The Tragedy Of Pearl Harbor

            
             If you didn't have Leo and Kate and you didn't have their love story, it would just be a sinking ship. Tora Tora Tora attempted to do this. And they did this at that time on a big scale, but it was more like a docudrama. You weren't identifying with any one person.
             After a boyhood of farming and football in Waco, Texas, Doris "Dorie" Miller enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1939. He was 19 and wanted to see the world and earn some money to send home.Miller joined the Navy as a mess attendant, third class, but was soon promoted to second class, then first class, and finally to ship's cook, third class. "You have to understand that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president in 1932, he opened up the Navy again to blacks, but in one area only; they were called mess attendants, stewards, and cooks," says Clark Simmons, who was a mess attendant on the U.S.S. Utah during the Pearl Harbor attack. "The Navy was so structured that if you were black, this was what they had you do in the Navy--you only could be a servant.".
             After training in Norfolk, Virginia, and serving a stint on the ammunition ship Pyro, Miller was assigned to the battleship West Virginia in 1940. He soon won renown as the best heavyweight boxer onboard. With the exception of a training stay at Secondary Battery Gunnery School, Miller would remain on the West Virginia until December 7, 1941, when the ship was in port at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
             The morning of the Japanese raid, Miller was doing laundry rounds when the call to battle stations went out. He rushed to his station, an antiaircraft-battery magazine. (It was common for everyone, even a cook, to have an assigned combat task.) Seeing the magazine damaged by torpedo fire, he went above decks to help the wounded to safety.
             Word came that "the captain and the executive officer, the "XO," were on the bridge and they both were injured," says Simmons. "So Dorie Miller went up and physically picked up the captain and brought him down to the first aid station.