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U.S.|Warren Upton, Who Escaped Sinking Battleship at Pearl Harbor, Dies at 105
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/warren-upton-dead.html
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The last survivor of the U.S.S. Utah, he was a 22-year-old Navy radioman when Japanese forces attacked.
Dec. 29, 2024, 10:45 a.m. ET
Warren Upton, the oldest survivor of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the final survivor of the battleship Utah, died on Wednesday in Los Gatos, Calif. He was 105.
The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors, who said Mr. Upton was being treated for pneumonia.
Mr. Upton was serving as a radioman aboard the U.S.S. Utah on Dec. 7, 1941. He was below deck, reaching for his shaving kit, when the Utah was struck in quick succession by two torpedoes at about 8 a.m.
“It was quite an inferno,” Mr. Upton, a resident of San Jose, Calif., told the San Francisco TV station KTVU in 2021. “I went over the side then,” he added, “and slid down the side of the ship as she rolled over.”
The ship began capsizing within minutes. Mr. Upton and others left the ship and swam to Ford Island, adjacent to the row of battleships in Pearl Harbor. Along the way, he helped another shipmate who couldn’t swim.
They took cover in a ditch that was being dug for sewer pipes, he recalled in a video interview in 2018. “We were covered with fuel oil. We had plenty of it on us and our clothes.”
