Dorie Miller –– Looking Back

by Bill Doughty––

In the wake of news that the U.S. Navy is considering renaming the upcoming aircraft carrier CVN-81 from "USS Doris 'Dorie' Miller" to "USS Donald J. Trump," we looked back at our previous Navy Reads posts mentioning Miller, his heroism at Pearl Harbor, and his ongoing legacy.

Here are excerpts from those posts:

Courage of a King and a Miller –– JANUARY 20, 2020

In a review of Barbara Darling-Smith's "Courage" (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), we focused on one of the Navy’s core values and necessary virtues. For example:

Dorie Miller showed “The virtues of an enlisted Sailor who assessed danger in the attack on Pearl Harbor and took matters into his own hands aboard USS West Virginia (BB 48). His heroism is remembered today as the Navy names a future aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller (CVN 81). Doris ‘Dorie’ Miller was killed at sea during World War II.”

His courageous virtues lived on to inspire others.

“After the war, Dorie Miller was a key influence to Americans who showed courage during the fight for Civil Rights Movement, a movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Examples of courage are not restricted to the battlefield.”

PEARL HARBOR (Jan. 20, 2020) The Honorable Eddie Bernice-Johnson, United States representative from the 30th district of Texas, left, speaks at the unveiling of the new Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller (CVN 81) at a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration event on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam as Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly look on. This will be the second ship named in honor of Miller, and the first aircraft carrier ever named for an African American and an enlisted Sailor. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication 2nd Class Justin R. Pacheco)

A Groundbreaking 'Double Victory' – NMAAHC –– FEBRUARY 12, 2020

Six years ago we reviewed NMAAHC founding director Lonnie Bunch III’s, "A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump" (Smithsonian Books, 2019).

(U.S. Navy photo by Arif Patani)

The museum opened during President Trump’s first term with an exhibit featuring Dorie Miller’s heroism in WWII.

In his book Bunch “conveys humility about what the museum can mean for all Americans.”

"Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century," he writes. 

"... But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education. Since its opening, NMAAHC has become a site where rational healing and reconciliation are possible.”

During a tour of the museum in 2017 with Director Bunch, President Trump paused at an exhibit showing the Dutch role in the transatlantic slave trade; Trump said to Bunch, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”

Visitors view an exhibit about the legacy of Mess Attendant Doris “Dorie” Miller at the Smithsonian NMAAHC, Nov. 1, 2016. Adm. Nimitz presented Miller with the Navy Cross for his extraordinary courage during the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (U.S. Navy photo by Arif Patani)

Andrew Young ‘An Easy Burden’ –– OCTOBER 17, 2025

We started our post about Andrew Young with this: “He was a lieutenant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, he was by his side not only in life but also at King’s death at the hands of an assassin.”

Young lived a life of service, and he was deeply devoted to human rights.

He credited the military for its role historically to promote civil rights.

“Andrew Young shows how the American civil rights movement arose largely as a result of World War II and the resultant Marshall Plan. The military provided proof and a blueprint for the success of diversity, inclusion, meritocracy, and equality."

Young writes about former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the struggle to “redeem the soul of America.” He shows how Dorie Miller and other black heroes inspired change. Young writes:

“That soul we saw less in America's actions than in its ideals: freedom, equality, justice. While we endured segregation, we knew that America had shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its sons and daughters in a war that ended slavery. We knew that America had risen up out of the depths of a Great Depression to defeat fascism. We had cheered the exploits of Dorie Miller and the Tuskegee Airmen and other colored soldiers who refused to let racial segregation prevent them from offering their lives for freedom and for America, and we were inspired by their example. Dorie Miller was told he could only be a cook's helper, but he dared to believe he could shoot down enemy aircraft [at Pearl Harbor]. The Tuskegee Airmen dared to believe black men could fly. 

We were thought to be naive, but in truth we were visionary. We dared to believe that America could be healed of the gangrene of racism. We saw America as we could become, not just as we were.”

Andrew Young celebrates black history with First Army, Fort Gillem, Georgia, in 2009 (Gayle Johnson, Public Affairs Office)

Stavridis on Crucial Crucible of Decision –– NOVEMBER 1, 2022

Four years ago, we reviewed one of our favorite authors, and one of his books of inspiration for warfighters.

“Admiral James Stavridis (USN, Ret.) offers key lessons for Sailors and Marines in ‘To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision’ (Penguin Press, 2022). Most of the stories will be familiar to readers of Stavridis or his recommended reading list

Our main focus the time was on Captain Brett Crozier, the heroic Navy Captain who was scapegoated for failures to address the dangers of COVID, early in the pandemic.

Stavridis’s book also explores weighty decisions made by Capt. John Paul Jones, Lt. Stephen Decatur, Rear Adm. David Farragut, Commodore George Dewey, Cook Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller, Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, Lt. Cdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, Rear Adm. Michelle Howard, and Cdr. Ernest Evans.

