Infamy (25 page)

At the same time, more and more of the young people in the camps continued to head for colleges and jobs east of California. But there were catches: they could not go to school within twenty-five miles of a railroad line, nor could they go to any university with military connections, including Reserve Officers’ Training Corps—which included almost every male-only or coed college in the country. Mary Sakaguchi Oda, who had been in medical school in California before the war, wrote: “When I heard that they were allowing students out of camp, I applied to ninety-one medical schools. When I received the replies, several of them stated that they could not consider my application because they had military installations on their campus. The implication of my return address—Manzanar—was that I was a potential spy or saboteur.” Eventually, she was accepted by a women’s medical school in Pennsylvania, becoming one of the more than forty-three hundred students released to continue their educations. The young Nisei were enrolled in six hundred colleges, none of them on the West Coast, though Robert Sproul, chancellor of the University of California, was the single most important figure in arguing for the release of students.

The Uchida family was among the luckiest in getting their children into colleges. With the help of church groups, particularly the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, Kay was offered a job as a teaching assistant at a nursery and day care center operated by Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Yoshiko, the Berkeley graduate, was offered a full scholarship as a graduate student at Smith College, also in Massachusetts. At the same time, because of their father’s work as a block captain reporting to Topaz administrators, a job that was becoming more and more dangerous, the WRA decided to allow their parents to relocate in Salt Lake City. Still, on her way east by rail, Yoshiko was confronted by the conductor who took her ticket. “You better not be a Jap,” he said, “because if you are, I’ll throw you off the train.” She said she was Chinese.

*   *   *

Earlier in 1943, Sergeant Ben Kuroki flew in Operation Tidal Wave, one of the largest bombing raids of the war. This was his twenty-fourth combat mission in Europe; he had only to fly one more in order to go home. This was the secret mission that Kuroki and the rest of the crew of the Tupelo Lass were training for; the target was the oil fields and refineries of Ploeşti, Romania, guarded by hundreds of antiaircraft guns. Back in North Africa, at a base near Benghazi, Libya, the Tupelo Lass and the rest of the Ninety-Third Group were alternating between days of treetop flying practice and bombing raids over Italy. The commander of the Ninth Air Force, Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton, came to Benghazi to tell the flight crews, “You’re going on the most important and one of the most dangerous missions in the history of heavy bombardment.”

August 1, 1943, was a beautiful Mediterranean day. The Tupelo Lass and 177 other B-24s took off at dawn in North Africa. The round-trip flight from Benghazi to Ploeşti and back would take thirteen hours. Of the 177 bombers that took off together, 58 were shot down. Only two of the nine planes in Kuroki’s squadron made it back. In all, 310 American airmen were killed. The survivors and the press were told the mission was a success—but it was not. Ploeşti oil continued to fuel German aircraft and tanks at the same rate as before the raid.

Kuroki continued on, undeterred by those losses. After he had flown the twenty-five missions in Europe necessary to go home, he volunteered for five more, writing home that he wanted to do that for his brother, Fred, who had been pushed out of the Army Air Corps. Epting, now a squadron commander, and others told him he was crazy. But he did it, racking up thirty missions before taking a boat back to New York and then being flown to the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a rest and recreation station on the ocean in Santa Monica, California. He figured that made him the first Japanese American to get to California in two years. Local folks stared at him—some ran away, some called police as he walked the beach and town with white airmen.

Now the army put him in the public relations business full-time, including visits to three relocation camps to urge young Nisei to enlist. Kuroki was to begin his tour on the popular NBC radio show of singer Ginny Simms, but one minute before the show in Hollywood started the army called and ordered him not to go on, fearing reaction across the country. He did appear, however, at the Commonwealth Club of California, in San Francisco, one of the country’s most prestigious forums. Six hundred members crowded a luncheon to see and hear him on February 4, 1944. But when Staff Sergeant Ben Kuroki was introduced, no one applauded—the room was silent.

“I’m just a farm boy from Nebraska…” he began.

