With U-boat attacks threatening to disrupt the flow of oil from Texas and Louisiana ports to East Coast shipping hubs, military planners recommended deploying aerial patrols using Florida-based bombers. Shortly after Ben and his comrades arrived in Fort Myers, the 93rd Bomb Group was thrown into the fight against Hitler’s U-boats.
THE 93RD’S PERSONABLE THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD commander, Colonel Edward Julius Timberlake, Jr., a 1931 West Point graduate descended from a long line of army officers, would later recall Fort Myers as “hotter than hell” during the 93rd’s stay. The rising late-spring heat was debilitating, but Ted Timberlake and his staff had an escape that was one of the privileges of their rank. While the enlisted men, both combat and support personnel, sweated in tents and swatted insects on the grounds of the Fort Myers air base, Timberlake and his aides spent their evenings in rented cottages along Fort Myers Beach, grilling seafood and steaks and sipping cocktails in the soothing sea breeze. Each day, Timberlake and his aides would awaken on their barrier-island paradise and commute ten miles inland to the air base.
The 93rd had taken over the Fort Myers base and adjacent Page Field from the B-24 Liberators of the 98th Bomb Group, an outfit that had been a step ahead of Timberlake and his men in the training pipeline. The 98th had trained at Barksdale just prior to the arrival of the 93rd, and then moved to Florida at the end of March to conclude their combat preparations at Fort Myers, where the air base was still under construction.
To make way for the 93rd at Fort Myers, the 98th crews and support personnel moved to Lakeland, Florida, one hundred miles to the north. The 98th had departed Fort Myers amid a swirl of intrigue. Security was still so lax in these early months of the war that the Fort Myers newspaper had reported freely on the presence of specific outfits at the local air base and their activities. Fort Myers News-Press coverage included reports on the Halverson Detachment, a group of twenty-three crews recruited from the 98th for a secret mission to bomb Axis oil refineries in Romania. The detachment was named for its commander, Harry Halverson, a rangy colonel from Iowa who had developed a passion for deep-sea fishing during his stay. As he led his men off on their clandestine endeavor only hours before the 93rd vanguard arrived, Halverson shared with a News-Press reporter his warm feelings toward Fort Myers. “Try to keep your city just like it is and try to give the new men the same fine treatment you accorded us,” Halverson said.1
Fort Myers civic leaders did just that, lavishing the 93rd Bomb Group with an enthusiastic welcome. As Timberlake and his staff settled into the seaside cottages vacated by their recently departed comrades, the 93rd’s crews set to work sharpening their combat skills.
While the men joked about the enervating heat that allowed monstrous mosquitoes to fly away with dazed victims, Ben wrestled with some of the same concerns he had harbored since the early days of his army experience. Would he ever earn the trust of his peers and his superiors in the 93rd Bomb Group? Would he ever get a shot to prove his patriotism in combat? Would he even make it out of Fort Myers with the group?
BEN’S FRIEND AL KUHN HAD ALSO ENDED up in Fort Myers, assigned to a service squadron camped on the air base. When duty hours ended, Ben could walk over to Al’s tent to hang out. They would pitch horseshoes or explore the surrounding area, or sometimes just sit around and talk. Kuhn remained a vital source of support and comfort for Ben during these months.2
One day Ben and Al were among a group in an army six-by-six truck that was carrying a load of men to a day at the beach when the driver misjudged a turn. The truck rolled over and many of the men were seriously injured. Ben escaped with only cuts and bruises, but Al Kuhn sustained a serious head injury.3
Kuhn was hospitalized in Tampa, a hundred miles away. With the help of a chaplain, Ben managed to wrangle an emergency pass to visit him and was relieved to find his friend had regained consciousness and was rapidly improving. Al Kuhn made a complete recovery, and the accident only deepened their friendship.
