Mess Attendant Second Class Dorie Miller moved easily among the officers and men while collecting laundry on the USS West Virginia. He was a sailor in the United States Navy and the keeper of a proud tradition. He was also a negro and the navy liked to keep its negroes in menial positions, below deck and out of sight.

As Miller moved from man to man collecting shirts, shorts, socks and under garments, he must have wondered, at least once, whether he had the ability to serve as a true sailor instead of a glorified washer boy wearing a navy suit. Whether the Navy would “make a man out of him” as Athens native George Hobbs said in a 1999 interview it did to him.

The alarm sounded at 0755 that Sunday morning, “The Japs are attacking us” someone cried. 

Bounding up the stairs, taking them two at a time, Miller soon found himself on the bridge of the ship. Looking out over the waters of Pearl Harbor, he could see Japanese planes attacking from all directions. Looking down, he saw the ship’s captain lying on deck suffering from a painful and fatal wound. With Japanese planes diving close to him and bracking the ship with bombs and torpedoes, Miller soon found himself lying next to a 50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun. 

Having never been trained to fire the gun, or any ship gun for that matter, he nevertheless grabbed the 50-caliber gun and shot down somewhere between two and four Japanese aircraft. When the dust settled and the bombs stopped falling, Pearl Harbor lay in ruin and America was at war. 

Though unwilling to admit it, America also had one of its first heroes of the war in the Pacific — and he was a negro. 

Back home in Athens, Alabama, young men were attending Trinity High School and preparing for war. Many believed the war would provide them with an opportunity to show the mettle of the negro. Furthermore, old timers from World War I told them it was their patriotic duty to defend “our country.” When activist-leaning young negroes pointed out the fallacy of defending a country that treated them as second-class citizens, the old soldiers scoffed at them.          

Afterwards, 45 negroes from Athens, possibly inspired by Miller’s heroics, joined the Navy.

After swearing in, their records show they were trained at Great Lakes Naval Training School. However, in his seminal book, “Soldiers of Freedom,” Kai Wright wrote: “Colored inductees were trained at a segregated camp located inside Great Lakes. Camp Robert Smalls was named after the Black Civil War hero who used trickery to capture the southern vessel Planter and sail the ship out of Charleston and into the waiting arms of the union navy.” 

Most of the Athens volunteers were assigned to domestic ammunition depots, construction projects and as mess attendants on ships. A few —  like Steward’s mate 3rd class George Erskine Hobbs, who served overseas in Guam — were given an opportunity to serve their country at home and overseas. They began to see a change in the American story. 

“I … caught a ship to Guam,” Hobbs said, “They still had enemy snipers in the hills when I got there. They shot at us. We shot back at them. I spent some of my time on a troop ship. When I first started in the navy, black sailors slept downstairs and whites slept upstairs. By the time the war was over, the world had changed and we were all sleeping together.”   

At the end of the war, one of the naval volunteers from Athens, much like Dorie Miller, also became a prestigious American.

Hospital Apprentice First Class Charles Lincoln graduated from Trinity High School in 1941 and was inducted into the United States Navy on July 11, 1944. His service included duty at the United States Naval Hospital, St. Albans, Long Island, New York, and the United States Naval Personnel Center Lido Beach, Long Island, New York. He received an honorable discharge from the Navy on Oct. 30, 1945.

After being discharged, Lincoln became professor of Religion and Life at prestigious Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He also authored 22 books, including “The Black Muslims in America” and “The Avenue Clayton City,” which included references to points of interest in Limestone County. Lincoln became the founding president of the Black Academy of letters and, in 1988, won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Best Southern Fiction for “The Avenue Clayton City.”      

Dorie Miller was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions at Pearl Harbor and he continued to serve his country on Navy ships. On Nov. 24, 1943, while serving on the USS Liscome Bay in the Battle of Makin Island, Miller was killed when his ship was sunk by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine.

— Walker, a retired lieutenant colonel, can be reached at James.Walker@dcs.edu.