“Each story methodically evaluates the circumstances, personnel, and ramifications of decisions made in moments of often extreme stress, with lives on the line, and when there appears to be no perfect response.”

Stavridis writes with his usual panache and passion. His book is accessible to any deckplate Sailor or rifleman Marine, who will be inspired by the courage and grit of Dorie Miller at Pearl Harbor. 

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 4, Unity –– FEBRUARY 24, 2023

A “statesman” is defined as “a wise, skilled, and respected political leader who guides a government and works for the public good instead of seeking personal power.”

Frederick Douglass, an unofficial advisor to President Abraham Lincoln, was himself one of our nation's greatest statesmen.

In “Douglass: Speeches & Writings” by Frederick Douglass (edited by David W. Blight, Library of America, 2022), the statesman examines American ideals, leaders, and the reality of caste over the concept of “race.”

In our Navy Reads post we mention the future USS Doris Miller (CVN 81) –– the first aircraft carrier named for an enlisted Sailor and the first named for an African American –– is expected to be launched “90 years after Miller’s heroic action at Pearl Harbor.”

We write, “Two hundred years prior to CVN 81’s expected launch, Frederick Douglass was still enslaved in Maryland but would soon escape in 1838 to the North in a sailor’s uniform.”

The Nimitz We Need Now –– MAY 14, 2023

We always admire the works of Clyde Symonds, author of “Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay” (Oxford University Press, 2022).

In this great biography, “We get a gripping recounting of the intelligence preparations, training challenges, command tensions, and communications frustrations in the early 1940s. We read about Nimitz’s quiet 'anxiety' in the lead-up to the Battle of Midway, for example, where Nimitz decided to trust Rochefort’s intelligence and ambush the then-powerful Imperial Japanese Navy. ‘It is difficult in hindsight to appreciation the boldness of that decision,’ Symonds writes."

Nimitz was the right leader at the right time. He was able to do good planning, build trust with people, and care for and about the Sailors and Marines he sent into harm’s way.

“Of course, like all humans, Nimitz was not a perfect person. Symonds calls the Texas hill country admiral ‘a product of his time and his culture’ in that he avoided African American service members (with the notable exception of Messman Doris ‘Dorie’ Miller, to whom Nimitz presented the Navy Cross for December 7 heroism). In 1943 there were no black officers in the Navy. And Nimitz also wanted no part in having women service members on his staff, disallowing WAVES from serving in the Pacific.”

Nimitz hailed from Fredericksburg, Texas. Miller was born in Waco, Texas, and enlisted in the Navy in Dallas in 1939. Nimitz presented his fellow Texan with the Navy Cross in 1942.

Miller receives the Navy Cross from Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, at an awards ceremony held on the flight deck of USS Enterprise (CV-6) at Pearl Harbor, 27 May 1942. The medal was awarded for heroism on board USS West Virginia (BB-48) during the Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941. (U.S. Navy)

Yesterday, the Waco FOX News affiliate FOX-44 reported on the public backlash against stripping Miller’s name from CVN-81 and replacing it with Trump’s name. “U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain [and Navy fighter pilot and astronaut], said Miller’s name should remain on the aircraft carrier and argued that his actions at Pearl Harbor warrant the honor,” FOX-44 reported.

In a social media post, Kelly wrote that Miller's Pearl Harbor bravery is legendary and argued the ship "shouldn't be renamed at all, let alone for Donald Trump, who has denigrated servicemembers like Dorie Miller who have paid the ultimate price.” During the Vietnam War, Trump famously avoided the draft and military service with five deferments, including one for bone spurs.

The Navy has not yet made a final decision about renaming the Gerald Ford Class aircraft carrier (CVN-81).

‘Zookeeper’s Wife’ and Shipwrecked Souls

Review by Bill Doughty––

In a village a circus lion suddenly died…

“The circus director asked a poor old Jewish man if he would pretend to be the lion, and the man agreed since he needed the money. The director said: ‘All you have to do is wear the lion’s fur and sit in the cage, and people will believe you’re a lion.’ And so the man did, muttering to himself, ‘What strange jobs I’ve had in my life,’ when his thoughts were interrupted by a noise. He turned just in time to see another lion creeping into his cage and fixing him with a hungry stare. Trembling, cowering, not knowing how to behave himself, the man did the only thing he could think of –– vociferously chant a Hebrew prayer. No sooner had he uttered the first desperate words, Shema Yisroel (Hear O Israel) … than the other lion lined in with adonai elohenu (The Lord our God), and the two would-be lions finished the prayer together.”

Zookeeper Jan Żabiński and real lion.

It’s an old folk story that Diane Ackerman heard as a young girl and shares in an introductory Author’s Note. And it’s a tale that became “oddly relevant” to the true story she tells in her amazing book, where art and storytelling come alive to become history.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story” (W. W. Norton,  2007) is based on a true story in which brave people in Poland risked everything to help protect Polish Jews in World War II from the Nazis and the Holocaust. Like the lion-man in the folk story, “shipwrecked souls” eventually make their way to a zoo outside Warsaw for sanctuary.