The chaplain who drove Ben to Tampa had become another lifeline during these lonely months. James A. Burris was twenty-seven years old and a native of northwest Missouri. His father had been a Methodist preacher and James had spent his working years before the war doing pastoral and youth work with the Methodist Church and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). A slightly built man with a long, angular face and piercing blue eyes, Burris had married at the age of nineteen and had two young children, a girl and a boy, back home in Missouri.4
Burris had been assigned to the 93rd at Barksdale, and had taken an interest in Ben’s well-being. He had invited Ben for long talks following worship services, and the chaplain addressed head-on the prejudice and bigotry that the Japanese American airman had experienced. The conversations had been therapeutic for Ben, and his relationship with the Protestant chaplain enhanced his standing with the other men.5 The truck accident also proved to be a bonding experience within the 93rd. Ben developed friendships with two men in the Communications Section, and noticed that other 93rd men began to warm to him.
Yet Ben found himself no closer to the action. He was reminded of that in June when two of the 93rd’s crews struck the group’s first blows of the war against Nazi Germany, earning credit for sinking a pair of German submarines in separate attacks.6 The submarine encounters energized the 93rd’s combat contingent, but the war still seemed distant to Ben. He remained in the Communications Section as a phantom teletype operator. Ben was underemployed—and increasingly vulnerable if the group whittled down its numbers before its overseas deployment.
When the 93rd reached the end of its six weeks of training at Fort Myers, Colonel Timberlake informed the men that their plans had changed. Until further notice, they would remain at Fort Myers and continue to fly submarine patrols over the Gulf of Mexico.
THE 93RD WAS STILL STUCK IN FORT MYERS on July 4 when news arrived from England that six British Douglas DB-7 Boston III light bombers crewed by Americans had joined with six RAF crews to bomb Luftwaffe airfields in the Netherlands. The modest raid had been ordered by Hap Arnold to make good on President Roosevelt’s promise to Prime Minister Winston Churchill that US forces would be bombing the Germans by America’s independence holiday. In reality, the raid was a publicity stunt, but it lifted home front morale.
In mid-July, the commander of the Eighth Air Force’s fledgling bomber force, Brigadier General Ira Eaker, finally received 180 planes, including forty heavy bombers. But the gunnery skills of the crews proved appalling. Eaker discovered that the 97th Bomb Group gunners “had never fired at tow targets before.” Furthermore, “the crews had done little flying at high altitude, the pilots were inept at formation flying and the whole outfit was lackadaisical, loose-jointed, fun-loving and in no sense ready for combat.” Eaker sacked the commanding officer of the 97th and gave his replacement sixteen days to get the group ready for combat.7
The deficiencies of his new crews had shocked Eaker, but their lack of readiness was merely symptomatic of larger problems with the bomber crew training program back in the United States. In Florida, the 93rd Bomb Group was nearing the end of its training no better prepared than the B-17 crews that Eaker had deemed unfit for combat.
By early August 1942, Hap Arnold seethed over the sluggish efforts to launch the American daylight bombing campaign. From the factories tasked with producing B-17 and B-24 bombers to the hastily assembled specialty schools created to train pilots, navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, radio operators, and gunners, missteps plagued the effort.
The 93rd Bomb Group’s delayed deployment highlighted some of the problems. Every day the 93rd crews devoted to submarine patrols was a day they weren’t practicing the skills they would need to survive in the skies over Europe.
On August 17, the Eighth Air Force finally mounted its first independent raid. A dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 97th Bomb Group climbed into the skies over East Anglia and crossed the English Channel into enemy territory for the first time. Eaker accompanied the raiding party as an observer in a B-17 named Yankee Doodle.
Forty miles inland, the Flying Fortresses released their bombs on the railroad marshaling yards at Rouen, France, then headed for home. Back on English soil, a jubilant Eaker emerged from Yankee Doodle, shed his flying suit for his trademark tunic and hat, lit a cigar, and regaled reporters with his eyewitness account of the historic raid. The fact that the RAF had already mounted thousand-plane raids against Germany didn’t dampen American newspaper coverage of the strike. “In Washington our hearts soared,” Hap Arnold later wrote.8
THE HEARTS OF THE MEN IN THE 93RD Bomb Group were also soaring, for their long-awaited deployment was finally underway. On August 5, an advance group of 93rd crews led by Colonel Timberlake and his staff bade farewell to steamy Florida and flew north to Grenier Field, New Hampshire. There they awaited delivery of new B-24D bombers.
