We took eight or ten bombs.
Seven minutes after 8:00, we took a bomb alongside number two turret. It went through five decks into
the lower handling room where we had a million pounds of powder for turrets one and two.
We blew up
In the summer of 1939, hostilities raged across Europe and Asia as the world was on the brink of
War. But as the United States of America sat in relative peace and isolation, young Louis
Conter of Denver, Colorado thought only of playing football and furthering his education.
Well, I was in the last year of my high school. Wheatridge High School in Denver. And I graduated.
My neighbor Dooley Wick had joined the Navy and so we went down with him while he signed up. The
Navy said, "Come on and take your exams." And we said, "We're going to college to play football."
"That's all right. There's an eight or nine month waiting list to get into the Navy." So we took our
exams. We all passed them, naturally. We were in good shape in those days. And November the
1st about 8:10, my mother came upstairs and says, "Are you in trouble, Lou?" And I said, "No, I'm
not." She said, "Well somebody's asking for Louis Anthony Conter on the phone." So I got dressed,
ran down and answered and it was in the Navy Department. And he says, "We got a draft going out
at 5:45 for San Diego. We're six men short and we got to fill it up. Would you like to sign up for
four years?" At that time you got $17 a month for boot camp for the 90 days, and then you got $21 a
month, board and room. So I signed up and called my girlfriend and told her I was leaving. I left
at 5:45. My first train ride, from Denver to San Diego. Got in San Diego the next day, had three
months of boot training, and after boat training I was assigned to the USS Arizona in Long Beach.
The USS Arizona was a battleship of the United States Navy and Lou's home for the next two years.
In the spring of 1940, the Arizona would embark to Oahu, Hawaii to a U.S Naval Base called Pearl
Harbor. But Lou, not satisfied with merely sailing the Open Seas, turned his ambitions to the skies.
We had put in for flight school, Johnny and I. I'd lay up on my bunk and study and everything else,
because you don't do much in liberty. And so Admiral Calhoun signed the request and
sent it back. In November of '41 we got our orders to Flight School.
And so we went and made reservations on the Lurline, and we're going to come back and go
to Pensacola. Captain Van Valkenburgh called us down and said, "We're going back December the
19th to Long Beach to pick up our 1.1's. And I'm not going to waste five thousand dollars
of Navy money. So you wait and go back and go to Pensacola from there." "Yes, Sir!" In
those days you told the captain "yes sir". You didn't say, "No, I got my orders, so let me go."
But Lou's plans for flight school would suffer a major interruption. As 1941 drew to a close,
the United States could no longer remain isolated from the surrounding World War.
The Japanese, they started this war in 1932. They started going through China and going down to
Singapore. Churchill and Britain were losing out to Germany, getting bombed to hell. And Churchill
and Roosevelt wanted us in the war to help them out. But people just didn't want to be in war. So,
Roosevelt was having a hard time getting anything done. And so Colonel Thorpe, who was one of our
Intelligence Officers down in Indonesia, sent a dispatch to Roosevelt on December the 4th,
telling him that the Japanese fleet was moving somewhere, but only one or two of the ships came
South. And they thought the others were going across the North Pacific. We all knew something
was going to happen, we just didn't know when. And so, Sunday morning of course Pearl Harbor hit.
It started five minutes to eight in the morning.
We were all tied up and all the battleships were in there, which was bad.
We took eight or ten bombs.
Five or seven minutes after 8:00, we took a bomb alongside number two turret. It went through five
decks into the lower handling room where we had a million pounds of powder for turrets one and two.
We blew up.
Guys came running out of the fire and wanted to jump over the side. And it was burning all
around the ship. So, Commander Fuqua told us, "Knock them out if you have to. Render them
unconscious and lay them down on the deck, and get them into the boat get them to the hospital." So
that's what we did for 25 minutes. We got about 16 of them laid down on the deck there waiting.
We got them over to the hospital, came back and
carried fire hoses into the fire because the ships couldn't get underneath the fire. The blaze was a
thousand feet. I mean it was really hot and bad. And so we fought the fire until Tuesday,
got it out, and we had to let the ship cool down for four days before we could go aboard it. And
we went aboard and we started diving on the ship to see if we could get anybody out of the ship.
But they were all dead.
So finally, after a couple of days, Commander Fuqua called it off and said, Abandon ship."
By the end of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, over 2,400 Americans
were killed. Nearly half of that number were lives lost on board the USS Arizona.
Though many bodies were pulled from the wreckage, more than 900 could not be
recovered from the sunken ship and remain entombed within the Arizona to this day.
Following the Japanese attack, the United States was fully invested in bringing an
end to the Second World War. Soon American forces were on the attack in Africa, Europe,
and the Pacific, and Lou finally had the opportunity to complete Flight School.
We were in the third week in January at Pensacola, seven days a week and seven nights
a week. And November the 15th we did our time we got graduated, and we got our wings. When I got
out of flight school I went to VP 11, which is in San Diego. And they kept us there for three weeks
while they painted all of our planes black, because we were the first Black Cat Squadron.
