HONOLULU– The last living survivor of the battleship USS Arizona that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor has died. Lou Conter lived to be 102.
Conter died Monday at his home in Grass Valley, California, after congestive heart failure, his daughter Louann Daley said.
The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines during the 1941 attack that thrust the United States into World War II. The battleship deaths account for almost half of the bombing deaths.
Conter was a quartermaster and stood on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on December 7 of that year. Sailors were just beginning to raise colors or raise the flag when the attack began.
Conter recalled how a bomb penetrated the steel decks 13 minutes into the battle, releasing more than 1,000,000 pounds of gunpowder stored beneath.
The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet out of the water, he said during a 2008 oral history interview stored at the Library of Congress. Everything from the mainmast up was on fire, he said.
“Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” Conter said. “Oil was on fire everywhere in the sea.”
His autobiography ‘The Lou Conter Story’ tells how he and other survivors tended to the wounded, many of whom were blind and severely burned. The sailors did not abandon ship until their senior surviving officer was confident that they had rescued all living humans.
The rusting wreck of the Arizona still lies where it sank. More than 900 sailors and marines are still buried there.
Conter attended flight school after Pearl Harbor and earned his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to search for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a ‘Black Cats’ squadron, which carried out dive bombing raids at night in black-painted aircraft.
In 1943, he and his crew had to dodge a dozen sharks after being shot near New Guinea. One sailor expressed doubt that they would survive, to which Conter replied, “nonsense.”
“Never panic in any situation. Survival is the first thing you say to them. Don’t panic, otherwise you’ll be dead,” he said. They were quiet and treading water until another plane arrived hours later and dropped a rescue boat for them.
In the late 1950s, he was appointed the Navy’s first SERE officer – an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. For the next decade, he trained Navy pilots and crew members on how to survive being shot down in the jungle and captured as prisoners of war. Some of his students used his lessons as prisoners of war in Vietnam.
Conter retired in 1967 after 28 years in the Navy.
Conter was born in Ojibwa, Wisconsin, on September 13, 1921. His family later moved to Colorado, where he walked five miles one way to school outside Denver. His house had no running water, so he tried working for the football team—less for the love of the sport and more so the players could shower at school after practice.
He enlisted in the Navy after turning 18 and was paid $17 a month and a hammock for his bunk bed in boot camp.
In his later years, Conter became a fixture at the annual Pearl Harbor memorial ceremonies jointly organized by the Navy and the National Park Service to mark the anniversary of the 1941 attack. When he was unable to attend in person, he took he recorded video messages for the public and watched remotely from his home in California.
In 2019, when he was 98, he said he liked to remember the people who lost their lives.
“It’s always good to come back and show respect for them and give them the highest honor they deserve,” he said.
Although many treated the shrinking group of Pearl Harbor survivors as heroes, Conter refused the label.
“The 2,403 men who died are the heroes. And we must honor them above all others. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it needs to be emphasized,” Conter told The Associated Press in a 2022 interview at his home in California.