USS West Virginia

We saw it.

With those Americans who died on the battleship Arizona and Nevada and West Virginia and California and Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Maryland and Oklahoma.

On those battleships and many other aircraft and warships, lives were lost because leaders failed to act.

And the same thing happened on September 11th, 2001.

We are the descendants of the men who fought and died on the beaches of Normandy, okay? We are the rightful children of the GIs in Vietnam who went into the La Drain Valley with guns blazing, helicopter blowin' smoke, knowing they might die because there was a wounded brother behind and they weren't gonna leave him there.

We are the descendants of the men like my grandfather who stood on the decks of the USS West Virginia on December 7th, 1941 as that ship was bombed out from under him and as he sank into a water that was on fire from the oil slicks on there, all of his brothers and he started grabbing at whatever they could find because their guns weren't working anymore and they had nothing to fight back with but there was a second round of suicide bombers coming in and they started grabbing whatever they could find and they started throwing it in the sky because this much This much they knew.

You don't go down without a fight.

That is the heart of freedom, my friends.

Which brings us right to the morning of December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor.

Miller is 22 years old, serving as a mess attendant second class on the battleship USS West Virginia.

And we have to set the scene here.

The West Virginia was a Colorado-class battleship.

It was a massive floating

fortress.

That's what he's doing when the first torpedo starts smashing into the port side of the hull.

And the physics of a torpedo hit are terrifying.

and later manned and operated a machine gun, .50 caliber, an enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.

Later on, Seaman Miller was awarded two Japanese shoot-downs, maybe more, but there was crossfire going on from the bridge of the West Virginia, December 7th.

I welcome Tom Mowdley because he's introduced to me into a story that begins with Tom's decision as acting Secretary of the Navy to name a Gerald Ford-class supercarrier, believed to be laid down in 26 and at sea trials 29, for Doris Miller.

That was his name, by the way, Doris, the midwife who delivered him, thought he was going to be a girl.