theguardian.com - Howard Kenton Potts died on Friday at the home in Provo, Utah, that he shared with his wife of 66 years, according to Randy Stratton, whose late father, Donald Stratton, was Potts’s Arizona shipmate and friend.
Stratton said that when he spoke to Potts on his birthday, 15 April, he was happy to have made it to 102. “But he knew that his body was kind of shutting down on him, and he was just hoping that he could get better but turned out not.”
Potts was born and raised in Honey Bend, Illinois. He enlisted in the US navy in 1939. On 7 December 1941, he was working as a crane operator shuttling supplies to the Arizona when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, according to a 2021 article by the Utah national guard.
In a 2020 oral history interview with the American Veterans Center, Potts said a loudspeaker ordered sailors back to their ships. “When I got back to Pearl Harbor, the whole harbor was afire,” he said. “The oil had leaked out and caught on fire and was burning.”
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I wonder if he ever finally accepted the truth that FDR LET Pearl Harbor happen so that the US would get drawn into the war and his blood profiteer friends could reap the millions that came from our involvement.
ReplyDeleteMy F-I-L spoke, in addition to English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. So the navy put him in the pacific aboard the Arizona. He was off-duty that night. As an Ensign he was housed above the harbor. Once the bombing started he drove to the scene and joined in the rescue/recovery operations for three days straight. Once the dust settled he got transferred to the Atlantic so he could participate in D-Day.
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