I’ll be seeing you
In all the old, familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through . . .
— Lyrics and music by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain
Kenneth B. Kai-Kee was the son of a pioneer family and a native-born Chinese American in an era when there were few. Even his surname was an invention of the Chinese American West.
Kenny, as he was known to his friends, was a grandson of Ching Hin Kim, a legendary Chinese pioneer who had settled in Ione, Calif. Ching ran the “Kai-Kee” general store that served the Chinese miners of Amador County. Grandfather Ching and his American-born wife, Mo See, had nine children, eight of whom were sons born in Ione. All the townspeople of Ione called the eight sons the “Kai-Kee boys,” and the name stuck. The Ching family was a long way from On Doong village in Heungshan County, Guangdong province, so why not invent a new name in an adopted country? In Chinese California, the family adopted the Kai-Kee store’s name as their American moniker.
Kenny’s father, Lock Kai-Kee, was already a longtime resident of Oakland, Calif., when Kenny was born in 1922. Lock and his wife, Ida Margarita (a.k.a. “Rita”), worked hard and bought a home at 927 45th St. in East Oakland. Lock was a member of the Wa Sung Athletic Club, and a picture of him as the third base coach of the Wa Sung baseball team of 1931 appeared recently in the Wa Sung Community Service Club 2004 Community Directory.
Swing Time at Cal
The Kai-Kees’ only son, Kenny, was a natural athlete in a family of prominent sportsmen. Kenny’s Uncle Sam played varsity football for the “Wonder Team” of 1918 at UC Berkeley. Uncle Mike played varsity baseball for Yale University in the 1920s. Another uncle, Mark Kai-Kee, earned a letter as a member of the boxing team and Stanford’s Class of 1934.
To his grade-school classmates, Kenny was an easy-going and fun kid who grew into the personable young man that he is remembered as today. He had little problem attracting his fair share of female attention. Dolores Wong, who entered UC Berkeley in the fall of 1938, remembered her fellow collegian, Kenny, as a likeable, social and friendly student and the old boyfriend of Phyllis Soohoo — my mother.
Alice (Chue) Lew, who joined the Cal gang in 1939 as a new generation of Chinese Americans started to attend college in force for the first time, recalled the good times before the war and the young adults living in the tempo of swing time.
“In those days, all Chinese students came together. It was something we felt — close together as Chinese. He [Kenny] was really a fun-loving person. He had a great personality. I remember him as a really nice guy to be around,” Lew recalls.
At Berkeley, Kenny had been a student-athlete on the move. He was studying accounting and “good at everything.” He was a memorable feature of the campus social scene, as he often planned the getaway trips to Santa Cruz for all of the Chinese kids. Snapshots of Kenny at Lake Lagunitas, relaxing with the gang at Cal, and walking the grounds of the World’s Fair on Treasure Island, show a relaxed, confident young man with an easy smile.
By all accounts, Kenny had a bright future. One friend recalled that he had the highest I.Q. test score and always seemed to have his homework done. This left him plenty of time to enjoy the outdoors and organize his share of the swim parties at Lake Temescal and Lake Anza, the double dates, and the big bands at big hotels such as the Palace, the Claremont and the Drake. Kenny was in the middle of it. After all, he also was one of the lucky guys on campus who owned a car — a two-seat Model A.
“[H]e was a very up-beat young man with a mischievous sense of humor,” recalls Maggie Gee, herself a legendary pilot for the WASPs during World War II.
War Comes to Oakland
In 1940, the U.S. Census counted 3,201 persons of Chinese ancestry living in Oakland, Calif. Lock and Rita must have been proud before World War II. They had worked hard to own their house on 45th Street, and their only son, Kenny, was enrolled at UC Berkeley. He was a natural athlete who would soon earn a letter jacket for one of Cal’s varsity teams.
When the war came to America’s Chinatowns, the young men of Oakland’s Chinese community answered the call. Men such as my uncle, Clayton Soohoo, and Alfred Fong and Wilfred Eng — as they told the Oakland Tribune last year — were inducted into the Army on the same day. The Army Air Force took 25 percent of the Army inductees, including Kenny.
“I remember Kenny Kai-Kee as a student at Cal, a talented athlete, very popular, with a good sense of humor,” says retired Judge Delbert Wong who had served with the AAF as a bomber crewman.
On October 1, 1943 — less than three months before the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act — Kenny entered the service of the U.S. Army Air Force as a pilot trainee.
