Last living survivor aboard USS Arizona during Pearl Harbor attack dies aged 102
The last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor has died. Lou Conter was 102.
Conter passed away on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, California, following congestive heart failure, his daughter, Louann Daley, said, adding she was beside him along with two of her brothers, James and Jeff.
The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and marines in the 1941 attack that launched the US into the second world war. The battleship’s dead account for nearly half of those killed in the attack.
Conter was a quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7.55am on 7 December that year. Sailors were just beginning to hoist colors or raise the flag when the assault began.
Conter recalled how one bomb penetrated steel decks 13 minutes into the battle and set off more than 1m lb (450,000kg) of gunpowder stored below.
The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40ft (9 to 12 meters) out of the water, he said during a 2008 oral history interview stored at the Library of Congress. Everything was on fire from the mainmast forward, he said.
“Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” Conter said. “Oil all over the sea was burning.”
His autobiography, The Lou Conter Story, recounts how he joined other survivors in tending to the injured, many of them blinded and badly burned. The sailors only abandoned ship when their senior surviving officer was sure they had rescued all those still alive.
The rusting wreckage of the Arizona still lies where it sank. More than 900 sailors and marines remain entombed inside. Only 335 Arizona crew members survived.
Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbor, earning his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the navy used to look for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a Black Cats squadron, which conducted dive bombing at night in planes painted black.
In 1943, he and his crew where shot down in waters near New Guinea and had to avoid sharks. A sailor expressed doubt they would survive, to which Conter replied: “Baloney.”
“Don’t ever panic in any situation. Survive is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They were quiet and trod water until another plane came hours later and dropped them a lifeboat.
In the late 1950s, he was made the navy’s first survival, evasion, resistance and escape (Sere) officer. He spent the next decade training navy pilots and crew on how to survive if they are shot down in the jungle and captured as a prisoner of war. Some of his pupils used his lessons as prisoners of war in Vietnam.
Conter retired in 1967 after 28 years in the navy.
He had been getting weaker and weaker in recent months and was hospitalized for 10 days in February, his daughter said. He had been in hospice since returning home.
He told his family he loved them, thanked them for being with him and taking care of him at home.
“I’m glad he’s at peace. I’m glad he didn’t suffer. I know when he transitioned over, he had so many people there waiting for him – his wife Val, who he loved dearly,” Daley said.
Conter is also survived by another son, Tony, and a stepson Ron Fudge, and many grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, nieces and nephews. Funeral arrangements were pending. The family plans to bury him in Grass Valley, next to his late wife Valerie, who died in 2016 after they had been married for 45 years.
With Conter’s death, there are now 19 survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack still living, according to Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. About 87,000 military personnel were on Oahu on 7 December, according to a rough estimate compiled by military historian J Michael Wenger.