Chapter 40
HEART MOUNTAIN
Ben’s Commonwealth Club speech won him powerful friends and celebrity status. But he still hadn’t landed the Pacific combat assignment he so publicly sought. Instead, while higher authorities in Washington and the Army Air Forces tried to figure out what to do with their Japanese American hero, Ben found himself shunted from the spotlight in Los Angeles to a temporary assignment at Fresno’s Hammer Field.
But the publicity surrounding Ben’s speech had moved the War Department to reconsider its clumsy handling of the canceled NBC Radio interview in late January. Officials abruptly arranged for Ben to travel to Hollywood for a live February 24 appearance on
The Ginny Simms Show. The day before the speech, Ben boarded a train in Fresno for the two-hundred-mile trip to Los Angeles. In the Mojave Desert, heavy rains washed out the tracks, so Ben set off for the nearest highway and hitchhiked the final seventy miles to Hollywood.
1His interview with Ginny Simms was beamed across America, and Ben touched on all the familiar themes of his inspiring story. He described the crews he had fought with as the embodiment of the American melting pot. “We all looked different, but we felt the same, and we were all heading for the same target,” Ben told Simms. “We were Americans.” Ben concluded with another public appeal to be allowed to fly raids against Japan. He couldn’t wait “to head for the Pacific and knock the rice out of my ancestors,” in his pithy description.
But the War Department wouldn’t budge. Shortly after his appearance on
The Ginny Simms Show, Ben was transferred to an Army Air base in Pueblo, Colorado, to train B-24 gunners. Ben would later say he found the duty more nerve-racking than flying thirty combat missions in Europe and North Africa. Nearly every day, wailing sirens signaled the crash of another inexperienced pilot and crew. “It was hair-raising,” Ben later recalled. “And I’d go up with them over these turbulent mountains in Colorado to teach the gunners to fire their guns and they would all get airsick and wouldn’t fire a shot.”
2About a month into his Colorado assignment, Ben was summoned to the camp adjutant’s office and given oral instructions. He was to visit three War Relocation Authority camps on behalf of the War Department and the army. He wasn’t shown any written orders or given detailed instructions, and there was only a vague mention of recruiting young men to fight. How he was supposed to do that wasn’t clear. All Ben knew was the names of the three camps he was supposed to visit. First on the list was Heart Mountain, Wyoming, five hundred miles north of Pueblo.
Ben wasn’t aware that the camp was in turmoil or that battle lines had been drawn among camp residents. He certainly didn’t know that militant elements within the camp were contemplating acts of violence against inmates perceived as collaborating with the government responsible for their imprisonment. Thousands of miles from the closest battlefront, Ben was walking into a different kind of war zone.
S
HORTLY AFTER MIDDAY ON M
ONDAY, April 24, some three thousand incarcerees at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center gathered near the front gate of the sprawling Wyoming camp to greet the honored guest. The
Heart Mountain Sentinel had written lavish articles and editorials about the visitor. A big handwritten sign was positioned near the gate to make a favorable first impression: “Welcome Sergeant Ben Kuroki.” A dark-colored army sedan approached. Peering out through a back window, Ben was shocked. “The armed guards were wearing the same uniform I was wearing,” he later recalled. “And inside, behind barbed wire, were my own people.”
3Ben arrived at Heart Mountain with only the vaguest idea of the ordeal the inhabitants of the camp had experienced, and no concept of the conditions under which they had been confined. Now he was shaken by the sight of men, women, and children who looked like him, packed into flimsy wooden barracks in this windswept place, guarded by rifle-toting US Army soldiers as if they were enemy combatants.
As Ben tried to process his surroundings, the Heart Mountain camp director and a community council representative fawned over him in a brief formal ceremony. The crowd of camp residents applauded politely, as if they were attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony back in their California hometowns. Later that evening, Ben was feted at a banquet attended by two hundred Japanese American community leaders.
The warm welcome Ben received at Heart Mountain belied the fault lines that had fractured the camp community. Moderate elements committed to cooperation with the federal government on the military draft and other matters were at ever sharper odds with the growing faction of militants who had now dedicated themselves to opposing the incarceration regime on all fronts.
Passions within the camp had been further inflamed by a rolling government crackdown on the resistance movement in the weeks since the arrests of Yosh Kuromiya and several dozen other men on federal draft evasion charges. In early April, federal agents abruptly transferred Kiyoshi Okamoto, the Fair Play Committee founder, to the segregation center for “disloyal” Japanese at Tule Lake, California. By late April, federal authorities had arrested fifty-three men at the Heart Mountain camp. These young men, Yosh Kuromiya among them, were now being held in scattered Wyoming county jails awaiting trial on federal draft evasion charges.
