When the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor shortly before 8am on December 7, 1941, Lou Conter was a quartermaster third class aged 20, standing watch on the deck of the USS Arizona as the colour guard prepared to raise the Stars and Stripes.
The 353 Japanese warplanes damaged or sank all eight US warships moored there that morning, propelling the previously neutral United States into the Second World War. But none was destroyed as completely as the Arizona, which suQered direct hits by three armour-piercing bombs before a fourth penetrated six steel decks to reach the ship’s magazine. There it detonated a million pounds of gunpowder and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Conter remembered a “boom you would never forget” and the huge ship being lifted out of the water by the force of the explosion. Her bow was blown apart and the vessel was consumed by a “giant fireball”. He was knocked oQ his feet, but escaped uninjured.
Initially he sought to help his burnt and blinded shipmates, stopping them jumping overboard into a sea covered in burning oil. “Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” he recalled. “Oil all over the sea was burning … our senior o]cer ordered all us survivors to take them in and even render them unconscious if we had to, and lay them down on deck so they wouldn’t jump over the side and kill themselves.”
But the Arizona was sinking fast, and soon Conter was told to abandon ship as the water lapped around his knees. From a lifeboat he sought to pull other sailors from the water.
In the deadliest attack on US territory until that of 9/11 60 years later, 2,403 Americans were killed. Of the dead 1,177 were sailors and marines from the Arizona. Only 335 of her crew survived. Of those Conter was, by the time of his death at the age of 102, the last one living despite being shot down twice as a pilot later in the war.
Louis Anthony Conter was born in the town of Ojibwa, Wisconsin, in 1921, the second of three children of an itinerant construction worker. The family moved in rapid succession to New Mexico and Nevada, before settling near Denver, Colorado, where his father found work with a meat-packing company. He lived on a smallholding without running water and walked five miles to school each day.
He joined the US navy in Denver in November 1939, aged 18. He completed his basic training in San Diego, California, and was assigned to the Arizona as a regular deckhand in January 1940. He was still in her crew nearly two years later when she was destroyed by the Japanese on what President Franklin D Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy”.
He later trained as a US navy pilot, earning his wings in November 1942, and flew 200 missions in the South Pacific with a squadron of patrol bombers known as the Black Cats. Its Catalina flying boats were painted black and hunted Japanese submarines, warships and cargo vessels by night.
He was shot down twice, but both times reached safety in liferafts. On the first of those occasions he ditched his plane seven miles oQ the coast of Papua New Guinea. He and his crew had to tread water for several hours as sharks circled around them.
Conter also won the Distinguished Flying Cross for extracting 219 Australian soldiers from Papua New Guinea over the course of three nights as the Japanese army advanced.
He joined the naval reserve at the end of the Second World War but returned to active service during the Korean War. He flew 29 combat missions, and served as an intelligence o]cer on the USS Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier, in 1951.
Later in the 1950s he was asked to set up the US navy’s first Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) programme to train naval airmen how to survive if they were shot down or captured. “We had to teach them how to live in the jungle … how to hide in the jungle, how to navigate and how to get out alive,” he said. “Survival is di]cult, but one has only two options if put in a survival situation: give up and die or fight like hell and live.”
The course was so brutal, some mothers and wives complained, but
one of those who took it and later survived seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam was Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s presidential running mate in 1992. He later told Conter he would not have survived without it.
Conter left the navy with the rank of lieutenant commander in 1967. He settled in northern California, where he worked as a property developer. Twice divorced, he married his third wife, Valerie, wryly noting that military life and marriage were “two elements of my life that just never seemed to get along very well”. He had three children by each of his first two wives. Valerie died of lung cancer in 2016.
Conter returned to Hawaii for the first time since Pearl Harbor in 1951. He set out on a boat to visit the platform that had been erected over the sunken remains of the battleship, but was overcome by emotion and opted to stay on the boat, merely saluting instead.
He returned in the mid-1960s to visit the new USS Arizona Memorial, which straddles the wreckage where more than 900 of his shipmates are entombed. Seeing the “shrine room”, where the names of the 1,177 who lost their lives are inscribed on the walls, “took my breath away and knocked me out”, he wrote in a memoir he co-authored in 2021. “I reflected for a moment about how easily my name could have been on that wall and wondered why it was not.”
Thereafter he attended the annual memorial services at Pearl Harbor until 2020, by which time he had grown too frail to undertake the long flight to Hawaii. Last year he became the oldest living survivor of the Arizona when Ken Potts died in Utah scarcely a week after celebrating his 102nd birthday. He was no hero, he always insisted. “I consider the heroes the ones that gave their lives, that never came home to their families,” he said. “They’re the real heroes.”
Louis Conter, Pearl Harbor survivor, was born on September 13, 1921. He died of congestive heart failure on April 1, 2024, aged 102
