What’s in a Name?
The U.S. Navy’s tradition of carrying on the names of some of its ships has resulted in the name Enterprise being linked to much of the nation’s history, so much so that the name has carried over into American popular culture. When Gene Roddenberry conceived the highly successful television program Star Trek, he chose the name Enterprise for the starship that would travel “where no man has gone before.” The first space shuttle in the NASA space program, several racing yachts, and one of the Goodyear blimps have all been named Enterprise.
There is a story—probably apocryphal—that tells of a Soviet agent overhearing a conversation between two American Sailors during the Cold War, then reporting back to Moscow that the U.S. Navy had developed a new defense system for its aircraft carriers that protected them from incoming missiles. As the story goes, the agent had heard the Americans discussing the “Enterprise’s protective shields.” Of course, the Sailors were referring to television’s starship Enterprise, not the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier!
Other ship names—for example, Wasp, Independence, Constellation, The Sullivans, Bonhomme Richard, and Intrepid, some of which feature in this heritage story—have also appeared and reappeared at critical moments in our past. But sometimes—as with the fourth, fifth, and sixth Enterprises—the roles of these ships do not catch the public’s fancy, nor do they earn much ink in the history books. But with each new incarnation, whether a sailing sloop with an assortment of cannons or a nuclear-powered submarine with ballistic missiles capable of striking virtually anywhere in the world, the mission remains the same: stand ready to protect the nation, by mere presence or by force of arms. It is a legacy that has been handed down from ship to ship, Sailor to Sailor, for more than two centuries, and it will likely continue for centuries to come.
Don’t Tread on Me
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On 31 May 2002, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England directed that until the War on Terrorism is won, a more symbolic flag would replace the Union Jack. A red-and-white-striped flag bearing a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” now flies from the jackstaff of every Navy ship in port. In the words of Secretary England, “The temporary substitution of this Jack represents an historic reminder of the nation’s and Navy’s origin and [its] will to persevere and triumph.”
That flag is an appropriate symbol for the struggle at hand, warning those who would challenge the American ideal and attempt to curtail our liberty that such actions bear consequences similar to those encountered should one step on a rattlesnake.
That flag is also appropriate because of the widespread belief that the same one had been flown by some ships of the fledgling Continental Navy when it first stood up to the might of Great Britain in the American Revolution.
Throughout its history, the U.S. Navy has often faced formidable odds, seemingly down and out at first, but coming back with the ferocity of a rattlesnake strike to ultimately prevail, proving that one should think twice before treading on a rattlesnake or before stepping on the liberty of America.
Weevee
Doris—“Dorie” to his shipmates—Miller had enlisted in the Navy to earn money for his family. The year was 1939, and opportunities were limited for African-Americans (“Negroes” in those days). He became a mess attendant third class, serving in USS Pyro, an ammunition ship, and later transferring to the battleship USS West Virginia—“Weevee” to her crew—at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
A big man who had played fullback on his high school football team in Waco, Texas, Miller also earned the title of heavyweight boxing champion in West Virginia. Because of his obvious physical strength, he was assigned as an ammunition handler in the antiaircraft battery magazine amidships for his battle station.
On the morning of 7 December 1941, Miller crawled out of his rack at 0600 to grab some early breakfast and then attend to his morning duties. Normally, those duties included waking Ensign Edmond Jacoby, but today was Sunday, and the ensign was sleeping in, so Miller went to the junior officer’s wardroom where he had been assigned as a mess attendant. It was quiet in the wardroom—just two officers had shown up for breakfast—so Miller began collecting laundry. He had been sorting among the piles of uniforms for more than an hour when, to his surprise, general quarters was sounded. General quarters drills were usually conducted during weekdays or on an occasional Saturday, but he could not remember ever having one in port on a Sunday.
As he headed along the long passageway leading to his magazine battle station, Miller felt the ship shudder violently and heard men shouting that the Japanese were attacking. The reality hit him like a left hook when he arrived at his battle station to find that it had been destroyed by a torpedo hit. He could feel the ship beginning to list as she took on water. Unsure of where to go or what to do, he was relieved when a chief petty officer told him to carry wounded men to the nearest battle-dressing station. Hefting wounded shipmates onto his broad shoulders, Miller made several trips, wading through water and slipping on oil as he struggled “uphill” along the sloping deck, until Lieutenant Commander Doir Johnson ordered Miller to follow him to the bridge.
The two men dashed up the steep ladders leading to Weevee’s towering bridge. When they stepped out into daylight for the first time, Miller saw Ensign Jacoby, now fully awake, and a number of other officers trying desperately to establish some kind of order in the midst of all the confusion. Miller wondered where the captain was.
