» Pearl Harbor reflections:
‘Things have changed,’ one says of 75 years since attack
Wisconsin veterans who survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reflect on President Barack Obama’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the site of the attack.
Lou Conter says it’s time — time for Japan’s prime minister and President Barack Obama to visit the USS Arizona memorial together in a symbolic gesture showing the friendship between two countries that once were bitter enemies.
“Heck, it was 75 years ago and things have changed a lot,” Conter said.
Conter has a unique perspective on Tuesday’s historic meeting in Pearl Harbor between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Obama. As the quartermaster on duty on the USS Arizona on that fateful morning, it was Conter who sounded the general quarters alarm shortly after the first bombs began falling.
Born in Ojibwa, Wis., Conter is one of only five living survivors of the USS Arizona.
“We did what we were trained to do. They (Japanese troops) did what they were told to do. I wouldn’t buy a Toyota for anything but I still look at them as people. After 75 years, I’ll shake their hands,” Conter, 95, said in a phone interview Tuesday from his California home.
Jim Hanson, 93, watched the USS Oklahoma get hit by torpedoes and roll over, trapping hundreds of men inside. He joined the Navy after getting kicked out of Madison East High School and had been up all night on standby duty for any seaplanes in distress while stationed at the naval air station on Ford Island. He was getting ready to go to breakfast on Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard an airplane diving. Then he saw a torpedo drop from a Japanese bomber and hit the Oklahoma.
He saw men trying to swim through burning oil to save themselves and save their buddies. Hanson went out on a boat to try to rescue as many as he could.
“We saw an awful lot of carnage that day. You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it — guys were swimming around in this burning oil. Unless you could get a hold of something on them you couldn’t drag them into the boat because they were so slippery,” Hanson said Tuesday frt5om his Belvidere, Ill., home.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, Hanson was sent to the island of Midway, where he operated 65-foot bomb target boats, rescuing downed fliers. He was on Midway during the battle in June 1942 that historians say was the turning point of the war in the Pacific, when four of the six Japanese aircraft carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor were sunk.
“We didn’t like (the Japanese), of course. I went from Pearl Harbor to Midway. I really thought they were picking on me,” Hanson joked.
Tuesday’s meeting in Pearl Harbor was not the first visit by a Japanese prime minister to Hawaii after World War II. But it’s the first time the leaders of Japan and America have met at the site of the Japanese surprise attack that killed 2,403 Americans and wounded 1,178. Abe and Obama laid wreaths at the Arizona memorial, which was built in 1962.
Conter noted that both Abe, 64, and Obama, 55, were born years after the attack.
“I don’t think (Abe) needs to apologize. It was a different era and a different thinking in Japan” 75 years ago, Conter said.
Conter moved from the Sawyer County community where he was born in northwestern Wisconsin to Gallup, N.M., when he was 2 when his father got a job helping build Route 66. Conter enlisted in the Navy in 1939 and was assigned to the USS Arizona, figuring he would serve a few years in the military and then go to college. He had orders to attend flight school starting Dec. 19, 1941, but his paperwork was lost when his ship sank and the commander who signed off on his transfer was killed in the attack.
Conter eventually made it to pilot training, earned his wings and flew PBY Catalina flying boats with the Black Cat Squadron, rescuing shipwrecked sailors and downed pilots in the Pacific. He and his crew were shot down near New Guinea in 1943, treading water for about 40 minutes until another PBY dropped a life raft and they eventually paddled to land. Conter was shot down off Cape Gloucester in 1944 when he was sent to pick up the crew of a crashed B-25.
He was never injured — not on the deck of the USS Arizona, not when he was shot down twice.
“I guess I had a little angel looking over me,” Conter said.
Of the 335 men who survived the sinking of the USS Arizona, only Conter and four others are still alive — Lauren Bruner, 95, of La Mirada, Calif.; Lonnie Cook, 95, of Morris, Okla.; Ken Potts, 95, of Provo, Utah; and Donald Stratton, 94, of Colorado Springs, Colo.
Four attended the 75th anniversary commemoration this month at Pearl Harbor, including Conter, who plans to rejoin his comrades when he dies. Many of the survivors have chosen to have their ashes deposited on the ship in a solemn ceremony held each Dec. 7. When it’s Conter’s turn, his ashes will also be interred.
“When the old man upstairs decides it’s our time to go, we’ll go,” Conter said.