Lou Conter, last survivor of WWII attack on USS Arizona at Pearl Harbour, dies at 102

Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, has died. He was 102.

Conter died 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 in the early hours of December 7 that year. Sailors were just beginning to hoist colours 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 (450,000kg) of gunpowder stored below.

The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40ft (9 to 12 metres) 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,” Conter said. “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 where it sank. More than 900 sailors and Marines remain entombed inside. Only 335 Arizona crew members survived.

Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbour,