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HONOLULU (AP) — Ken Potts, one of the last two survivors of the battleship USS Arizona, which sank in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 102 years old.
Howard Kenton Potts died Friday at the Provo, Utah home he shared with his wife of 66 years, according to Randy Stratton, whose late father, Donald Stratton, was Potts’ shipmate and close friend. in Arizona.
Stratton said Potts “had all his marbles” but lately has been struggling to get out of bed. When Stratton spoke to Potts on his birthday, April 15, he was happy to have turned 102.
“But he knew his body was kind of closing in on him, and he was just hoping he could get better but (it) turned out not to be,” Stratton said.
Potts was born and raised in Honey Bend, Illinois, and enlisted in the Navy in 1939.
He was working as a crane operator shuttling Arizona on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, according to a 2021 article from the Utah National Guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors to return to their ships, so he got on a boat.
“When I came back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was on fire,” he said in the interview. “The oil had leaked out and caught fire and was burning.”
Dozens of ships sank, capsized or were damaged in the bombing of Naval Base Hawaii, which catapulted the United States into World War II.
Sailors were thrown or forced to jump into the oily mud below, and Potts and his fellow sailors pulled some to safety in their boat.
The Arizona sank just nine minutes after being bombed, and its 1,177 dead account for nearly half of the servicemen killed in the attack. Today, the battleship still sits where it sank eight decades ago, with more than 900 dead buried inside.
Potts recalled decades later that some people were still giving orders amid the attack, but there was also a lot of chaos. He carried his memories of the attack over his long life.
“Even after coming out of the navy, in the open, and hearing a siren, I was shaking,” he said.
Stratton noted that the sole remaining survivor from Arizona is now Lou Conter, who is 101 and lives in California.
“It’s history. It’s going away,” Stratton said, adding, “And once (Conter) is gone, who’s telling all their stories?”
Several dozen Arizona survivors had their ashes interred on the sunken battleship so they could join their shipmates, but Potts didn’t want that, according to Stratton.
“He said he got off once, he wouldn’t come back on board,” he said.
Stratton said many Arizona survivors shared a similar dry sense of humor. This included his own father, who was badly burned in the attack and also unwilling to return to the ship as ashes in an urn.
“’I was cremated once. I’m not going to be cremated twice,” joked Donald Stratton, according to the younger Stratton, before his death in 2020 at age 97.
“They’ve had that all their lives. They had a sense of humor and they knew sooner or later they would make it,” said Randy Stratton. “Our job now is to keep their memories alive.”
Potts is survived by his wife, Doris. Information about other survivors was not immediately available.
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