Despite all this, hundreds of Heart Mountain residents continued to support the draft resisters. Fair Play Committee leaders urged other men to defy the draft as they received their physical exam summons. But the militants had gone beyond words. In recent days, they had denounced the editors of the Heart Mountain Sentinel as collaborators who had cast their lot with their government oppressors, and a number of violent clashes had put the camp on edge.
Ben knew none of this when he arrived at the Heart Mountain camp.
AWAKENING AT HEART MOUNTAIN ON Tuesday, April 25, Ben was hustled by his handlers to speaking events and meet-and-greets arranged by administrators and community leaders. He toured the camp’s wooden barracks, mess halls, schools, churches, baseball fields, basketball courts, and other recreation areas.
Within a day or so, Ben understood why he was there. He was to encourage Nisei men to enlist, or at least not resist the draft. In conversations with small groups of draft-age men and in public speeches, Ben shared his story of patriotism, perseverance, and courage. Many young men hung on every word, and mesmerized children sat at his feet. “A lot of boys and girls—especially the girls—were asking for [Ben’s] autograph,” recalled camp resident Eiichi Sakauye.
4Although he was treated like a movie star by many inmates, Ben quickly became aware of the deep divisions within the camp. He was shocked when members of the Fair Play Committee began to interrupt and heckle him during his speeches. They accused Ben of collaborating with the very people who had deprived camp residents of their rights. “While most Nisei treated me as their first war hero, the dissidents seemingly despised me and some even resorted to derogatory name-calling,” Ben recalled. “Their leader called me a bull-shitter.”
5Camp administrators and community leaders asked Ben to talk to a group of Fair Play Committee members in hopes of persuading them to drop their resistance to the draft. “There might be trouble,” Ben was told, and so extra guards were assigned. He gave his talk without disruption, but he wasn’t changing many minds.
At one of his meetings with Heart Mountain dissidents, Ben bluntly told his hostile audience that if they thought Japan was going to win the war, as some did, they were “crazy.” Bluntly, Ben warned them of a looming catastrophe for the land of their ancestry. “Japan is gonna get bombed off the map,” Ben flatly declared.
6Some of the audience members booed and hissed his words.
The hostile reactions pained Ben. He fervently believed that the Nisei inmates should follow his example and prove their loyalty to America through military service. In the case of the Heart Mountain Nisei, joining the army and serving with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team “was going to help” the people of Japanese ancestry in America, Ben insisted.
7His words infuriated the Heart Mountain militants. Most of them were Californians and better educated than Ben. They viewed him as unsophisticated and uninformed. Their families had lost nearly everything but their lives. Ben and his family hadn’t experienced anything like the harm they had suffered.
Even worse, in their eyes, Ben seemed oblivious to the anguish felt by some of the incarcerees, and that infuriated them. “He’d never been in camp,” said Jack Tono, a Heart Mountain dissident who was eventually convicted of draft evasion and spent two years in a federal prison. “He’s a Nebraska boy, and here we’d lost everything and then [were] thrown into camp. He’s coming out, preaching to us what the hell we should be doing.”
8The fury toward Ben built during the week. In the eyes of the resisters, Ben was a race-traitor who had broken faith with his own people for a few medals and the approval of their oppressors. “There was guys in camp wanna kill [Kuroki],” said Tono. “He’s lucky he went out of there alive.”
9
ON THURSDAY, APRIL 27, BEN ADDRESSED a large mass meeting at the camp high school. There were more events on Friday and Saturday. After a full weekend of activities, he delivered his final speech on Sunday, April 30, at a farewell ceremony in his honor. Standing on an outdoor platform before an American flag poster, he thanked the residents for their hospitality and called for young men in the audience to honor Japanese Americans by joining the army.
Ben had done everything asked of him at Heart Mountain. He had done his best to convince draft-age inmates that they should enlist, or at least not resist the draft. Some men heeded his exhortations and enlisted. Others complied with their draft summons under duress, fearing the costs of challenging the federal government. At one point, Ben had boarded a bus loaded with departing Heart Mountain recruits to wish them luck. “I was met with stony silence,” Ben said, laughing nervously at the memory of the tense encounter.
10While Ben’s visit was judged a success by camp administrators and the army, he had not broken the spirit of resistance that coursed through Heart Mountain and was spreading. On the day Ben climbed into the back of an army sedan and rolled back through the barbed wire that confined the camp inmates, another six Heart Mountain incarcerees refused to report for their pre-induction physicals.
11