Lou Conter, last survivor of the battleship USS arizona The ship that sank during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor died. He was 102 years old.
AP report Mr. Conter died Monday of congestive heart failure. His daughter LouAnn Daly said she and her two brothers, James and Jeff, were by his side in hospice care.
Japanese air raids killed 1,177 sailors and marines on board. arizona The 1941 attacks opened the lid on hell and propelled the United States into World War II.
This battleship accounted for almost half of the deaths that day.
December 7, 1941: The USS Arizona goes up in smoke after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during World War II. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
File/view of a column of battleships during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, when an explosion damaged three American battleships. From left to right: USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and USS Arizona. (U.S. Navy/Provisional Archive/Getty Images)
Conter, a quartermaster, was standing on the main deck of the Arizona at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2017, as Japanese planes passed overhead, the Associated Press reported.
When the attack began, the sailors had just begun hoisting and hoisting their flags, and Conter later said, “13 minutes into the battle, one bomb penetrated the steel deck, and the bomb that was stored beneath it.” He recalled how more than a million pounds of gunpowder exploded.
He told a news conference in 2008 that the explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet above the water. oral history interview Archived at the Library of Congress. Everything was on fire from the front of the main mast, he said.
“The men were running away from the fire and trying to jump over the side,” Conter said. “The oil in the sea was burning.”
his autobiography Lou Conter’s story He describes working with other survivors to care for the wounded. Many of the injured were blind and had suffered severe burns. The sailors abandoned ship only when the surviving senior officers were convinced that they had rescued all survivors.
Contour himself was unharmed.
Arizona Memorial during the 71st commemoration commemorating the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II at the National Monument to Pacific Valor of World War II in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 2012. File/Lou Conter standing in the hall’s cathedral room. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
Contour continued to train as a pilot and earned wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to hunt for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with the “Black Cats” squadron, which conducted night dive bombing in black-painted planes.
In 1943, he and his crew were shot down near New Guinea and had to avoid sharks. One sailor expressed doubts about whether they would survive, to which Mr Konter replied: “It’s rubbish.”
“Never panic in any situation. Survival is the first thing I tell them. Don’t panic or you will die,” he said.
Contel dedicated his life to serving his country. He served as military advisor to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.
Pacific Historical Park announced on its Facebook page that Conter died surrounded by his family at his home in Grass Valley, California.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “less than 1% of the 16.1 million Americans who served in the military during World War II remain with us today.”
The National World War II Museum in New Orleans is working to preserve their stories, as they die at a rate of 131 people each day, most in their 90s and older, UPI reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
