56The Sailor at the Bow

Doris Miller was born near Waco in October 1919, the third of four sons of sharecroppers, and given a girl's name because his parents were expecting a girl. He enlisted in 1939 into the only branch of the Navy that would take him — the segregated messman branch — and was assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia as a mess attendant. On the morning of 7 December 1941 he was collecting the ship's laundry.

When the attack began, the magazine he was supposed to report to had already been destroyed. He went up instead. He helped carry his mortally wounded captain off the bridge, and then he manned a .50-calibre anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to fire — Black sailors were not permitted weapons training — and he fired it until the ammunition ran out and he was ordered off the ship. Admiral Chester Nimitz pinned the Navy Cross on him aboard the USS Enterprise on 27 May 1942. He was the first African American to receive it.

You will read elsewhere that he shot down two planes, or four, or six. The Handbook of Texas calls those accounts almost certainly apocryphal, and the citation cast into the paving here — read it, it is worth the minute — claims no number at all. Miller himself said he thought he might have hit one. He did not need the number. He is remembered for going toward the guns.

He was promoted to cook third class and sent to the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay. On 24 November 1943 a Japanese torpedo found her near Makin in the Gilbert Islands and she went down with 644 men aboard, Miller among them. He was twenty-four. The memorial's two long slanted walls are the hull of a ship — an abstraction of the West Virginia herself. The steel sculpture folded along them is titled Many Sailors Make A Ship, and the plaque says what it is for: the 2,403 service members killed at Pearl Harbor. Eddie Dixon's nine-foot bronze of Miller stands where the bow would be, facing the river he grew up beside.