Chapter 15
BROTHERS IN ARMS
Never in his wildest dreams could Ben have imagined that on the first morning of 1943 he would awaken in a tent in North Africa’s Sahara Desert. Yet here he was. In his twelve months in the US Army Air Forces, he had encountered more bigotry than he had experienced in his entire prewar life. But he had remained unbowed, and now he could proudly call himself a combat veteran. He had made his combat debut with Jake Epting’s crew as a waist gunner on December 13, and on his fourth and final mission of 1942 he had been entrusted with the even more demanding and solitary assignment of tail gunner—the role he carried into the New Year.
At first glance, Jake Epting was an improbable champion of the Japanese American farm boy he had now entrusted to watching his back. Epting was born on January 14, 1921, in the racially segregated town of Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the only child of a postal clerk and a homemaker who later found work as a saleslady in a local dry goods store. Jake Sr.’s job with the post office spared the Epting family the worst privations of the Depression years. The family wasn’t wealthy, but they didn’t want for much, and so young Jake’s childhood was stable and largely devoid of hardship or heartache. Life revolved around family, church, school, and sports. Upon graduating from high school in Tupelo in 1938, Jake Jr. entered Mississippi State College in Starkville. He studied business, pledged a fraternity, and joined the campus Reserve Officers Training Corps, serving in one of the regiment’s two infantry battalions. An article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger newspaper in his freshman year listed J. B. Epting as one of eleven young men inducted into the Phi Kappa Tau social fraternity. A year-and-a-half later, the 1940 Mississippi State yearbook listed Epting with an even more prestigious affiliation: Signa Alpha Epsilon, a fraternity founded in Alabama in the 1850s as a paragon of the antebellum South’s notions of virtuous manhood.
Jake Epting was about to begin his sophomore year at Mississippi State when Hitler invaded Poland, and by the early weeks of his junior year America had initiated the first peacetime draft in the nation’s history. Epting had just finished his junior year when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps on May 31, 1941.
Epting quickly found himself on a track to earn his pilot’s wings. He was slight of build for a pilot—enlistment records listed him as five-foot-eight and 133 pounds—but he had a natural flair for flying. He cruised through two phases of training in Texas and was progressing through the advanced course at Brooks Field in San Antonio when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. One week later, with America now at war with not only the militaristic government of Japan but also Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Epting proposed marriage to his girlfriend—a smart and socially prominent young woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and on January 8, 1942, he earned his pilot’s wings at Brooks Field. The following day he married Nancy Roddey at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, and after a brief honeymoon, Epting entered four-engine bomber training. Two months later, he was assigned to the 93rd Bomb Group at Barksdale Field, Louisiana.
In the cockpit of a B-24 Liberator, Epting’s deft feel for flying was tested by his size. He had to scoot his pilot’s seat all the way forward so his feet could work the rudder pedals. His nickname was Baby Jake, one senior 93rd officer recalled. Yet Epting’s skills as a pilot weren’t in question. As an aircraft commander responsible for an expensive four-engine bomber and the lives of nine men, Epting adopted a stern by-the-book leadership style. He wasn’t humorless, but he ran a tight ship. The enlisted men on the crew were glad that their other three officers took a much more lenient approach to military discipline and protocol.
Epting’s cockpit partner was a copilot who shared his flair for flying, but not his stern style of command. Born in central Iowa on July 19, 1917, Harold (Hap) Kendall grew up in Chariton, a small town about forty miles south of Des Moines. He was four years older than Epting. His laid-back approach toward the men of his crew wasn’t the only contrast he struck alongside Epting. Kendall had played college basketball, and, at six-foot-two and 170 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes, he was physically imposing. Kendall had been a star basketball player at Grinnell College in Iowa and excelled at track. He was a cool hand in the cockpit, and Kendall and Epting formed a formidable team.
When gunner George Ingle received his orders detaching him from the crew on Thanksgiving Day, Epting had done his due diligence in his search for a replacement. Ben Kuroki had come highly recommended from several sources, including Chaplain Burris and fellow 409th Squadron pilot Dick Wilkinson. In his brief association with Epting and the rest of the crew, Ben had acquitted himself well. He knew how to handle the .50-caliber machine guns, didn’t panic under fire, didn’t drink to excess, and got along well with others. From Epting’s vantage point, Ben Kuroki was worthy of his trust.
