HONOLULU (AP) — Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 102.
Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Conter passed away on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, California, following congestive heart failure, his daughter, Louann Daley said, adding she was beside him along with two of her brothers, James and Jeff.
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 attack.
Conter was a quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7 that year. Sailors were just beginning to hoist colors or raise the flag when the assault began.
Conter recalled how one bomb penetrated steel decks 13 minutes into the battle and set off more than 1 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of gunpowder stored below.
The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 metes) 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.
What strikes me is the amount of blogs that wrote about this. Sure, the major papers covered it, they had to, it is news. But, no left wing blogs at all and an smattering of right wing blogs covered it. It is sickening. The left wing blogs are too busy painting Trump is some sort of crazy person, who is going to declare martial law and imprison all Democrats and liberals if elected. The right, well they are too busy mocking Joe Biden and “owning” the liberals on the left…..whatever that means.
The crazy thing is, that war, the only constitutionally declared war, was fought to protect the rights of these boneheads who printing the tripe that they are printing today. If it were not for the MEN, and yes, they were MEN, fighting MEN that put their butts on line to protect this Nation of ours and to punish Japan and Germany from reaching their evil goals and the World is much better off for it too.
It is a terrible state what our media — Broadcast, cable, and online media have become in 2024.
