Doris Miller and the Crew of USS West Virginia

Outboard at F-6

On the morning of 7 December 1941 the battleships along the southeast shore of Ford Island lay in pairs, bows to the southwest. West Virginia (BB-48) was moored outboard of Tennessee at berth F-6, between the Maryland–Oklahoma pair ahead and Arizona astern. The arrangement decided who would be torpedoed. An inboard ship had another battleship between her and the open anchorage, so Tennessee and Maryland took no torpedoes at all. Every torpedo that struck Oklahoma or West Virginia was one that might otherwise have reached them (Chapter 4).

West Virginia was hit on the port side in the first minutes of the attack, as Oklahoma was. Her torpedo count grew as the damage was surveyed: five, then six, and finally seven in the Naval History and Heritage Command’s ship history. Cressman and Wenger describe six hits on her port side and a seventh that blew off her rudder; the National Park Service gives six torpedoes and two bombs. Two of the high-level bombers’ armor-piercing bombs also hit her. One wrecked the port casemates and collapsed the deck into the galley, where fires set off ready-service ammunition; the other went through a turret roof without exploding, but burning aviation fuel from the wrecked floatplane on the catapult above it did the damage (DANFS, “West Virginia II”).

The counterflood

Oklahoma, torpedoed in the same minutes, rolled over in eight to ten minutes. West Virginia did not, and the difference was a decision made by one officer. Lt. Claude V. Ricketts, the assistant fire control officer, had some training in damage control. He saw the list developing and had compartments on the starboard side flooded to bring the ship back toward an even keel. The NHHC credits his “prompt action” with saving her from Oklahoma’s fate. Instead of turning over, West Virginia settled to the bottom in about 40 feet of water, upright, and wedged Tennessee against her quays. Ricketts had enlisted as a seaman before entering the Naval Academy; he rose to four-star rank and became Vice Chief of Naval Operations.

Settling upright meant that men could get off her, and that she could be saved. It did not end her ordeal. Her fires burned through the day and night. Volunteers went back aboard after the first order to abandon ship to fight them, and the garbage lighter YG-17 stayed alongside pumping water while ammunition exploded on deck. The flames were out by the afternoon of 8 December. Boats from every ship that could launch them worked through the burning oil around her, pulling men from the water.

The captain on the bridge

Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion, a Utahan born in 1887 who had taken command of West Virginia in 1941, reached his bridge early in the attack. When a bomb burst on the center gun of Tennessee’s No. 2 turret, fragments swept across to West Virginia, and one tore into his abdomen. The wound was mortal, and he knew it. He kept asking for reports and giving orders as his officers tried to shelter him, protested being carried from the bridge, and died before the ship was abandoned. His posthumous Medal of Honor citation records his “conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage, and complete disregard of his own life” (Chapter 7).

Doris Miller

One of the men who came to Bennion’s side was Mess Attendant Second Class Doris Miller, 22, of Waco, Texas, who had enlisted at Dallas in September 1939. The messman branch was then the only part of the Navy open to Black enlistees; its men cooked, served officers’ meals and cleaned. When the attack began Miller’s own battle station was wrecked, and he was ordered to the bridge to help with the captain. He helped move Bennion to a more sheltered place. Afterward he manned a .50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun he had not been trained to use, firing “for about fifteen minutes,” in his words, until the ammunition ran out and the order came to abandon ship (NHHC, “Doris Miller”).

The Navy did not at first name him. The NAACP asked President Roosevelt to decorate the unidentified Black sailor, and once Miller was identified in March 1942, bills were introduced in Congress to award him the Medal of Honor. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox commended him on 1 April and advised against the higher award. Roosevelt approved the Navy Cross on 11 May, and on 27 May 1942 Adm. Chester W. Nimitz pinned it on Miller on the flight deck of the carrier Enterprise at Pearl Harbor. It was the first Navy Cross awarded to an African American.

The record of what Miller did is strong enough without embellishment, and the Navy’s own historians have said so. The NHHC calls the award controversial and the product of outside political pressure, and it cautions that the number of planes Miller shot down “has been embellished over time” and cannot be confirmed. Miller said only that he thought he got one (NHHC, H-Gram 001-3). The citation does not depend on a tally. It honors a man assigned to service work who took on rescue and combat when his ship needed them.

Miller’s story belongs beside the damaged ships because it shows the people inside the disaster, and the limits the Navy placed on some of them. In April 1942, while his case was before the public, the Navy announced that it would begin accepting Black volunteers for general service ratings that June, though it kept them in segregated units and the messman branch remained. His life connects the morning of Pearl Harbor to the rest of the Pacific war and to a longer argument about who could serve, who could fight and who would be recognized for it.

While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing … later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.

