Two Japanese suicide planes carrying 1,100 pounds of bombs plunged into the flight deck of Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's own flagship early today, killing several hundred officers and men, and transforming one of our biggest and finest flattops into a floating torch, with flames soaring nearly a thousand feet into the sky. For eight seemingly interminable hours that followed, the ship and her crew fought as tense and terrifying a battle for survival as has ever been witnessed in the Pacific, but when dusk closed in the U.S.S. Bunker Hill—horribly crippled and still filmed by thin wisps of smoke and steam from her smoldering embers, was valiantly plowing along under her own power on the distant horizon—safe! Tomorrow she will spend nearly eight equally interminable hours burying at sea the men who died to save her.

Only once before during the entire war against Japan has any American carrier suffered such wounds, fought such fires, and lived—and that was when the battered, gutted hulk of the Franklin managed miraculously to steam away from these waters under her own power. Like the Franklin, the Bunker Hill took everything the Japs could give her, under the most unfavorable circumstances, and survived it. And tonight, as she licks at her wounds and nurses her wounded, she stands as a living monument to the fact that no major unit of the American fleet has ever been sunk by a suicide plane or by any combination of them. She constitutes one more link in the chain of evidence that must, by now, have convinced the Japs that all the maniacal, suicidal fury that they can unleash against us cannot save them.

From the deck of the neighboring carrier a few hundred yards distant I watched the Bunker Hill burn, and I do not yet see how she lived through it. It is hard to believe that men could survive those flames, or that metal could withstand such heat.
I still find it incredible; too, that death could strike so swiftly and so wholly unexpectedly into the very heart of our great Pacific fleet. At one minute our task force was cruising in lazy circles about sixty miles off Okinawa without a care in the world and apparently without a suggestion of the presence of an enemy plane in any direction. In the next minute the Bunker Hill was a pillar of flame. It was as quick as that—like summer lightning without any warning rumble of thunder.

The Oriental equivalent of Lady Luck was certainly riding with Japan's suicide corps today. Everything broke for them with unbelievable good fortune. A series of fleecy-white, low-hanging clouds that studded a bright sky concealed the intruders from the vigilant eyes of all the lookouts manning all the stations on all of the ships that go to make up this great armada called Task Force 58. Not until they began their final screaming plunge from the cover of these clouds did the Jap kamikazes become visible.
And it was sheer luck, of course, that they happened to strike on the particular day and at the exact hour when their target was most vulnerable. Because there was no sign of the enemy and because the Bunker Hill and the men aboard her were weary after fifty-eight consecutive days in the battle zones off Iwo Jima, Tokyo, the Inland Sea and Okinawa her crew was not at General Quarters when she was hit. For the first time in a week our own ship had secured from General Quarters an hour or two before. Some of the watertight doors that imprisoned men in small, stifling compartments were thrown open. The ventilators were unsealed and turned on, and those men not standing the regular watch were permitted to relax from the deadly sixteen-hour vigil that they had put in at their battle stations every day since we had entered the danger zone.

So it was on the Bunker Hill. Exhausted men not on watch were catching a catnap. Aft on the flight deck thirty-four planes were waiting to take off. Their tanks were filled to the last drop of capacity with highly volatile aviation gasoline. Their guns were loaded to the last possible round of ammunition. Earnest young pilots, mentally reviewing the briefing they had just received, were in the cockpits warming up the motors. On the hangar deck below more planes—also crammed with gasoline and ammunition—were all set to be spotted on the flight deck, and in the pilots' ready rooms other young aviators were kidding around while waiting their turn aloft. Just appearing over the horizon were the planes returning from the early mission. They jockeyed into the landing circle and waited until the Bunker Hill should launch her readied craft and clear the deck for landing. And it was at this precise moment that a keen-eyed man aboard our ship caught the first glimpse of three enemy planes and cried a warning. But before General Quarters could be sounded on this ship, and before half a dozen shots could be fired by the Bunker Hill, the first kamikaze had dropped his 550-pound bomb and plunged squarely into the midst of the thirty-four waiting planes in a shower of burning gasoline.