He spoke for a long time from twelve single-spaced typewritten pages. He told his story, beginning in Hershey and the farm the family had worked since 1928. He told them about the loneliness and fear of looking like the enemy, of peeling potatoes and begging officers to let him fight, then talking about his first mission and the flak slicing into Dawley’s head, and the terror of flying fifty feet over Ploeşti. “We were,” he said, “flying through a furnace.” He continued his story, saying:

I learned more about democracy, for one thing, than you’ll find in all the books, because I saw it in action. When you live with men under combat conditions for fifteen months, you begin to understand what brotherhood, equality, tolerance, and unselfishness really mean. Under fire, a man’s ancestry, what he did before the war, or even his present rank, don’t matter at all … you’re fighting for each other’s lives and for your country, and whether you realize it at the time or not, you’re living and proving democracy.…

The tunnel gunner … was Jewish. I’m a Japanese-American. The bombardier of our crew was German. The left waist gunner was an Irishman.… We had a job to do and we did it with a kind of comradeship that was the finest thing in the world.…

I nearly got it on the 30th mission, my last one. We were over Munster in Germany and a shell exploded right above the glass dome of my top turret. It smashed the dome, ripped my helmet off, smashed my goggles and interphone, but I didn’t get a scratch. Things like that aren’t explained just by luck.…

I certainly don’t propose to defend Japan. When I visit Tokyo, it will be in a bomber. But I do believe that loyal Americans of Japanese descent are entitled to the democratic rights which Jefferson propounded, Washington fought for, and Lincoln died for.

The crowd, almost every one of them white men, stood and applauded for ten minutes. Some were crying, including Henry J. Kaiser, whose shipyards, including the one on Terminal Island in Los Angeles, had been essential to the rebuilding of the U.S. Navy after Pearl Harbor. The speech and the boy from Nebraska were a sensation. He was interviewed by
Time
magazine and the
New York Times
. His photograph was in a dozen California newspapers and in the window of Brandeis’s of Omaha, the biggest department store in Nebraska. A crew from WHO, the big radio station in Omaha, traveled to the farm outside Hershey to interview his family. The Office of War Information had the Commonwealth Club speech translated into Japanese—a language Kuroki could not speak or understand—for propaganda broadcasts. And he was invited back to the
Ginny Simms Show
and had dinner with the star at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills.

But it was not that way at the three camps he visited. To most of the evacuees, particularly younger ones, he was a hero—Kuroki was cheered and mobbed by young people wanting his autograph—but he heard boos and hisses as well. He was considered a fool and a traitor by many. He had no idea that, by then, large numbers of men in the camps hated him, hated the idea of a Nisei serving with the army holding them as prisoners. Kuroki was booed when he said, “If you think that Japan is going to win, you’re crazy. We’re going to bomb them out of existence.”

Frank Emi, the Los Angeles grocer at Heart Mountain, was not impressed by Kuroki. He was one of group of three hundred or so young evacuees who boycotted Kuroki’s speech. “We just thought he was an asshole,” said Emi. “A Nebraska boy who never knew anything about the camps, never was forced out of his home and for him to come to these camps and try to influence the people there to respond to the draft was totally stupid of him.” Another hostile evacuee, Jack Teno, added, “He was lucky to get out of here alive.”

That was not an empty threat. Beatings of evacuees were common in several camps; the victims were usually JACL members accused of spying on their own people and informing camp administrators. At Poston, the national chairman of the league, Saburo Kido, the lawyer from San Francisco, was beaten twice with planks and baseball bats and was in the hospital for weeks.

Then Kuroki received a letter from his family back in Hershey. His best friend at home, his hunting buddy, Gordy Jorgensen, a marine, had been killed by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. Kuroki’s reaction was to ask to go overseas again, to the Pacific Theater, and to train on the country’s new superbomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Kuroki’s request was denied. There was a specific War Department regulation stating that no Japanese Americans could fly in combat zones in the Pacific. He decided to write to members of the Nebraska congressional delegation, asking them to intercede for him with Secretary of War Stimson. He made the same request of the important men he met at the Commonwealth Club, particularly Monroe Deutsch, the vice president of the University of California at Berkeley, who sent a telegram to Stimson and recruited other prominent Californians to do the same. Dillon Myer of the WRA sent one as well.

