Honolulu—

Lou Conter, the last survivor of the USS Arizona, which exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, has died. He is 102 years old.

Conte died of congestive heart failure on Monday at his home in Grass Valley, Calif., said his daughter, Louann Daley, adding that she was with her two brothers, James and Jeff, at his home. around.

In 1941, the Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in an attack that launched the United States into World War II. Battleship deaths accounted for nearly half of the attack’s fatalities.

At 7:55 a.m. on December 7 of that year, Conte, a quartermaster officer, stood on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead. When the attack began, the sailors were just beginning to hoist the flag, or flag.

Conte recalled how 13 minutes into the battle, a bomb penetrated the steel deck and detonated more than 1 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of gunpowder stored below. The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) out of the water, he said in a 2008 oral history interview preserved by the Library of Congress. He said everything was on fire starting from the front of the mainmast.

“People are running away from the fire and trying to jump over the fire,” Conte said. “Oil is burning all over the sea.”

his autobiography The story of Lu’s opponents Tells how he worked with other survivors to care for the injured, many of whom were blind and severely burned. The sailors abandoned ship only when the senior surviving officer was convinced they had rescued everyone still alive.

The rusting wreckage of the Arizona still lies where it sank. More than 900 sailors and Marines remain buried inside. Only 335 of Arizona’s crew survived.

After Pearl Harbor, Conte attended flight school and earned a wing flying PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to find submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with the “Black Cats” squadron, which dive-bombed aircraft painted black at night.

In 1943, he and his crew were shot down off New Guinea and had to fend off sharks. One sailor expressed doubts about their survival, to which Conte replied: “Nonsense.”

“Don’t panic under any circumstances. Survival is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They tread water quietly until another plane comes hours later and drops a lifeboat on them.

In the late 1950s, he was appointed the Navy’s first SERE officer—SERE stands for Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Escape. He spent the next decade training naval pilots and aircrews on how to survive if they were shot down in the jungle and taken as prisoners of war. Some of his students used his courses while serving as prisoners of war in Vietnam.

Conte retired from the Navy in 1967 after 28 years of service.

Conte was born on September 13, 1921, in Ojibwa, Wisconsin. His family later moved to Colorado. When he turned 18, he joined the Navy, receiving $17 a month and a hammock in boot camp.

Kathleen Farley, California president of the Sons of Pearl Harbor Survivors, said that after Conte’s death, there are still 19 survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack. According to a rough estimate by military historian J. Michael Wenger, approximately 87,000 military personnel were on Oahu on December 7.

In his later years, Conte became a regular at the annual Pearl Harbor commemoration ceremony, which is jointly organized by the Navy and the National Park Service on the anniversary of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. When he didn’t have the energy to attend in person, he recorded a video message for people gathered at his home in California to watch remotely.

In 2019, when he was 98, he said he loved participating in events like this to honor those who had lost their lives.

“It’s always good to come back and show them respect and give them the highest honor they deserve,” he said.