b. 03/06/1893 Prolog, Austro-Hungary. d. 07/12/1941 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
DATE OF MOH ACTION: 07/12/1941 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Peter Tomich MOH
Tomich was an ethnic Croat from Herzegovina born as Petar Herceg (family nickname ‘Tonić’) in Prolog near Ljubuški, under Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He immigrated to the United States in 1913 and joined the US Army in 1917.
Tomich served in the US Army during World War I and enlisted in the US Navy in 1919, where he initially served on the destroyer USS Litchfield (DD-336). By 1941, he had become a chief watertender on board the training and target ship USS Utah. On December 7, 1941, while the ship lay in Pearl Harbor, moored off Ford Island, she was torpedoed during Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor. Tomich was on duty in a boiler room. As Utah began to capsize, he remained below, securing the boilers and making certain that other men escaped, and so lost his life. For his “distinguished conduct and extraordinary courage” at that time, he posthumously received the Medal of Honor. His Medal of Honor was on display at the Navy’s Senior Enlisted Academy (Tomich Hall). Later, the decoration was presented to Tomich’s family on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the southern Adriatic city of Split in Croatia, on 18 May 2006, sixty-four years after US President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded it to him.
MOH CITATION:
For distinguished conduct in the line of his profession, and extraordinary courage and disregard of his own safety, during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor by the Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. Although realizing that the ship was capsizing as a result of enemy bombing and torpedoing, Tomich remained at his post in the engineering plant of the U.S.S. Utah until he saw that all boilers were secured and all fireroom personnel had left their stations, and by so doing lost his own life.
BURIAL LOCATION: BODY NOT RECOVERED. NAMED ON MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING, NATIONAL MEMORIAL CEMETERY OF PACIFIC, HONOLULU.
IN MEMORY MARKER AT ALL SOULS CEMETERY, CHARDON, OHIO.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER, WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, WASHINGTON DC.
