The Two Wars of Ben Kuroki
After Pearl Harbor, Ben Kuroki wanted to fight for his country. But as a Japanese-American, he first had to fight against the prejudice and fear of his fellow Americans. The young sergeant from Hershey proved equal to the task.
By Leo Adam Biga
“I had to fight like hell just
for the right to fight for my own country,” said Hershey native Ben Kuroki.
During World War II, he became one of only a handful of Japanese-Americans to
see air combat, and was America’s only Nisei (child of Japanese immigrant
parents) to see duty over mainland Japan.
For Kuroki, just being in the Army
Air Corps was an anomaly. At the outset of war, Japanese-American servicemen
were kicked out. Those who enlisted later were mustered out or denied combat
assignments. But Kuroki was desperate to prove his loyalty to America and persisted
in the face of racism and red tape. As an aerial gunner, he logged 58 combined
missions, 30 on B-24s over Europe (including the legendary Ploesti raid) and
28 more on B-29s over the Pacific.
Between his European and Pacific tours,
the war department put Kuroki on a speaking tour. He visited internment camps
where many of his fellow Japanese-Americans were being held. He spoke to civic
groups, and one of his speeches is said to have turned the tide of West Coast
opinion about Japanese-Americans.
Few have faced as much to risk their
life for an ungrateful nation. Even now, the 90-year-old retired newspaper editor
asks, “Why the hell did I do it? I mean, why did I go to that extent?
I was just young. I had no family – no children or wife or anything like
that. I was all gung-ho to prove my loyalty.”
A new documentary film about Kuroki,
“Most Honorable Son,” premiered in Lincoln in August and will be
broadcast on PBS in September. For filmmaker Bill Kubota, who grew up hearing
his father tell of Kuroki’s visit to the camp at which he was interned,
Kuroki’s story is unique.
“It’s very rare you find
one person that can carry a lot of different themes of the war with their own
personal experience,” Kubota said. “He saw so many different things…
It’s a remarkable story no matter who it is, but throw in the fact he’s
basically the first Japanese-American war hero and you have even more of a story.”
One key to what Kuroki calls his “all guts no brains” loyalty is
his upbringing. His parents “pounded it into their children to never bring
shame to yourself or your family,” he says in the film. “I hated
the fact I was born Japanese. I wanted to try and avenge what they (Japan) had
done for causing what we considered shame.”
From his home in Camarillo, Calif.,
where he lives with his wife, Shige, Kuroki added, “But I think in the
long run I have to thank my Nebraska upbringing, my Nebraska roots for playing
a real credible role in giving me a solid foundation for patriotism. It really
was a way of life. Freedom was always something really I had the best of.”
Kuroki came from a poor family of
10 children. His parents emigrated from Japan with scant schooling and speaking
no English. His father, Sam, arrived in San Francisco and worked his way west
on Union Pacific section crews. The sight of fertile Nebraska land was enough
to make the former salesman stay and become a farmer.
A small Japanese enclave formed in
western Nebraska. Times were hard during the Great Depression and the years
of drought, but Ben enjoyed a bucolic American youth, playing sports, hunting
with friends and trucking potatoes down south and returning with fresh citrus.
Though accepted by the white majority, the newcomers were always aware they were different. “But at the same time,” Kuroki said, “I never encountered racial prejudice until after Pearl Harbor.”
On December 7, 1941, he was in a North
Platte church basement for a meeting of the Japanese American Citizens League,
a patriotic group fighting for equality at a time of heightened tensions with
Japan. Mike Masaoka from the JACL national office was chairing the meeting when
two men entered the hall and, without explanation, said something to Masaoka
and led him out.
“Just like that, he was gone.
We were just baffled,” Kuroki said, “so we just sort of scattered
and by the time we got outside the church someone had a radio and said, ‘My
God, Pearl Harbor has been bombed by the Japanese.’ That was a helluva
experience for us the way we found out... It really was a traumatic day.”
They soon learned that Masaoka had
been arrested by the FBI and jailed in North Platte. “I guess all suspects,
so to speak, were taken into custody,” Kuroki said. Masaoka was soon released,
but his arrest presaged the restrictive measures soon imposed on all Japanese-Americans.
As part of the crackdown, their assets – including bank accounts –
were frozen. As hysteria built on the West Coast, Executive Order 9066 forced
the evacuation and relocation of individuals and entire families. Homes and
jobs were lost, lives disrupted. As the Kurokis lived in the Midwest, they were
spared internment.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, Kuroki and
his younger brother Fred were surprised when their father urged them to volunteer
for the armed services. As Kuroki recalls in the film, their father said, “This
is your country, go ahead and fight for it.”
They went to the induction center
in North Platte. They passed all the tests but kept waiting for their names
to be called. “We knew we were getting the runaround then because all
our friends in Hershey were going in right and left,” Kuroki said. The
brothers left in frustration. “It was about two weeks later I heard this
radio broadcast that the Air Corps was taking enlistments in Grand Island and
so I immediately got on the phone and asked the recruiting sergeant if our nationality
was any problem, and he said, ‘Hell, no, I get two bucks for everybody
I sign up. C’mon down.’ So we drove 150 miles and gave our pledge
of allegiance.”
The Omaha World-Herald ran a picture
of the two brothers taking their loyalty oaths.
