Battleship Arizona’s last remaining survivor was 102
Navy veteran from Grass Valley, Calif., served in World War II and Korean War.
Lou Conter, the last survivor of the U.S. battleship Arizona, which sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that launched the United States into World War II, died at his home in
Grass Valley, Calif., on Monday. He was 102.
Conter was surrounded by family and died peacefully, according to Pacific Historic Parks, a nonprofit that helps maintain the USS Arizona Memorial and other historic landmarks in Hawaii. The nonprofit confirmed Conter’s death through his daughter.
Born in 1921, Conter was just 20 on the morning of the attack and had joined the military only two years earlier.
The Arizona was the centerpiece of the carnage the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. Of the more than 2,400 service members and civilians killed that day, nearly half — 1,177 — were sailors and Marines aboard the Arizona. As Japanese bombers laid waste to “battleship row,” explosions ignited a massive amount of gunpowder stored on the Arizona. The resulting explosion lifted the ship “30 to 40 feet out of the water,” Conter said during a January 2008 interview with the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was the deadliest foreign assault on U.S. soil before the 9/11 terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
Conter, a quartermaster, was lauded for helping rescue fellow crew members during the attack, according to the Pacific Historic Parks post. After the bombing, Conter remained enlisted until 1945, flying combat missions throughout the war, according to his interview with the Veterans History Project. He also served in the Korean War in the 1950s and reached the rank of lieutenant commander.
Despite the traumatic memories of that day, Conter was no stranger to the USS Arizona memorial in Honolulu. In 2016, he told a Times reporter that he visited the site every Dec. 7 to stand aboard the Arizona memorial as wreaths were laid to remember his fallen comrades.
“There were 335 of us on the ship that got off that day,” he said in 2016 as he stood near the ship he almost died on decades earlier. “We were just lucky.”
Even at 95, Conter knew exactly where he was standing when the attack began.
“I was on the quarterdeck, just about where we are,” he told The Times. “Everything from right over there forward blew up and was on fire.”