It worked. Stimson sent a telegram to Dr. Deutsch saying, “I am happy to inform you that, by reason of his splendid record, it has been decided to except Sergeant Kuroki from the policy to which I earlier referred.”

That was the end of it—almost. The crew of the B-29 to which Kuroki was assigned voted to call the plane the Honorable Sad Saki, a play on the names of a cartoon character called Sad Sack and the Japanese rice wine. As the crew prepared for takeoff from their training base in Nebraska, army intelligence officers and an FBI agent, claiming he was a reporter, tried to trick Kuroki into getting off the plane. His new pilot, Lieutenant James Jenkins, and the bombardier Lieutenant Kenneth Neill, confronted the agent with a copy of Kuroki’s orders and the Stimson telegram. Neill yelled, “Stay there Ben. You don’t have to say a damn word to them.” Jenkins and Neill climbed aboard the Honorable Sad Saki. “Gun it!” yelled Jenkins. “Gun it!” And the Superfortress roared into the sky, headed for Tinian Island, fifteen hundred miles from the Japanese mainland.

Two days later, the Sad Saki was on Tinian, which was being used as a platform for B-29s dropping incendiary bombs on major cities in Japan. A plane called the
Enola Gay
was parked down the silver line on the forty-eight-square-mile island. It was being secretly refitted to carry a new kind of bomb, the atomic bomb. There were still Japanese soldiers hiding on the island, so Kuroki was ordered to wear a helmet at all times and never walk alone—one white man walked ahead of him and one was behind him because his superiors were worried that he would be shot, not by the Japanese but by American marines. If those guys spotted a Japanese face, they were trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

If shot, Kuroki would not be the first Japanese American killed by his own men. Sergeant Frank Hachiya was an MIS graduate from Hood River, Oregon—“the most beautiful place on earth,” he would tell anyone who’d listen. He was a
Kibei
whose father was at Tule Lake and whose mother was still in Japan. He had volunteered to parachute onto Leyte in the Philippines to gather intelligence on Japanese positions as U.S. Marines prepared to invade. Hachiya was shot on December 30, 1944, and died four days later. The fatal shot was apparently fired by a marine, who saw Hachiya bringing Japanese maps back to American lines.

8

“IS THAT THE AMERICAN WAY?”

HEART MOUNTAIN DRAFT RESISTANCE: FEBRUARY
1944

In the first week of January 1944, Anne O’Hare McCormick, a
New York Times
foreign correspondent and columnist, visited the three Poston camps in southwestern Arizona. On January 8, 1944, she wrote as if she were in another country, a country of “the homesick.” She described a strange city with lush gardens and farms that had emerged “like an oasis in an endless desert of sand, sage, mesquite and huge cacti,” a town that looked like “a cross between an American military camp and an Oriental town.”

McCormick reported that when these American Japanese settlers first arrived in 1942, “the population had little in common … but its race and its fate. It was composed of aliens and citizens, rich and poor farmers, and professional people.” While their isolation tended to make the interns turn inward and become “more ingrown, more Japanese,” overall “they put an extraordinary cheerful face on their tragedy.”

She went on to stress that “both they and the government know that there is no solid legal reason for holding them in detention. If they were politically organized and less frightened they would fight for their civic rights.”

That column, along with the new newspaper attacks on American Japanese in California and increasing violence in the camps, had become a great worry in the White House. The 1944 presidential campaign was about to begin and Roosevelt intended to run for an unprecedented fourth term. He did not want the incarceration and treatment of American Japanese to be a campaign issue. The WRA was becoming a target for both sides in the ongoing debate inside the government that had begun immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Without the usual fanfare, Roosevelt, on February 17, 1944, issued an executive order placing the WRA under the control of the Department of the Interior, led by a critic of the evacuation, Harold Ickes. From the beginning, in private correspondence, Ickes had called the whole idea “fancy-named concentration camps.”