And we left there in January of '43, and then we went down to New Guinea and we
spent two years in combat. We'd carry two one thousand pound bombs and two 500's,
and dive bombed the Japanese Fleet in Northern New Guinea and north of New Britain Islands
and Admiralty islands, and go back to Port Moresby. I had 200 missions in the Black Cats.
In September of '43, we were up the coast of New Guinea at seven or eight hundred feet. We got way
up just about to Wewak, and a shot went through the after end and it hit the parachute flares
and exploded one. Of course we were on fire from the engines, back. We had to land immediately.
And all nine men on the ship got out through the pilot's escape hatch, but that was just before
dark. And Gordon Kennington said, "You guys say your prayers. We're seven miles offshore. We've
got sharks all around us and I don't think anybody can swim that far and it will be dark before an
hour." And I said, "Bullsh..." I said, "Get in a circle. You're not dead yet. Grab each other,
hold each other, tread the water lightly." And we were in the water for about 30 minutes, and
the sharks came along. Hit them in the nose your first. And I hit the first one and it swam away.
Another PBY saw us on fire and came back and saw we didn't have a boat,
and threw one of the lifeboats out to us. And I went and got it and got the guys on it.
We got into New Guinea, in the jungle, and the Japanese were there. And they're looking for you.
And I hid the guys and told them, "Just be quiet."
And so, the second night I heard... I said, "That's a PT boat. They're looking for us." So,
my plane captain and I got our boat and went out. We got 50 or 100 feet away from them. They had
those 50 calibers pointed right us. I said, "Turn those g.d. guns away from us." They said, "That's
Conter, come on aboard." So we went aboard, and I said, "Let's go back and get the other seven
guys." They went in there and they were back in an hour with all seven men. And we turned South, went
back down towards Moresby to get to our tenure. We got to the tenure, had a briefing that morning,
breakfast that morning, dinner that night, breakfast the next morning, the next night at
5:30, we took another PBY, and went out for 13 and a half hours. That's what we did in those days.
Of the men who survived the PBY crash,
one Lieutenant Commander Gordon Kennington credited Lou for saving his life.
His daughter was born in '47, after we came back and he got married, and had a daughter. And she
said, "Dad always said, 'If it wasn't for Lou, you would be here because I would have been dead.'"
And she said, "Here I am, seventy-some years old." She was born in '47.
And said, "I've had a big life and happy." But, it was worth it.
And that would not be the only lives Lou would save over the course of the war.
In December of 1943, Lou took part in a rescue mission to save over 200
Australian soldiers trapped behind Japanese lines.
They were intelligence people we dropped behind the lines. The Japanese sent a
whole division into Wewak. That's fifteen thousand Japanese soldiers. We had to fly
into Northern New Guinea in the Sepik River. Landed in the river and picked
up 15-16 and take off. And we jumped into the clouds because the Zeros were on us.
We flew up to 9,000 feet into the clouds and turned South,
and flew for an hour and 15-20 minutes, and went down to land in Port Moresby, dropped people off,
and went up and got another load. We brought out 219 men in three days, free and clear.
By the turn of 1944, Japan had long since lost the advantage in the war, but continued to maintain
a relentless foothold throughout the Pacific Islands. Though the Allies slowly achieved victory
after victory, each one was hard fought and bloodier than the last. By August of 1945, U.S.
president Harry Truman faced a difficult decision: send American troops into what was sure to be the
deadliest invasion yet, or unleash a new weapon, the likes of which the world had never seen.
We had a million and a half men trained to land in Japan in November of '45, and another
million and a half starting to train to land in March of '46. And we figured we'd have five to six
hundred thousand casualties, because even the 12 and 14 year old kids in Japan were taught to have
a grenade and walk up to American Soldier and put in his pocket and pull the pin and run like hell.
So he gave the order to drop the first one, and dropped a second one, and they quit.
You just had to do what you had to do at that time to save 500,000 lives. And you would have lost
them if we'd landed in November of '45. And so, September of '45 they signed the treaty.
On September 2nd, 1945, nearly four years since the attack on Pearl Harbor,
the Second World War was finally over.
To this day, the USS Arizona rests beneath the waves of Pearl Harbor. Built directly
above the wreckage sits the USS Arizona Memorial, dedicated to the men who perished aboard ship.
The memorial sees more than one million visitors every year,
and one of its most frequent is Lieutenant Commander Louis Conter.
My wife and I used to go to the memorial all the time,
every year. I went to the 50th, I think it was, in '91.
We've buried a few guys on there that wanted to be buried on the ship.
Divers take their ashes down and put them with the other guys in the ship, in the turret.
On the memorial where they have that plaque and they've got all the names, forward there.
I walk in and, naturally, salute them and stand there and say a prayer. And
thank God my name is outside on the plaque out there, rather than on the wall up there.