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Ken Potts, the oldest identified survivor of the Japanese sneak assault that sunk the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1941, taking probably the most lives ever misplaced on an American warship, died on Friday at his dwelling in Provo, Utah, lower than per week after celebrating his 102 birthday.
His dying was introduced by the Nationwide Park Service, which administers the usS. Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, above the sunken hull the place the stays of greater than 900 of the 1,177 sailors and Marines who had been killed within the assault are nonetheless entombed.
The Arizona’s dying toll accounted for almost half the navy personnel killed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as “a date which is able to stay in infamy” and which prompted the USA to declare warfare on Japan.
Lou Conter, a 101-year-old Californian, is now believed to be the one dwelling survivor among the many Arizona crewmen who escaped the inferno that Sunday morning. Solely 93 of those that had been aboard the ship on the time lived; 242 different crew members had been ashore.
Mr. Potts, a 20-year-old boatswain’s mate and crane operator, had been on go away in Honolulu for 2 days. He was on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor when sirens blared and loudspeakers ordered Navy personnel again to their ships.
“This isn’t a drill, that is the true factor,” he remembered considering. By then the sailors may already hear, see and odor that the warning was genuine.
“After I bought again to Pearl Harbor, the entire harbor was afire,” Mr. Potts mentioned in an interview with the American Veterans Middle in 2020. “The oil had leaked out and caught on hearth and was burning.”
“Going again to the ship, we needed to drag sailors out of the oily water,” he instructed the photographer D. Clarke Evans in 2014. “We couldn’t assume a lot about it. You don’t assume a lot of something, I suppose. You’re in shock. All you nervous about was staying alive.”
After the order to desert ship was sounded, he instructed the veterans heart, “We pulled a whole lot of them out of there, attempting to maintain their heads above the oil. A few of them swam to shore, a few of them had been picked up. A few of them didn’t make it.”
In asserting Mr. Potts’s dying, the Park Service mentioned: “Trying to navigate by means of the flaming harbor, Potts and different crewmen pulled males from the water and took them to shore on Ford Island.”
Struck by Japanese bombers, the Arizona toppled over in 9 minutes and burned for 2 days earlier than sinking. After fishing dozens of survivors from the harbor, Mr. Potts later dived into the ship to seek for extra, however discovered solely our bodies.
“My finest day within the Navy is after I survived Dec. 7, 1941,” he instructed Mr. Evans. “It was additionally my worst day.”
Howard Kenton Potts was born on April 15, 1921, in a farmhouse with out working water or electrical energy in Honey Bend, Sick., about 40 miles south of Springfield. His father, Joseph, labored in a radiator manufacturing unit. His mom was Clara (Baker) Potts.
He attended a one-room schoolhouse by means of the eighth grade. As an alternative of enrolling in highschool, which might have entailed strolling 14 miles round-trip day-after-day, he briefly joined a Civilian Conservation Corps mission through the Melancholy, till he realized that probably the most dependable place for regular employment was the navy.
The Coast Guard wasn’t taking recruits, and so forth Oct. 4, 1939 — barely a month after Nazi Germany invaded Poland — he enlisted within the Navy. That December, he sailed from San Pedro, Calif., on the Arizona, the one ship on which he would serve.
After the Japanese assault, he was assigned to the Pearl Harbor port director’s workplace at some point of the warfare. Considered one of his duties was delivering confidential orders to arriving ship commanders informing them of their locations within the Pacific
He was discharged in 1945 as a boatswain’s mate top quality. Returning to Illinois, he briefly labored as a carpenter. He moved to Colorado, the place he helped construct properties, and moved once more, in 1946, to Utah, the place he owned and managed a used automotive lot for the following 30 years.
Amongst his survivors are his spouse, Doris, whom he married in 1957, in addition to his youngsters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Potts returned to Pearl Harbor on a number of events, the primary time in 1986 for a commemoration. He returned in 2011 as a visitor of the Timpview Excessive Faculty marching band of Provo, which carried out at a ceremony marking the seventieth anniversary of the assault.
The united statesS. Arizona Memorial attracts some 1.7 million guests a 12 months. For many years the submerged battleship continued to shed black tears within the type of a couple of quart of oil leaking from someplace inside hull day-after-day. Mr. Potts, too, retained a legacy of that Sunday morning in 1941.
“For a very long time,” he mentioned, “even after I bought out of the Navy, after I was out within the open and listen to a siren, I’d shake.”
After their deaths, a number of dozen veterans of the Arizona rejoined their shipmates by having their ashes interred within the sunken vessel, one as just lately as 2021. Mr. Potts most popular a extra conventional funeral, in accordance with Randy Stratton, the son of a former shipmate and pal, Donald Stratton, who died in 2020 at 97.
“He mentioned he bought off as soon as,” Mr. Stratton mentioned of Mr. Potts, referring to the Arizona. “He’s not going to return on board once more.”
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