BEN EXPECTED TO BE BOOTED FROM the air service any day. Unlike his peers, he drew the dirtiest assignments for days on end. “I didn’t dare complain because I knew they were going to kick me out as quick as they did my brother,” Ben recalled.5
As miserable as he was, Ben didn’t break. And then, almost miraculously, he completed basic training. Around the first of February 1942, Ben received orders for his next assignment: the Army Air Forces clerical school at Fort Logan, Colorado, eight miles southwest of Denver.
In Colorado, Ben’s life improved. He was lying in his top bunk shortly after arrival when the fellow below him struck up a conversation. The airman’s name was Al Kuhn. Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, Kuhn had grown up in Bergen County, across the Hudson River from New York City. They were the same age and same build, close in height and weight. Kuhn had a handsome face and warm personality. His outlook on life was summed up by his senior quote in his high school yearbook: “I have a heart with room for every joy.” Kuhn’s sunny disposition had served him well in his work selling insurance for Globe Indemnity Co.
As he chatted with Ben, Kuhn never asked about his ancestry; it didn’t seem to matter to him. For Ben, this kindhearted soul became his first real friend in the military. Kuhn introduced Ben to another Bergen County boy and another airman they had befriended. They invited Ben to join them on their outings off the base.6
Slowly, Ben began to feel he belonged in the Army Air Forces.
AS BEN MEMORIZED RULES, REGULATIONS , and statistics as part of his clerical training, the anti-Japanese hysteria reached a peak in America. Japanese victories in the Pacific prompted panicked politicians and civic leaders at home to call for the removal of everyone with Japanese blood from the West Coast. On February 19, President Roosevelt obliged the mob by signing Executive Order 9066, empowering the armed forces to remove anyone deemed a security threat.
As the events on the West Coast played out, Ben completed his clerical training.
He and Al Kuhn were in a group of forty newly minted Army Air Forces clerks ordered to report to Barksdale Field, outside Shreveport, Louisiana. Crossing from Texas into Louisiana near the end of their journey, they had a layover as they changed trains. Ben encountered a sign over a toilet door: For White Only.
At a moment when more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent were about to be forcibly removed from their homes and locked into camps, Ben began the next uncertain chapter of his military career in the shadow of Jim Crow.7
Chapter 5
“ARE YOU AN AMERICAN CITIZEN?”
In the spring of 1942, Barksdale Field emerged as a crucial staging ground for Hap Arnold’s plan to create an air force to bomb Nazi Germany into submission. Local residents began to see the first indications of Barksdale’s new role as a training center for heavy bomber crews in February. After years of watching pursuit planes and light bombers zip across their steamy skies, the northwest Louisiana residents suddenly began seeing big B-24 Liberators and the occasional B-17 Flying Fortress landing, taking off, and droning overhead.
Barksdale’s transition to training the vanguard of the heavy bomber crews that would carry out the high-altitude campaign against Nazi Germany began with the arrival of two newly formed B-24 units, the 44th and 98th Bombardment Groups. On March 1, 1942, they were joined by the B-24 crews of the 93rd Bombardment Group and the B-17 Flying Fortress crews of the 92nd Bombardment Group.
Taking to the skies in 1935, the B-17 had captured the public imagination with a series of high-profile missions and goodwill flights that established the aircraft as a glamorous demonstration of American power. When the ungainly B-24 made its debut in December 1939, it was inevitable that airmen and the public at large would compare America’s two heavy bombers. The curvaceous B-17 boasted a classic profile with a single tail and broad 103-foot wingspan. The twin-tailed Liberator introduced a state-of-the-art tapered wing that measured 110 feet tip-to-tip and looked too thin to support a bulky fuselage that reminded some observers of a pregnant cow. Both heavy bombers generated nearly the same horsepower from four engines, but the B-24 initially had an edge in cruising speed and range. Wartime modifications would gradually narrow the gap.1
Over the next four years, the Liberator would prove itself a versatile bomber, patrol aircraft, and transport. The Flying Fortress would garner more media coverage and, fairly or not, a better reputation for combat survivability, especially in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). But the intense press scrutiny—and the fierce rivalry that developed between B-17 and B-24 crews—still lay in the future as Ben and his contingent of freshly minted clerks arrived at Barksdale Field in early April 1942.
At first, the clerks found themselves in a strange state of stasis. The Army Air Forces was struggling to induct and place tens of thousands of new recruits, and it took a few days to figure out what to do with another batch of clerks. After a week, all the new clerks except for Ben and one other man had been assigned to operational groups.
