Lt. Cmdr. Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, died April 1 at his home in Grass Valley, Calif. He was 102.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Louann Daley.
The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in the 1941 attack that launched the United States into World War II. The battleship’s dead account for nearly half of those killed in the surprise attack.
Cmdr. Conter was a Navy quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7. Sailors were just beginning to raise the flag when the assault began.
Cmdr. Conter recalled how one bomb penetrated steel decks 13 minutes into the battle and set off more than 1 million pounds of gunpowder stored below.
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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 was on fire from the mainmast forward, he said.
“Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” he added. “Oil all over the sea was burning.”
His autobiography, “The Lou Conter Story,” recounts how he joined other survivors in tending to the injured, many of them blinded and badly burned. The sailors only abandoned ship when their senior surviving officer was sure they had rescued all those still alive.
The rusting wreckage of the Arizona still lies in waters where it sank. More than 900 sailors and Marines remain entombed inside.
Share this articleShareCmdr. Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbor, earning his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to look for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a “Black Cats” squadron, which conducted dive bombings at night in planes painted black.
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In 1943, he and his crew were shot down in waters near New Guinea and had to avoid a dozen sharks. A sailor expressed doubt they would survive, to which Cmdr. Conter replied, “baloney.”
“Don’t ever panic in any situation. Survive is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They were quiet and treaded water until another plane came hours later and dropped them a lifeboat.
In the late 1950s, he became one of the Navy’s first SERE officers — an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He spent the next decade training Navy pilots and crews on how to survive if they were shot down in the jungle and captured as a prisoner of war. He retired in 1967.
Louis Anthony Conter was born in Ojibwa, Wis., on Sept. 13, 1921. His family later moved to Colorado, where he walked five miles one way to school outside Denver. His house didn’t have running water, so he tried out for the football team because the players could take showers at school after practice.
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He enlisted in the Navy after he turned 18, getting $17 a month and a hammock for his bunk at boot camp.
In his later years, Cmdr. Conter became a fixture at remembrance ceremonies in Pearl Harbor that the Navy and the National Park Service jointly hosted on the anniversaries of the 1941 attack.
Though many treated the shrinking group of Pearl Harbor survivors as heroes, Cmdr. Conter refused the label.
“The 2,403 men that died are the heroes,” he told the Associated Press in 2022. “We’ve got to honor them ahead of everybody else. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it should be stressed.”
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