Ben Kuroki's Story

              unfortunately, it was German and Italian lives or ours. That was the only
way you could look at it.
It was a happy day when after three months of Libya, we received
orders to return to England. We took off from Tobruk at midnight. There
was no formation; the planes left at two-minute intervals, and each was
on its own.
The next morning, instead of seeing daylight, we looked out over a
blanket of clouds without any opening. We had had to go up to about
10,000 feet to get over the clouds, and now we couldn't go under them, for
fear of crashing into mountains.
We were lost. The navigator could do nothing, and the radio operator, though he was working like mad, couldn't get his messages through
because of the weather. Finally he got a message, but by that time we
didnt' have enough gas to get to the airfield that had answered us. We'd
already been up I I hours and 20 minutes with a 10-hours' supply of gas.
We expected to go down any minute.
The pilot called back that anyone who wanted to bail out could
do so. Nobody did; I know I had so much faith in Major Epting's flying
ability that I wouldn't leave until he did. All of a sudden, and it seemed
like a miracle to us who were tensely waiting for the crash, there was a
tiny rift in the clouds. Epting didn't wait one second; he just dove right
into it, and made a perfect landing in a valley that wasn't big enough to
land a cub in safely.
We had just gotten out of the plane when a swarm of Arabs surrounded us. There must have been a hundred of them, and they were
armed with rifles, spears, and some with clubs. When we saw them coming
we debated whether we should shoot at them or try to talk to them. We
decided to talk to them, but we couldn't understand them and they couldn't
understand us.
They didn't hurt us, but they certainly weren't friendly. They took
everything away from us—guns, wallets and everything we had in our
pockets—and they wouldn't let us near the plane.
We had no idea where we were, but in a few minutes a Spanish officer
came up and arrested us, and we found that we had landed In Spanish
Morocco. The officer marched all of us, our crew and the Arabs, into a
native*village about two miles away. The procession we made caused
more excitement, I guess, than that village had had in its entire history.
The natives all thought I was Chinese, but Kettering, our radio operator, explained to the Spanish soldiers that I was Japanese American. That
created quite a stir when it got around. Most of the people, both Spanish and Arabs, flatly refused to believe it, and later it took the American
embassy to prove it to them.
In a few days we were flown to Spain in a German plane and interned
in a mountain village. We thought we'd be there for the duration, but
within two months, through methods I can't reveal, we were in England.
From England we bombed targets in Germany and began preparations