Chapter 42
HONORABLE SAD SAKI
July 1944 found Ben back in Colorado training B-24 crews how to survive in combat, while stewing over his own unrequited goal to serve a tour in the Pacific. His view of military service had always been infused with the spiritual themes of atonement and redemption. But now he also harbored a taste for Old Testament retribution. In his mind, he would avenge the lives lost at Pearl Harbor and Bataan and he would avenge the death of Stanley Bates. In recent weeks, his thirst for vengeance had become almost insatiable after receiving devastating news from home: His friend Gordy Jorgenson had been killed fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific.1
At the same time, a recent incident had convinced Ben he still hadn’t done enough to earn the respect and trust of his fellow Americans. He was passing through Colorado during his recent travels and flagged down a taxi at the Denver train station. A passenger already in the taxi took one look at Ben in his bemedaled dress uniform and snarled, “I won’t ride with no lousy Jap!” The man slammed the taxi door in Ben’s face, unleashing a wave of shame and self-doubt.2
Ben concluded he still hadn’t done enough to prove himself to his fellow Americans, or at least to some of them. He resolved to bomb Tokyo to prove beyond any doubt where his loyalties lay. He wouldn’t rest until he landed a Pacific combat assignment.
 
IN AUGUST 1944, BEN RECEIVED ORDERS to report to the 505th Bomb Group in Harvard, Nebraska. On his arrival, Ben was assigned as the tail gunner on a B-29 Superfortress crew.
The crew was commanded by Lieutenant James Jenkins, a five-foot-ten, twenty-six-year-old Michigan native. Jenkins was born in the state’s rural interior but spent most of his life in and around Detroit. He graduated from Detroit’s northside Cooley High School in 1936, and, when his parents divorced, he moved to Flint, Michigan, with his mother and her new husband. In Flint, he found work as a parts manager at a local auto garage. When he registered for the Selective Service draft in October 1940, twenty-one-year-old Jim was back in Detroit, working in the General Motors Company’s Chevrolet Division retail store in the city’s bustling New Center area.
Jenkins entered the Army Air Forces after Pearl Harbor, earned his pilot’s wings, and got married. He learned to fly B-17s and became an instructor at the army’s advanced flying school at Pampa, Texas, as the American bombing campaign in Europe entered its darkest months. Now he was commander of B-29 Crew 84-10, as it was known in 384th Squadron records.
Jenkins was asked by his superiors whether he would be willing to take on a tail gunner of Asian descent. “I didn’t know he was a Japanese American when I first saw him,” Jenkins recalled of his introduction to Ben Kuroki. Once he became aware of Ben’s ancestry, Jenkins thought about the complications of taking on a Japanese American gunner. He finally decided it was the right thing to do. When he wrote his mother to tell her about his new tail gunner, Mabel Jenkins expressed her disapproval of “that man.”3
As Ben began to bond with members of his new crew, he found his comrades baffled by his decision to request another combat tour when it wasn’t required of him. “What’s the matter with you?” some of them asked. Why keep going?4
Ben tried to explain the obsession that burned inside—his compulsion to prove himself loyal, his desire to avenge compatriots and friends who had been cut down by Japanese bullets and bombs. He tried to explain why he was willing to put his life on the line by undertaking a combat tour in another theater when no one was asking him to do so. If he struck a blow against Japan and showed his willingness to shed the blood of his own ancestral kin, no one could ever again call him a “lousy Jap” or question his loyalty to his country.
 
WHEN BEN ARRIVED AT HARVARD Army Air Field, the 505th Bomb Group was still taking shape. The group was comprised of three squadrons: the 482nd, 483rd, and 484th. Ben’s squadron, the 484th, had been created in Florida with only a few men and officers before moving to Harvard the previous spring.
After nearly freezing to death in some of his B-24 missions over Europe, Ben could hardly believe the creature comforts and cutting-edge technology of the B-29. America’s new super-bomber was a truly revolutionary aircraft—bigger, heavier, and more spacious than the B-17 or the B-24, capable of flying farther, faster, and higher. The Superfortress was the first American aircraft with pressurized compartments and a centralized fire-control system that allowed gunners to remotely operate turrets from the comfort of the fuselage.
The B-29 had been conceived before America’s entry into World War II as a high-altitude strategic bomber. Hitler’s aggression in Europe led Hap Arnold to seek and receive permission to put the bomber into production, but the program was plagued by technical problems and never saw action in the campaign against Nazi Germany. Eventually, with the program’s cost dwarfing that of the Manhattan Project by more than $1 billion, the B-29 would be directed at Japan.
Despite the thirty combat missions Ben had under his belt, the B-29 presented a learning curve. On a B-24, each gunner was on his own. On the B-29, computers allowed gunners to synchronize their fire to best defend against an enemy threat. The isolation of the tail gunner’s position on a B-17 or a B-24 presented its own unique psychological challenges in combat. As Ben discovered, the B-29 promised similar isolation. The tail gunner occupied a pressurized compartment separate from the main fuselage. That required Ben to remain in his self-contained cocoon until the aircraft descended to an altitude that allowed unpressurized flight.
By the end of August, the crews were working through their training checklists. In October, they began to undertake three-thousand-mile cross-country flights. Maintenance problems disrupted the training schedule at times, and the loss of eleven men in a fatal accident at Ben’s old B-24 base at Barksdale Field, Louisiana, reminded the men of the perils of their work. By the beginning of November, the 505th Bomb Group crews had completed their training.
Finally, on November 6, 1944, the group’s ground echelon—maintenance crews, mechanics, armorers, and other support staff—departed Harvard Army Air Base for Seattle, where they were to board a transport ship bound for the Pacific.
The combat crews were to follow on a staggered basis after Thanksgiving—everyone except Ben Kuroki, that is. Ben had been informed that he wouldn’t be allowed to accompany his crew to the Pacific. Ominously, Ben was told the order came “from the top.”
 