While on the train to Sheppard Field, Texas, for recruit training, the brothers
got a taste of things to come. Kuroki recalled how “some smart aleck said,
‘What the hell are those damn Japs doing in the Army?’ That was
the first shocker.”
Things were tense in the barracks
as well. “I’ll never forget this one loudmouth yelled out, ‘I’m
going to kill myself some goddamned Japs.’ I didn’t know whether
he was talking about me or the enemy and I just felt like I wanted to crawl
in a hole and hide.”
But at least the brothers had each
other’s back. Then, without warning, Fred was transferred to a ditch-digging
engineers outfit.
“My God, I feared for my life
then,” Kuroki said.
As Kuroki learned, it was the rare
Japanese-American who got in or stuck with the Air Corps – almost all
served in the segregated 442nd Infantry Regiment that earned distinction. The
brothers corresponded a few times during the war. Fred ended up seeing action
in the Battle of the Bulge.
From Sheppard Field, Kuroki went to
a clerical school in Fort Logan, Colo., and then to Barksdale Field (La.) where
the 93rd Bomber Group, made up of B-24s, was being formed. As a clerk, he got
stuck on kitchen patrol several days and nights.
“I knew they were giving me
the shaft,” he said. “But I wasn’t about to complain because
I was afraid if I did, the same thing would happen to me that happened to my
brother – that I’d get kicked out of the Air Corps in a hurry.”
He took extra precautions. “I
wouldn’t dare go near one (a B-24 bomber) because I was afraid somebody
would think I’m going to do sabotage. That’s the way it was for
me for a whole year. I walked on egg shells worried if I made one wrong move,
if I was right or wrong, that would be the end of my career,” he said.
Then his worst fear came to pass. Orders were cut for him to transfer out, which would ground him before he ever got over enemy skies. That’s when he made the first of his pleas for a chance to serve his country in combat. He got a reprieve and went with his unit down to Fort Myers, Fla. – the last stop before England. But after three months training, he once again faced a transfer.
“I figured if I didn’t
go with them then I’d be doing KP for the rest of my Army life,”
he said. “And so I went in and begged with tears in my eyes to my squadron
adjutant, Lt. Charles Brannan, and he said, ‘Kuroki, you’re going
with us, and that’s that.’ All these decades later I’m forever
grateful... because if it wasn’t for him I probably would never have gotten
overseas.”
He made it to England – the
great Allied staging area for the war in Europe – but he was still a long
ways from getting to fly. He was still a clerk. But after the first bombing
missions suffered heavy losses, there were many openings on bomber crews for
gunners. Not leaving it to chance, he took his cause directly to his officers.
“I begged them for a chance
to become an aerial gunner and they sent me to a two-week English gunnery school.
I didn’t even fire a round of ammunition.”
In late ’42, Kuroki got word
his outfit was headed to North Africa… and he was going with it. It took
beseeching the 93rd’s commander, Ted Timberlake, whose unit came to be
called The Flying Circus, before Kuroki got the final go-ahead. He was delighted,
even though he had “practically no training.” As he would later
tell an audience, “I really learned to shoot the hard way – in combat.”
Training or not, he finally felt the
embrace of brother airmen around him.
“Once I got into flying missions
with a regular crew and I was with my own guys, the whole world changed,”
he said. “On my first mission I was just terrified by the enemy gunfire
but I suddenly found peace. I mean, for the first time I felt like I belonged.
And by God we flew together as a family after that. It was just unbelievable,
the rapport. Of course we all knew we’re risking our lives together and
fighting to save each others’ lives.”
One of his crewmates dubbed Kuroki
“The Most Honorable Son.” It became the nickname of their B-24.
At the same time, Kuroki was reading
accounts of extremists calling for all Japanese-Americans to be confined to
concentration camps. Some nativists even suggested Japanese-Americans should
be deported to Japan after the war.
But by then, Kuroki’s own battles
were more with the enemy than with the military apparatus. His first action
came on missions targeting the shipping lines of the “Desert Fox,”
Erwin Rommel, whose Panzer tank divisions had caused havoc in North Africa.
Kuroki was on missions that hit multiple locations in North Africa and Italy.
Kuroki and his crewmates made it through
more than a dozen missions without incident. Then, on a return flight in ’43,
their plane ran out of fuel and made an emergency landing in Spanish Morocco.
Armed Arab horsemen converged on them. They feared for their lives, but Spanish
cavalry rode to their rescue. The Spanish held the crew more as reluctant guests
than as prisoners. Kuroki tried to escape.
“I just had to prove my loyalty,”
he said. He was caught.
What ensued next was a limbo of bureaucratic
haggling over what to do with the captured airmen. They were taken to Spain,
where they were told they might sit out the rest of the war. For a time, it
was welcome news for the crew, who stayed in luxurious quarters. But soon they
felt they were missing out on the most momentous events of their lifetime.
Finally, the way was cleared for them
to rejoin the 93rd, which soon moved to England for missions over Europe. Of
all those bombing runs, the August 1, 1943 raid on Ploesti, Rumania, is forever
burned in Kuroki’s memory. In a daylight mission, 177 B-24s came in at
treetop level against heavily-fortified oil refineries deep in enemy territory.
Nearly a third of the bombers failed to return.