Afterward

Miller went back to sea. He was serving in the escort carrier Liscome Bay when a Japanese submarine sank her off the Gilbert Islands on 24 November 1943, and he was among the hundreds of her crew who were lost. The Navy later named a frigate, USS Miller, for him, and in 2020 it named a future aircraft carrier, Doris Miller (CVN-81).

West Virginia was raised. When salvage crews pumped her out in 1942 they found the bodies of 70 men who had been trapped below, among them three in a storeroom who had lived for days after the attack. She was refloated in May 1942, entered dry dock on 9 June, and was rebuilt almost from the keel up. On 25 October 1944 she was in the battle line that fired on the Japanese battleships at Surigao Strait, one of five Pearl Harbor battleships there, and in September 1945 she was in Tokyo Bay for the surrender (Chapter 9). Her dead of 7 December are among the names on the Remembrance Circle at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.

The insignia, rendered

Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The Navy did not issue shoulder insignia to ships’ companies in 1941; the drawings borrow a generic anchor.

Timeline

1. September 1939Doris Miller, of Waco, Texas, enlists at Dallas; the messman branch is the only rating open to him.
2. 7 Dec 1941, about 0755Torpedo planes run in on Battleship Row; West Virginia is hit on the port side in the first minutes.
3. 7 Dec, first waveLt. Claude Ricketts orders counterflooding; the ship settles upright in about 40 feet of water.
4. 7 Dec, first waveCapt. Bennion is mortally wounded by a fragment from a bomb that hit Tennessee.
5. 7 Dec, morningMiller helps move the captain, then fires a .50-caliber machine gun until ordered to abandon ship.
6. 8 December 1941West Virginia’s fires are out by the afternoon.
7. 27 May 1942Nimitz presents the Navy Cross to Miller aboard Enterprise, the first to an African American.
8. May–June 1942West Virginia is refloated and enters dry dock on 9 June.
9. 24 November 1943Miller is lost with the escort carrier Liscome Bay off the Gilberts.
10. 25 October 1944The rebuilt West Virginia fires on the Japanese battle line at Surigao Strait.

People of the ship

Read the full story

• Chapter 4: Battleship Row: The First Wave, 0755 to 0825
• Chapter 7: Fifteen Medals of Honor: Courage, Rescue and the Men Inside the Oklahoma
• Chapter 9: Raising the Fleet and the Reckoning
• Doris Miller in the Pearl Harbor collection
• The Pearl Harbor collection and harbor atlas

By the numbers

USS West Virginia and Doris Miller by the numbers

106of West Virginia’s crew killed on 7 December, by the NPS count (NHHC: 105)

7torpedo hits in the Navy’s final count, with two armor-piercing bombs

~40 ftof water in which she settled upright instead of capsizing

8–10minutes it took Oklahoma, torpedoed in the same minutes, to roll over

~15minutes Doris Miller fired a machine gun he had never been trained to use

1stNavy Cross awarded to an African American, 27 May 1942

How many torpedoes? The count grew

Torpedo hits on West Virginia as recorded by different sources; the two bomb hits are not in dispute

Early damage survey

5

National Park Service

6 torpedoes

Cressman and Wenger

6 on the port side + 1 at the rudder

NHHC ship history (final count)

7

Armor-piercing bombs (all sources)

2

Source: Naval History and Heritage Command, DANFS, “West Virginia II”; National Park Service, “Battleship Row”; Cressman and Wenger, Infamous Day

The men of West Virginia

Her dead of 7 December, and those found when she was raised in 1942

Killed, 7 December 1941 (NPS)

106

Bodies found below decks during salvage

70

Men in a storeroom who lived for days after the attack

3

Source: National Park Service; Naval History and Heritage Command; Homer N. Wallin, Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal (1968)

In pictures

More photographs

In the art of World War II

Insignia, posters and art

December 7th — Remember! Above and Beyond the Call of Duty The Moment Arizona Blew Up, from Above Battleship Row Three Days Later Ship's Search Lights, Pearl Harbor Avenge December 7 Remember Pearl Harbor. Work – Fight – Sacrifice

Explore the Art of World War II →

Sources

• Naval History and Heritage Command, “Doris Miller” (biography and Navy Cross citation); “Loss of Cook 3rd Class Doris Miller”; H-Gram 001-3 and H-Gram 066.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: “West Virginia II” and “Tennessee V”; ship action reports, Pearl Harbor attack.
• Robert J. Cressman and J. Michael Wenger, Infamous Day: Marines at Pearl Harbor; National Park Service, “Battleship Row,” Pearl Harbor National Memorial.
• Congressional Medal of Honor Society, citation for Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion; Library of Congress, photograph of Nimitz presenting the Navy Cross, 27 May 1942.
• Homer N. Wallin, Pearl Harbor: Why, How, Fleet Salvage and Final Appraisal (Naval History Division, 1968); Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. III.