BEN HAD BEEN WARNED EARLY IN HIS B-29 training that the War Department had an ironclad ban on Japanese Americans flying combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Undeterred, he requested an exemption based on his combat record and was confident it would be granted, but on September 27, he had received a letter from Colonel Warren Williams, deputy chief of staff of the Second Air Force, responsible for bomber crew training west of the Mississippi River. “I hate to give you the bad news, but I have done everything humanly possible to get you overseas in the Pacific Theater, but the War Department absolutely refuses to grant permission,” Williams wrote. At the bottom of the page, Williams scribbled a postscript. “We went right to the top and they would do nothing,” he wrote. “Sorry.”5
Two years earlier, when faced with the prospect of being left behind by the 93rd Bomb Group, Ben’s only option had been to beg for reconsideration. Now, with a national profile and friends in high places, Ben unleashed his allies on the White House and the War Department. On October 17, one of Ben’s Commonwealth Club friends, Monroe Deutsch, vice president and provost at the University of California, Berkeley, sent a telegram to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging a dispensation for the decorated Japanese American airman. Stimson refused to budge. Ben dashed off another flurry of letters to powerful friends he had made over the past year, but the War Department still refused to rescind its policy.
In early November, with deployment only a few weeks away, Ben played his last card. Accompanied by pilot Jim Jenkins and other officers on his crew, Ben tracked down Congressman Carl Curtis, a New Deal Democrat, at a meeting in a town fifty miles from their base. Ben explained his predicament: His crew was scheduled to depart for the Pacific in a matter of days, but the War Department refused to let him go. Could the congressman help?
Ben and the congressman talked for a while. Curtis asked Ben about his life before the war, and Ben shared his family story. Curtis was impressed with Ben and the obvious bond he had forged with his crew. The congressman brought the conversation back to Ben’s wish to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. “Is this really what you want to do?” Curtis asked. “Yes, I do,” Ben replied. “I am an American.”6
Curtis had heard enough. He drafted a telegram to the army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, and urged that Ben be allowed to fly and fight in the Pacific. He also fired off telegrams to Secretary of War Stimson and General Arnold.
On Thursday, November 16, Secretary of War Stimson sent letters to Monroe Deutsch, Congressman Curtis, and other influential advocates who had written appeals on Ben’s behalf. “I am now happy to inform you that, by reason of his splendid record, it has been decided to exempt Sgt. Kuroki from the provision of the policy to which I earlier referred,” Stimson wrote.7
Ben would be allowed to serve in the Pacific after all.
 
AROUND DECEMBER 15, BEN AND THE other members of the Jenkins crew loaded their gear aboard their B-29. They were poised to depart Harvard Army Airfield for the final time when men who identified themselves as army intelligence officers accosted Ben and asked him to prove he had permission to deploy to the Pacific. Ben frantically dug into the pile of gear stowed inside their B-29 in search of his B4 military garment bag. He pulled a copy of Secretary of War Stimson’s letter from the bag and showed it to the men. While the purported intelligence officers contemplated their next move, Jim Jenkins gunned the engines and took off with Ben aboard.
A similar scene played out during a stop at Mather Field, outside Sacramento, California. Once again, Jenkins settled the issue by getting his crew aboard and taking off before the shadowy inquisitors could take Ben away for questioning.8
During a layover in Hawaii, the 505th crews performed the ritual of naming their aircraft and having a base artist paint their preferred mascot on the nose. Most of the crews opted for a sexually suggestive name and a nude woman as their talisman. The Jenkins crew decided to pay tribute to their courageous tail gunner. They had previously nicknamed Ben “The Honorable Sad Saki,” a mashup of the popular Sad Sack comic book character popular with army readers and the beverage saki, the fermented rice wine that many Americans associated with Japanese culture. Henceforth, their glistening silver B-29 would be known as Honorable Sad Saki.
In the final week of December 1944, with Ben’s steadfast advocate Jim Jenkins in the command pilot’s seat, Honorable Sad Saki climbed into the skies over Hawaii. The shimmering waters of Pearl Harbor and the sunken hulk of the battleship USS Arizona flashed beneath them as Honorable Sad Saki banked to the west and an unknown destination in the Northern Mariana Islands. Since December 7, 1941, the ghosts of Pearl Harbor had haunted Ben, as if he somehow shared personal responsibility for the deeds of the Japanese armed forces. In his anguish and his shame, Ben had convinced himself that only by confronting Japan in combat could he prove his patriotism and atone for the deaths of more than ninety thousand Americans in three years of Pacific combat.