While he awaited his orders, Ben enjoyed watching the big twin-tailed Liberators as their crews went about their training. He had never seen America’s celebrated heavy bombers up close, and he was thrilled by their size and power. Some of the clerks in Ben’s cohort had hitched joy rides on the bombers, but Ben feared being suspected of nefarious aims, so he kept his distance. “It was the first time I ever saw a B-24 in the air and, my God, I thought that was about the most impressive thing I could think of,” Ben later recalled. “As much as I was impressed by seeing them in flight, I didn’t dare to go near one because I was afraid somebody would think I was trying to sabotage it.”2
Ben could imagine flying into combat in one of those big bombers, but as a clerk seen as untrustworthy because of his ancestry, he could only dream. Then, after weeks of peeling potatoes on kitchen duty, a miracle: Ben was assigned to a heavy bomber group designated for duty with a new strategic bombing force in the United Kingdom.3
BEN’S NEW OUTFIT WAS THE 409TH SQUADRON, one of four combat squadrons comprising the 93rd Bombardment Group (commonly shortened to the 93rd Bomb Group). The group had been officially formed on March 1 and assigned to fly B-24 Liberators. In the vision of AAF planners, the aircrew—whether a solo fighter pilot or a ten-member B-17 or B-24 crew—would form the basic unit of each squadron. A squadron could range in size from 200 to 500 men at full strength, and each heavy bomber group would eventually become a combat force of about 2,200 officers and enlisted men, or so Hap Arnold’s air strategists envisioned.4 But by April the 93rd Bomb Group still consisted of only a skeletal force limited to commissioned officers in support roles and a growing cadre of pilots. There were no navigators, bombardiers, or enlisted men to fill out a ten-member B-24 crew, and no timetable for when they might arrive.
When Ben reported to the squadron headquarters for duty, a sergeant barked at him.5
“Are you an American citizen?”
All eyes in the room fell on Ben.
“Yes,” Ben replied.
Instead of the snide comment that Ben had braced for, the sergeant turned and disappeared into the commanding officer’s office. When he emerged, the sergeant was all business: He assigned Ben and another man to a barracks and told them to report to a Sergeant Smathers in the Communications Section.6 And with that, Ben was a member of the 409th Squadron—for the moment.
A few days passed while the sergeant tried to figure out what to do with two more clerks for whom he had no work. Ben and the other new guy were assigned to be “teletype operators,” even though the squadron had no teletype machines. Ben and the other teletype operators sat around and shot the bull during their duty hours for several weeks.
April gave way to May and the news on the war front worsened. Besieged US and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese on April 9. On May 6, the last American and Filipino holdouts on Corregidor—the supposedly impregnable island fortress guarding the mouth of Manila Bay—fell to the Japanese.
The week following the Corregidor news, the men of the 93rd got word to prepare to move. Ben was summoned to the office of the squadron commander. He was so nervous that he couldn’t stand still. “You’re being transferred out of this outfit, Kuroki,” the squadron commander said. “The order just came from group headquarters.”7
Ben’s eyes blurred with tears. “Is it because of my nationality, sir?” he softly asked.
The squadron commander eyed Ben carefully. Sensing an opening, Ben recounted his unhappy military career to date and begged to remain with the 93rd. Having made his case, Ben returned to his barracks. He packed and awaited the signed orders that would dash his dreams.
The orders never arrived, thanks to the sympathetic squadron commander. 8 When the 93rd boarded a train for Fort Myers, Florida, on May 15, 1942, Ben was still part of the group.
Chapter 6
“IN NO SENSE READY FOR COMBAT”
The 93rd Bomb Group’s expedited training schedule called for the men to spend six weeks honing their aerial combat skills at the army air base in Fort Myers, Florida, followed by a deployment to England in July. But only days after Ben and his comrades reached their destination, an alarming development forced Hap Arnold to scrap the timetable.
German U-boat attacks had been a vexing problem for President Roosevelt even before America’s entry into the war. In 1940, as Roosevelt tried to keep Britain afloat with weapons and other materiel, German submarines threatened to cut Winston Churchill’s North Atlantic lifeline. In the second half of 1940, U-boats sank nearly three hundred Allied ships in the waters surrounding the British Isles. Jubilant German submariners dubbed those months the “Happy Time.”
Immediately following Nazi Germany’s declaration of war on the United States on December 11, 1941, the supreme commander of the German Navy’s submarine service, Admiral Karl Dönitz, set in motion a plan to attack Allied shipping off America’s East Coast. US military commanders rebuffed British and Canadian advice to enforce a nighttime blackout in East Coast cities and to implement a convoy system for shipping. The results were devastating.
Night after night, German U-boats sank Allied merchant ships silhouetted against the lights of East Coast cities. From January 13, 1942, until the time of their first withdrawal from American waters for logistical reasons on February 6, U-boats sank 156,939 tons of shipping without the loss of a single submarine. A second wave of German submarines supported by refueling tankers arrived within weeks and inflicted even greater losses. German submariners now celebrated their rampage in American waters as the “Second Happy Time.”
In May, US military commanders belatedly employed a convoy system for merchant shipping along the East Coast. In short order, convoy escorts sank seven U-boats, prompting Admiral Dönitz to shift his submarines to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. On May 12, as the 93rd prepared to conclude its training in Florida, the German submarine H-507 torpedoed the tanker Virginia in the mouth of the Mississippi River below New Orleans, with the loss of twenty-six crewmen. German attacks in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean escalated.