And regarding relevance: Though the book was written in 2007 –– one year before Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, seven years before he invaded Crimea, and 15 years before he began waging war in Ukraine –– readers in 2022 will likely think of Poland's role in Putin's current war in Ukraine as they read about what happened in Warsaw eight decades ago.

At first Ackerman lulls readers with her depiction of an idyllic human-animal bond, one of understanding, love, and respect for life. Innocence. Nature. Nurture. Peace. The pursuit of happiness in pre-war Warsaw. Ackerman beautifully depicts that world before the storm clouds of war start to destroy the way of life of the Żabiński family.

Antonina and family pet badger

Antonina Żabiński is the Zookeeper’s wife and a hero of this tale along with her husband, Jan, who served secretly with the Polish Underground to fight the Nazis. Ackerman dedicated the book “For Antonina and her family, human and animal.” The Żabiński matriarch helps manage the improbable zoo as well as schemes to hide and feed Jews they call “Guests.”

With the arrival of the Nazis, the sometimes-normal-occasional-calm of the zoo is shattered. Fascism brings iron-fisted and racist “law and order.” The Nazis build walls and deny freedom based on differences of religion and ethnicity. Casual cruelty leads inexorably to calculated genocide.

Ackerman depicts the banal evil of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Eugene Fischer, and others who valued the lives of other animals over the humans they condemned to camps, ovens, and mass graves.

Ackerman writes in a “narrative history” style. Her embellishments are sometimes well beyond David McCullough’s interpretive style. Yet, like McCullough, she imparts cold hard history. In "The Zookeeper's Wife" she builds her storytelling around actual facts published or contained in interviews, news stories, and diaries, including the diary of Antonina.

“‘How can this barbarity be happening in the twentieth century?!!!!!!’ Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points.” Antonina saw the war as a return to the Dark Ages. She and her family counter their horrors with efforts to help those who were targeted by the Nazis for destruction. Along with housing and feeding castaways, the Żabińskis participated in a plot to feed Jewish residents in the Ghetto.

The Warsaw zoo helped make animal-human connections in 1938, before the arrival of the Nazis.

After most of the animals in their zoo were removed, released, or killed by the Nazis, the Żabińskis turned their enterprise into a pig farm. They secretly transported meat into the Ghetto. “If it felt a little off-color giving Jews pork, a taboo food, dietary laws had long since been waived, and everyone was grateful for protein, a scarce gift on either side of the wall,” Ackerman observes.

Such humanism and such audacity –– helping targeted victims of the Nazis –– was extremely risky.

“Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed ‘collective responsibility.’ Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.”

Diane Ackerman

Ackerman, author of “The Whale by Moonlight,” “Natural History of the Senses,” and “Dawn Light,” writes with heartbreaking brilliance of “The unbearable weight of Ghetto life.” Not surprisingly, her words include these metaphors of nature and the sea.

“During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weatherbeaten, ‘like shipwrecked souls,’ Antonina wrote in her diary. ‘We felt that our house wasn’t a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo’s submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port.’ Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and ‘casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,’ needing more than refuge. ‘They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,’ while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.”

Navy readers and their families who choose to read this book will identify with the core values of the Żabiński family: honor, courage, and commitment.

There is a familiar ethos in the character of the men, women, and children who participated in rescuing victims of the Nazis. Ackerman writes:

“Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and usually flexible –– able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment’s notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn’t regard themselves as heroic. Typically, one would say, as Jan did: ‘I only did my duty –– if you can save somebody’s life, it’s your duty to try.’ Or: ‘We did it because it was the right thing to do.'"

Antonina had to deal with Nazis who invaded her home and threatened her; then she had to confront Russians who came to liberate Poland but tried to take what wasn’t theirs. Her inner strength, voice, and instincts proved to be all too powerful.

This is another treasured find I discovered in a used book store. It is also a book that gives a hopeful view of the human spirit, strength in resilience, and the power of righteousness in time of war.

Ackerman and W. W. Norton include comprehensive “details,” a bibliography, and index. The paperback version I scored comes with a “reading group guide” and list of other books with similar group guides. Blurbs are from an impressive list of reviewers, with standouts for me by Dava Sobel (“Longitude”), Jared Diamond (“Guns, Germs, and Steel”), and Donna Seaman of Los Angeles Times.

The Żabińskis in Warsaw, Poland, saved 300 Jews.

As of the autumn of 2022, Poland has accepted at least 1.4 million refugees who fled Ukraine due to Putin’s war and campaign of terrorism against civilians. This week, during a Russian missile onslaught against Ukraine, a Ukrainian defensive missile exploded on a grain farm in the rural village of Przewodow, five miles within Poland's border, killing two people. NATO nations, including the United States, met to consider additional options to deal with Russia’s continued aggression.

Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)