Word: kuroki
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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West Coast draft boards got orders last week to start reclassifying their U.S.-born Japanese for induction into the armed forces. The announcement was not even of academic interest to one member of the Nisei, 25-year-old Ben Kuroki...
...Kuroki is a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, a qualified turret gunner in B-24 Liberator bombers, veteran of 30 heavy bombing missions against the enemy, survivor of the ruthless, costly raid on the Ploesti oilfields of Rumania, winner of two Distinguished Flying Crosses, wearer of the coveted Air Medal with four oakleaf clusters...
...Kuroki may have been the first person of Japanese descent to watch the Pacific surf curl on the beach at Santa Monica since the great evacuation of Japanese from California after Pearl Harbor. He was there last week, with several hundred other battle-weary U.S. airmen, resting in the luxury of the former Edgewater Beach Club, now an Air Forces redistribution center. Like his comrades, he slept late, guzzled orange juice and fresh milk, tried to unwind and get toned...
Earned Repose. He had earned his rest. Few men can ever have gone through more plain hell trying to find a place in the special hell of battle. Ben Kuroki's father was a seed-potato grower in Hershey, Neb., a town of about 500 people. Ben and his kid brother Fred (now overseas with an engineer outfit) volunteered for the Army two days after Pearl Harbor, were accepted a month later. Ben landed in the Air Forces and started to run his personal gantlet at Sheppard Field...
When he is ready for combat again, Ben Kuroki hopes to go to the Pacific theater. His roommate at Santa Monica now is Tail Gunner Edward Bates, who lost a brother in the Pacific. Says Ben: "I promised him the first Zero I get will be for his brother...