Gregg Jones Publishes Latest Work

Gregg Jones, Greenhill Upper School journalism teacher, published his most recent work Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II. The book went on sale on July 23 and was officially released on August 1. He completed a 4,700-mile book launch tour this summer to celebrate the release.

This is the first comprehensive biography of Japanese American World War II hero Ben Kuroki. A Nebraska farm boy who enlisted following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ben overcame bigotry and prejudice to earn a combat role in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He flew thirty missions as a B-24 gunner in Europe and North Africa and returned home a decorated hero in December 1943. While awaiting his next assignment, Ben became the subject of national news coverage focused on his courage, patriotism, and perseverance. He delivered a stirring denunciation of anti-Japanese bigotry in a speech before San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in February 1944 that spurred the Roosevelt Administrations to reconsider its policy of incarcerating more than 110,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent. With the personal approval of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Ben flew twenty-eight missions as a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific. He returned home in the fall of 1945 to more acclaim and used his platform to launch his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour: a seventeen-month, nationwide speaking tour in which he challenged Americans to “win the peace” by addressing socioeconomic and racial inequities at home. Afterward, Ben earned a journalism degree from the University of Nebraska and published and edited weekly newspapers in Nebraska, Idaho, and Michigan before concluding his distinguished career as a news editor in Ventura County, California.

Jones learned of Ben Kuroki’s story in a personal quest to learn about the death of his mother’s oldest brother in World War II. His uncle and Ben were in the same Eighth Air Force bomber group in Europe and they flew many of the same missions; his uncle was killed four weeks before Ben completed his tour in Europe in the fall of 1943.

A long-time investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Gregg Jones covered civil wars and insurgencies in Asia and Latin America, the fall of Asia’s two longest-ruling twentieth-century dictators, and the early months of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. He has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution; he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and the U.K. editions of The Guardian and The Observer. His three previous books received critical acclaim:  Honor in Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; Last Stand at Khe Sanh: The U.S. Marines’ Finest Hour in Vietnam, received the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for distinguished nonfiction; and Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement was praised by The Atlantic as a work of “prodigious, often brave reporting” and “an engrossing and highly informative book.”

Join Gregg Jones at Interabang Books in Dallas for an event for the book at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, August 13. Amanda Bresie Ph.D. '96, Greenhill Upper School history teacher, will moderate a conversation about the book.