The rest of the group—aircrews, headquarters staff, and other ground personnel, including Ben—waited for the orders that would send them northward on the first leg of their journey to some unknown destination. In the meantime, newspaper stories about the combat debut of their B-17 brethren fueled visions of imagined glory within the 93rd.
When the balance of the 93rd forces finally received orders to proceed to Fort Dix, New Jersey, Ben was stunned to be informed that he was being transferred to another stateside outfit.
Once again, he tearfully pleaded his case, this time with Chaplain Burris and the 409th Squadron adjutant. “Where is it written in stone this kid can’t go?” Burris asked the senior officers who would decide Ben’s fate. The squadron adjutant, Lieutenant Charles F. Brannan, a twenty-two-year-old from Texarkana, Arkansas, asked the group adjutant if anything could be done. The group adjutant reached Colonel Timberlake by phone in New Hampshire and explained the situation involving Ben Kuroki.
Timberlake didn’t hesitate.
“Bring him along,” the 93rd commander decreed.9
Ben’s quest to prove himself in combat remained alive.
Chapter 7
QUEEN OF THE SEAS
On August 22, 1942, Ben and the other 93rd air and ground personnel who still remained at Fort Myers boarded a northbound train for the first leg of their deployment. The train rolled from Florida into the Carolinas, on through Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and into New Jersey. At a rail siding in Fort Dix, about fifty miles south of New York City, Ben and his comrades disembarked with their bags.
Throughout that summer, trains packed with military personnel had converged on the area as the buildup of American forces in Britain got underway. In June, the army opened a new processing facility—Camp Kilmer—in Raritan Township, twenty-five miles from Midtown Manhattan. Camp Kilmer would be a way station for personnel bound for Europe, a place where they would undergo final processing before boarding transport ships bound for Britain.
At Fort Dix, over several sultry August days, Ben and his 93rd comrades moved from one long line to another. They rolled up their sleeves for vaccinations, signed life insurance papers, boxed up personal effects for shipment to their families, and took possession of required clothing and equipment for the journey ahead. Once those tasks were accomplished, the 93rd men made the short journey to one of Midtown Manhattan’s three eleven-hundred-foot “super piers” arrayed along the Hudson River waterfront from West 49th Street to West 52nd. Arriving at Pier 88, the 93rd men were astonished and excited to discover the identity of their transport.
Before the war, she was the crown jewel of the Cunard White Star Line fleet, ferrying well-heeled passengers between New York City and Southampton, England, on a weekly basis. Ben and his comrades were among more than eight thousand American soldiers and airmen who filed aboard the magnificent vessel, now repainted in muted bluish-gray wartime colors. Their long-awaited departure from America was thrilling in itself, but their anticipation soared after discovering they would make the perilous North Atlantic crossing in the world’s largest and fastest ocean liner: the renowned RMS Queen Elizabeth.
THE PASSAGE OF THE RMS Queen Elizabeth and her precious cargo would be assigned a convoy number that would be communicated to Britain in coded Allied communications, but the reality was that the men of the 93rd wouldn’t be traveling by convoy. There were no fast destroyers or corvettes assigned to defend the Queen Elizabeth; the magnificent ship was on her own. The passage would pit the speed of the world’s fastest ocean liner against the wiles of multiple U-boat wolf packs prowling the North Atlantic for prey.
On August 28, under the cover of darkness, the QE slipped her moorings and eased downstream into New York Harbor. Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty loomed to port. Steaming past Sandy Hook, the great ship emerged into the Atlantic Ocean. A few miles out to sea, the captain turned his ship north. More than twenty hours of uneventful sailing brought the QE to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she docked long enough to take on Canadian troops. From Halifax, she steamed northeast to Newfoundland, then turned east into the treacherous waters beyond.
