Dores "Dorie" Miller became the first African American to receive the Navy Cross, which he received for manning
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.
Miller grew up on his parent's farm in Texas and had joined the Navy at age 20 in 1939. He would not survive the war, being killed when a ship he was later assigned to was hit by a torpedo in 1943, setting off the ship's munition's stores.
His curious legal name was the result of a midwife being convinced he'd be born a girl, although even at that the family decision to stick with the name is odd. It didn't fit him at all, as Miller grew to be a giant of a man. His nickname is a matter of dispute, and may not have actually come about at all until press reports misstated his name, although there are other explanations for the name.
Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the "Final Solution", was badly wounded in an assassination exercise by Czech operatives in an SOE planned operation. He'd die on June 4. Heydrich was drenched in evil, but the assassination did not in any way stop the Holocaust, and it resulted in massive German reprisals.
Jews in Belgium were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David.
As with almost any day in this period, the Battle of the Atlantic raged, with submarines taking their toll.
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