Ben Kuroki's Story

              bardment, ranking as a battle in itself. It is officially regarded not as the
Ploesti raid but as "the battle of Ploesti."
There was no line at the mess hall that night. Even though we were
starved, we couldn't eat when we thought of the men that should have been
standing in line and weren't.
And even though we were dead tired, we couldn't sleep. ' know I
didn't sleep for several nights after that. The ground crews kept J-he runway lights on all night, and many of them stayed up until mornin \ r.-.ouqh
they knew the planes they had worked so hard on and their friends, the
men who flew them, weren't coming back.
The next morning was rough, too. We always tjor up at six o'clock,
and there was always a lot of yelling back and forth between the tents—
sometimes we'd throw rocks at each other's tents. The only yelling we heard
that morning was our co-pilot calling for his friend Junior, although he had
seen him go down in flames the day before.
Ploesti was my 24th mission. For most of the crew it was the 25th;
in other words, it completed their tour of duty for them. I was assigned
to another crew for my last mission.
For a long time I had been thinking about volunteering for an extra
five missions. I wanted to do that for my kid brother; he wasn't overseas
then. The day after my 25th, I asked my commanding officer if I could go
on five more. He said I should go home; in fact, there were orders out
already for me to do so, and a plane ticket to the States waiting for me.
But he finally gave me permission, and I stayed with the crew I had flown
with on what was supposed to be my last raid.
It took me three months to get those five missions in, the weather was
so bad. And then when I came home it was by banana boat and not airplane.    I was sure burned up about that.
It was at this time that I flew with the only full-blooded American
Indian pilot in the European theater; everybody called him "Chief," but
his name was Homer Moran, and he was from South Dakota. Four of those
extra five missions I flew from England over Germany.
I nearly got it on the 30th mission, my last one. We were over Mun-
ster, 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 goggle and interphone. The concussion threw me back against the seat, but
I didn't get a scratch. I thought the ship had blown apart, the noise of
that explosion was so loud. I passed out, because my oxygen mask had
been torn off, but the radio operator and the engineer pulled me out of
the turret and fixed me up with an emergency mask.
Things like that aren't explained just by luck. I must have had a guardian angel flying with me that time and on the other missions, too. They
say there are no atheists in foxholes; I can tell you for sure there are none
in heavy bombers either.
I left England the first of December. They wanted me to stay over
there, with my outfit, as chief clerk in operations, but from the beginning
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