What kind of ship was the USS Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor; last survivor Lou Conter died this year

The USS Arizona, a Pennsylvania class battleship, sank in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. She was the flagship of Battleship Division One at the time.

The Arizona, launched in June 1915, measured 608 ft, with a beam of 97 ft. She was fully modernized in 1929, after which she was crewed by 92 officers and 1,639 enlisted men. The final living survivor of the Arizona, Lou Conter, died earlier this year, on April 1, 2024.

At Pearl Harbor, the Arizona was hit by four bombs just after 8 a.m., the final one of these is believed to have gone through the armoured deck and blown up the ship’s forward magazines with devastating effects.

The explosion tore the ship in two, and led to fires that burned for two days. The bombs, subsequent explosion and sinking of the Arizona killed 1,177 of the 1,512 crewman on board at the moment of the attack. Both the captain of the Arizona, Franklin Van Valkenburgh, and rear admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd, the head of the Battleship Division One were killed on the bridge of the Arizona.

After the attack, it was determined that the Arizona had been so badly damaged that she could not be salvaged, unlike many of the other vessels damaged and sunk during the raid by the Japanese. Her surviving superstructure was scrapped in 1942 and she was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on December 1, 1942, a year after being sunk.

Many of her main guns however were salvaged; some were installed on the USS Nevada, which fired them against the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

USS Arizona memorial

The wreck of the Arizona was designated a national shrine in 1962 and a memorial was built across the remains, including a shrine room listing the names of the crew who were lost in the attack.

More than two million people visit the memorial each year. It is only accessible by boat and straddles the sunken hull of the Arizona, without touching it.

Last survivor of the USS Arizona, Lou Conter, dies in 2024

As mentioned above, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona, Lou Conter, died on Monday, April 1, 2024 at his home in Grass Valley, California. He was 102 and was suffering from congestive heart failure. His daughter, Louann Daley was with him, she said, along with two of her brothers, James and Jeff.

Conter was a quartermaster standing on the main deck of the Arizona when the Japanese attack started. In his autobiography “The Lou Conter Story” he tells the harrowing story of that day, and how he tried to look after as many of the injured as possible.

He retired in 1967 after 28 years in the Navy and was a regular attender at the annual remembrance ceremonies for Pear Harbor. “It’s always good to come back and pay respect to them and give them the top honors that they deserve,” he said.

With Conter’s death, that left just 19 survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor still alive.

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