Peering out through one of the shattered bridge windows, he saw an unbelievable scene of great chaos and devastation. Japanese aircraft swooped about like a flock of angry birds, darting among the towering pillars of smoke that rose from the decks of stricken ships into the pristine blue of the Hawaiian sky. The harbor water was striped with the wakes of inbound torpedoes and cluttered with struggling Sailors. He saw other men lolling in the water who would struggle no more. Ugly clogs of black oil floated among the huge ships in Battleship Row, some of it burning, some of it waiting to absorb those who had no choice but dive into it as raging fires engulfed their ships. He stared, momentarily mesmerized, as USS Oklahoma—moored directly ahead—listed farther and farther to port until, to his horror, she turned turtle, her glistening, barnacle-encrusted hull suddenly facing the sky. He wondered how many men were now trapped inside the inverted ship.
Looking away from the awful sight, Miller saw his captain and realized why he had not taken charge. Captain Mervyn Bennion was lying across the sill of the signal bridge door on the starboard side. He had been cut down by a jagged piece of shrapnel from an exploding bomb on nearby Tennessee, his abdomen badly torn. It seemed apparent he was not going to survive. Ensign Victor Delano was kneeling near the captain, trying to ease his pain by holding a can of ether to Bennion’s nose, hoping to make him pass out. Despite his pain and the ether, the captain kept asking how the battle was going, what was the status of his ship? Delano lied to his captain, knowing the truth would merely add to the dying man’s misery.
USS West Virginia (“Weevee”) and USS Tennessee after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
Weevee too was perilously close to death. Like Oklahoma, she had been listing heavily to port and might well have suffered the same fate had not the senior gunnery officer, Lieutenant Claude Ricketts, gone to damage control central and taken it upon himself to counter-flood. This caused the big battleship to settle into the mud of the harbor bottom, relatively upright. Ricketts was now on the bridge, and in the words of a witness, “served as a pillar of strength.”
Dorie Miller and several other men moved their captain to a safer spot behind the conning tower. Then Ensign Delano recruited Miller and two other Sailors to man two .50-caliber antiaircraft machine guns forward of the conning tower. Because Negro Sailors were always assigned as ammunition handlers, never gunners, Delano assumed the other two Sailors would do the shooting and Miller would pass them belts of ammunition. But a moment later he discovered that Miller was firing one of the
guns as though he had been doing it his entire life. Whipping the gun about with great agility, he fired hundreds of rounds at the marauding Japanese planes. Miller later said: “It wasn’t hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us.”
By then, most of the battleship that remained above water was engulfed in flames, and much of her hull was filled with water and oil. Captain Bennion had died, and it was apparent that little else could be done for West Virginia. From down in central control the word was passed to abandon ship. The encroaching fires cut off Miller, Delano, Ricketts, and the others on the bridge. Seeing their plight, a seaman from the deck below aimed a fire hose their way and managed to keep the flames away long enough for them to climb down a line that another shipmate had tossed up to them.
Before long, Miller and Weevee’s other survivors had left the stricken ship, and it seemed “the old girl had breathed her last,” as a grizzled old chief said, tears cutting winding paths through the soot on his blackened face.
After the Japanese aircraft returned to the six aircraft carriers that had launched them on their surprise attack, Pearl Harbor was a shambles. Nineteen ships were sunk or heavily damaged, including battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, California, Nevada, Maryland, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Ninety-two naval aircraft were destroyed and 31 damaged. The Army lost 96 aircraft, with another 128 damaged. Casualties were enormous: 2,008 Sailors killed and 710 wounded; 109 Marines killed and 69 wounded; 218 Soldiers killed and 364 wounded; and 68 civilians killed and 35 wounded.
On the evening of 8 December, an American task force that had been at sea during the attack returned to Pearl Harbor. Admiral William F. Halsey, embarked in the carrier Enterprise, watched from the carrier’s bridge wing as the ship made her way up the channel. A pall of smoke hung over the harbor, and the surface of the water was coated with an ugly blanket of fuel oil. The blackened skeletons of burned-out buildings lined the shore, the smells of death and destruction were everywhere and strong, but perhaps the worst sight of all was the broken remains of Battleship Row where the concentrated power of the Pacific Fleet had once resided. Arizona, or what little of her that remained, still burned. Little more than California’s super-structure showed above the black water. West Virginia was a scorched hulk, and Oklahoma’s underbelly turned skyward was the most unsettling sight of all. Staring at the devastation with a fierce intensity carved into his rugged features, Halsey was heard to snarl, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!”
The Japanese had dared to tread upon the U.S. fleet. Now the rattlesnake was poised to strike.
Midwatch in Surigao Strait
On board the destroyer McDermut, Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class Roy West sat at his battle station on the ship’s torpedo mount amidships waiting for something to happen. He watched as a bit more perspiration than the 80-degree night would normally have drawn traced glistening paths down the face of the man nearest him. The tension had been building ever since the word had come down that the Japanese were coming up Surigao Strait and McDermut had received her battle instructions from the squadron commodore.
