0755, Sunday: Battleship Row
A quiet morning
It was a Sunday. At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on 7 December 1941, the first wave of Japanese aircraft attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Along the southeast side of Ford Island, the battleships lay moored in a line that came to be called Battleship Row.
By the end of the day, according to the National Park Service, 2,390 Americans had lost their lives, service members and civilians together. On USS Arizona alone, 1,177 service members died. On 7 December 2026 it will be 85 years.
The numbers matter, but they can hide the people. Records from that morning are full of men who did their duty in circumstances nobody had trained them for.
The mess attendant on West Virginia
Doris Miller was a Mess Attendant Second Class aboard the battleship West Virginia. In the Navy of 1941, that rating meant cooking, serving and cleaning. Black sailors were largely restricted to it, and it included no gunnery training.
When the attack came, Miller went to help. He helped carry the ship's mortally wounded commanding officer, Captain Mervyn S. Bennion, to a place of greater safety. Then, as the Navy's own account records, he loaded and fired an anti-aircraft machine gun, a weapon he had never been trained to operate.
In late May 1942, aboard Enterprise at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz presented Miller with the Navy Cross. Miller did not survive the war. He was serving in the escort carrier Liscome Bay when she was torpedoed near Makin Atoll on 24 November 1943, and he was lost with 645 of his shipmates.
The Navy has honored his name twice: the frigate USS Miller, and the future aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller (CVN-81), named on 20 January 2020. She is the first aircraft carrier named for an African American and the first named for an enlisted sailor.
The captain who would not leave the bridge
Captain Bennion was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. His citation, a public U.S. government document, records that "after being mortally wounded, Capt. Bennion evidenced apparent concern only in fighting and saving his ship, and strongly protested against being carried from the bridge."
The boatswain on Nevada
Further along the row, the battleship Nevada was trying to get underway. Chief Boatswain Edwin J. Hill led his line-handling party ashore to cast off her lines in the middle of the bombing and strafing, then swam back to his ship. His Medal of Honor citation records that he was later "blown overboard and killed by the explosion of several bombs" while trying to let go the anchors on the forecastle.
What we carry from that morning
Most of the men on Battleship Row that day were young. Many had joined the Navy for a steady job and a way to see the world. Some were cooks, some were officers, some were seamen a few months out of training. When the moment came, many of them chose to stay at their stations and help one another.
Eighty-five years on, the right way to mark the day is to learn their names, read their citations, and tell the story as it actually happened.
Our Seven December collection is made to keep that morning in view.
Harborborne is an independent brand and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.
