"Aboard a Fast Carrier in the Forward Pacific Area, May 11 (Special-Delayed) -- Two Japanese suicide planes carrying 1,000 pounds of bombs plunged into the flight deck of Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s own flagship today,... transforming one of our greatest flat-tops (aircraft carriers) into a floating torch, with flames soaring nearly 1,000 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 had ever been witnessed in the Pacific, but when dusk closed in, the U.S.S. Bunker Hill — horribly crippled and still filmed by wisps of smoke and steam from her smoldering embers — was plowing along under her own power on the distant horizon, safe. Tomorrow she will spend another eight terrible hours burying at sea men who died to save her. From the deck of a neighboring carrier a few hundred yards distant I watched the Bunker Hill burn. It is hard to believe that men could survive those flames or that metal could withstand such heat. One minute our task force was cruising in lazy circles about 60 miles off Okinawa without a care in the world and apparently without a thought of an enemy plane. The next the Bunker Hill was a pillar of flame. It was as quick as that — like summer lightning.... For the first time in a week, our own ship had secured from general quarters an hour or two before... and those men not on regular watch were permitted to relax from the deadly sixteen-hour vigil they had put in at battle stations every day since we had entered the battle area. So it was on the Bunker Hill. Exhausted men not on watch were catching a catnap. Aft, on the flight deck, 34 planes were waiting to take off. Their tanks were filled to the last drop with highly volatile aviation gasoline. Their guns were loaded to the last possible round of ammunition.... Just appearing over the horizon were the planes returning form an early mission.... Then it was that a 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 on the ship and plunged his plane squarely into the 34 waiting planes in a shower of burning gasoline.... 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.... 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 to their posts.... It was a neighboring destroyer, which finally scored a direct hit on the Jap and sent him splashing harmlessly into the sea.... For more than an hour there was no visible abatement in the fury of the flames.... Crippled as she was she plowed ahead at top speed, and the wind that swept her decks blew the flames and smoke astern over the fantail, preventing the blaze from spreading forward on the flight deck.... Trapped on the fantail itself, men faced the flames and fought grimly on; with... no way of knowing how much of the ship remained on the other side of that fiery wall.... After nearly three hours of almost hopeless fighting, she had brought the 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 goodly thick book could not record all the acts of heroism that were performed aboard that valiant ship today.... [A]t 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.... But the ship has not been sunk.... As it is the Bunker Hill will steam back to Bremerton Navy Yard under her own power and there will be repaired.... But within a few weeks she will be back again, sinking more ships, downing more planes, and bombing out more Japanese air fields. Perhaps her next task will be to cover the invasion of Tokyo itself!"