Hiroichi Tomita

Rule Changes

Killed in action, Italy, 1944; posthumously promoted to 2nd Lieutenant, January 2026

In December 1941, seven University of Hawaii students were weeks away from becoming Army officers when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The U.S. government stripped them of their military status and branded them 'enemy aliens,' but they volunteered anyway, joined the most decorated unit in American military history, and died fighting Nazis in Europe. Eighty years later, the Army finally granted them the rank they would have earned—if not for wartime discrimination against Japanese Americans.

Updated May 23