One of the last two survivors of an American battleship sunk during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941 has died at the age of 102.Utah Howard Kenton Potts was a 20-year-old crane operator carrying supplies aboard her USS Arizona when her Japanese attacked her on December 7, 1941. A total of 1,177 sailors died on board, nearly half of American casualties during the attack.
The United States entered World War II after the attack. According to Randy Stratton, son of Pott’s friend and shipmate Randy Stratton, Mr. Potts, whose first name was Ken, died in Utah with his wife, with whom he had lived for 66 years.
The Associated Press quoted Mr. Stratton as saying that Mr. Potts had “all his balls” but that days before he died he “knew that his body was disconnected from him”. Stratton added, “He just wanted himself to get better, and he turned out not to.” A native of Illinois,
Mr. Potts first enlisted in the US Navy in 1939. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he was delivering supplies to the aircraft carrier USS Arizona when Japanese aircraft began attacking US naval installations at Pearl Harbor. When the attack began, Mr. Potts used his boat to rescue the drowning crew and take them to the nearest island. He was still in port when the Arizona exploded and sank the ship nine minutes after the first collision. “I still see and feel it… most often it feels like a nightmare,” Potts later told the National Guard in a 2021 interview. “The whole house was burned.
The water caught fire because the oil caught fire.” Later, Mr. Potts is assigned to retrieve his body in Arizona. “It,” he told the National Guard. “It was a big deal.” More than 900 sailors are buried in Arizona, where they remain at the exact spot where they sank at Pearl Harbor.
The sole survivor from Arizona is California resident Lou Conter, who is 101 years old. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, and the United States government declared war on them.