Roy West and the other men manning the torpedo mount did not know the details of the battle plan, but they did know the Japanese were expected to come up through the strait to the south of them and that McDermut and the other four ships of Destroyer Squadron 54 would attack with torpedoes when, and if, they came. The captain had seemed pretty certain that the Japanese would come when he spoke to the crew earlier over the ship’s general announcing system, briefly explaining what was expected to happen and exhorting each man to do his best in the coming battle.
At about 2200, the ship had been ordered to “Condition I Easy,” which meant that all battle stations would be manned but that certain designated doors, hatches, and scuttles could be briefly opened and shut to allow the men limited movement to make head calls or to deliver coffee and sandwiches. All around the ship the men passed the time according to individual needs. Some were very quiet, silently praying, while others joked loudly. A few invoked the seafarer’s ancient rite of complaining, and some ventured to predict what the night would bring. Letters, pictures of wives, girlfriends, and dogs, and decks of playing cards emerged from denim pockets, and more cigarettes than usual flared in the ship’s interior spaces where there were no munitions.
At McDermut’s torpedo mount amidships, West listened as a young man nearby talked about the many virtues of his mother, and he watched as another man nervously fingered a small silver cross. One of the men, who consistently wore an air of bravado as though it were part of his Navy uniform, caught Roy’s eye and grinned at him as if to say that all was routine and normal. But tiny strands of spittle between the man’s lips said more about what was going on inside than did the forced grin.
The life jackets and helmets that always seemed a burdensome nuisance during drills now brought a mixed sense of foreboding and comfort as the minutes ticked slowly by. West had the almost constant, unsettling feeling of having just stepped in front of a speeding automobile, waiting helplessly while the vehicle careened toward him, tires screeching as the few feet of asphalt between them rapidly disappeared.
And still nothing happened.
Roy West and his shipmates were about to fight in one part of the largest naval battle in history at a place called Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. It was the night of 24–25 October 1944, and a lot had happened since the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The U.S. Navy had fought a long and arduous campaign across the Pacific, at places like Midway, Guadalcanal, and the Philippine Sea.
Dorie Miller had served in two more ships since West Virginia had gone to the bottom of Pearl Harbor. For his valor, the boxer-turned-gunner had received the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. At the presentation ceremony on 27 May 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, proved prescient when he said, “This marks the first time in this conflict that such high tribute has been made in the Pacific Fleet to a member of his race and I’m sure that the future will see others similarly honored for brave acts.” Indeed, many more Sailors of every race had shown their mettle as the Navy had beaten back a fanatical and capable enemy across the vast reaches of the Pacific.
Petty Officer Doris Miller receives the Navy Cross from Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, 27 May 1942. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
The victories came with price tags—many of them hefty. Assigned to the newly constructed escort carrier USS Liscome Bay in the spring of 1943, Dorie Miller was serving in her during Operation Galvanic, the seizure of Makin and Tarawa atolls in the Gilbert Islands the following November. At 0510 on 24 November 1943, a Japanese submarine fired a torpedo into the carrier’s stern. The aircraft bomb magazine detonated a few moments later, sinking the warship within minutes. Six hundred forty-six Sailors went down with the ship, Dorie Miller among them.
Sometime after 0200, Roy West and the other men at McDermut’s torpedo stations sensed that the ship was no longer pacing monotonously at her patrol station but had changed course and speed. A quick look at the gyro repeater confirmed they were moving south. West heard someone nearby say, “This is it.” He felt the soft rustling of butterfly wings somewhere deep in his stomach.
Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class Richard Parker’s battle station was on the port bridge wing, along with the torpedo officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Dan Lewis, who was running the port torpedo director. From their vantage point, Parker and Lewis had more information about what was happening, and Parker began passing the “gouge” over the sound-powered phone system to the others at the various torpedo stations. West, whose battle station was gyro setter for torpedo mount number two, looked at the mount captain, Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class Harold Ivey, as reports came in describing American PT
boat attacks against the oncoming Japanese force. Several times the word battleship was used, and each time West and Ivey exchanged quick looks.
After a few more minutes, the luxury—or curse—of idleness dissipated as things began to happen rapidly. Evidently, McDermut was closing on the enemy because a torpedo firing solution began to take shape. The men on both mounts began quickly matching pointers with the information coming down from the port torpedo director, cranking in gyro angle, alternately engaging and disengaging spindles, and occasionally taking a quick swipe at the beads of perspiration running down their faces. West concentrated hard as the glowing dials before him spun in a jerky dance of whirling numbers. Trying to ignore the thumping cadence of his heart, he worked the cranks just as he had done hundreds of times before in training for this moment.
The destroyer heeled to port as her rudder went over, and she came quickly right about 40 degrees. As she steadied up, West knew his ship must be directly paralleling the target’s approach course, on the reciprocal, because there was suddenly no gyro error to correct. Assuming the enemy would continue on his present course and speed, this meant McDermut had a near perfect firing solution and an optimum chance for success. It also meant the Japanese ships were closer to Roy West than they had ever been before, and they were probably coming directly at him at a relative speed of nearly fifty knots.
A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy Page 14