The bomb, fitted with a delayed action fuse, pierced the flight deck at a sharp angle, passed out through the side of the hull and exploded in mid-air before striking the water. The plane—a single-engined Jap fighter—knocked the parked aircraft about like ten-pins, sent a huge column of flame and smoke belching upwards and then skidded crazily over the side. Some of the pilots were blown overboard, and many managed to scramble to safety; but before a move could be made to fight the flames another kamikaze came whining out of the clouds, straight into the deadly anti-aircraft guns of the ship. This plane was a Jap dive bomber—a judy. A five-inch shell that should have blown him out of the sky, set him afire and riddled his plane with metal, but still he came. Passing over the stern of the ship, he dropped his bomb with excellent aim right in the middle of the blazing planes. Then he flipped over and torched through the flight deck at the base of the island. The superstructure, which contains many of the delicate nerve centers from which the vessel is controlled, was instantly enveloped in flames and smoke which were caught in turn by the maws of the ventilating system and sucked down into the inner compartments of the ship, where the watertight doors and hatches had just been swung shut and battened down. Scores of men were suffocated in these below deck chambers.
Minutes later a third Jap suicider zoomed down to finish the job. Ignoring the flames and the smoke that swept around them, the men in the Bunker Hill's gun galleries stuck courageously to their posts, pumping ammunition into their weapons and filling the sky with a curtain of protective lead. It was a neighboring destroyer, however, which finally scored a direct hit on the Jap and sent him splashing harmlessly into the sea.

That was the end of the attack and beginning of a heroic and brilliant fight for survival. The entire rear end of the ship was burning with uncontrollable fury. It looked very much like the newsreel shots of a blazing oil well, only worse—for this fire was feeding on highly refined gasoline and live ammunition. Greasy black smoke rose in a huge column from the ship's stern, shot through with angry tongues of cherry-red flame. Blinding white flashes appeared continuously as ready ammunition in the burning planes or in the gun galleries was touched off. Every few minutes the whole column of smoke would be swallowed in a great burst of flame as another belly tank exploded or as the blaze reached another pool of gasoline flowing from the broken aviation fuel lines on the hangar deck below. For more than an hour there was no visible abatement in the fury of the flames. They would seem to be dying down slightly as hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and chemicals were poured on them, only to burst forth more hungrily than ever as some new explosion occurred within the stricken ship.

The carrier itself had begun to develop a pronounced list, and as each new stream of water was poured into her the angle increased more dangerously. Crippled as she was, however, she ploughed ahead at top speed and the wind that swept her decks blew the flame and smoke astern over the fantail and prevented the blaze from spreading forward on the flight deck and through the island structure. Trapped on the fantail, men faced the flames and fought grimly on, with only the ocean behind them, and with no way of knowing how much of the ship remained on the other side of that fiery wall. Then, somehow, other men managed to break out the huge openings in the side of the hangar deck, and I got my first glimpse of the interior of the ship. That, I think, was the most horrible sight of all. The entire hangar deck was a raging blast furnace, white-hot throughout its length. Even from where I stood the glow of molten metal was unmistakable.

By this time the explosions had ceased and a cruiser and three destroyers were able to venture alongside with hoses fixed in their rigging. Like fireboats in New York Harbor, they pumped great streams of water into the ship and the smoke at last began to take on that greyish tinge which showed that somewhere a flame was dying. Up on the bridge, Capt. George A. Seitz, the skipper, was growing increasingly concerned about the dangerous list his ship had developed, and resolved to take a gambling chance. Throwing the Bunker Hill into a 70-degree turn, he heeled her cautiously over onto the opposite beam so that tons of water that had accumulated on one side were suddenly swept across the decks and overboard on the other. By great good fortune this wall of water carried the heart of the hangar deck fire with it. That was the turning point in this modern battle of the Bunker Hill. After nearly three hours of almost hopeless fighting, she had brought her fires under control, and, though it was many more hours before they were completely extinguished, the battle was won and the ship was saved.

