The Pearl Harbor tragedy lasted just over an hour before becoming a “day that will live in infamy.”
And Louis “Lou” Conter remembered every brutal moment.
The tough last survivor of the USS Arizona, he died on December 7, 1941, when the Navy ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese during a surprise attack in Hawaii Harbor, killing all 1,177 people on board (almost half of the Americans). ) was on deck when he died. He was lost that day.
Conter, 102, died of congestive heart failure Monday at his home in Grass Valley, Calif., surrounded by his family, according to Conter’s daughter LouAnn Daly, according to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and Pacific Historical Park. It is said that he passed away. He reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and was a naval aviator.
This veteran lived a long life to keep the memory of Pearl Harbor alive, continuing to give interviews until he was 100 years old.
Konter, just 20 years old, was on duty as quartermaster at 7:55 a.m. that Sunday as sailors began hoisting the flag.
“It was five minutes until 8 o’clock and the first plane was on its way,” Conter recalled in a 2022 interview with KCRA-TV.
“As soon as they came in, we knew what was going on. We knew we had been training hard for six months to fight Japan in a war,” he said. said. “They were dive-bombing and were right under the edge of the ship. They didn’t have time to look up and see what was going to happen. They were already at the water’s edge.
“”It lasted about 40 minutes. We mounted her 50-60 hundred pound bombs next to the second turret. It passed through her five decks in the lower forward cockpit, detonating the power of the first and second turrets there, and the entire bow of the ship rose out of the water. ”
Thirteen minutes into the raid, one bomb penetrated five steel decks and ignited more than a million pounds of gunpowder stored in the hull below.
Conter said in a 2008 oral history interview that the explosion propelled the battleship about 40 feet into the air and set it ablaze from the front of the main mast. Stored at the Library of Congress.
He was one of the lucky ones when the first big explosion occurred. He was thrown forward on the deck and others were thrown overboard.
Conter and other sailors began helping the injured, trying to prevent them from jumping overboard.
“The men were trying to escape the fire and jump over the side. The oil in the sea was burning,” he said in 2008.
“We were just grabbing them.” [as they came out of the fire] and put them down,” Conter said. KCRA. “They were really bad. When you pick up bodies, the skin on your hands comes off.
“There was no time to do anything. It happened so quickly.”
When the USS Arizona sank in the waves off Oahu, “we got in boats and picked up the bodies from the water.”
Conter’s 2012 autobiography, The Lou Conter Story: From USS Arizona Survivor to Unsung Hero, details how he later joined other survivors and tended to the wounded. Many of them were blind and suffered severe burns.
The sailors abandoned ship only when the surviving senior officers were convinced that they had rescued all survivors.
A total of 19 ships and 188 aircraft of the Pacific Fleet were lost in the massive air raid that Sunday morning. In total, 2,403 Americans were killed and 640 were missing. More than 1,100 people were injured. As a result, America entered World War II.
Mr. Conter, whose memory seemed sharp to the end, spoke candidly about some of the epic stories that came out after the attack – particularly that many of the sailors were fast asleep during the Japanese attack. .
“There’s been a lot of talk about them sleeping in their bunks since they played at the Battle of the Bands the night before. That was pretty bullish,” Conter told Navy Times. “They went to a combat base and all of them were killed at the combat base.”
Some of the dead at Pearl Harbor were buried without any information given. The remains of 647 service members rest in Hawaii’s National Cemetery of the Pacific, where a granite marker simply reads “Unknown.”
USS Arizona remains sunk in Pearl Harbor. Half of those killed at Pearl Harbor were in Arizona. A U.S. flag flies above the sunken ship, serving as a memorial to all Americans killed in the attack.
After the tragedy, Conter attended flight school and flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with the stealth “Black Cats” squadron. Dive-bombed at night by a black-painted plane.
In 1943, he and his crew were shot down in shark-infested waters near New Guinea.
One sailor was worried that he might not make it home alive.
“Balonie,” Contour said.
“Never panic in any situation. Survival is the first thing I tell them. Don’t panic or you will die,” he recalls saying at the time.
The sailors swam in silence until another plane arrived and dropped the lifeboat.
Contour applied the lessons he learned from his near-death experience when he first joined the Navy. Sele He became a Naval Officer (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) in the late 1950s and spent more than a decade training naval personnel how to survive if shot down or captured as a prisoner of war.
Predeceased by his third wife, Valerie, he leaves behind a daughter, three sons, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Following Konter’s death, tributes poured in both in real life and online. This included one on Facebook that evoked the traditional farewell to brave sailors as they embark on their next voyage.
“Fair wind, tailing sea, sailor, we have a watch.”
