On this day in 1944, a hero engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. John Joseph Tominac’s Medal citation reads like a Hollywood movie script! Would you believe he even rode atop a burning tank, leaping off just as it exploded?
Amazingly, he survived.
Then-1st Lt. Tominac’s bravery came on September 12, near Saulx de Vesoul, France, as he served with the 3rd Infantry Division. Our soldiers had been working their way through France for weeks, and the fighting had been tough. Indeed, half of Tominac’s platoon had been wounded or killed in the month since they’d landed on French shores.
Perhaps Tominac had had enough? He ultimately made four, separate charges against German positions that day, including one singlehanded advance across 50 yards of open territory. But even that brave run was nothing compared to the charge he made atop a blazing tank.
That move was surely a sight to behold?!
At the time, Tominac had been advancing about 50 yards ahead of his men to reconnoiter an enemy position. A German gun at that location was firing upon one of the American tanks, ultimately setting it afire. Tominac didn’t then know it, but the four-man crew had evacuated the tank. Thus, the American tank was unmanned and out of gear, rolling steadily toward the enemy.
Nevertheless, the young first lieutenant thought maybe the crew was inside, still making a run for it.
“I thought that to be unusually aggressive,” Tominac later laughed. “I thought, hell, these guys are really something.” He jumped aboard the tank to help, and he began spraying fire at the enemy from the machine gun mounted on the tank’s deck.
Tominac’s Medal citation describes the “withering enemy machine-gun, mortar, pistol, and sniper fire,” which was falling all around him as he stood “[p]lainly silhouetted against the sky.” Nevertheless, Tominac kept riding that burning tank as it continued towards the Germans.
His daring move would finally force those Germans out of their position. The tank had taken multiple hits, though, and Tominac thought “things were getting hot, so I decided to abandon.”
He leapt off the tank just in time, leaping to the ground as it exploded. He’d survived, but he had a painful shrapnel wound in his shoulder. Naturally, Tominac wasn’t going to be stopped by a wound, no matter how painful. He had his sergeant remove the shrapnel with a pocketknife, and he was soon back at it.
The young soldier would receive a Medal of Honor for his bravery that day, but Tominac didn’t think he’d done anything special.
“I felt I was fighting for a worthwhile cause,” he explained. “But the main thing was the day-to-day desire to do the job. To take the objective each day. There was the strong ties of comradeship. There was family influence, training influences, love at home.”
But there was more than that, too. Tominac acknowledged that he’d been scared at many points during that long day of fighting. He wasn’t going to let fear rule him, though.
“I felt that to display cowardice in the face of my troops would be worse than death,” he concluded.
Another member of the Greatest Generation, just doing what had to be done.
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Primary Sources:
Great Welcome for Johnstown’s Hero Planned Next Week (News-Herald; July 28, 1945) (p. 2)
How Colonel Won Medal of Honor (Honolulu Star-Bulletin; May 12, 1965) (p. C-6)
Lyle Nelson, Colonel Tominac and the Medal of Honor (Honolulu Star-Bulletin; May 12, 1965) (p. C-6)
Medal of Honor citation (John Joseph Tominac; WWII)
Surprise Welcome Given War Hero on His Arrival Home (News-Herlad; Aug. 1, 1945) (p. 6)
Tominac: A Tank Ride He’ll Never Forget (Californian; May 27, 1978) (p. 38)
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