Doris "Dorie" Miller

October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943

Navy cook who manned an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor and became the first African American awarded the Navy Cross.

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Doris Miller, known to everyone as Dorie, was born on October 12, 1919, on a farm near Waco, Texas, the son of Black sharecroppers. He grew up doing hard field work, played fullback on his high school football team, and was a big, strong young man looking for a way out of poverty. In 1939 he enlisted in the United States Navy. But the Navy of that era was rigidly segregated, and it decided in advance what a Black sailor was allowed to become. No matter his talent, Miller could serve only as a Mess Attendant, cooking meals, washing dishes, and doing laundry for white officers. Black sailors were barred from gunnery, navigation, and command; the country asked them to serve while telling them they were not fit to fight. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Miller was collecting laundry aboard the battleship USS West Virginia when Japanese planes roared over Pearl Harbor, dragging the United States into World War II. As torpedoes tore into the ship, Miller rushed up to the deck amid fire and explosions. He first carried wounded sailors to safety, among them the ship's captain, who was mortally wounded, and then he did something he had never been trained or permitted to do: he took hold of an unmanned .50-caliber anti-aircraft machine gun and opened fire on the attacking planes. A cook who had never been taught to use the weapon fired it until the ammunition ran out and he was ordered to abandon the sinking ship. 'It wasn't hard,' he said later. 'I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine.' At first the Navy would not even release his name, identifying the hero only as an unnamed Black messman; the Black press and civil rights groups pressed until his identity and his deed became known nationwide. The pressure worked. In May 1942, aboard a carrier at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester Nimitz personally pinned the Navy Cross, the Navy's second-highest award for valor, on Dorie Miller, making him the first African American ever to receive it. His face soon appeared on a famous recruiting poster, and he became a powerful symbol for Americans who asked how a nation could accept a Black man's courage in battle while denying him equal rights and equal opportunity at home. Miller returned to sea duty, still classified as a cook because the Navy's rules had not changed. On November 24, 1943, he was serving aboard the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay near the Gilbert Islands when a Japanese submarine's torpedo struck the ship, detonating its bomb magazine. The carrier sank within minutes, and Miller was among the more than 640 men killed. He was twenty-four years old. Dorie Miller's legacy is both an inspiration and an honest indictment of his times. His bravery at Pearl Harbor helped fuel the wartime 'Double V' campaign, victory against fascism abroad and victory against racism at home, and pointed toward the fights that fellow Black servicemembers like the Tuskegee Airmen and their commander Benjamin O. Davis Jr. were waging to break the color barrier in the armed forces, and toward the broader civil rights movement that followed the war. The military he served would not be desegregated until 1948, years after his death. In 2020 the Navy announced that a new aircraft carrier, the future USS Doris Miller (CVN-81), would be named in his honor, the first carrier ever named for an African American and for an enlisted sailor, so that the cook who dared to fight will sail on in the fleet that once told him he could not.

Doris "Dorie" Miller

Further reading