{"id":15424,"date":"2024-04-01T21:37:11","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T21:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/01\/lou-conter-last-survivor-of-the-battleship-arizona-dies-at-102\/"},"modified":"2024-04-01T21:37:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-01T21:37:12","slug":"lou-conter-last-survivor-of-the-battleship-arizona-dies-at-102","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/01\/lou-conter-last-survivor-of-the-battleship-arizona-dies-at-102\/","title":{"rendered":"Lou Conter, Last Survivor of the Battleship Arizona, Dies at 102"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/01\/multimedia\/01Conter--tmlg\/01Conter--tmlg-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Lou Conter, Last Survivor of the Battleship Arizona, Dies at 102\" title=\"Lou Conter, Last Survivor of the Battleship Arizona, Dies at 102\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the battleship Arizona, which sank with the loss of 1,177 sailors and Marines in Japan\u2019s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II, died on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, Calif. He was 102.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The death was confirmed by Warren R. Hull, a co-writer (with his wife, Annette Hull) of Mr. Conter\u2019s 2021 memoir, \u201cThe Lou Conter Story: From U.S.S. Arizona Survivor to Unsung American Hero.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Conter, who held the rank of quartermaster, a position assisting in the Arizona\u2019s navigation, was on his shift shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when a Japanese armor-piercing bomb penetrated five steel decks and blew up more than one million pounds of gunpowder and thousands of rounds of ammunition stored in its hull as the ship was moored in the harbor, in Honolulu, Hawaii.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe ship was consumed in a giant fireball,\u201d he wrote in his memoir.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Conter, who was knocked forward but uninjured, tended to survivors, many of them blinded and badly burned. When the order to abandon ship came, he was knee deep in water. A lifeboat took him ashore, and in the days that followed he helped in recovering bodies and putting out fires. Only 93 of those who were aboard the ship at the time lived; 242 other crew members were ashore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Conter later attended Navy flight school and flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific, some of them involving nighttime dive bombing of Japanese targets. During one three-night period, his crew rescued 219 Australian coast watchers from New Guinea who were in danger of being overrun by approaching Japanese. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for that exploit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Holding the rank of lieutenant, Mr. Conter went on to fly 29 combat missions during the Korean War and serve as an intelligence officer for a Navy aircraft carrier group. In the late 1950s, he helped establish the Navy\u2019s first SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) to train Navy airmen in how to survive if they were shot down in the jungle and captured.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He retired from the Navy in 1967 as a lieutenant commander and was later a real estate broker and developer in the Los Angeles area.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\"><a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oQRvG-1vnlE\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Louis Anthony Conter<\/a> was born on Sept. 13, 1921, in the northern Wisconsin town of Ojibwa, a son of Nicholas and Lottie Conter. His father was involved in construction work that eventually took the family to Wheatridge, Colo., outside Denver. After graduating from high school, Lou joined the Navy in 1939 and reported to the Arizona in January 1940.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His wife, Valerie, died in 2016. His two previous marriages ended in divorce. He had three children from his first marriage and another three from his second, along with many grandchildren. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. <\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death came almost a year after that of <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/04\/25\/us\/ken-potts-dead.html\" title=\"\">Ken Potts<\/a>, the second-to-last survivor of the attack, who was also 102.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Conter\u2019s home in Grass Valley, in Northern California near Tahoe National Forest, was filled with memorabilia from the Arizona, including a piece of the wreckage. He once said that \u201ceach morning I wake up, pay homage\u201d to all the Americans killed on Pearl Harbor Sunday, \u201cincluding the 1,177 of my shipmates on the Arizona, and go from there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He rejected any notion that the dwindling number of Arizona survivors should be hailed as heroes. \u201cThe 2,403 men that died are the heroes,\u201d he said in a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, referring to all the Americans who perished in the Pearl Harbor attack. \u201cI\u2019m not a hero. I was just doing my job.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Until 2020, when the infirmities of age limited him, Mr. Conter attended annual memorial services at Pearl Harbor organized by the Navy and the National Park Service.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pearl_Harbor\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Pearl Harbor<\/a>, which is overseen by the park service, marks the resting place of 1,102 of the crewmen killed in the attack on what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called \u201ca date which will live in infamy\u201d when he asked Congress for a declaration of war with Japan. The memorial, built in 1962 and visited by nearly two million people annually, straddles the sunken hull of the Arizona without touching it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">It reads: \u201cTo the memory of the gallant men here entombed and their shipmates who gave their lives in action on December 7, 1941, on the U.S.S. Arizona.\u201d The battleship\u2019s sunken remains are a National Historic Landmark.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-798hid etfikam0\">Alex Traub<!-- --> contributed reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the battleship Arizona, which sank with the loss of 1,177 sailors and Marines in Japan\u2019s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II, died on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, Calif. He was 102. The death was confirmed by Warren R. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/01\/multimedia\/01Conter--tmlg\/01Conter--tmlg-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2671,21263,21262,16,3252,5403],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15426,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15424\/revisions\/15426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}