Less than two months after the aircraft carrier Franklin had been hit off Kyushu by two Japanese bombs and turned into a floating inferno (TIME, May 28), the same fate befell her elder, more experienced sister, the Bunker Hill. The circumstances were astonishingly similar: the ship was at flight quarters (launching planes). The enemy aircraft dived through the Bunker Hill's own combat air patrol so suddenly that they could not be splashed by U.S. fighters.
A Zeke (old-type Zero) dropped a delayed-action bomb which penetrated the Bunker Hill's flight deck, went out through the ship's side and burst over the...
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