LIKE MOST BOMBER CREWS, JAKE EPTING and his nine men were a diverse group in terms of geography, education, and socioeconomic status. They were an American cross section to an extent, with the notable exception that no Black Americans were assigned to bomber units at that point. Epting and his men had roots in big cities, small towns, and farming communities. Some had grown up in comfort, while others, like Ben, had known hard times. Five of the men had attended some college. Five of them, Ben included, hadn’t progressed beyond high school.
The Epting crew was divided into two groups by military rank. At the top of the hierarchy were the crew’s four commissioned officers, all bearing the rank of first or second lieutenant. As the aircraft commander, Epting was senior in rank to Harold Kendall, bombardier Al Naum, and navigator Edward Weir. Below the commissioned officers were the crew’s six enlisted men, all of whom had entered the army as privates and now held the rank of technical sergeant or staff sergeant. None of the enlisted men could expect to rise any higher unless they received a battlefield commission or some other special dispensation. That had recently happened to gunner George Ingle, who made the Atlantic crossing with Epting and flew three missions with the crew before receiving permission to enter pilot’s training back in the US.
In a heavy bomber squadron, pilots tended to congregate in their own informal groups within the larger body of commissioned officers, and such was the case with the Epting crew. Navigators and bombardiers, many of whom had “washed out” of pilot’s training before receiving orders to attend another Army Air Forces specialty school, formed their own social groups. Army fraternization rules discouraged close personal relationships between commissioned officers and enlisted men, but Naum and Weir horsed around with Epting’s enlisted contingent to an extent that was atypical on most crews—a fact that sometimes irritated Epting, but endeared Naum and Weir to Ben and the other enlisted men.
Ben forged his deepest bonds with the five other enlisted men on the crew: radio operator Dell Kettering; engineer and top turret gunner Alexander Halbridge; and gunners James Holliday, Richard Ryan, and Ples Norwood. Oldest among them was Kettering, who had just turned twenty-six, followed by Ben at twenty-five, Halbridge and Ryan at twenty-four, and the twenty-one-year-old Norwood. Kettering and Ryan were both married—Kettering had exchanged vows with his hometown sweetheart in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the Epting crew picked up their new B-24 and prepared to depart for England, while Ryan had married in 1938 and had a three-year-old daughter back home in Massachusetts.
At five-feet-ten-and-a-half-inches and 170 pounds, Ryan was one of the most physically imposing men on the crew, with brown hair and brown eyes. He grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family in the Boston area. His father was a salesman and his mother a hairdresser. Ryan had married an Irish Catholic girl whose parents worked in shoe factories in the Boston suburb of Lynn, where Ryan and his family were living. Before the war, Ryan held a good job as a lab assistant for a chemical company in Cambridge.
Kettering, who would become Ben’s closest friend on the crew, hailed from Monmouth, Illinois, near the Mississippi River in the west-central part of the state. When the federal census was taken in the spring of 1940, Kettering was living with his parents and younger sister in Monmouth and working as a salesman. Not long afterward, he moved to Southern California. At five-foot-eight, 152 pounds, Red Kettering, as he was widely known, had a more compact build that was common among the men serving on bomber crews. He had a ruddy complexion, hazel eyes, and a head of red hair that inspired his nickname.
Ben was also especially fond of Alex Halbridge, the Brooklyn-born-and-raised son of Russian Jews who had immigrated to America’s East Coast not long after Ben’s parents had arrived on the West Coast. Halbridge was tall and lanky at six-foot-one and 174 pounds, with blond hair and brown eyes. He was the youngest of three children in a home where Yiddish was the first language. His mother took care of the children and managed the household while his father worked in a Brooklyn hat factory, crafting the wooden blocks used to mold hats into specific shapes and sizes. Halbridge had another distinction among Epting’s enlisted men: He had attended college for a year before going to work as a clerk at a Brooklyn industrial firm that manufactured screws and other metal products.
The most experienced and poised gunner on the Epting crew at this point was James Holliday. He was the youngest of five children born to a bricklayer and a homemaker in Canton, Ohio, but Holliday’s mother had died when he was five. He was raised by three older sisters and his paternal grandparents, who had emigrated from England. At the time of his enlistment in April 1941, Holliday was working as a stock boy at a Canton business. Ten days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he entered the Army Air Forces. He was five-foot-seven and 158 pounds, with a ruddy complexion, brown hair, and blue eyes. He projected an air of coolness under fire that played well with his peers on the crew.
