[WashingtonPost] The USS Arizona burned around him in Pearl Harbor. A fellow sailor defied orders to save his life.
Donald Stratton stood on the deck of the USS Arizona as a Japanese bomb decimated part of the battleship, stationed in Pearl Harbor off the coast of Honolulu. The ground trembled beneath his feet as explosions rang out and a fireball ripped through him, setting his T-shirt ablaze and destroying part of his ear, he wrote in his memoir, "All the Gallant Men."
Cont- "The six of us went hand over hand across the line and above the inflamed water," Stratton wrote. "My body was burned, my hands were raw, and I was focused on survival. I never thought about not making it."
Lou Conter and Ken Potts, both 98, are now the only living survivors of the Arizona, where 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed ‐ roughly half of the total death toll ‐ and 335 escaped in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The loss of one of the few remaining people with memories of what happened on that ship heralds the time when a monumental part of the infamous attack will be lost to history.