War between the United States and the Empire of Japan drew the children of the Kim and Ahn families into the nation’s armed forces. The sons and daughters of the late Kim Chang Sei and Ahn Chang Ho stepped forward to serve in the defense of the country that their families had chosen to make theirs. U.S. citizens by birth, James Kim and Susan, Philip, and Ralph Ahn each solidified their status as Americans through their wartime service.
Susan Ahn enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and became the service’s first Asian-American woman, then its first Asian-American female officer. Commissioned as an officer in the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1943, she served initially as a gunnery instructor, training sailors and naval aviators to operate machine guns. She then became an intelligence officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
After the war she married Francis Cuddy, a Navy Chief Petty Officer, and became a civilian intelligence analyst and section chief at the newly created National Security Agency (NSA). Recognized as a significant figure in the histories of the U.S. Navy and the NSA, Susan Ahn Cuddy passed away at the age of 100 in 2015.
Philip Ahn, a pioneering Asian-American actor who had starred in two movies with Anna May Wong in the 1930s, enlisted in the Army. After serving as a performer in the Special Services, the organization that entertained Army personnel, he was released from military service and returned to acting in Hollywood movies.
After the war he had a lengthy movie and TV career that lasted into the 1970s, culminating in the role of Master Kan in the TV series Kung Fu from 1972 to 1975. He passed away in 1978 and in 1984 received the posthumous honor of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6211 Hollywood Boulevard.
Coincidentally, rock stars Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love rented Philip Ahn’s former house at 6881 Alta Loma Terrace in Los Angeles in 1992-93, a period when their daughter Frances Bean Cobain was born.
Ralph Ahn, upon turning 18 in 1944, enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After the war he also became an actor. His movie and TV career continued into his nineties to 2018. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95.
James Kim had enlisted in the Army in September 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He would end the war as an officer, decorated for his actions in combat as an infantry platoon leader. Each of those milestones came after a struggle to overcome great obstacles in his path forward.
Sent from Shanghai to Los Angeles to live with the Ahns in 1937, James and his sister Betty did not get along with their relatives, whom they had not seen for more than a decade. Betty returned to Shanghai in 1939 after James ran away and dropped out of school in 1938, to live on his own at the age of only 16. He found a place to live by working as a live-in servant for a wealthy family in Beverly Hills, which enabled him to finish high school at Beverly Hills High School in 1940.
James volunteered for the Army after spending the summer of 1941 working as a firefighter in northern California with the California Division of Forestry. Inducted on September 11, 1941 and sent to Camp Roberts for training, he found himself dumped into a pool of Japanese-American soldiers for dismissal from the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Koreans were considered to be Japanese by the State Department and War Department in Washington, being subjects of the Empire of Japan, so James faced the two-fold injustice of being mistakenly classified as Japanese and therefore subject to a presumption of disloyalty.
How James Kim overcame this obstacle in his path to distinguishing himself during the Second World War will be the subject of Chapter 4 of Victory in Shanghai, “James Kim, American Soldier”.
This series previews my upcoming book Victory in Shanghai: A Korean American Family’s Journey to the CIA and the Army Special Forces, whose publication is expected by June 1, 2025. You can pre-order it now through Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, at this link, or through your favorite local independent bookseller.
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