Global Courant 2023-04-26 02:18:57
Ken Potts, the oldest known survivor of the Japanese sneak attack that sank the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1941, claiming the most lives ever on a U.S. warship, died on Friday at his home in Provo, Utah, less than a week later. celebrates its 102nd birthday.
His death was announced by the National Park Service, which manages the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, above the sunken hull where the remains of more than 900 of the 1,177 sailors and marines killed in the attack are still buried.
Arizona’s death toll accounted for nearly half of the military personnel killed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed “a date that shall live in infamy” and prompted the United States to prompted Japan to declare war.
Lou Conter, a 101-year-old Californian, is now believed to be the only survivor among the Arizona crew members who escaped the inferno on Sunday morning. Only 93 of those aboard the ship at the time were alive; 242 other crew members were ashore.
Mr. Potts, a 20-year-old crane operator with the rank of boatswain’s mate, was on leave in Honolulu for two days. He was on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor when sirens blared and loudspeakers ordered naval personnel to return to their ships.
“This isn’t a drill, this is the real thing,” he recalled thinking. The sailors could already hear, see and smell that the warning was authentic.
“When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was on fire,” Mr. Potts said in an interview with the American Veterans Center in 2020. “The oil had leaked out and caught fire and burned.”
“Going back to the ship, we had to drag sailors out of the oily water,” he told the photographer D. Clarke Evans in 2014. “We couldn’t think much about it. You don’t think much about anything, I guess. You are shocked. You were only concerned about staying alive.’
After the order to abandon ship was issued, he told the Veterans Center, “We got a lot of them out of there, trying to keep their heads above the oil. Some swam to shore, some were picked up. Some didn’t make it.”
On the announcement of the death of Mr. Potts told the Park Service, “Potting to navigate the flaming harbor, Potts and other crewmen pulled men from the water and brought them to shore on Ford Island.”
Hit by Japanese bombers, the Arizona capsized in nine minutes and burned for two days before sinking. After fishing dozens of survivors out of the harbor, Mr. Potts later dove into the ship to search for more, only to find bodies.
“My best day in the Navy was when I survived December 7, 1941,” he told Mr. Evans. “It was also my worst day.”
Howard Kenton Potts was born on April 15, 1921, in a farmhouse with no running water or electricity in Honey Bend, Illinois, about 40 miles south of Springfield. His father, Joseph, worked in a radiator factory. His mother was Clara (Baker) Potts.
He attended a one-room school through eighth grade. Instead of enrolling in high school, which would mean walking 14 miles round trip every day, he briefly joined a Civilian Conservation Corps project during the Depression, until he realized that the most reliable place for permanent work was the army.
The Coast Guard was not taking any recruits, so he enlisted in the Navy on October 4, 1939—barely a month after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In December he sailed from San Pedro, California on the Arizona, the only ship on which he would serve.
After the Japanese attack, he was assigned to the Pearl Harbor port director’s office for the duration of the war. One of his duties was to deliver confidential orders to arriving ship commanders informing them of their destinations in the Pacific
He was discharged in 1945 as boatswain’s mate first class. Returning to Illinois, he briefly worked as a carpenter. He moved to Colorado, where he helped build homes, and moved again to Utah in 1946, where he owned and managed a used car lot for the next 30 years.
His survivors include his wife Doris, whom he married in 1957, as well as his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Potts returned to Pearl Harbor several times, the first being in 1986 for a memorial service. He returned in 2011 as a guest of Provo’s Timpview High School marching band, who performed at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the attack.
The USS Arizona Memorial attracts about 1.7 million visitors each year. For decades, the sunken battleship continued to shed black tears in the form of about a gallon of oil leaking somewhere inside the hull every day. Mr. Potts, too, retained a legacy of that Sunday morning in 1941.
“For a long time,” he said, “even after I got out of the Navy, when I was outside and I heard a siren, I was shaking.”
After their deaths, several dozen Arizona veterans rejoined their shipmates by having their ashes buried in the sunken ship, one not until 2021. Mr. Potts preferred a more traditional burial, according to Randy Stratton, the son of a former shipmate and friend, Donald Stratton, who died in 2020 at the age of 97.
“He said he got out once,” Mr. Stratton said of Mr. Potts, referring to the Arizona. “He’s not going back on board.”
