The Deuce: just when I was starting to have sympathy for residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki*

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https://www.kuow.org/stories/lou-conter-last-survivor-of-the-uss-arizo

Lou Conter, the last known survivor of the attack on the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, has died at the age of 102.

Conter, who was a 20-year-old quartermaster at the time of the naval assault, was on the back decks of the battleship on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese forces decimated the U.S. Pacific fleet. The unprecedented attack killed 1,177 on the Arizona, with over 900 of those individuals never recovered.

As the bombs rained down on the naval base, one landed between two main guns at the front of the Arizona. The explosion ignited a huge store of TNT black powder that was used for the ship's battery guns.

"There went a million pounds of powder," Conter recalled in a 2018 interview with the American Veterans Center. "It blew up!"

The explosion was so intense that it split the ship in two, "and the bow came up about 30, 40 feet out of the water and fell straight back down," he remembered.

...

Shortly after the horrors in Hawaii, Conter was selected for flight training and became a Navy aviator. He flew some 200 combat missions in the Pacific throughout WWII.

Ed Bonner, a family friend who wrote the foreword for Conter's autobiography, The Lou Conter Story, described the war veteran as a warm man who never lost his cool — even when being shot down during a mission.

In September 1943, Conter was given orders to drop flares over the Japanese fleet off the coast of New Guinea to keep them awake, Bonner told NPR, sharing one of his favorite war stories of Conter's. But as they were flying over the base, Conter's plane was struck, crashing into the ocean. "And as they hit the water – about six miles off of New Guinea — the co-pilot tells the 10-person crew, 'Say your prayers, boys. We are all going to die.' "

But Conter wasn't having that, Bonner laughed.

Instead, he ordered the terrified crew not to panic. In fact, Bonner said, that was Conter's life mantra: Don't panic.

So, as they were going down, Conter tried to calm his men with a plan. "He said, 'Get ready to swim. We're going to just paddle slowly and if a shark comes up to you, punch it in the nose.' "

That's exactly what they did, escaping about a dozen sharks on their way to the shore, according to Bonner