Kenny’s training did not pass without incident. AAF records indicate that he had survived a landing accident at Dyersburg AAF base in Tennessee on February 24, 1944. Kenny and the pilot of the B-17F suffered a landing gear collapse after landing.
Kenny’s uncle, Mark, recalls hearing from a friend of Kenny’s that the accident occurred in part because of an error by Kenny in hitting the gear switch instead of the flap switch after completing their landing roll. The oversight was understandable because Kenny and his co-pilot were distracted after having been lost, and they were excited to have found their way back to base.
In spite of receiving a reprimand for the bad landing, Kenny qualified as a bomber pilot in 1944. The stateside snapshots of him taken for the relatives back home show how easily he wore the snappy uniform and the pilot’s wings of the AAF.
“He was one of the few Asians to become a bomber pilot,” recalls Wong, a fellow collegian. Wong survived 30 missions with the AAF as a navigator with the 401st Bomb Group. “Since the pilot was the captain of the crew, there were many on the selection board who thought Asians would not be good leadership material. Most Asians on combat air crews were navigators, bombardiers or gunners.”
Kenny Kai-Kee, the handsome Chinese college kid and the only son of Lock and Rita Kai-Kee of Oakland, Calif., had grown into manhood with the Army Air Force.
Daylight Bombing
When Kenny received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Force in October 1943, the tide of the Second World War in Western Europe had not yet turned against Nazi Germany. The air offensive conducted by the bombers of the Army Air Force during daylight, in concert with the night bombing campaign by the Royal Air Force against Germany and Italy, is credited with helping to defeat the Axis powers.
The AAF paid a high price for its successes. Losses from all causes totaled 27,694 aircraft, including 8,314 heavy bombers; 1,623 medium and light bombers; and 8,841 fighters destroyed in combat.
The casualties incurred by the strategic bombing campaign over Germany’s industrial heartland were particularly horrific. American military planners had simply assumed that the bombers “would always get through.” AAF brass had further assumed, according to military historian Tami Biddle, that “the speed of bombers such as the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ and its multiple guns would enable bombers to fly in self-defending groups — without long-range fighters to fly alongside as protective escorts.”
The daylight missions by the 8th and 15th Air Forces killed and wounded thousands of men. According to U.S. Air Force Museum historians, total AAF battle casualties were 91,105 personnel — 34,362 killed; 13,708 wounded; and 43,035 missing, captured or interned.
Even when long-range escort fighters using throw-away fuel tanks were introduced in the winter and spring of 1944, the air forces of the United States and Germany were locked in a brutal war of attrition. Given American numerical superiority in aircraft, the resulting degradation of German industrial capacity and Luftwaffe interceptor aircraft had assured effective Allied air supremacy by the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.
Into Austria
The flight of the old and slow bomber, nicknamed “Laura,” took its co-pilot, Kenny Kai-Kee, and his crewmates north from Italy in the middle of summer in 1944. The Laura was part of a 28-plane group from the 32nd Squadron of the 301st Bomb Group (heavy) that had flown without incident across the Alps, and into Austrian airspace on July 26, 1944. The bombers intended to rendezvous with other planes of the 15th Air Force to bomb an aircraft factory complex at Wiener-Neustadt.
Unknown to the bomber group, the 15th Air Force had cancelled the mission and recalled all bombers. The group leader’s plane, however, never received the recall order. Thus, Kenny’s plane and the other ships from the 32nd Squadron flew on toward the heavily defended industrial suburbs of Vienna.
“The 15th Air Force cancelled and recalled the planes,” squadron leader Bob Piper reveals in an e-mail message to Kenny’s cousin a half-century later. “Somehow our group did not get the radio message and we continued on alone. The fighter planes were waiting for us.”
From his station in the middle of the plane’s fuselage, Kenny’s radioman, Bill Brainard, waited for the usual number signal at 11:00 a.m. from the base radio station. At 10:55 a.m., Brainard was scanning the skies from the window when he saw on the horizon dozens of contrails — the strands of vapor left by planes rushing toward the bomber formation. Brainard immediately switched on his plane intercom and called over the system to ask if the pilot had seen approaching group of planes.
“I hope they are our escort,” answered the Laura’s pilot, 2nd Lt. Leo J. McDonald. “They’re late! Everybody, keep your eyes on ‘em.”
