This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
The battle for Okinawa was fated to be the greatest, the bloodiest, and perhaps the last great air-sea fight in history. In scope and ferocity, it was to dwarf even the Battle of Britain. Winston Churchill called it “the most intense and famous battle of military history.” Task Force 58 and adjoining units made up the greatest naval armada in history, with 1,321 ships in all, manned by half a million men and carrying 200,000 assault troops for the capture of Okinawa. Against them, the Japanese threw close to 2,000 kamikaze sorties and twice that number of conventional air sorties.
On the morning of 11 May 1945, the .Essex-class carrier Bunker Hill (CV-17)—flagship of Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s formidable Task Force 58—was mounting air strikes on Okinawa some 70 miles away. At 1005, 25 of her planes were flying sorties, 30 stood ready on the flight deck, and another 48 were being fueled and armed on the hangar deck. The day before, the ship had been refueled at sea and her tanks were brimming with aviation gas and 1,873,000 gallons of oil. After being in action for 58 consecutive days, the carrier was experiencing a slight lull, and the condition was set at One Easy for the crew. Ventilators were open to let fresh air in.
Suddenly, a Japanese Zeke fighter burst out of a cloud on the starboard beam, dropped a 500-pound delayed- action bomb, and then dove into the 30 planes on the flight deck, igniting them like a string of firecrackers. The bomb went through the flight deck and out through the side of the ship, exploding just above the water. Only 30 seconds later, a Judy single-engine dive bomber whipped in at full throttle, made a steep climbing turn, and then dove directly for the Bunker Hill. Gunners caught the Judy with a five-inch shell and 40-mm antiaircraft fire, but the suicide pilot managed to drop another 500-pounder, which penetrated the after flight deck and exploded in the gallery deck immediately below. Scores of crew members were blown into the water, and flames engulfed the deck. As confusion mounted, a third kamikaze approached for an attack. But the Bunker Hill’s antiaircraft gunners had stayed at their posts and shot down the attacker.
Within seconds, three of the Bunker Hill’s top decks had become an inferno from amidships to the fantail, and the 3,000 men on board threw themselves into a frantic struggle to save the ship and their own lives. While damage-control teams broke out hoses, other crewmen raced to turn on sprinklers, jettison ammunition, and close hatches and vents to cut down drafts. Other vessels in the task force steamed to the carrier’s aid. Some of them screened the stricken ship against further attack, while the cruiser Wilkes-Barre (CL-103) and three destroyers trained their hoses on the fires, evacuated wounded, and rescued men from the sea.
Captain George A. Seitz, commanding officer of the Bunker Hill, swung her broadside to the wind so that the smoke and flames would not be blown the length of the carrier. Later, when water, debris, and gasoline from ruptured pipes had accumulated dangerously on the flight deck, he made a sharp 70° turn that sloshed tons of fuel overboard through openings in the deck’s siding. These moves and six hours of courageous struggle by the crew brought the fires under control.
But casualties were high for the Bunker Hill: 396 crewmen were dead or missing, another 264 were injured, and the kamikaze’s devastating blows had knocked the ship out of the war.
Anthony Faccone (inset, left) was one of the 3,000 men on board the Bunker Hill that morning. Having worked his way up from the chow hall, he was a photographer’s striker, although he could best be classified as the “dipper,” because he worked the late-evening-early-moming shift to dip film from aerial reconnaissance flights into developing solutions. He never flew photo missions or did the more exciting duties as did the more experienced photographers. He was strictly a beginner—a dipper.
At 1005, Faccone was caught in the photo lab. Suddenly overcome by heavy black smoke, he quickly made his way to the forward area of the flight deck, where he met up with one of the experienced photographers who asked him to hold onto his camera while he went to a forward locker for more film. While Faccone lay prone, using the bulky camera to protect his face from possible shrapnel as he viewed the mayhem on the flight deck, he began clicking off the remaining film. Later, the film and camera were picked up and eventually delivered to Washington, along with hundreds of other action, damage, and casualty pictures. One of Faccone’s random shots, however, was destined for fame.
On 28 June 1945, the Navy released the full story and a series of dramatic photographs detailing the Bunker Hill’s fight for survival. Faccone’s flight deck photo captured the front page of every major newspaper nationwide—with the standard credit of “Official U.S. Navy Photo.” The famous Bunker Hill photograph has since been reprinted on the cover of countless magazines and books—including the best-seller U.S. Navy War Photographs: Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay and the award-winning album Victory at Sea. The U.S. Postal Service considered using the photograph as a commemorative stamp in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the year of the kamikazes in the battle for Okinawa.
Mr. Udoff was a radar man in the combat information center when the Bunker Hill was hit on 11 May 1945. He is the author of the book The Bunker Hill Story (Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 1994).
Proceedings / May 1995