Ships
- USS Indiana (BB-58) Captain from 17 March 1944 · Relieved on 1 May 1945
Thomas Joseph Keliher Jr. was a career officer of the United States Navy and the wartime captain of the battleship USS Indiana (BB-58). He was born on 5 March 1893, gave Washington, D.C., as his home, and graduated from the Naval Academy in the class of 1916. He became a commander on 1 July 1936 and a captain on 1 November 1941, weeks before the United States entered the war.
On 17 March 1944 he took command of Indiana, a fast battleship of the South Dakota class, armed with nine 16-inch guns. She belonged to the striking forces built around the aircraft carriers. His work was to keep her in formation with those carriers, to guard them while their planes were away, and to use her heavy guns against shore targets when the landings called for it.
In the summer of 1944 Indiana operated with the fast carrier task forces in the Marianas. In June she stood in the battle line during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. She remained with those forces through the Philippines campaign in the autumn, then went north in the first months of 1945 for the strikes and bombardments that covered Iwo Jima and the opening assault on Okinawa. Keliher was relieved of command on 1 May 1945.
His handling of Indiana in the Pacific from April 1944 to May 1945 brought him a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit. An earlier Legion of Merit had already marked other service in the war. The Navy advanced him to commodore on 30 June 1945.
As a commodore he commanded Service Division 104 and served as senior officer present afloat at Buckner Bay, Okinawa, from 13 July 1945 through 15 August 1945, the day the fighting ended. That tour earned him a second Gold Star in lieu of a third Legion of Merit.
He stayed in the Navy after the war and retired on 1 June 1949 as a rear admiral. Thomas Joseph Keliher Jr. died on 21 February 1953 at the Livermore Veterans Hospital, at the age of 59.