A thick book could not record all the acts of heroism that were performed aboard that valiant ship today. There was the executive officer, Commander H. J. Dyson, who was standing within fifty feet of the second bomb when it exploded and who was badly injured; yet he refused medical aid and continued to fight the blaze until it was safely under control.

Then there was a squad of Marines who braved the white heat of the hangar deck and threw every bomb and rocket out of a nearby storage room. But the most fruitful work of all, perhaps, was performed by the pilots of the almost fuelless planes that had been circling overhead for a landing when the ship was struck. In the hours that followed, nearly three hundred men went overboard, and the fact that 269 of these were picked up by other ships in the fleet later was due, in no small measure, to the work of these sharp-eyed airmen.

Although our own flight deck had been cleared for their use and they had been instructed to land on it, these pilots kept combing every inch of the surface of the sea, tearing packets of dye marker from their own life jackets and dropping them to guide destroyers and other rescue vessels to the little clusters of men they saw clinging to bits of wreckage below them. Calculating their fuel supply to a hairbreadth nicety, some of them came aboard us with such a close margin that a single wave-off would have sent them and their planes into the sea before they could make another swing of the landing circle and return.
In all, I am told, 170 men will be recommended for awards as a result of this day's work. Late today Admiral Mitscher and 60 or more members of his staff' came aboard us to make this carrier his new flagship. He was unhurt—not even singed by the flames that swept the Bunker Hill, but he had lost three officers and six men of his own staff and a number of close friends in the ship's company. It was the first time in his long years of service that he had personally undergone such an experience.

As he was hauled aboard in a breeches buoy across the churning water that separated us from the speedy destroyer that had brought him alongside, he looked tired and old and just plain mad. His deeply lined face was more than weather beaten—it looked like an example of erosion in the dust-bowl country—but his eyes flashed fire and vengeance. He was a man who had a score to settle with the Japs and who would waste no time going about it. He had plans that the Japs will not like. But as a matter of fact, the enemy is already on the losing end of the Bunker Hill box score. Since she arrived in the Pacific in the fall of 1943 the Bunker Hill has participated in every major strike that has occurred. She was initiated at Rabaul, she took part in the invasions of the Gilberts and the Marshalls, pounding at Kwajalein and Eniwetok. With Task Force 58, she has struck twice at Tokyo and also at Truk, the China Coast, the Ryukyus, Formosa, the Bonins, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

During this period the pilots of her air groups have sunk, probably sunk and damaged, nearly a million tons of Jap shipping. They have shot 475 enemy planes out of the air, 169 of them during the past two months. In two days here off Okinawa they splashed sixty-seven Nipponese aircraft, and the ship herself has brought down fourteen more by antiaircraft fire. On a raid last March at Kure Harbor when the Japanese fleet was hiding out in the Inland Sea, Bunker Hill planes scored direct bomb hits on three carriers and one heavy cruiser, and then sent nine torpedoes flashing into the side of the enemy's beautiful new battleship, the Yamato, sinking her.

That is our side of the box score. In the Jap column stands the fact that at the cost of three pilots and three planes today the enemy killed a probable total of 392 of our men, wounded 264 others, destroyed about 70 planes and wrecked a fine and famous ship. The flight deck of that ship tonight looks like the crater of a volcano. One of the great fifty-ton elevators has been melted almost in half. Gun galleries have been destroyed and the pilots' ready rooms demolished. Virtually the entire island structure with its catwalks and platforms is a twisted mass of steel, and below decks tonight hospital corpsmen are preparing 352 bodies for burial at sea, starting at noon tomorrow.

But the ship has not been sunk. Had it been it would have taken years to build another. As it is the Bunker Hill will steam back to Bremerton Navy Yard under her own power and there will be repaired. While she remains there one American carrier with a hundred or so planes and a crew of 3,000 men will be out of action, but within a few weeks she will be back again, sinking more ships, downing more planes, and bombing out more Japanese airfields.

By Phelps Adams
Reporting World War II
American Journalism 1938-1946

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