The youngest member of Ben’s group was Ples Norwood. He had followed a path to the Epting crew that was similar to Ben’s. Norwood had been a ground crew member with the 93rd in England when he had talked his way into gunnery school and a combat assignment. Back home in eastern Tennessee, Norwood was the oldest of three boys. He grew up in a rural area on the western edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was a manual laborer in a marble mill. Norwood was close to Ben in size at five-foot-eight and 144 pounds, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a ruddy complexion. Economic necessity had been a factor in Norwood’s decision to enlist: When the draft got underway in the fall of 1940, he was jobless and single, and thus a prime candidate for conscription. Rather than wait to be drafted and lose his freedom of choice as to branch of service, he had traveled to Atlanta after Christmas and enlisted in the Air Corps on January 4, 1941.
These were the men with whom Ben now spent every waking hour as the crews adjusted to their primitive desert life and prepared to ramp up the air war against Axis supply lines. Epting had already seen two gunners leave his crew—one who was still recovering from severe frostbite in his fingers suffered on the crew’s first raid and the other to pursue pilot’s training. In the months ahead, as combat took its inevitable toll, the Epting crew would see more turnover.
BEN AND HIS COMRADES AWAKENED TO A cool morning in their desert camp on January 1, 1943. The 93rd had been informed that they would have the day off from flying—their comrades of the 98th were scheduled to bomb the Tunis harbor later in the day—and so a leisurely day was on tap for Ted Timberlake’s men. There would be time for naps, writing letters, chewing the fat, searching for souvenirs, and a pickup baseball game.
Flight surgeon Wilmer Paine awakened at ten minutes past seven, lit the oil heater he and Ken Cool had procured for their tent, and washed his face and hands in a meager ration of water that filled the bottom quarter of his steel pot helmet. After getting dressed and eating breakfast, Paine held sick call for men complaining of assorted ailments. When that was done, he caught up on his paperwork, filling out certificates for twelve men who had earned the Purple Heart for injuries received in the December 13 raid on Bizerte and the December 29 raid on Sousse.
That still left time for the bearded flight surgeon to convene with Colonel Timberlake and three other officers to welcome the New Year with a warm-up drinking session before lunch. Between the five of them they polished off a half bottle of Canadian Club whisky and three bottles of Palestinian wine while they read poems from a new anthology. After lunch, Paine and Jake Epting hopped into a jeep with a supply of tea, sugar, cigarettes, and whiskey and spent the afternoon driving from one Bedouin camp to another in hopes of trading for a German officer’s Luger pistol. They returned to camp empty-handed.
1The day ended with some excitement when British antiaircraft guns opened up nearby and the men braced for an attack. German aircraft had apparently picked up the trail of the 98th raiding party of fifteen Liberators as they returned from bombing Tunis, and they tracked the Liberators back to the 98th’s new home at one of Gambut’s nearby satellite fields, LG 159. A Luftwaffe Ju-88 shot up one 98th B-24 as it landed, wounding three men. Another 98th crew missed the airstrip and bailed out over the desert. Several bombs fell harmlessly around the airstrip and the 98th camp, and the guns fell silent.
The first night of the New Year held more unpleasant surprises for the men. Rain began to fall, and the wind stiffened, and around 2:00 a.m. a dust storm hit the camp. The wind howled and dust and sand scoured the camp all night, and when the men awakened bleary-eyed on the morning of January 2 it was still blowing strong. It was a lost day as the dreaded khamsin, as the Sahara dust storms were known, lashed the camp without respite. The mess tent blew down, and so the enlisted men huddled in their tents, picking at canned C-rations, writing letters, playing cards, and sleeping. Part of the 93rd’s headquarters tent collapsed, and the day ended with the men still hunkered down, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.
The wind and dust finally eased on Sunday, January 3, but the rain returned. The 93rd had been scheduled to send twelve aircraft to bomb Bizerte. The crews were briefed and the gunners climbed aboard their ships with their .50-caliber weapons and ammunition, waiting to take off, only to be told to stand down because of the foul weather.
Another wasted day, leaving the men of the 93rd and their officers discouraged. The chilly, damp weather in England had gotten old in a hurry, but life in the desert was even more dispiriting. “We left Alconbury four weeks ago this morning,” Doc Paine scribbled in his diary. “Wish the devil we were back there now.”