Ben Kuroki's Story

              a day for everything. This water we drew from a well, which we had to
abandon after a while when we found some dead Germans in it.
We were at least 300 miles from any town, excepting the dead city
of Tobruk. We had no entertainment of any kind out there on the desert;
when we weren't on raids we just lay around in our tents, or took walks
in the desert.
The most dismal Christmas eve of my life I spent on the Libyan desert.
It was cold, and we didn't even have tents to sleep under. We slept in our
clothes and didn't even take off our shoes. Our morale was certainly low that night, as we thought of the fun we could be having in the
States, and of our families and friends back there. But it's things like that,
as well as actually fighting together, that bring men close to one another,
as close as brothers.
Our group was going on raids about every other day while we were
in the desert, and they were all pretty rough. We bombed Rommel's
shipping lines over and over at Bizerte, Tunis, Sousse and Tripoli in Africa.
Then we started in on Sicily and Italy.
We had some boys of Italian parentage flying with us, and whenever
we took off to bomb Naples or Rome I'd kid them about bombing their
honorable ancestors. "We're really going to make the spaghetti fly today," I'd say, and they'd retort that they couldn't wait to knock the rice
out of my dishonorable ancestors.
Naples was always a rough target. It was the "flack city" of the Italian theater. The flak burst so thick and black you couldn't even see
the planes a hundred yards behind you. Yet our raids over there were
called spectacular examples of precision bombing.
We participated in the first American raid on Rome last July. It was
the biggest surprise I'd had so far; we thought we were going to run into
heavy opposition, and we were almost disappointed when we found hardly
any.
We bombed Sicily and Southern Italy at altitudes of about 25,000
feet, and it really gets cold at that height. One time over Palermo it was
42 below zero. I froze two oxygen masks; after that I had to suck on the
hose to get any oxygen.
Even at that height we could see our bombs breaking exactly on their
targets, and as much as an hour after we had left the targets we could
see the smoke rising from the fires we had caused.
It gave you a funny feeling; you couldn't help but think of the people
being hurt down there. I wasn't particularly religious before the war, but I
always said a prayer, and I knew for sure my pal Kettering, the radio operator, did too, for the innocent people we were destroying on raids like that.
But we were in no position to be sentimental about it. The people
know they were in danger, and they could have gotten out. Besides, we
weren't fighting against individual people, but against ideas. It was Hit-
lerism or democracy, and we couldn't afford to let it be Hitlerism.   And so,
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