Fighter Attack
Brainard, assuming all was in order, switched off his intercom and back to his radio to wait for the base radio signal. Feeling uneasy, Brainard switched back to his intercom to find out what was happening outside. As he did so, he heard through his headphones a gunner’s quiet remarks.
“They look like ME-109s,” a voice said matter-of-factly.
“God damn it, they are 109s!” blared the same voice, and Brainard heard the gunners start firing their Browning .50-caliber, air-cooled machine guns.
According to Piper, approximately 50 Focke-Wulf fighters descended at once on the lumbering flight of American bombers about 50 miles south of the target. The results were horrific to the air crews who had witnessed the carnage.
“They were waiting for us,” Piper recalls in his e-mail message. “The fighters started at the back of the squadron, and worked up to the front. Planes 3 (on my right wing), 5, 6 and 7 (the three trailing ships) went down almost at once. Planes 2 (on my left wing) and 4 (trailing just behind me) were hit. We did not see any of them completely destroyed.”
During the ten-minute attack, the gunners of Piper’s ship, “Miss Tallahassee Lassee,” shot down eight of the FW-190s and damaged a dozen more. The aircrew of Piper’s No. 4 plane destroyed another nine and damaged five of the German planes.
“Twenty-millimeter cannon shells were bursting between the lead squadron and me, a hundred of them, from the rear, right in front of my face,” Piper recounts. “I remember ducking, and then remembering that my seat back included armor plate.”
A few minutes after fighting off the German fighters, Piper’s bomber flew into a cloud. When his ship emerged, bombers 4 and 2 were nowhere in sight. The Miss Tallahassee Lassee, the sole survivor from its squad, flew on for another 20 minutes in the clouds — dropping its bombs at random because of the thick cloud cover and avoiding flak and mid-air collisions with other American bombers — and then rejoined the other survivors of the group for the trip back to Lucera. Piper’s plane had endured the ordeal unscathed. His No. 4 plane, which had returned to base after the fighter attack, was the only other ship from his original seven-plane Diamond formation.
The Laura, co-piloted by Kenny Kai-Kee, was missing.
Death Spiral
The tail gunner on board the leading plane of the bomber group saw Kenny’s ship pull up suddenly from its lower tail-end position to an altitude slightly higher than the lead bomber. When it could ascend no more, the Laura began to roll over and head downward.
On board the Laura, Kenny and his pilot, MacDonald, were coping with the catastrophic damage to their ship. Machine gun or cannon fire from the Luftwaffe planes had torn into the American bomber’s wing, setting on fire its right wing tanks. The ship had started going down in a “right peel.” A ball turret gunner in another plane saw the Laura pass overhead — on fire.
“It appeared as if the pilot pulled it to one side to spare other ships in the formation,” Staff Sgt. Albert Bernard Jr. reported later to the AAF. “157 [Laura’s serial number] was to the rear of us at five o’clock when it dove straight down, spinning as it went down.”
As Kenny and his pilot fought to regain control of their ship, the damaged bomber was seen by witnesses to level off momentarily.
“It pulled out for a moment then continued to dive,” Bernard wrote. “When it was 1,000 yards below us, it blew up. One chute was seen to open.”
Brainard had been firing his machine gun and watching another bomber from its high-right position in the formation fly over Kenny’s plane, missing it by inches and finally going down. Brainard continued firing while clipping on the parachute that he had forgotten to wear.
Ten Minutes
At the moment when the Laura exploded, the sudden lurch of the plane slammed Brainard’s face onto the fuselage floor. Centrifugal forces pinned him there momentarily. When he could move, Brainard pulled himself into a squatting position at the bulkhead door to the bomb bay, looking forward. He could see nothing but sky; the bomb bay had blown away. From his position, Brainard saw the entire front portion of the Laura descending with its full load of bombs, its propellers still spinning. Kenny and the pilot were still strapped into the cockpit, at the controls. The nose of the bomber had been blown out, blowing the bombardier out of the plane without a parachute.
The same opening in the nose allowed the navigator, Thomas J. Steed, to escape. Steed became the last living person to hear Kenny’s voice before the explosion.
“Is everything all right, navigator?” Kenny asked. A second later, the plane was spinning downward, and Steed was trapped at the escape hatch. At about an altitude of 1,000 feet, Steed was able to pull himself out of the plane’s nose and deploy his parachute about 500 feet above the ground.
To be continued …