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On December 7, 1941, Miller awoke at 0600. After serving breakfast mess, he was collecting laundry when the first of nine torpedoes to hit the West Virginia was launched at 0757 by a Japanese carrier. Miller headed for his battle station, an anti-aircraft battery magazine amidship, only to discover that torpedo damage had destroyed it.
He went instead to "Times Square", a central spot where the fore to aft and port to starboard passageways crossed, and reported himself available for other duty. Miller was spotted by Lieutenant Commander Doir C. Johnson, the ship's communications officer, who ordered the powerfully built sailor to accompany him to the bridge to assist with moving the ship's Captain Mervyn Bennion, who had a gaping wound in his abdomen where he had apparently been hit by shrapnel. Miller and another sailor lifted the skipper and, unable to remove him from the bridge, carried him from an exposed position on the damaged bridge to a sheltered spot behind the conning tower. The Captain refused to leave his post and questioned his officers about the condition of the ship, giving various orders. The Captain remained on the bridge until his death.
Lieutenant Frederic H. White ordered Miller to help him and Ensign Victor Delano load the unmanned #1 and #2 anti aircraft machine guns aft of the conning tower. Miller wasn't familiar with the machine gun, but White and Delano told him what to do. Miller had served both men as a room steward and knew them well. Delano expected Miller to feed ammunition to one gun, but his attention was diverted, and when he looked again Miller was firing one of the guns. White had loaded ammo into both guns and assigned Miller the starboard gun.
Miller fired the gun until he ran out of ammo, when he was ordered to help carry the Captain up to the navigation bridge out of the thick oily smoke generated by the many fires on and around the ship. Bennion was only partially conscious at this point and died soon after. Japanese aircraft eventually dropped two armor-piercing bombs through the deck of the battleship and launched five 18 in (460 mm) aircraft torpedoes into her port side. When the attack finally lessened, Lt. White ordered Miller to help move injured sailors through oil and water to the quarterdeck, thereby "unquestionably saving the lives of a number of people who might otherwise have been lost.
His Navy Cross citation reads as follows:
For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.
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