bigots took their cue from the hysterical news coverage and incendiary public statements by politicians and government officials.
President Roosevelt fueled the rising backlash on January 5 when the government reclassified all draft-age Japanese American men from the draft-eligible 1-A status to the ineligible 4-C. The army followed suit by discharging most Japanese Americans already in uniform or stripping them of their weapons and shipping them to Camp Robinson, Arkansas, to perform menial chores. From Roosevelt down to petty bullies at the local level, an unmistakable message was conveyed to the country: Even the American-born children of Japanese immigrants couldn’t be trusted.
It was against this ominous backdrop that the Kuroki brothers began their Army Air Forces basic training on eight hundred acres of recently converted ranchland north of Wichita Falls, Texas.
NAMED FOR US SENATOR MORRIS SHEPPARD, a recently deceased Texas politician best known for writing the constitutional amendment that produced Prohibition, Sheppard Field had been conceived as an aviation mechanics school. Those plans suddenly changed during the Roosevelt administration’s urgent defense buildup in the face of Axis military aggression. When army brass dedicated the base in mid-October 1941, Sheppard Field held an expanded brief as an Army Air Forces basic training center. At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the service had some twenty-one thousand recruits enrolled at Sheppard Field and two other basic training centers. By late January 1942, the Army Air Forces had inducted another nineteen thousand new recruits, and they were scrambling to find a place for them all.1
Although each center’s commander could determine the day-to-day schedule of basic training at the beginning of 1942, the course followed a set template over three to four weeks. On arrival at a basic training center, recruits underwent four to six days of processing that oriented the men to military life. There were lectures and films on military courtesy, the Articles of War, sex hygiene, war bonds, and life insurance. Medical personnel blood-typed and immunized recruits. Other instructors schooled the recruits on care of clothing and equipment and the basics of military drill. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the men underwent a series of classification tests and interviews aimed at matching a recruit’s intelligence and talents to a specific Army Air Forces need. Many of the men would be sent to a technical school for additional training in specialties that ranged from clerical work to gunnery.2
As the training got underway, Ben and Fred found themselves subjected to derogatory comments about “sneaky Japs” or “dirty Japs” or boasts about killing “Japs” in combat. No one talked to them in the barracks. A room would fall silent when they made their entrance.
The brothers decided they might stand out less if they didn’t hang around together. They limited their interaction to mail call, when they would huddle to compare news from home. Their sisters Wilma and Fuji wrote upbeat letters about their lives in Chicago, but a missive from their brother Henry plunged them into despair. Henry described being harassed because of his ancestry and rejected by the army when he tried to enlist. The brothers sometimes lay awake at night in their bunks, consumed by their misery and crying into their pillows.3
About two weeks into basic training, without warning, Fred was transferred into a ground unit to dig trenches and perform other menial labor.
Ben was on his own.4
