USS Doris Miller

Who was Doris Miller? The question arises because the Navy has been thinking of naming a new aircraft carrier after Miller but now is reportedly looking at naming the vessel for President Trump. Already 10 of our carriers have been named for presidents. So there’s precedent to putting the 47th president’s name on one of our mighty warships. The idea, according to a report by our Bradley Cortright, would be to name a different warship for Miller. It would be a mistake, though, for the President to step in ahead of Doris Miller. It would be hard, after all, to find a figure quite as compelling as, in Doris “Dorie” Miller, a hero of Pearl Harbor. He was on United States Ship West Virginia as a mess attendant. When Japanese aircraft emerged from the skies, Miller raced to man a machine gun and, though he’d had no training on such automatic weapons, began firing. He downed at least one enemy aircraft.It’s not that Dorie Miller’s heroism has been overlooked. His astounding courage and patriotism caused him to be handed up for the Navy Cross, the second highest award for valor. It was pinned on him by Admiral Nimitz. CNN has reported that the Navy is recommending Miller for America’s highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, though the war department tells The New York Sun that at the moment it has nothing further.It certainly had something to say when it decorated Miller. It cited him for “distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor” on December 7, 1941. “While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety.”Then, the decoration says, Miller “manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.” So famed was his deed that Miller returned to America to, as a Georgia State University website puts it, “publicize war bonds and to generate support for the U.S. war effort. The speeches increased his confidence and led to the bringing about of more opportunities and recognition of Black servicemembers.” Millions of Americans felt Dorie Miller deserved more than the Navy Cross. The only higher decoration is the Medal of Honor. It was campaigned for by the African American press, and a few members of Congress. The Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, once spoke of a “seaman aboard a battleship” who “single-handedly manned a machine gun and blasted an attacking torpedo plane as it leveled against his ship.” Yet no mention of Doris Miller by name.*Sadly, the Georgia State website records, Miller “would not live to see the fruits of what his heroism communicated to American society — an example that helped in the path toward integration of the military in 1948 and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. After his tour in the United States, Miller returned to active duty and was presumed killed in action at the Battle of Makin in the Pacific in November 1943, at the age of 22.”Miller was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously. The vessel that might be named in his honor, USS Doris Miller, is, Georgia State’s bio notes, a “Ford-class supercarrier” under construction at Newport News, Virginia, and is due to be commissioned in 2034. It would be the second ship to bear his name. The first was a destroyer escort.** It would also be “the first carrier to be named in honor of a sailor for actions while serving as an enlisted man in the Navy.”There are dramatizations of Miller’s heroism in two blockbuster movies, “Tora, Tora, Tora” and “Pearl Harbor.” They have inspired millions. The Dorie Miller story is a reminder, at a time when the world may well be gathering for war, that heroes are handed up from all sorts of circumstances. What a sad day it would be were Dorie Miller to be stood aside for anyone who covets the halo of the lowly seaman who sprang from his galley to imperishable glory.________* “Doris Miller: Hero of Pearl Harbor,” by Bill O’Neal. Published in 2007 by Eakin Press, Waco.** The destroyer escort was decommissioned in 1973.

USS Doris Miller

USS Doris Miller

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